Key Reflections
* Jihadist and neo-Nazi extremists have succeeded in penetrating each other’s echo chambers despite being on the opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. There are also shared traits, such as antisemitism.
* The pandemic has radical subcultures, such as alt-jihadism, which overlaps with neo-Nazis. There is cumulative learning across extremist groups.
* In both neo-Nazi and jihadist movements there is a strong prevalence to violently abuse and control women. Both want to return to a distant past, where women had no rights, absent of societal structures.
* Women play a prominent role in terrorism, as recruiters, groomers, and perpetrators of violence. Some of them have a femininity crisis. There are comparisons between male and female suicide bombers in the radicalization pathways.
* It is becoming harder to distinguish between an online threat and an unfolding plot. The language and narratives produced in communications by terrorists can be used to improve their detection and prevention practices.
* Russian-sponsored media outlets give airtime and repeat the hashtags and campaigns driven by extremists and other fringe communities. Ideology does not matter as long as it creates chaos within Europe and North America.
Transcript:
SG: Dr. Sajjan Gohel
JE: Julia Ebner
SG: Hello, and welcome to DEEP Dive, brought to you by NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme. I’m your host, Dr. Sajjan Gohel. Each episode, we speak to experts and practitioners in international security and defence, counter-terrorism, and geopolitical current events to gain insight into the most pressing matters of global affairs.
In this episode, we speak with Julia Ebner, a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), specialising in extremism, radicalisation, viral disinformation and terrorism prevention. Julia advises parliamentary working groups, security agencies and tech firms, and delivers lectures globally. She is the author of the books, The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far-Right Extremism and Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists. Julia is currently completing her DPhil in Anthropology at Oxford University.
Julia Ebner, welcome to NATO DEEP Dive.
JE: Hi, thank you for having me.
SG: In your book, The Rage, you look at extremist movements, both online and offline, and you’re one of the first people to show how neo-Nazi and jihadist extremists have succeeded in penetrating each other’s echo chambers. What made you decide to go down this path of research and what did you learn that perhaps you didn’t anticipate before?
JE: It was interesting because back when I started with that research, it was mostly jihadist/ISIS inspired attacks that we saw across Europe and across the world, really. But I was wondering what the impact would be on our societies, especially our liberal democracies in Europe. And what I saw was that there was big backlash coming from the far-right side of the spectrum, where anti-Muslim resentment was growing and where it seemed like the jihadist attacks were directly feeding into the strength of far-right extremist movements. So, that made me interested in investigating, a bit further, what the interplay was between jihadists and far-right extremists.
And what was really surprising, or at least I didn’t anticipate, [was] the extent to which there are parallels in the narratives, in the strategies, and of course, also in the goals that both of these fringe groups, that are on the opposite sides of the ideological spectrum, have in common. And mainly, of course, the black and white narratives of pitting one part of the population against another, perceiving the world as very black and white, and dividing it into in-groups that are being victimised and an out-group that is being demonised and sometimes dehumanised. And that was really interesting.
And then of course, also the goal of bringing about dramatic political and societal change and using terrorist attacks, for example, to further exacerbate these existing divisions and to further accelerate a potential political collapse. That’s really the goal that a lot of these extremist fringe groups have in common because they are on the less powerful side in the power game.
SG: That’s very interesting. One aspect that I found very revealing about what you were just saying is—is it fair to say that both neo-Nazis and jihadist need each other, effectively, to utilise their respective recruitment streams?
JE: I would say so, to some extent. Of course, we see that they have existed independently from each other, but there is a sense that they really help each other in amplifying their rhetoric and their propaganda and in really lending credibility to their narratives. Jihadist movements who recruit a lot of alienated Muslims on the basis of the statement, ‘us Muslims are being discriminated against, are targeted by hate crimes,’ their claims are partly so credible because there have been attacks happening against Muslim communities, and a lot of these attacks have been carried out by far-right extremists.
And vice versa, far-right extremists who would then say, ‘well, we’ve seen all these jihadists inspired attacks, that’s the danger of immigration,’ or ‘that’s the danger of Muslim communities who are growing in European countries or in North America,’ unfortunately they can make an argument based on the number of attacks we’ve seen. So, there is a sense that they’re feeding off one another.
And there have also, interestingly, been instances of cooperation because, of course, they have shared traits as well. For example, antisemitic narratives and conspiracy myths. Where, for example, in the supermarket hostage taking that appeared around the time when the Charlie Hebdo shootings happened in a suburb in Paris. There we had actually the weapons that were supplied to the jihadists who carried out that hostage taking, were supplied by a far-right identarian from the north of France. So, there have also been very odd cases of actual collaboration between those two different sides of the ideological extremist’s spectrum.
SG: When you talk about this odd dynamic, there’s another new emerging trend that has taken place, possibly due to the pandemic, or the pandemic may have proliferated it, is this dynamic of alt-jihad subculture. Do you think that that is a growing concern? Do you see overlaps between that alt-jihad subculture and the far-right neo-Nazis in action? And in terms of how they operate online and what the eventual goals are?
JE: Absolutely, this has been really fascinating from a research perspective, but of course, also quite concerning to see the extent to which extremist groups are borrowing from each other and also learning from each other. There is almost a sense of cumulative learning across extremist groups. So, what initially the alt-right did, on the far-right extremist side, was that they borrowed a lot of the elements that seemed to work well in ISIS campaigns. They used a lot of the tactics to appeal to younger generations, which ISIS was of course pioneering and really managed to do, unfortunately, quite well, to recruit people between the ages of 18 and 25 especially. So, the alt-right copied some of their tactics, with national action, using very similar slogans even using a ‘white jihad’ kind of rhetoric, so, really applying the rhetoric of ISIS and jihadists.
And now we’re seeing as you say, the opposite trend, where Islamist extremists and jihadists are using some of the online tactics and social media campaign tactics that the alt-right has, has pioneered, to some extent. The use of memes and satire and humoristic visual content, that’s something that was more an innovation by the alt-right and they’re sometimes using the exact same memes that originated from alt-right channels. We actually released a report at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, where I’m a research fellow, that’s called Islamogram, that really shows how Islamist extremists have adopted some of that alt lingo and alt vocabulary and visual strategy.
SG: So, it seems to be a very vicious cycle where they’re feeding off each other and it’s growing and it’s metamorphosing in various different ways, very disturbing ways. I want to also address the misogyny angle here because we know that in both neo-Nazi and jihadist movements there’s a strong prevalence to violently abuse and control women. Neo-Nazis and jihadist, they’re different, but then we’re also seeing similarities that you are identifying. Why does misogyny play such an important role for these respective extremist entities?
JE: It’s a really important common denominator as you say, both have such a deeply ingrained or deeply inherent misogynistic element in their ideologies and in their narratives. And the reason partly, that that is the case is because they both want to return to a distant past, where women had no rights, where we didn’t have modern, liberal societal structures, where women fulfilled a very different role in society. And it’s interesting because this is coupled—this kind of idealisation, or glorification of the past, where human rights were not respected to the same extent as today and women’s rights especially—with a desire to use the techniques of the future to be an early adopter of new, innovative online techniques and use new technologies. but couple those with very old ideologies. So, it’s an interesting dichotomy of old ideologies coupled with new technologies.
SG: Another related aspect is that we’ve also seen women play a prominent role in terrorism, as recruiters, groomers, and even engaging in violence itself. ISIS were very prominent in that approach. There have been cases in both Germany and the United States recently, where women who were part of ISIS have been prosecuted for enslaving other women, during the height of ISIS’ so called ‘caliphate,’ and literally handing these women over to ISIS male fighters as female slaves. Can you explain why women would want to play such a prominent role in terrorist groups and engage in some very disturbing behaviour, are motivations similar to men?
JE: It’s a very good question that I’ve asked myself multiple times, especially when speaking to female members of both Islamist extremists and far-right extremist groups. But what seems to be interesting, and such a paradox because of course, they would be part of a deeply misogynist group, is that they would often say that they felt empowered by it, and they had a completely new way of looking at what it means to be a woman. Some of them had a femininity crisis. So, we often talk about the masculinity crisis as being a major driver of extremism, and interestingly, I could see a similar identity crisis among some of the women, who couldn’t really cope with, for example, double burdens, with the fast-paced dating life, and who were just frustrated by some aspects of being a woman in today’s world. So, that was an interesting commonality and a parallel to what drives male extremists.
But of course, there were other factors too and they were actually very similar to what is driving men. So, there is something more. It’s not true to look at women as completely unique and very different, having a very different radicalization pathway. From my research and also from what other researchers wrote, even in terms of female suicide bombers, there are many parallels and many commonalities in the radicalization pathways.
SG: You’ve mentioned several times some of the research that you’ve done, you’re a primary source researcher, you don’t just talk about issues from afar you go very deep. And that leads me to what I wanted to talk to you about next, which is that you’ve written another book Going Dark, where you literally go undercover, adopting five different identities, and joining about a dozen or so extremist groups from across the ideological spectrum. What was that like? And did it take a toll on your mental health?
JE: Yes, that was definitely an interesting research project and an investigation, really my goal was to understand better what drives people on a very human level to join extremist groups and also to stay within extremist groups, and to understand the tactics better. And I thought the best way to do that is to really be on the inside of an extremist group. So, I adopted lots of different identities to join different groups across the ideological spectrum. I built up five different avatar accounts over time, to be recruited by extremist groups like Generation Identity, the white national nationalist movement, but I also went to a neo-Nazi festival in Germany. So, I also did offline investigations. I also spent time with white nationalists, actually meeting them in a pub in London and going to an event at an Airbnb in Brixton.
And that was definitely something where I was increasingly concerned about my own safety, and it’s also the reason why I didn’t continue it. Because it definitely took a toll on me, I think on a psychological level as well, because of course, many researchers working in that field of radicalization prevention are exposed to a lot of content that can be deeply traumatising, especially over time, and can turn into chronic trauma. But being so close also in the offline world, really meeting up with people, had a different dimension to it as well, because of course there were campaigns against me after that. There were hate campaigns, including death threats and sexual threats when they found out who I really was—which was inevitable because of the books that I published and the articles that I wrote.
SG: I can imagine that must have been extremely challenging to deal with. Related to this, did you notice people becoming disenchanted, wanting to leave these groups that you were embedding yourself in? And if so, what led to the choice of leaving? Did this experience provide any insights on what more can be done to stop individuals from succumbing to violent ideological doctrines?
JE: Definitely. There were a few cases, and it seemed to follow a wider pattern that I could observe from up close, which was people leaving after some kind of event or incident that really questioned their own worldview and their perception of the in-group versus the out-group. So, for example, Charlottesville: I was on the inside of the organisation teams and looked at what was happening in the run-up to the Charlottesville rally. And when the events then turned violent and actually led to one counter-protester dying, being murdered in the car terrorist attack there, that really alienated some of the people within the movement and led them to leave the movement, because they were so surprised that this could happen. The same was true when the Christchurch shooting happened, where you saw that a few people could just not really combine being part of a community that they felt was very much reflecting their own state of mind, their own ideologies, but then seeing that community turn towards violence. That was definitely something that led to some people leaving. But equally, when all of a sudden, the enemy—or the perceived —was no longer perceived as so evil…because some of the individuals would then have positive experiences with the so-called enemy and would start to question these black and white narratives. So usually, some kind of surprising moment that would lead them to break up their narratives about the “us” and the “them” was a good starting point for people to leave.
SG: So, to connect the thread further, you’ve been researching the language and narratives that are being produced and written communications by terrorists, including manifestos that are associated with violent attacks. You co-authored a very important peer-reviewed journal article in relation to this. Can this be used to help security agencies; defence ministries improve their detection and prevention practices when it comes to counter-terrorism?
JE: That would be the hope. It can of course add one additional layer to early warning systems, for example, to really see when someone is radicalising towards violence, because it’s getting increasingly hard these days to distinguish between what’s an empty threat online—because of the sheer amount of threats that we have in the online spaces—and what’s actually something that should be further investigated and should be taken seriously. And the idea of the systematic terrorist manifesto analysis was to both quantitatively—statistically—but also qualitatively examine, in terms of the language and the social psychological drivers revealed through language, what distinguishes the communications of terrorists from the communications or texts written by people who would never resort to violence.
And what came out of this was that there is almost a formula of different factors that seem to be statistically significant among future terrorist perpetrators who uploaded the terrorist manifestos—and that was identity fusion, which has already been found in previous research to be linked to extreme forms of violence. And it means basically when your personal identity merges with your group identity. And that can be tracked in language as well, and it’s revealed subconsciously, so even if you strategically escalate or deescalate in your language, it goes beyond that. Even the use of satire wouldn’t really distort this phenomenon of identity fusion. And that’s often then combined with violence-condoning group norms—such as the justification of violence, the glorification of previous attackers, or the glorification of martyrdom—and with dehumanising and demonising language towards a perceived enemy group. So those are the different factors that seem to be uniquely or exclusively a pattern in terrorist manifestos, as opposed to non-terrorist manifestos. And I would hope that this can help at least maybe allocate the resources to the right groups or to individuals online who are really posing a credible threat to violence and who might actually resort to terror tactics.
SG: I’d like to pivot to another dynamic. You have done so much primary source research. I’m curious, do you ever come across the role of hostile state actors, such as Russia, who may engage with proscribed entities to cause social tensions with other countries? Because we know that Russia engages in a lot of actions that are designed to cause problems in many countries, and we’re seeing a lot of psychological operations coming out of the Kremlin during the whole conflict in Ukraine. Has that ever come across your path?
JE: It definitely has. And there have been many touch points for my research. At the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, we’ve done a lot of research into disinformation campaigns and how they interact with radicalization and amplification of what fringe and extremist groups do. So, it’s interesting to see a parallel in the goals of fringe actors, extremist actors in, say, our liberal democracies and foreign state actors who are hostile to our democracies, like Russia. Russia is definitely an important one among them because it has been the Kremlin’s goal to destabilise the European Union, to destabilise the UK and North America. And so, there is a common sense that they’re trying to reach the same goal. It’s been really difficult to prove the exact links, but there have been amplification mechanisms, which we could pinpoint in our research. For example, Russian-sponsored media outlets really giving airtime and repeating the hashtags or the campaigns that were driven by far-right extremists and also by other fringe communities. It doesn’t really matter to them which ideology it is, as long as it creates chaos within Europe or within North America. So that’s an ongoing, I guess, question, to what extent can we prove that there are actual Russian officials who are behind this or who are funding this? I believe lots of journalists and researchers are really on this, but it’s still a tricky topic to approach.
SG: Yes, I can imagine. You spoke about fringe narratives and how Russia may wish to exploit that for their own agenda. It sort of makes me want to track back to some of the things that we were discussing earlier, in the sense that have you noticed what the main gateways into online extremists’ communities are, for both Islamist and far-right? Are there commonalities, things that are identified as “acceptable” ways of getting lured into these dangerous pathways?
JE: Yeah, definitely. There’s the exploitation of similar grievances, and they often have something to do with personal experiences, personal feelings of loss of status or socioeconomic issues, or even a feeling to be an outsider, to not be heard by politicians. All of these grievances are then projected or turned into a bigger narrative that fits the group or the movement’s ideology. And that’s the interesting parallel between all types of extremist movements—that they’re very good at turning personal grievances into something bigger that would reflect the group’s ideology. And of course, conspiracy myths are kind of an intermediary here. They’re used to make that connection, to make that bridge. And very often, that’s quite handy, especially in times of crisis.
We saw that with COVID and also the Russian war in Ukraine, that some of the information vacuum and the uncertainty in those crises was exploited and misused by extremists. And they could really tap into entire population segments that seem to be more vulnerable and seem to look for some kind of overarching explanation for their own personal losses or fears or their own lack of perspective. And so I think it’s really important also on a political level to really spot what are the population segments in a crisis—and that can be the health crisis, that can be even to do with the COVID impact on mental health and on socioeconomic situations—what are the population segments that might be most likely to develop a sense of anti-establishment or grievance or feeling of deep discontent with the status quo, who can then easily be brought to the side of extremists and extremist narratives? And the same is true now with the economic and energy crisis. This is a major opportunity, unfortunately, for extremist movements to recruit more people into their arms.
SG: You’ve demonstrated throughout our conversation just the breadth of research that you’ve undertaken. And it’s very important in terms of helping us understand and demystify a lot of the different narratives that feed into extremism and how they operate. So, a final question. It’s a preconceived, leading question, I guess. You studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science. You took the master’s course Political Islam that I happen to teach along with Dr. Kirsten Schulze. How much did the course help you in your career path?
JE: I would say it was even the kick-starter of what got me interested in the topic. And it helped me really to understand the underlying patterns of different forms of extremism. So, I still benefit from the course today, and I’m not just saying that because you’re hosting this podcast, but it’s been really very fundamental in my thinking about extremism, about radicalization. And it was what initially got me interested in the topic because it was a really fascinating course. And so, I can definitely recommend it to anyone who is studying at the LSE. But yeah, I’m very grateful for what I learned in the course and also for all the questions that it prompted.
SG: Well, you remain one of the all-stars of the course, and everyone’s very proud of what you’ve done and what you’re continuing to achieve. So, thank you for the plug for HY435 at LSE. Let me also just thank you again, Julia, for spending the time talking to us about all these very important issues, and we look forward to your ongoing research. And let me just say thanks again for joining us on NATO DEEP Dive.
JE: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
SG: Thank you for listening to this episode of DEEP Dive. I’m your host, Dr. Sajjan Gohel. DEEP Dive is brought to you by NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme. The production and research team are Marcus Andreopoulos and Victoria Jones. For additional content, including full transcripts of each episode, please visit: deepportal.hq.nato.int/deepdive.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity.