My year-in-review thread: This year I've been working a fairly unified theme, developing a framework for studying extremism and radicalization. 
The most important piece of this was Extremist Construction of Identity, a paper published by the Counter Terrorism Strategic Communications program at @ICCT_TheHague icct.nl/publication/ex…
The framework was derived from a detailed analysis of the ideology that spawned Christian Identity, a violent white nationalist belief system. In two follow-up papers, I applied the framework to the ideology of ISIS.
The first, presented at Europol and published by @ICCT_TheHague looked at a historical piece of ISIS propaganda icct.nl/publication/de…
The second, published by @ICCT_TheHague, looked at a more recent piece of ISIS propaganda, suggesting messaging strategies in light of its disastrous loss of territory icct.nl/publication/co…
All of this raises the question of what policy makers mean when they say they're going to "defeat the extremist ideology" icct.nl/publication/de…
This research also helped inform a piece for @WarOnTheRocks about the alarming current U.S. political situation warontherocks.com/2017/04/a-dang…
Relatedly, I wrote about the Trump administration's malevolent dismantling and rebranding of CVE washingtonpost.com/posteverything…
Before I leave the topic of politics, I also teamed up with @selectedwidsom, @webradius, @jonathonmorgan and @SecureDemocracy on the #Hamilton68 dashboard tracking Russian influence operations dashboard.securingdemocracy.org politico.com/magazine/story…
Back to the extremist identity research, which also informed a piece for @TheAtlantic about the cycle of radicalization between the far-right and jihadists theatlantic.com/international/…
In a talk at @IEAdeParis I discussed the link between extremist identity construction and uncertainty, to be further developed in my next book (fall 2018)
More recently, @AmarAmarasingam and I talked about issues related to ISIS and uncertainty in a piece for @monkeycageblog washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-ca…
Most of this work was pretty focused on a singular goal of developing and fleshing out an evidence-based framework for studying extremism across different ideologies.
That research will be an even bigger focus in the year to come, including through the new book, another book in the works, some exciting projects in the alt-right space, and some major research projects I hope to announce soon. Thanks for following, and stay tuned!
