Contact Zones: Understanding recruitment processes to violent extremism in comparative domains

A consistent feature in radicalisation processes is recruitment to a violent extremist cause, an organisation, course of violent action. The focus of this project is on an identified gap in the research field; the tactics, techniques, resiliency, resources and skills of those who are active recruiters in violent extremist contexts.
The project explores these issues comparatively across different violent extremist ideologies, networks and communication platforms in Australia and the UK.    

Paper Presentation at the AVERT Research Symposium 2021

Professor Michele Grossman (presenting), Dr Vanessa Barolsky, Lydia Khalil, Dr Vivian Gerrand, Professor Hass Dellal and Adjunct Professor Natalie Davis Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University
Dr Mario Peucker Victoria University
Professor Paul Thomas and Dr Kris Christmann University of Huddersfield

This paper presents findings from a quasi-systematic literature review on change and persistence in terrorist recruitment definitions and strategies that forms part of a broader project on understanding the dynamics of terrorist recruitment in order to develop a typology of recruitment definitions, characteristics, methods and processes that can assist communities, analysts and practitioners to identify and disrupt recruitment processes at an early stage.

We reviewed literature on recruitment in Islamist extremist, right-wing and left-wing extremist and online/offline recruitment from 1979 - 2021, as well as allied literature on grooming, cults, gangs, military and lone actor and gender dimensions. We present findings from the literature review here, in particular focusing on temporal shifts in recruitment (from 'influencer' to 'handler' or facilitator); how recruitment is aligned with or distinguished from social influence; the relationship between spatial and relational analyses of recruitment processes, and the change from organisationally driven to 'leaderless' or collective recruitment processes.