All through the COVID-19 pandemic, extremists have sought to take advantage of the pandemic setting to their very own ends. The place a lot of the inhabitants sees a permanent well being disaster, extremists are likely to see alternative.
Over the previous two years, we have now seen hospitals focused by extremists, infrastructure attacked, and extremist narratives go viral. This has been most marked in western democracies, together with Australia.
Funded by a Charles Sturt College COVID-19 Analysis Grant, we examined the Australian safety context to raised perceive how extremists had been understanding and responding to the pandemic. Our key consideration was what extremist responses would imply for the safety of Australians each now and into the long run.
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Our focus shortly turned excessive ideologies. Ideologies had been essential to our research as a result of they helped us make sense of the hyperlink between understanding and doing, between thought and motion. By observing extremist statements and behaviours, we had been in a position to establish and map ideology in motion.
Ideology will be divided into three elements:
it offers a proof of the present state of affairs. That’s, why the world is as it’s
it imagines another and most popular order.
it proposes a way of political motion to realize that different. For extremists, that technique of political motion is thru extreme, deadly violence that meets the edge for terrorism.
That is essential, as a result of ideology shapes technique. It’s a important consider who extremists decide are legitimate targets of their violence. With reviews of assaults towards Australians of Asian descent early within the pandemic, we believed it was essential to analyze these ideologically motivated behaviours.
To know this higher, we mapped narratives and actions of three major extremist threats over 2020. These included violent Salafi jihadists, the intense proper, and the intense left in Australia.
Whereas we discovered little knowledge on the intense left, we had 4 key outcomes from the info collected on the intense proper and violent Salafi jihadists with respect to Australia. They had been energetic in utilizing the rising pandemic to assist their very own beliefs.
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First, and most importantly, we recognized ideological buttressing. This meant extremists had been integrating the pandemic setting into their current beliefs. For instance, extremists included COVID-19 to decry globalism, immigration, and trendy society on the whole. This strengthened their current narratives, which in flip positively influenced their potential to recruit.
This comes with nationwide safety implications. Extremists had been in a position to cement beliefs and positions, thereby deepening the divide and mistrust between fringe components and their authorities. Buttressing ensures that the specter of lone actor and group terrorism will endure. It would additionally problem future deradicalisation practices.
Second, we recognized adjustments in current ideologies – what we known as diversification. That’s, we discovered extremists adopting new or contradictory beliefs along with their former positions. Usually, this occurred the place extremists who had been numerous in ideological affiliation gathered in the identical house (albeit with differing objectives). For instance, conventional White supremacists adopted among the sovereign citizen motion concepts on authorities oppression.
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What this implies is that extremists had been uncovered to totally different concepts, objectives, and other people. Their ideology was shifted by having a extra numerous vary of individuals of their networks, however typically with chaotic outcomes: supporters held seemingly contradictory positions concurrently.
This shifting will problem the environment friendly identification and categorisation of an extremist or group of extremists: the pandemic has made all the things messier. There could possibly be, in consequence, flow-on results, each to the neighborhood in reporting suspected extremists and the authorities investigating extremists.
The third outcomes was what we name “idiosyncratisation”. That is the place extremists built-in particular conspiracies into their narratives. Conspiracies will not be often ideologies in a technical sense, as a result of they not often present a different order. Nonetheless, we noticed the adoption of objectionable and disconnected beliefs, similar to 5G inflicting COVID-19 throughout each excessive left and excessive proper actions.
Lastly, our fourth final result was that – regardless of COVID-19 countermeasures – the sharing of ideologically motivated concepts didn’t solely happen on-line, as may need been anticipated in a pandemic setting. As an alternative, misinformation and ideological content material was shared offline, and in some instances, in individual. Whereas the web was a freeway for COVID-19 narratives world wide, it was not the one one.
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The context created by COVID-19 has sophisticated Australia’s nationwide safety setting. Now we have seen new leaders rising and new concepts being adopted. On the identical time, previous actions are reworking and previous ideologies being bolstered.
As we transfer into 2022 and the pandemic continues, there might be crucial issues for the nationwide safety panorama. These embrace the rising complexities related to extremists and the way they’re utilizing COVID to additional their very own means. The 4 key outcomes recognized in our research make clear this ever-evolving menace to our nationwide safety.
Funded by a CSU COVID-19 Analysis Grant
