Post by Joseph A. Carter, Shiraz Maher and Peter R. Neumann All comments welcome… Over a twelve month period from early 2013 to early 2014 a team of researchers at ICSR created a database of social media profiles of 190 Western and European foreign fighters. More than two thirds of these fighters were affiliated with Jabhat al-Nusrah or the Islamic State (IS) – two groups that have, at one point or another, maintained formal relationships with al-Qaeda. The social media activity of these users provided a unique and unfiltered window into the minds of Western and European foreign fighters in Syria, which provided the information for the ICSR’s very well…

Ben O’Loughlin and Andrew Hoskins introduce the concept of ‘Arrested War’ to describe how mainstream media is re-appropriating the images and stories that describe contemporary conflicts. All comments welcome…. Arrested War: After Diffused War In the past two decades we have passed through three phases of media ecology, and each has shaped a different way media have entered into the operations and understandings of war and conflict. The 1990s saw the final stage of broadcast era war. National and satellite television and the press had a lock on what mass audiences witnessed, and governments could exercise relative control of journalists’ access and reporting. By the turn of the millennium, mass internet…