Donald Holbrook: Al Qaeda Media - a podcast by John F. Morrison

Donald Holbrook is a Visiting Fellow at ICCT. He became a lecturer at the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion at Lancaster University, UK, in September 2016. Prior to that he was Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St Andrews, which he joined in 2008.

His research has focused mostly on beliefs, ideas, and media in the context of terrorism and political violence, especially on how terrorists interact with published media and social media and how this engagement has changed over time. He has published on a wide variety of topics relating to these themes, including a book, edited volumes, journal articles, as well as reports and other deliverables for counterterrorism practitioners and policymakers. He currently manages a large-scale research project dissecting ways in which individuals involved in terrorism use different types of media, developing case studies and thematic analyses of different ideological milieus (including far-right and Islamist extremism), different types of activity (including domestic terrorism and ‘foreign fighters’) and different organisational contexts (such as groups versus lone actors), as well as comparisons across sections.

Research that has influenced Donald:
Benford, R & Snow, D. (2000) ‘Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment’ in Annual Review of Sociology (Vol. 26., pp. 611-639) à or indeed other material from them on collective action frames

Max Taylor & John Horgan (2006) ‘A Conceptual Framework for Addressing Psychological Process in the Development of the Terrorist’ Terrorism and Political Violence (18: 4).

Political Terrorism: A New Guide To Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories, And Literature, Alex P. Schmid, Albert J. Jongman. 1988, Transaction Publishers à or other Schmid work on the essence of terrorism

Donald's Key Work:

The Al-Qaeda Doctrine: The Framing and Evolution of the Leadership’s Public Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2014) &
Al-Qaeda 2.0: A Critical Reader (Hurst, 2017)
I’d take these together as one is essentially a supplement to the other.

‘What Types of Media Do Terrorists Collect? An Analysis of Religious, Political, and Ideological Publications Found in Terrorism Investigations in the UK’, ICCT (September 2017)

‘Designing and Applying an ‘Extremist Media Index’, Perspectives on Terrorism (9:5, 2015)

Further episodes of Talking Terror

Further podcasts by John F. Morrison

Website of John F. Morrison