Self-Radicalisation in the Post-Pandemic World

As extremist movements increasingly move across social media, gaming platforms, encrypted messaging services, influencer networks, and other digital spaces, traditional approaches to radicalisation struggle to explain how contemporary online extremism develops. Self-Radicalisation in the Post-Pandemic World introduces an ecological framework for understanding these changing pathways, examining how individuals, identities, communities, technologies, platforms, algorithms, and wider social conditions interact to create environments in which extremist narratives can emerge and flourish. Drawing on extensive empirical research into non-violent extremism, online recruitment, extremist communication, gaming-adjacent platforms, misinformation, and emerging technologies, the book challenges organisation-centred and technologically deterministic explanations of radicalisation. Instead, it presents online radicalisation as a dynamic process shaped by interconnected digital ecosystems, ideological hybridity, social belonging, and technological affordances. Bringing together academic scholarship and insights from practitioners, policymakers, and counter-terrorism professionals, this book offers a timely and theoretically grounded framework for understanding — and responding to — the evolving nature of extremism in the digital age.