Central European - 2 years ago

On May 7, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Professor and Founding Director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University, Washington D.C., delivered a public lecture at CEU titled “Hold Them Down: The Gendered Roots of Violent Extremism”. The event was hosted by CEU’s Nationalism Studies Program and the Department of History in partnership with the European Forum Alpbach. The talk was part of an intensive joint masterclass for CEU students, who had participated in seminars about radicalism and extremism with Miller-Idriss during the week.   The scholar’s most recent book, “Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right”, was published by Princeton University Press in 2022. Research for her forthcoming book on the gendered dimensions of violent extremism served as the basis for the CEU lecture.   “Toxic online subcultures that are misogynist can easily introduce or strengthen exclusionary ideas about national purity, degradation and degeneracy that are racist and dehumanizing. That s why I argue that it s impossible to understand the rise of the modern far-right without recognizing how it is fundamentally gendered,” said Miller-Idriss, who regularly briefs policy, security, education and intelligence agencies in the U.S. and the United Nations on trends in domestic violent extremism and strategies for disengagement.  The talk’s title, “Hold Them Down”, refers to the theme of containment. Introducing the concept, Miller-Idriss said: “The desire to control and contain, to keep women in their place, explains why so many sexist and misogynist metaphors involve motion: ‘Send her back,’ ‘lock her up,’ ‘hold her down,’ ‘ditch the witch’…” Such terms of containment, she said, are examples of misogynistic tactics.   The scholar noted that common and everyday forms of sexism and misogyny promote exclusionary ideas and open pathways for more violent ideas and mobilization to take root and thrive. By sharing cases situated in online gaming, memes and short-form video, as well as self-help forums and influencers as entry points into violent male supremacist radicalization, Miller-Idriss examined how these transmissions can normalize and help mainstream extremist, xenophobic and nationalist violence.   “The attention to possible radicalization in online gaming has been rich and comprehensive in many ways. It is mostly focused on the risks that the live chat or text communication features create for grooming and recruitment,” said Miller-Idriss, who is also a globally recognized expert on far-right youth and preventative interventions. “Those vulnerabilities have been well documented in games oriented toward younger children where there are reports of extremist actors trying to plant seeds among children to help undermine the legitimacy of parents, for example, recruiting them into encrypted rooms.”  

Cynthia Miller-Idriss at CEU. Photo by Sotiris Bekas. Discussing the role of memes and short-form videos, Miller-Idriss highlighted that such content embedded with exclusionary and sexist messages can be shared widely in text chains and groups, serving as a pathway for young people to follow hyperlinks that can become rabbit holes into ever more offensive sites and subcultures.  Moving on to a third series of cases composed of self-help forums and influencers, Miller-Idriss pointed to another pathway to violent male supremacist radicalization: “What you typically see here is an online self-help search. That is, young men seeking guideposts in the transition to adulthood, who then discover a world of online spaces rife with influencers who offer a set of success strategies, often at the price of a monthly subscription, to get their lives together.” She noted that it is within this online culture obsessively focused on men s bodies, physical fitness, body image and self-improvement where hateful content can be found embedded through the use of an “affable, joke-filled delivery style”.  Miller-Idriss closed the talk by discussing the efforts of her lab, PERIL, which is working to address the toxic online phenomena. Currently, the lab is in the process of creating a new gender-based bigotry guide for parents and teachers, which is being designed and tested with populations. The goal of the resource is to help communities of caregivers, including mental health counsellors, teachers, school social workers, parents and grandparents, better understand what their children are seeing online, how they might intervene and where they can seek support.   “The takeaway that I have on the policy side is that we in the U.S. have adopted officially a public health metaphor around prevention of violent extremism that aims to intervene much more upstream,” said Miller-Idriss. She concluded: “I would argue that any of those efforts will only be successful if we take the gender dimension of violent radicalization more seriously, starting with the very online spaces where we spend time every day.”  Unit: Department of HistoryNationalism Studies ProgramResearch Area: History and Medieval StudiesNationalism and Religious StudiesCategory: NewsImage: Content Priority: High

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