This episode explores the social worlds of various extremist groups and the corrosive effects of radicalization on contemporary democracy. Why is it necessary to observe extremist organizations up close? And how are gender and religion instrumentally deployed? Listen to hear about the unexpected similarities between various extremist groups and how the negative effects on democracy can be countered.
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Glossary
Identitarians
(06:49 or p.2 in the transcript)
The term of “Identitarians” originated in France with the founding of the Bloc Identitaire movement and its youth counterpart, Generation Identitaire. Identitarians espouse racism and intolerance under the guise of preserving the ethnic and cultural origins of their respective counties. American Identitarians such as Richard Spencer claim to want to preserve European-American (i.e., white) culture in the US. As Michael McGregor, a writer and editor for Radix wrote in an article in the publication, Identitarians want “the preservation of our identity–the cultural and genetic heritage that makes us who we are.”Identitarians reject multiculturalism or pluralism in any form. Namely, Identitarianism is a post-war European far-right political ideology asserting the right of peoples of European descent to culture and territory which are claimed to belong exclusively to people defined as European. Building on ontological ideas of modern German philosophy, its ideology was formulated from the 1960s onward by essayists such as Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Guillaume Faye and Renaud Camus, considered the movement’s intellectual leaders.
While on occasion condemning racism and promoting ethnopluralist society, it argues that particular modes of being are customary to particular groups of people, mainly based on ideas of thinkers of the German Conservative Revolution, in some instances influenced by Nazi theories, through the guidance of European New Right leaders. Some Identitarians explicitly espouse ideas of xenophobia and racialism, but most limit their public statements to more docile language. Some among them promote the creation of white ethno-states, to the exclusion of migrants and non-white residents. The Identitarian Movement has been classified by the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in 2019 as right-wing extremist. The movement is most notable in Europe, and although rooted in Western Europe, it has spread more rapidly to the eastern part of the continent through conscious efforts of the likes of Faye. It also has adherents among North American, Australian, and New Zealander white nationalists. The United States–based Southern Poverty Law Center considers many of these organizations to be hate groups. source
Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world today. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna, and Senior Visiting Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute, Geneva.
This is the fifth episode of season nine of Democracy in Question. It's a great pleasure to welcome Julia Ebner, a social anthropologist by training, who is a leading expert on radicalization, extremism and terrorism prevention. Her work addresses the threats to democracy, to women's rights and minority rights from a variety of extremist groups. She's the internationally bestselling author of three books that concern us today. “The Rage”[i], published in 2017, “Going Dark”[ii], 2019, and most recently, “Going Mainstream”[iii], in 2023. Julia is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London and the leader of the Violent Extremism Lab at the University of Oxford's Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion.
Based on her academic research, as well as her undercover investigations among far-right extremists, misogynist groups, as well as jihadist groups, Julia also provides advice to governments and intelligence agencies, to tech firms and transnational organizations. She previously acted as special advisor on counter terrorism for the United Nations, and regularly writes for newspapers such as “The Guardian” and “The Washington Post”. Earlier this year, I had the honor to confer on Julia Ebner the prestigious Open Society Prize awarded by our university, the Central European University. This is the first part of a truly eye-opening conversation with Julia, which we will continue over the next episode as well.
I begin by asking her to share with us her unique experience of studying ethnographically the social worlds of many extremist groups, both online and onsite, to document the corrosive effects of radicalization on contemporary democracy. Immersing herself in the social microcosm of radical fringe groups is not without risks. Why is it necessary to observe extremist organizations on this level of minute everyday patterns of interactions, which elude the grasp of policymakers and also of security forces? Among the socio-cultural aspects of radicalization that Julia's work deals with, I'll ask her to address the instrumental deployment of gender and religion within these extremist and often violent groups.
We'll discuss the unexpected similarities between the various extremist groups that consider each other as their mortal enemies, and yet, interestingly, display a logic of co-constitutive hostility. We'll also talk about the various distinct subcultures whose ideologies of hate feed into each other, mutually reinforcing a spiral of violence in rhetoric, but sometimes also in practice. I'll also ask Julia to elaborate on the paradoxical use of the latest technology by these groups and of new media channels for the propagation of antimodern messages advocating racism and patriarchy. How do the logics of technological and social aspects mutually reinforce each other? What are the implications of this techno social dynamic for regulatory oversight?
We'll conclude today's conversation with some thoughts about the contradictions between the quasi-utopian democratizing potential of the internet and the negative effects that its fragmentation of virtual publics has had on our politics. Can we counter this tendency and if so, how? How can democracy be protected without either unduly restricting freedom of speech and expression or sacrificing the right to security and also the need for regulation?
Julia, welcome to the podcast, and it's a great pleasure to have you as my guest. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Julia Ebner (JE): Thank you so much for having me.
SR: I'm going to start with a small autobiographical detail, which struck me in the introduction to your book, “Going Dark”. You confess that as a child, you wanted to study tornadoes, but you've ended up chasing extremists for a living instead of chasing storms. You've immersed yourself in the world of a range of political extremists, which is hardly less dangerous than standing at the heart of a storm. And you write that your main aim in studying these extremist groups was to render their sociality, their cultural, anthropological, psychological makeup visible and legible.
These hidden social dynamics have to be studied up close and this gladdens my heart as a fellow social anthropologist of course. You say they elude our grasp at a distance. These dynamics have been neglected in your view by lawmakers and policy experts usually because they are focusing either on security or regulation or censorship. So, let me begin by asking you how on earth did you develop an interest in chasing extremist group members, networks, through multi-sided, multimedia investigations, through ethnographic research? What I remember of my days of doing fieldwork was that it was always very difficult to work with people towards whom one either felt a political aversion or even, in your case, often moral revulsion. What kind of risk did you take, but what kind of closeness and distance were you able to build up to the objects of your study? You worked undercover among both far right, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, identitarians, but also Islamists and jihadists.
JE: Yes, really good questions. I think what first got me interested in studying extremist groups was that in high school I was bullied myself and I saw how quickly social dynamics can turn into something very toxic and how quickly out group uttering is happening, and how quickly that can even turn towards aggression and violence. So, I've always been interested in that, but that was more on a subconscious level. And then I did my master's first in China and then at LSE (London School of Economics) in the U.K. in London. And I studied the history of jihadism. And that was when ISIS was just starting to recruit a lot of fighters from across Europe to join them in Iraq and Syria.
I was already interested then in studying jihadist forms of violence and extremism. But then I also saw in the aftermath of that how there was a massive far-right backlash against minority communities, a racist and anti-Muslim backlash that was seen on a global scale, but especially in Europe. And that led me to then also study these movements better and understand their inner workings better, their recruitment strategies, how they motivate members, how they communicate internally. And I was doing this kind of work in a think tank setting. I was mainly analyzing what was visible to everyone from the outside, but I felt that I was hitting a wall at times. So, I felt the need to also take an anthropological approach and immerse myself in these communities to understand how they work from the inside, a bit like you have to be on the inside of the storm to understand it better, to study it.
And it's of course something where, like storms, extremist movements are changing direction very quickly. They're extremely fast, but they're also dangerous and they're complex. And I think that was where my interest came from. But as you say, it's been really difficult sometimes to keep the distance necessary to understand on an academic level and to study these movements, because sometimes these people did speak about real grievances. There were connecting points on a very human level where I felt I could understand where they were coming from. I couldn't understand where they ended up or how they got to endorsing really extreme ideologies or adopting even violence or even taking violent actions. But the starting points were often very human and that often built an emotional bridge between me and them.
I also often thought some of the people I encountered were very average in the sense that you wouldn't immediately notice that they're part of an extremist or even violent extremist group. Sometimes we spoke about where we even found common ground or where we had things in common. That also led me to believe that anyone can become an extremist or a violent extremist, even because we all have vulnerabilities that can be exploited.
We are all prone sometimes, especially in moments of crisis, to being groomed or recruited, even by very extreme actors. It meant that sometimes these people would have perhaps been friends if it wasn't for their extreme political ideologies. On a very human level, they could be. But it was, of course, sometimes difficult to distance myself enough to keep my research going because sometimes I also wanted to help them get out of the movement.
But the whole point of the research was to not have my identity uncovered too quickly. And I was mainly an observer or did immersive observation inside those groups. My role wasn't to try and prevent them from going further down that path. That is, of course, something I want to contribute to. And that's something where my research has informed prevention initiatives. And that's the work that I've been doing with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, where they also focus a lot on counter radicalization and intervention approaches and also early prevention.
SR: Can you say something about the gender dynamics in these groups and about the way in which often religion is instrumentalized for what could have been political disaffection or economic grievances?
JE: Two very good questions. Gender definitely plays an important role. And there is a bit of a paradoxical relationship there because there are lots of extremist movements both on the jihadist side and on the far-right white nationalist side, but also of course in the misogynist spectrum. In any case, that's very common to have very male dominated communities.
So, there is a sense that often these communities frame themselves as not really being open to accepting female members. Some of them, however, really have a strategic focus on reaching out to women because they know they need that for radical change, which is of course what they want to achieve in the future. A lot of these movements, despite being deeply misogynist and despite being very much rooted in a thinking about gender roles that is more rooted in the 1950s or even earlier, where they try to reverse some of the human rights we take for granted today, despite all of that, they do see the necessity to recruit women and to sometimes even use women in a very exploitative way or a very opportunistic way - at their front lines, in their public facing campaigns - to give the movement the sense of legitimacy to give them a feeling of being more normal, perhaps in the public eye. You can see how religion is often taken out of context and very radical interpretations are imposed by group leaders onto the entire group. And often the people who join are not very knowledgeable about these religions. So, you see on the jihadists’ side with ISIS a very twisted versions of Islam, but the people who joined ISIS were often not very knowledgeable of Islam. They weren't really studying the Quran, for example, or studying different interpretations of Islam. So, it was easier to sell a twisted or manipulated version, and a very radical version, of course, to them. And the same is true on the far-right extremist side, where you can sometimes also see that religions are being exploited and manipulated in ways that they are adopted into the wider belief system or into the framework that serves the purpose of the extremist group.
SR: One important lesson that I drew from your work was that our democracies are under attack from opposite extremes. And while those who inhabit these extremes may be each other's sworn enemies, unfortunately that doesn't make either of them our friends. It locks them instead into a vicious cycle of mutually reinforcing hatred and sometimes also physical violence. Could you say something about the underlying patterns and logic that you discovered in these antagonistic fringe groups, which they interestingly share? And what do white supremacists and radical jihadists copy from one another? In what ways do they mirror one another?
JE: Yeah, it's really interesting. That dynamic first came to my attention when I saw that backlash in the far-right communities following jihadist attacks from ISIS-affiliated groups or cells across Europe. Then when I saw that there were so many parallels in the narratives and in the worldviews of the far right as on the Islamist extremist side, where, for example, they see this inevitable war of races or cultures or religions.
The West is seen as a homogenous entity that is perceived as a homogenous entity of Islam. So, there's this idea of there being a necessary conflict between the West and Islam, which is actually propagated by both sides. And of course, then this vicious circle starts as soon as one of the radical sides launches an attack. And then the other side feels justified in their perception that, oh, all Muslims are evil, or all Westerners are evil. So, there's this vicious circle that I could observe, especially in the aftermath of attacks. We also saw, for example, after ISIS attacks, there were spikes in online anti Muslim and even more broadly anti-minority hatred.
And vice versa, after a far-right attack, Islamist extremist channels and especially the ISIS affiliated channels I looked into spoke a lot about how the West is evil and how they treat Muslims. So, they would also see the far right as representative of the whole West and would use that in their propaganda to fuel victimhood narratives, which are very common on both sides, and which then often serve the purpose of demonizing the other side. So, there's this sense that their narratives are mirrors of one another, but also, they find common ground, of course, in some of their antisemitic, misogynist, but also anti-LGBTQ ideas and ideas that are deeply opposed to open society. They want to go back to a time where they would have to reverse human rights essentially to get there.
So those things are then sometimes also offering windows for them to actually have even forms of collaboration, which seem unlikely, but there have been a few. Cases where, for example, identitarians or far-right extremists have actually shifted to joining ISIS, where neo-Nazis joined ISIS. So, you can also see that social dynamics also lend themselves to these kinds of sides switching. Because in the end, the ideologies are very similar in the patterns that they propagate or in the patterns that are repeated on both sides.
SR: One other commonality which you point out in a lot of your work is, and if I may quote you here, you say that: “they globalize anti globalist ideologies and use modern technologies to put into place anti modern visions”. So not only are some of these ideologies, sometimes even postmodern in the way in which they are just put together quite selectively out of elements from religious or even non-religious thinking, but what seems striking in your work is how skillful all these far-right groups are at deploying social media and cutting-edge modern technologies. This seems to be a common characteristic. Maybe I could sum up in your own words that extremist groups, and I quote you here, “use tech to give individuals what tech has taken from them. Belonging, self-confidence, and identity, or illusions of that”. One of my recent guests on the podcast, Catherine Fieschi, also argued that new digital technologies and social media have had a transformative effect on the political unconscious of societies privileging duplicity, a false sense of immediacy at the expense of trying to understand complexity and embracing also the contradictions with some of the liberal values which open societies hold. You go even further, and you show, and I'm going to quote you here: “We are witnessing a toxic combination of ideological nostalgia and technological futurism that might determine the direction of travel for 21st century.”
I'd like you to elaborate on this nexus, the implication of technology and the social, but what strikes me in your work is the argument which follows from this where you then say that it’s not enough, therefore, to just focus on tech-centered solutions to combat extremism, but it's equally inadequate to focus entirely only on online/offline, society focused solutions.
JE: It's very true that there is this paradox that extremist movements want to go back, ideologically speaking, to a distant past, but use the technologies of the future, are early adopters of new technologies. And we even see that now, in light of AI, large language models, deep fakes that are being used by extremist movements.
And they are sometimes the first successful users of these because very often, and I hope no one takes that the wrong way, but I sometimes compare extremist groups to startups, where you have to conquer a market share, of course, not on an ideological level, I wouldn't compare them to startups, but just on a tactical level, they have to conquer a bigger share of the market if they want to provoke radical change, which is usually their aim, they have to use new technologies and be very innovative in order to achieve that.
So often we see that they are much better and much earlier in adopting new technologies and using social media strategies in a skillful way. And looking to the latest trends and to future trends, when it comes to new technologies, it might give them an advantage that is disproportionately high. So that also means that they have now a window of opportunity that might allow them to conquer a bigger size of the market. And this is exactly what we see now with the mainstreaming of extremism, that they've managed to some extent to use these new technologies and in particular social media, TikTok and on other platforms, extremist movements have managed to turn their symbols and their language into something that is no longer confined to the ideological fringes, but it has actually entered more mainstream discourse and sometimes people use these symbols and the words coming out of extremist networks unknowingly because they have been mainstreamed to that extent. So, there's this manipulation that is happening and I think that is something where extremists have been extremely tech savvy. I listened into some of the strategy conversations in some of these extremist groups, both on the jihadist side, but also, for example, on the identitarian side, with white nationalists who were speaking very clearly about what their media strategy and their new media strategy would look like, how they would, for example, use strategic polarization, also online, to make sure that the divisions increase and that people have to choose one or the other radical side, that there's nothing left in the middle.
And unfortunately, the algorithms on social media reinforce that dynamic of hyperpolarization, because multiple studies have shown that the recommendations, for example, on YouTube or on other social media channels are often geared towards reinforcing more and more radical content. That means that you might just enter at a perhaps relatively political content level, but you end up in an extremely radical echo chamber, and that is something that is hugely dangerous and is hugely counterproductive when it comes to social cohesion or to countering radicalization.
SR: Julia, could you say something about the kinds of resources that are available to these groups, which enable them to use these technologies to disseminate their messages so far and wide? Who funds them, or how do they get enmeshed also in networks of foreign government funding in order to polarize and destabilize Western democracies in Europe or in the U.S. or elsewhere.
JE: Well, they have shared interests with state actors. In many ways, there are state actors that want to destabilize Europe that want to destabilize the United States and even with the EU being constantly under attack from disinformation, but also hacking campaigns. We see that state actors have a clear interest in amplifying some of the existing societal divisions. And that also means that by supporting extremist groups, they can produce exactly that outcome. They can simply act via these multipliers who then amplify outgroup hatred who amplify existing polarization on the political and on the societal level and who spread disinformation and potentially conspiracy myths that undermine trust in not just the media, also science and politics and democratic institutions.
So. there is an element of state support there. But there is also a big share of, especially when we talk about their revenue, a big share of the revenue of a lot of these extremist movements is coming from donations. They run a lot of campaigns on social media. Now, social media tech firms, the big ones at least, have become a little bit better at making sure these influencers can't monetize their activities on their platforms. But even now, until today, it's still possible for them to attract a lot of views and to start campaigns where they would then fundraise and use crypto wallets and get transfers in cryptocurrencies and also sometimes use ads on their content or monetize their extremist campaigns.
SR: So, the internet, which was our utopian vision just a few decades ago, was supposed to democratize and decentralize the free flow of information. A transnational public sphere has actually led to an erosion of trust in independent, verifiable information. And many people have got just increasingly suspicious of "the establishment”, including, as you just said, mainstream media and also of science.
So, the sheer scale of the internet and the speed with which it's able to spread this kind of disinformation, and especially in a situation where audiences are so fragmented, it's able to circulate and manipulate in a way that mainstream media can hardly compete with. Some polls and the recent surveys that you cite in your own work suggest that a large proportion of our populations, even in the most advanced democracies, rely on social media rather than on public broadcasting companies or established news sources and are therefore susceptible to what seems to us to be completely crazy and outlandish conspiracy theories. How do we deal with this? How do we get back standards of rationality and proof and of information which can be verified and which people can rely on? The dilemmas here of the future governance of the internet are I think rather complex. We need to balance considerations of security with liberty and free speech for protecting democracy in a profoundly changing media ecology where the enemies of open societies of liberal democracies are just one step ahead.
JE: It's a really fine and difficult balance to strike. I completely agree. And I've seen some initiatives that while still maintaining complete freedom of speech have managed to get fact checking or content that debunks some of the disinformation out there and some of the misinformation, get that to social media channels and make that go viral. NGO, I believe it's called Facts for Friends, and it uses quick fact checking content and turns that into something that can go viral on social media and underlays it with good visuals. It's very crisp and it works really well on social media. I think we need a lot more of that because what I've seen is that extremist movements are extremely strategic in the way that they present their content, in the way that they spread disinformation or spread conspiracy myths online.
So, I think perhaps on a tactical level, it is necessary to also adopt to the formats of Instagram and TikTok, for example. Even with the elections, we see that the centrist parties are usually worst when it comes to using social media, especially the new channels on TikTok or Instagram. And the far-right populist parties have been best at doing that.
And that's also how they got a really high share among young voters, an unprecedentedly high vote among young voters. 17 percent in Germany voted for the AfD in the European elections. Even the ways in which they used, for example, anime characters from the Japanese pop culture, you see that they really tap into these online youth cultures, into Internet culture, in a way that centrist parties and also centrist movements or movements trying to counter that tide of radicalism don't do. And so, that's something where perhaps we could get better at. And that would be an easy win whereas of course cutting down on freedom of speech can always lead to counterproductive effects where actually that feeds into some of the victimhood narratives and can also be again exploited by extremist groups to further amplify their conspiracy myths about the global elites, the so called global elites trying to impose a complete surveillance state or a complete totalitarian state.
SR: Julia, the far-right and extremist groups you've been studying, groups of jihadists or white supremacists and identitarians are not only media and tech savvy, but they seem to be extremely good at marketing themselves, especially to be able to boost their appeal to a young hip audience. And also, to wider mainstream publics, who would not necessarily be attracted by a recognizably fascist image.
You cite in this context the American expert, Cynthia Miller-Idris. Her research has shown that the far right has gravitated away from, as she calls it, and I quote her here, “from the singular hard edged skinhead style in favor of sophisticated and fashionable commercial brands that deploy cosmetics and coded extremist symbols”.
You mentioned earlier the unexpected similarities between the far-right and ISIS, and ISIS too, and I quote you here, “has modeled itself as a cool counterculture and lifestyle brand that resists mainstream thinking while still adhering to the latest cultural touchstones”. And the anime you just spoke about would be a part of that cultural repertoire.
Could you say something more about this fascinating strategic and symbolic significance of branding of fashion, a recognizably counter cultural aesthetic that you've observed among these extremist groups?
JE: They've used very similar aesthetics and very similar ways of trying to frame themselves as cool, young and hip countercultures. With ISIS, it was first, you could see that they used video game covers, for example, and put the heads of jihadists on top of that. Although, of course, there's a big paradox there as well, because they really wouldn't endorse the Western video game industry. They used Hollywood covers, again, they wouldn't endorse Hollywood at all, but they used them, and they put the heads of jihadists on top and, for example, turned Call of Duty into Call of Jihad and portrayed that image of joining ISIS being a bit like in a video game. You can become a hero in that global fight that they're leading. Gamified communication was also something that was very common in the far-right extremist groups. The alt-right has been one of the prime examples of this in the U.S. Even in the run up to the 2016 elections, we saw that the alt-right used a lot of gamifications in their communication, and they also used video game references, they used pop culture references to appeal to the young people.
And, in a way that is sometimes distracted from the ideologies, or it was often a gateway into these communities without necessarily having a recognizable ideological or political dimension yet. But then people were socialized into the group and then only radicalized gradually because the group bonds became really deep and because then people slowly started to adopt the same language. The socialization aspect was almost more important than the ideological indoctrination, which sometimes happened as a side product. And that was true for some of the ISIS affiliated groups as well as for some of the alt-right and new right extremist groups.
SR: Thanks a lot, Julia, for being with me here today and thanks for your really fascinating insights into the group dynamics and the technological aspects that allow these far-right extremist groups but also jihadists and other extremist groups to propagate so successfully their ideologies and for sharing your suggestions about what we could be doing about it in order to protect our open democratic society.
JE: Thank you so much for having me.
SR: We learned from Julia that the alarming new phenomena of online radicalization can't be adequately understood if we limit ourselves to a legalistic or even a moralizing approach. Only fine-grained ethnographic research like hers can reveal the internal workings of extremist movements, namely the dynamics of forming social ties of solidarity as well as the manipulative targeting of often partly legitimate grievances to recruit and groom youth in times of multiple crises.
The social anthropological thick description of such subcultures of extremism reveals many other curious paradoxes as well. For instance, deeply misogynistic anti-feminist groups, whether white supremacists or jihadists, have nevertheless adopted clever tactics to recruit women among their ranks. There is also the further paradox of underlying similarities between the far right and the Islamists, who share essentializing, homogenizing views of each other as metonymic representatives of their respective civilizational universes.
But they also share some common enemies, including the liberal values of democratic open societies and human rights. Another interesting paradox that Julia elaborated on is that for all their anti-modernist and traditional primordialist rhetoric, these extremist groups have rather skillfully used the internet, digital platforms, social media, and online games. As she put it, they have liberally borrowed from the technologies of the future to advocate a return to a mythical past, which has allowed them, interestingly, to widen their social appeal. We'll return to this subject in the next episode.
The algorithms of social media unfortunately reward and amplify polarizing messages that extremist groups send out. They also benefit from the patronage of state actors, political forces, and donors who have an interest in destabilizing democracies worldwide. Democrats have been trying to catch up to the techno social challenges that this use of technology poses. But they've been relatively slow to react to these new threats.
Julia has cautioned us against any harsh regulatory response to the spread of disinformation, as it's likely to play into the hands of the extremists, who portray themselves quite skillfully as victims of censorship and oppression by the establishment and the elites. What she proposes instead is a two-pronged strategy against radicalization. First, trying to counter manipulative and hateful misinformation through easily communicable fact checking through social media channels. And second, by making a concerted effort to tap into the new communication forms of young voters. Whether this will be sufficient or satisfying in stemming the online tide of extremist politics remains to be seen. We should be aware that extremists of all hues have been adept at cloaking their violent ideologies in the guise of hip, cool, countercultural repertoires.
This was the fifth episode of season nine. Thank you very much for listening. Join me again in two weeks for the second part of my conversation with Julia Ebner, in which we will talk about the profoundly disconcerting spread of radicalization in mainstream political discourses in Europe as well.
Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed and do let your friends know about this podcast if you've enjoyed it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.
[i] Ebner, J. (2021). The rage: The vicious circle of islamist and far-right extremism. I.B. Tauris.
[ii] Ebner, J. (2021). Going dark: The secret social lives of extremists. Bloomsbury Publishing.
[iii] Ebner, J. (2024). Going mainstream: How extremists are taking over. Bonnier Books LTD.