Projects

Countering violent extremist content online: A multidisciplinary approach

  • Funder: Google Safety and Trust
  • Date: Fall 2025-2026
  • Role: Lead Investigator with Dr. Graig Klein

Countering violent extremist content is not a new challenge for counterterrorism (CT) practitioners, but the breadth and diversity of online extremist content, including ‘lawful but awful’ materials that may start one on the path towards radicalisation, and advances in technology such as AI-generated content, creates new challenges. These problems require new research which can directly inform online security policies, processes, and procedures to directly improve online safety, and strengthen public-private partnerships. Our project focuses on countering online content, particularly exploitative AI, and engages with a tremendously important yet challenging opportunity – interdicting during individuals’ radicalisation processes. We propose a forward leaning approach to investigate, hypothesise, and test best-practices for moderating and countering extremists’ online content and exploitation of AI/generative AI. By doing so, we address a fundamental critique of terrorism studies – that it is reactive in nature, providing retrospective analyses and responses to new actors, events, and trends, rather than anticipating them. Our approach benefits academic research, policymakers and practitioners, industry, and lawmakers. 

See more information here: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2024/12/joana-cook-and-graig-klein-awarded-google-trust–safety-research-grant

Terrorist Exploitation of AI : A Blue Sky approach

  • Funder: NCTV
  • Date: 2024
  • Role: Lead Organizer

ICCT and Leiden University decided to organise a pioneering platform to explore the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and terrorism. This initiative addresses the critical question of how terrorist actors might exploit AI capabilities to enhance their strategies, tactics, and objectives. The project aims to anticipate future challenges and explore potential scenarios. It emphasises the importance of addressing potential threats proactively rather than responding retroactively, which has been a common critique in terrorism studies.

To this end, ICCT and Leiden University hosted a two-day ‘Blue Sky’ Workshop, which combines forward-thinking from diverse and multidisciplinary perspectives. The workshop is intended to identify the most likely and most impactful scenarios of the use of AI in the global security space, the starting base upon which multidisciplinary collaborative research on counter-measures to deter, prevent, or disrupt such scenarios could eventually be conducted.

This project is funded by the Dutch Coordinator for Security and Terrorism (NCTV).

See more information and related publications here: https://icct.nl/project/intersection-artificial-intelligence-ai-and-terrorism

PREPARE: Promoting collaborative policies of inclusion relating to children of far right and Islamist parents in Western Europe

  • Funder: EU Internal Security Assistance Fund (ISAF)
  • Date: 2022 – 2023.
  • Role: Lead Investigator

This EU-funded project aims to identify the vulnerabilities and stigmas children may face when their parents are part of violent extremist networks and how those can best be addressed by relevant front-line actors in an informed, prepared, and collaborative way that centres on the needs of the child.  PREPARE is guided by a human-rights, rule-of-law and gender informed approach. 

PREPARE aims to support these children by working with frontline practitioners in six European countries (the Netherlands, Spain, France, Sweden, Germany & Kosovo) to develop a state-of-the-art Child Vulnerability and Intervention Tool to identify the stigmas and vulnerabilities that children may experience. Moreover, PREPARE aims to develop training modules to support a wide range of stakeholders who are working with these children and their families.

Project website and further information is here.

For a recent article on questions I discuss about prepare see here. You can watch the final conference with investigative journalist Joshua Baker and other experts here.

EU GA No 101035861– PREPARE

For more on the projects I’ve been involved in at ICCT, please see our project webpage. Recent projects have included: