MARK DUCKWORTH • May 19, 2020

In 2015 the Council of Australian Governments published a high-level strategy on counter- terrorism. A lot has happened since then.  The recent comments by the Director-General of Security in February 2020 make it clear that there needs to be a restatement about the best approaches to countering violent extremism, community engagement and building community resilience.

LYDIA KHALIL • May 19, 2020

Ever since the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. foreign policy and national security have been swallowed whole by counter-terrorism considerations, even as a number of counter-terrorism experts have cautioned against overemphasizing the terrorist threat.

MICHELE GROSSMAN • May 19, 2020

“Resilience” has become a popular concept in 21st century life. In times of far-reaching social and economic change, with increasing stress and strain on both individual and group-level resources, “resilience” is often invoked as the thing that will see us through to emerge stronger and better able to cope in the aftermath.

VIVIAN GERRAND • May 19, 2020

In the absence of a vaccine or a cure for COVID-19, how might we build resilience to it? To buy ourselves the time necessary to grapple with the health threat the virus poses, adopting radical new physically distanced behaviours is crucial.

LYDIA KHALIL & JOSH ROOSE • May 19, 2020

Only four months into the start of the new decade, Australia has faced not one but two national crises: a bushfire disaster that has caused unprecedented damage to the natural environment and livelihoods, and now the Covid-19 pandemic, a global crisis which has hit Australia and already resulted in unprecedented restrictions and threatens to inflict long-term economic pain.

ANDREW ZAMMIT • October 31, 2019

Of the 82 counter-terrorism laws passed by Australian governments since 9/11, one of the most controversial has been the power to revoke citizenship. Under this law, passed in 2015, dual-national Australians can lose their Australian citizenship if they are convicted of a terrorism offence inside Australia, or if they are overseas and the newly-created Citizenship Loss Board concludes that they are involved in terrorist activity.

YUSUF SHEIKH OMAR • August 13, 2019

The Somali saga began long time ago, notably when the military dictatorship staged a coup and ousted the democratically elected government in October 1969. The military regime oppressed its own citizens, and denied their basic human rights such as freedom of expression. As a result, disorganized clan-based militias were formed to fight the regime. When the military regime finally collapsed, there was neither a nationally-agreed political agenda nor were there united forces ready to form an alternative government.

ANDREW ZAMMIT • July 31, 2019

If you search "Australian counter-terrorism" in Google Image, the results are usually pictures of heavily armed police officers or soldiers, possibly raiding a house, guarding an iconic location, or standing outside an armoured vehicle. There are good reasons for the popularity of such attention-grabbing images; they convey the idea of preventing deadly acts of terrorism more simply than images of people sitting behind desks.

GREG BARTON • May 16, 2019

As the people and government of Sri Lanka reel with shock and grief in the wake of the extraordinarily devastating suicide bomb attacks over the Easter weekend they are forced to confront some important lessons. And whilst the horrors of the attacks are uniquely personal to the people of Sri Lanka the challenges that they present go well beyond the island nation.

ANDREW ZAMMIT • March 13, 2019

Part 1 showed that Australia’s jihadist plots had transformed following the rise of Islamic State in 2014, summarised in the table below: From September 2014 to the end of 2018, Australia experienced a greater number of jihadist plots, but the cells were smaller and the attack methods were simpler. The plots usually relied on knives and firearms rather than explosives, and often targeted police officers. Australia’s jihadist plots became more likely to involve women and children as perpetrators and less likely to involve people who had trained in jihadist camps abroad. They also proved more likely to harm people, causing five deaths and several injuries.

ANDREW ZAMMIT • May 8, 2019

In 2014 and 2015, Australian members of Islamic State gained media attention for appearing in recruitment videos, making violent threats, instigating attacks, and proudly boasting of war crimes. Today, these Australians, at least those who remain alive, gain media attention for quite different reasons. Captured over the past year by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), many of the remaining Australians are being held in prison cells and crowded refugee camps in north-east Syria and have been publicly pleading for help.

JAY MARLOWE • April 4, 2019

We might like to think the actions of one person may appear as an extreme aberration, but the sentiments and beliefs that underlie such wanton violence sadly are not. Thirty-seven minutes was all it took to challenge the understandings we have of ourselves and as a country. What follows will require great introspection, and more importantly, concerted action to address some of the root causes that allowed such senseless violence to occur.   

DEBRA SMITH • March 25, 2019

Since the horrific attacks on peaceful Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, we have been subjected to a steady flow of mealy-mouthed condemnations by Australian politicians. Political leaders in Australia engaged in logistical backflips to distance their political rhetoric from any relationship to a growing far-right threat. From their perspective, there is no relationship between constructing certain groups as a  threat to the provision of healthcare, or to the safety of Victorians going out for dinner, or to jobs in Australia, and an environment conducive to nurturing bigotry and hatred. Neither is using Parliament to promulgate the idea of a white genocide seen as relevant, or blaming innocent victims for their own deaths at the hands of a self-proclaimed white supremacist terrorist.

MICHELE GROSSMAN • March 24, 2019

The only surprise for many Australians is that the horrific Christchurch terrorist attack occurred in New Zealand (a country that ranked in 2018 at 114/138 (‘very low’) on the Global Terrorism Index) rather than in Australia itself.

MATTEO VERGANI • March 18, 2019

The Christchurch terror attack conducted by Brenton Tarrant highlights the urgent need to break the destructive synergy between media reporting and terrorist messaging. Tarrant planned a careful media strategy. He exploited social media, like many al-Qaeda and ISIS-inspired terrorists before him, live-streaming his attack and uploading a manifesto in the expectation that these digital products would be circulated widely by mainstream media, amplifying his efforts to instil fear and inspire like-minded individuals.

ANDREW ZAMMIT • January 23, 2019

My first AVERT post examined which Australian terrorist plots had been genuinely connected to Islamic State, and what forms these connections took. For this post, I look at the wider impact Islamic State had on Australia’s terrorist threat. This post will show how the threat has changed since the Islamic State’s rise in 2014 while the next post, Part 2, will discuss why these changes came about.

ANDREW ZAMMIT • November 26, 2018

In mid-October, the NSW Department of Public Prosecutions withdrew a terrorism charge against a 25-year old Sri Lankan student. The charge, "collecting or making a document which is connected with preparation for, the engagement of a person in, or assistance in a terrorist act", centred on writing found in a notebook reportedly listing targets for a potential terror attack. The charge was dropped after a forensic examination failed to conclude that the student had written these notes. The NSW Joint Counter Terrorism Team's investigation "shifted to focus on the possibility that the content of the notebook [was] created by other people".

ANDREW ZAMMIT • October 17, 2018

Hello readers. I will be a regular blogger for AVERT, publishing one post here each month on a range of topics involving violent extremism. For this first post, I want to revisit a number of proven and alleged terrorist plots in Australia.