This article presents data from interviews with eighteen individuals from Western countries who volunteered to fight in Syria with the Kurdish YPG against the Islamic State. We find that, despite predictions in the literature about ideological or religious indoctrination as the primary factor motivating foreign fighter mobilization, respondents described their decisions to join YPG determined by two individual-level factors: The first was precipitating new information, such as viewing war crimes videos, which was an emotional tipping point for volunteers already interested in the conflict. The second factor was the preconditions, or permissive conditions, that permitted them to leave their home countries, such as the end of a lease. The data adds richness to models of militant activity by indicating that it may not be a linear transmissive process but one that is dependent on the alignment of variables specific to the subject.

In this article, we explore community-building practices among followers of far-right masculinist influencers. Utilising visual ethnography and netnography, we examine the Right-Wing Bodybuilder (RWBB) community on the platform X and focus on how followers cohere around and promote two previously pseudonymous influencers: Sol Brah and Bronze Age Pervert. Our analysis of memes produced by these follower communities highlights the participatory nature of culting influencers, a process that fosters community-building and reinforces in-group cohesion. We also show how follower communities facilitate message uptake by disseminating influencer messages and mobilising against threats to their credibility from adversaries. Our article contributes to influencer studies by examining the reciprocal dynamics between influencers and followers through these engagement practices.

This article examines the contributions of ‘formers’, individuals who were previously affiliated with groups advocating violent extremism but who now work as researchers and practitioners in the P/CVE field. There are a limited number of studies assessing the value added of formers to P/CVE programs. We make two significant contributions to the body of work. First, we examine how formers can contribute not only to P/CVE practice, but to academic research of terrorism, and how their insights and experience can be employed for improving research designs and interview completion rates and responses. Second, none of the extant works incorporates the views of formers themselves in the assessments. Four of the co-authors of this article are formers who publish peer-reviewed and policy institute research, and they present their perspectives on who counts as a former, and how their individual backgrounds inform and bolster their research and praxis. We encourage researchers of political violence to emulate other fields of social science and incorporate appropriately trained formers as subject-participants to improve research in the field.