Journalists, scholars and counter-terrorism practitioners have recently drawn attention to a particular strain of Islamic State terror attacks which have been described as “virtually planned”.

This refers to terror plots where the perpetrators are guided through sustained online communication with Islamic State operatives who provided encouragement, instructions or advice. These plots are also characterised by the absence of physical connections that might make them more directly planned than the term “virtual” would imply, such as one of the perpetrators having trained or fought with Islamic State.

Thomas Hegghammer and Petter Nesser appear to be the first authors to note this as a distinctive type of plot. In 2015 they created a six-part typology to categorise jihadist plots in the West, and Type 4 was “remote communication with directives”. From 2016 onwards authors  such as Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Madeleine Blackman, Nathanial Barr, Bridget Morang, Rukmini Callamachi, Kim Cragin and Ari Weil popularised the term “virtual planning” to describe these plots.

Other authors explored the same concept but used different terms. Thomas Jocelyn and Peter Neumann described them as “remote-controlled” plots, Seamus Hughes and Alexander Melagrou-Hitchens referred to “virtual entrepreneurs” (capturing that Islamic State’s virtual planners also play a number of online roles other than plotting attacks, such as providing advice on how to travel to Syria) while John Mueller used the term “cyber coaching” (to refer specifically to virtual planners teaching the perpetrators which methods to use for their attacks). I tend to stick with “virtual planning”, and explored Australian examples with articles on the 2015 Anzac Day plot and the alleged 2017 Sydney plane plot.

Since then, Katrina Zorzi and I have been doing quite a bit of research on virtual planning, as a side-project, to interrogate and contribute to the further development of the concept. We’re looking at the extent to which such plots are genuinely new, widespread, and significant, and what they tell us about various debates within terrorism studies, such as those over online radicalisation and lone wolves. We also hope to examine how virtual planning has created opportunities for women to be more involved in Islamic State’s external attacks, even during periods when their propaganda appeared to eschew combat roles for women, and if broader contextual factors have helped enable the development of virtually planned attacks. We’re also interested in what aspects of Islamic State’s strategy and military doctrine made it particularly open to adopting this approach, and why other jihadist organisations have so far used this approach far less (which also involves revisiting al-Qaeda’s small number of virtually planned attacks).

We will post some intermittent updates about it on this blog, but first I wanted to share this table summarising existing estimates of how widespread such plots are.

This table lists the number of virtually planned plots various authors have noted in particular regions at particular times, and where possible how large a proportion of all Islamic State-associated attacks they accounted for.  At the end of the table I added my own estimates for Australia.

Not all the figures in these articles match up. For example, Cragin and Weil state that that Islamic State carried out fifty-one virtually planned plots across the world (that is, in countries that did not contain an Islamic State Wilayat) between January 2014 and December 2017, and that seventeen of these were in the West. However, the figure of seventeen seems too low given evidence of six virtually planned plots in Australia, sixteen in Europe and eight in the United States, either within the same time period or within even shorter periods.

Nonetheless, these various sets of figures indicate that Islamic State’s virtually planned terror plots have been quite prevalent, amounting to between a fifth and half of all Islamic State plots depending on the region.

It will be interesting to how Islamic State’s loss of territory inside Syria and Iraq changes that. I’ve previously expressed scepticism that this territorial loss will have much impact on virtually planned attacks, on the grounds that that “virtual encouragement or direction has been provided to plotters in the West by individuals in Somalia, Libya, and the United Kingdom”, but I hope that scepticism turns out to have been misplaced.

[1] For Europe, Nesser, Stenersen and Oftedal’s did not explicitly estimate the number of virtually-planned attacks, but noted that nineteen of their plots involved “involve online instruction from members of IS’s networks”. Three of these nineteen involved returned foreign fighters, but the remaining sixteen fit the criteria for virtually planned plots. See their article here along with Appendix 1 and Appendix 2.

[2] For Australia, my estimate of six virtually-planned plots from January 2014 to December 2017 is based on the February 2015 Sydney plot (NSW JCTT Operation Castrum), the 2015 Anzac Day plot (Vic JCTT Operation Rising), the 2015 Mother’s Day plot (Vic JCTT Operation Amberd), the 2016 Anzac Day plot (NSW JCTT Operation Vianden, but this is an extremely tentative inclusion), the alleged September 2014 Sydney plot (Operation Appleby) and the alleged July 2017 Sydney plane plot (NSW JCTT Operation Silves). My estimate of nineteen total IS-associated plots in Australia during this period is based on the sixteen incidents listed here along with the June 2017 Brighton siege, the alleged July 2017 Sydney plane plot, and the alleged November 2017 Melbourne plot.

Update 1: I have now removed the 2016 Anzac Day plot, which was tentatively included based on reports of possible instructions the perpetrator received from abroad. Last week he was sentenced and it turns out both of the people he was communicating with overseas were undercover police officers (see paragraphs 11-13 of his sentencing). For this reason, it cannot be counted as one of the Islamic State’s virtually planned plots, so my estimate for such plots in Australia during this period has changed from six to five, and I have updated the table to account for this.

One interesting part of Senate Estimates is when the ASIO Director-General testifies before the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee. Ever since the self-described Islamic State siezed territory in Syria and Iraq and became a major security concern worldwide, the Director-General has been sharing ASIO’s estimates of how many Australians are involved with IS and other jihadist groups in the region.

I’ve compiled the official figures from current ASIO Director-General Duncan Lewis’s latest Senate Estimates hearing, as wells as figures from previous hearings (for categories that weren’t covered in the latest one).

Australian jihadists currently in Syria and Iraq:
“ASIO assessed that around 110 Australians are currently in Syria or Iraq and have fought or otherwise supported the Islamic extremist groups.” ASIO DG Duncan Lewis, 24 May 2018, page 100.

Australians killed while involved with jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq:
“At least 78 and possibly as many as 90 Australians have been killed because of their involvement in the conflict.” ASIO DG Duncan Lewis, 24 May 2018, page 100.

Australians subject to travel restrictions:
“Since 2012, around 240 Australian passports have been cancelled or refused and 39 Australian passports have been suspended on ASIO’s recommendation in relation to Syria and Iraq.” ASIO DG Duncan Lewis, 24 May 2018, page 100.

Total number of Australians who traveled and joined jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq during the conflict:
“Since 2012, around 220 Australians have travelled to Syria/Iraq to join the conflict. Although unable to further breakdown these figures for security reasons, ASIO notes that as the conflict continues, fewer individuals are successfully entering the conflict zone.” ASIO DG Duncan Lewis, 27 February 2018.

The groups they joined:
“The vast majority of the Australians who travelled to Syria or Iraq in support of terrorist organisations are assessed to be associated with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).” ASIO DG Duncan Lewis, 27 February 2018.

Other Australians have been involved with Jabhat al-Nusra (which renamed itself Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and then formed the umbrella group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) as well as Ahrar al-Sham and some other groups.

Warrants issued for those still overseas:
“In relation to those individuals, the AFP has worked with its partner agencies, ASIO and the state and territory police, and we’ve obtained 21 arrest warrants in relation to those persons.” Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin, 27 February 2018, pages 35-36.

Those who returned:
“The other figure which is always of interest to this committee is those who have returned from the Middle East. That still sits at around 40. And, as I’ve said on several occasions before this committee, the overwhelming majority of them returned to Australia before ISIL was actually declared as this so-called province—this caliphate.” ASIO DG Duncan Lewis, 24 October 2017, page 132.

Those suspected of providing support from within Australia:
“Furthermore, ASIO is investigating around 190 people here in Australia who are actively supporting extremist groups in Syria and Iraq through recruiting, fundraising and in some cases seeking to travel to join these groups themselves. This number includes our investigation into about 40 Australians who have returned from the conflict zone.” ASIO DG Duncan Lewis, 18 October 2016, page 177.

The children involved:
“Of further concern are up to 70 children of Australians, that we are aware of, who have been exposed to extremist groups in Syria or Iraq. These children either travelled to the conflict zone with their Australian parents or, indeed, have been born there.”
ASIO DG Duncan Lewis, 18 October 2016, page 177.

Some interesting terrorism-related academic events are coming up very soon in Canberra and Perth.

First, my intermittent co-author and podcast guest, Levi West, and his colleagues at Charles Sturt University have organised three masterclasses on terrorism studies, which have a number of international guests skyping in.

The first two classes in particular look fantastic and have great guest lecturers. Steven Tankel wrote this excellent book on Lashkar e-Toiba which I’ve drawn on in previous work, Craig Whiteside and Seamus Hughes are in my “must-read” list whenever I hear they have something new out, Sarah Phillips is possibly Australia’s top scholar covering conflict in Yemen, Mark Pitcavage does great work on the extreme right, and Christopher Anzalone is probably the person I read most on al-Shabaab. It’s rare to have this much international talent at a terrorism studies events in Australia, particularly at a teaching-focused event intended.

These classes are all taking place in Canberra this month. The first masterclass is on the history of terrorism (its coming up so try to apply soon):

Followed by one on contemporary terrorism (try to apply before 10 May):

And then one on the financing and resourcing of terrorism (try to apply before 20 May):

It’s a busy month. In Perth, the University of Western Australia is hosting a Conference on Radicalisation and De-radicalisation: Post-ISIS:

Three years ago, ISIS claimed a cross-border caliphate stretching over vast swathes of north-western Iraq and eastern Syria. Fascinated by its rise, Muslim youths from all corners rapidly joined its cause. After three years of shocking violence, ISIS has faced major setbacks and has been in retreat in those areas it formerly controlled. Many of its fighters have been returning. This conference brings together experts to shed light on the lessons on radicalisation and de-radicalisation in the context of the rise and apparent decline of ISIS and to offer insights into future trends. What would radicalisation and de-radicalisation look like in the future? What are the responses required? These are the questions at the heart of this one-day conference being organised by The Centre for Muslim States and Societies, The University of Western Australia. The conference will be useful for policy makers, law enforcement groups, academia, students and all those interested in countering radicalisation.

Its speakers are:

Professor Amin Saikal, Australian National University | The defeat of the ‘Islamic State’ and its impact on US foreign policy in the Middle East

Profess James Piscatori, Australian National University | The Umma post-ISIS

Professor Samina Yasmeen, The University of Western Australia | JUD, ISIS and Pakistan: future trajectories of radicalisation

Dr Richard Vokes, Associate Professor, University of Western Australia | The shifting contexts of jihadism in Sub-Saharan Africa: a comparison of al-Shabaab and the Allied Democratic Forces

Dr Ian Chalmers, Adjunct Senior Lecturer, The University of Western Australia | How have the jihadists coped with Indonesia’s de-radicalisation campaign?

Dr Leila Ben Mcharek, Research Fellow, CMSS, The University of Western Australia | Libya: a case of survival of Daesh

Dr Shehzad Saleem, Research Fellow and Vice President, Al-Mawrid Institute | Understanding ISIS’s ideology and its continued influence

Nava Ghalili, Journalist | Youth empowerment as a means to prevent youth radicalization?

Ridwan, PhD Candidate, The University of Western Australia | Transnational Islam and Threat of Radicalisation in Indonesia

Farooq Yousaf, PhD Candidate, University of Newcastle, New South Wales

This is quite a different event to the masterclasses above, but it similarly looks excellent. I’m much less familiar with the work of its speakers (except for Samina Yasmeen, Amin Saikal and Ian Chalmers), but generally the scholarly background of the speakers looks to be area studies and Islamic Studies rather than terrorism studies, which is good change of perspective (I’ve gone on a bit before about how something as complex and contentious as terrorism requires a range of approaches).

It is also extremely affordable ($50 for students, $100 for others) and it’s this Friday, so if interested you’ll need to be quick.

And in a smaller bit of news, back in February post I mistakenly wrote that Talal Alameddine would be sentenced on 2 March for supplying the handgun used to murder NSW Police employee Curtis Cheng in the Parramatta terrorist attack. He will actually be sentenced on 18 May.

Four bits of news relevant to readers of this blog.

First, one of the founders of modern terrorism studies, Bruce Hoffman, is briefly coming to Australia. He will give a public talk in Canberra on 30 April, organised by Charles Sturt University:

Second, Kate Grealy and I have released a new episode of Sub Rosa, for the first time in over a year.

I interviewed David Schaefer, who is now at King’s College London, about Australia’s dependence on US space technology and how this impacts our military alliance and the risks of conflict entrapment. Click here to listen to the episode:

Third, the Monash Gender, Peace and Security group has released an interesting new resource which maps gender provisions in peace agreements. Take a look here.

Fourth, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute is hiring a new National Security / Counter-Terrorism Analyst. You can apply here before 29 April. They have also announced openings for their six month paid internships, you can apply here before 6 May.

Enjoy!

I’ve often written about Australians who have joined jihadist groups abroad, but have rarely come across evidence of Australians fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Intuitively, you could expect that some Australians were involved in fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The 1979 Soviet invasion prompted tens of thousands of Muslims across the world to travel to Afghanistan and join the fight throughout the 1980s. This was the world’s largest jihadist foreign fighter mobilisation until the Syrian civil war.

Given Australians have joined jihadist groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere since the 1990s, it would be surprising if there had been no Australians involved at all in the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Yet I have only occasionally come across indications of Australian involvement, such as a section in Irfan Yusuf’s book Once Were Radicals, where he states that in the 1980s a friend of his, Kamal, “seemed to know a lot of what was happening there [in Afghanistan], and he also knew people who had gone from Australia to fight in the jihad” (page 151).

Another example is that an Australian woman, Rabiah Hutchinson, travelled to Pakistan in 1990 and based herself in the village of Pabbi (near the Afghan border). She stayed under the auspices of Abdul Rassul Sayyaf (who trained many Jemaah Islamiyah terrorists) and interacted with Osama bin Laden. But this was after the Soviets withdrew, and bin Laden was (according to Hutchinson’s biography, The Mother of Mohammed) surprised to encounter an Australian. He reportedly said “Australian – that must be a first!” (page 191). This anecdote suggests that Australians were absent during the 1980s, but we can’t read too much into it. The story might not be true, and Bin Laden was not then the central figure he would later become, so we can’t assume he would have known the nationality of each of the thousands of volunteers who traveled to join the conflict.

So there has generally been extremely little information around on any Australians fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

However, Thomas Hegghammer recently sent me some interesting things he has found.

He found that “there were people in Australia reading al-Jihad and writing letters to the editor”. Al-Jihad was the magazine produced by Abdullah Azzam’s Services Bureau. Hegghammer provided this image of al-Jihad’s 18th issue, page 41:

He added that the “same guy is mentioned in the next issue (p.45) as having sent money.”

Hegghammer also showed that the book Jihad in Afghanistan Against Communism refers explicitly to Australians among the mujahideen at the time:

Hegghammer helpfully adds to the extremely small body of public information on any Australian involvement in the 1980s foreign fighter mobilisation against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

It wouldn’t be surprising if a few Australians had been fighting the Soviets, but information on it is hard to come across, and I will let readers know if I hear of anything else.

Update 1: (added 29 March 2018) Anthony Davis from IHS-Jane’s has sent the following example. As with the examples above, I am not personally in a position to verify it, but I greatly appreciate it for adding to the small and fragmentary body of information on this topic:

l met a young Australian fighter called Yusuf while working in the northern Kunduz-Khanabad area in the late summer of 1982 with a group of mujahideen of the Jamiat-i-Islami party. He had served in the ADF and later married a Muslim woman from Malaysia and converted to Islam. He was actually less interested in killing communists than in fulfilling his duty as a Muslim to perform jihad. He took his religion extremely seriously rather to the amusement of his Afghan comrades-in-arms not all of whom prayed five times a day and many of whom enjoyed the odd joint of good local hash. They nick-named him “Sheikh” in a back-handed compliment to his religious rectitude. But with a full beard, long hair and turban, he otherwise fitted in well enough. At the end of the year he turned in his AK and joined me on the three week trek back to Pakistan. As far as I’m aware, he then returned to his wife in a kampong in northeastern Malaysia, having successfully ticked the ‘jihad’ box.

In this guest post, Katrina Zorzi discusses changes to the management of radicalised prisoners in New South Wales and what this might imply for Victoria and other states.

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In the past year, the New South Wales government has ushered in a raft of changes to the management of radicalised prisoners. This post provides a short outline of these changes and offers some thoughts on an inspection by the NSW Inspector of Custodial Services, some recent changes that have been either implemented or proposed, and some of the national security and human rights dilemmas raised by this issue.

Goulburn Supermax

The rise and fall of the Islamic State’s ‘Caliphate’ and the apprehension of Australian-based IS supporters has increased the need for a workable, sustainable policy on incarcerating terrorists. In NSW, discussions around the incarceration of radicalised prisoners frequently centre on Goulburn’s ‘High Risk Management Correctional Centre’ Supermax facility.

There are reportedly 40-50 prisoners housed within the Goulburn Supermax. Not all are radicalised or terrorist inmates who are thought to be risks to national security (Ivan Milat, for one, is reportedly an inmate at the Supermax) though more than half are there on terror-related charges. In 2016 NSW Corrective Services Commissioner Peter Severin told The 7:30 Report that: “Supermax was built for extremely violent offenders… It wasn’t built and designed for people who pose a threat to national security.” The decision to house a broader array of radical inmates there reportedly dates from August 2015, when radical preacher Junaid Thorne – who was jailed for booking airline tickets under a false name – was transferred there. Individuals arrested in 2005’s Operation Pendennis, for example, which disrupted two terror cells in Sydney and Melbourne, were already housed in the Supermax.

Goulburn Supermax has gained a lot of media attention in the past few years, generally focused on the convicted and accused terrorists housed there. In 2016, anonymous senior counter-terrorism officials told The 7:30 Report of their concerns that youth terrorism suspects held within Goulburn’s Supermax facility were being further radicalised by extremist adult inmates. In April 2017 The Weekend Australian featured an article by Paul Maley, who had been given access to Goulburn Supermax, which featured insights from the Supermax’s intelligence unit and detailed the day-to-day living conditions of the radicalised prisoners. Last month it was reported that a prisoner within the facility had attacked and injured two guards.

One aspect that has not been reported on for some time is the inspection announced in 2016 by the NSW Inspector of Custodial Services.

The not-yet-public inspection

The NSW Inspector of Custodial Services (ICS) is a statutory agency tasked with “providing independent scrutiny of the conditions, treatment and outcomes for adults and young people in custody, and to promote excellence in staff professional practice”. The ICS has jurisdiction over all correctional facilities in NSW and an inspection can be initiated by either the Inspector, the Minister for Corrections, a Parliamentary Joint Committee or a public authority or official.

In April 2016, the ICS was tasked to undertake an inspection on the “Management of radicalised prisoners in the NSW correctional centres”. The centres identified to be examined in the inspection were: the Metropolitan Remand and Reception Centre, the Mid North Coast correctional Centre, the Lithgow Correctional Centre, the Goulburn Correctional Centre and its High Risk Management Correctional Centre.

However, it is not clear what has come of this inspection. In October 2016, the ABC reported that the review was expected to be handed down to the State Government in November. And, presumably, for it to be made public sometime after this. However, as of early March 2018, the report is still not publicly available on the ICS’s website. The ICS still lists the inspection into the management of radicalised prisoners as a ‘current inspection’.

Yet the ICS’s 2016-2017 annual report mentions the inspection in past tense, articulating that:

Pursuant to a request by the Minister for Corrections and in accordance with section 6(1)(f) of the Inspector of Custodial Services Act 2012, a review of the management of radicalised inmates in NSW prisons was commenced on 22 April 2016… The inspection examined approaches and practices relating to the risk assessment, classification, designation, placement, and management of inmates, conditions within centres, and offender programs and services. Over 200 CSNSW staff were consulted, as well as executive and specialist staff.

If it is not reading too much into the use of past tense it would suggest that the inspection has long been completed.

The 2016-2017 annual report also asserts that: “The ICS publishes all reports and responses to reports on its website”. That the inspection report is not publicly available might be for a few reasons. It might simply have not been posted on the ICS website as an oversight. It is also possible that publishing has been withheld on national security grounds, provisions for which are built into the Inspector of Custodial Services Act 2012. The lack of even a public statement on the inspection or a redacted version is disappointing, given the potential for ICS reporting to bring transparency to the way in which NSW deals with radicalised prisoners.

The remit of the ICS’s inspection into radicalised prisoners in NSW would suggest that they are housed in a number of prisons across the state, not just in Goulburn’s Supermax facility – despite the fact that most media reporting tends to focus on that prison. This relatively high level of media reporting might be due to the notoriety increasingly attached to that facility or a prison management decision to sporadically permit or encourage such reporting. Maley’s article thus offers a rather unique insight into the prison. In this way, Goulburn Supermax has perhaps been more subject to media scrutiny than other prisons situated within NSW corrections housing terrorist or radicalised inmates.

There have also been several changes announced in the NSW government’s approach, though it is impossible to know if they are a result of the ICS’s inspection.

Recent change: extended detention

In October 2017, ahead of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting on counter-terrorism in Canberra, the NSW government announced its intention to usher in measures that would allow the ‘indefinite detention’ of radicalised prisoners. In November the Terrorism (High Risk Offenders) Bill 2017 was passed in NSW state parliament, which complements laws introduced at the Federal level in 2016. Under the changes, an inmate in a NSW prison could be designated as a radicalised national security threat and be jailed for up to an additional three years. Radicalised inmates would undergo a rehabilitation assessment and a medical assessment presumably to determine whether they were still ‘radicalised’ and posing a threat to the community. The process to initiate this would be done at the behest of the state’s attorney general to the Supreme Court. There is the potential for these extensions to continue in perpetuity.

At the time, NSW Counter Terrorism and Corrections Minister David Elliott explained that evidence would be gathered from a range of agencies to determine whether a prisoner was radicalised and thus representing an unacceptable risk to the community. Such evidence “would include radical behaviour, letters, interactions, treatment of staff within the corrections establishment, treatment of other inmates”. Elliott went on to assert: “It is unfortunate that we have to introduce what are potentially the toughest anti-terrorism laws in the world – but what would be more unfortunate is if somebody who was radicalised in a prison and was then released and did harm.”

Why up to three years? It is not clear what the logic is behind this. Presumably it would be much more difficult for the NSW government to muster support for longer extensions to prison sentences given the human rights issues potentially at play. Whether there are current or viable future ‘deradicalisation’ or disengagement programs being run in the NSW prison system that authorities believe can work in three years or less is another potential consideration.

Another issue is that the concept of radicalisation – and thus the nature of what it means to be ‘radicalised’ too – is contentious. What the threshold for determining whether an individual is ‘radicalised’ and so constitutes an ongoing threat to national security is unclear. Whether there is room in this approach for an inmate to maintain a radical political ideology but disavow violence is also unclear. No doubt any declaration of the sort would be greeted by authorities with a healthy dose of scepticism.

Proposed change: new facility

The scale of this is set to increase, following the announcement last year that the NSW government was spending $47 million to build a new ‘mini-max’ facility within Goulburn’s Supermax for radicalised inmates. A logical inference would be that this is intended to address the problems raised by Severin (that Goulburn Supermax was built for violent offenders, not offenders who pose a risk to national security).

This is supported by Maley’s reporting in April 2017, which highlighted that Corrective Services NSW was looking at a ‘differentiated’ approach of separating radicalised inmates (presumably from the broader prison population) and also anticipated that the ICS report on the management of radicalised prisoners would make recommendations in favour of this too.

That $47 million will now be spent on a specialised facility within the Goulburn Supermax would suggest that, at least in part, the practice of centralisation and separation for radicalised inmates is being given a boost.

Proposed change: juvenile justice strategy

The changes continue, as in February this year the NSW government announced that it intended to create a ‘countering violent extremism’ unit within the juvenile justice system to designate and monitor youth inmates who constituted national security threats. It would also work to identify inmates ‘at-risk’ of radicalisation and involve them in ‘deradicalisation’ programs. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian highlighted that “this new strategy complements other initiatives such as our post-sentence detention scheme and stronger parole provisions”.

Further thoughts

The NSW government’s approach is not the only way to address this issue. There are some good media articles which articulate the different approaches taken by New South Wales and Victoria to managing offenders convicted of terrorism or terrorism-related offences. ANU’s Dr Clarke Jones and others have commented publicly and written at length on this topic. However, Severin expected that changes in Victoria might bring it closer to the NSW model. And recent reports also quote Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews as being supportive of having a federal prison facility solely for terrorist prisoners – in direct contrast to Victoria’s existing arrangements.

From a national security perspective, it is understandable that authorities are unwilling to risk releasing any individual they suspect still harbours violent extremist goals.

I am not convinced that complete transparency, for its own sake, is necessarily in the community’s best interest when it comes to national security. However, greater overtures could be made to transparency regarding the processes internal to the NSW government that have initiated these wide-ranging changes to policy and now practice. This is where the benefit of having strong mechanisms of oversight and public trust in institutions often kicks in. At the same time, of course, few people are going to be willing to go into bat for the rights and liberties of terrorists and the NSW government is probably quite confident of the public’s acceptance of such measures.

From a human rights perspective, things might look a bit different. Especially considering that some of these changes concern the incarceration of minors. We might expect that a new, purpose built facility for radicalised inmates will create qualitatively different conditions of life for inmates – for better or for worse. This aspect is much better commented on by someone with an advocacy, human rights or legal background.

But it is a good time to pause and take stock of the ways in which NSW deals with its incarcerated, radicalised population. We might also consider whether, for Victoria and other states, this represents the way of the future or a cautionary tale.

Katrina Zorzi is a sessional academic at Monash University, Charles Sturt University and Deakin University.

To help celebrate International Women’s Day, this post presents a collection of security-related research by Australian women.

It covers research released in the past year or so. The list is not comprehensive, it’s a small selection of research by people whose work I happen to be familiar with, and deserves to be much larger.

Kate Barrelle
Does the Pursuit of Meaning Explain the Initiation, Escalation, and Disengagement of Violent Extremists? Aggression and Violent Behavior, Volume 34, May 2017 (co-authored with Rosleenda Ali, Simon Moss and Pete Lentini)

Helen Berents
Gender and Age in the Construction of Male Youth in the European Migration “Crisis”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Volume 43, Number 3, 2018 (co-authored with Lesley Pruitt and Gayle Munro)

Leah Farrall
Revisiting al-Qaida’s Foundation and Early History, Perspectives on Terrorism, Volume 11, Issue 6, 2017

Michele Grossman
Community Reporting Thresholds: Sharing Information with Authorities Concerning Violent Extremist Activity and Involvement in Foreign Conflict – A UK Replication Study, CREST Research, 18 September 2017 (co-authored with Paul Thomas, Shamim Miah and Kris Christmann)

Amy King
A New Normal? The Changing Future of Nuclear Energy in China, Learning from Fukushima: Nuclear Power in East Asia, ANU Press, 2017

Sarah Logan
The Needle and the Damage Done: Of Haystacks and Anxious Panopticons, Big Data & Society, published online 27 October 2017

Sofia Patel
The Sultanate of Women: Exploring Female Roles in Perpetrating and Preventing Violent Extremism, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 13 February 2017

Alex Phelan
Engaging Insurgency: The Impact of the 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement on FARC’s Political Participation, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, published online 20 Feb 2018

Natalie Sambhi
Indonesia’s Naval and Coast Guard Upgrades and Jokowi’s Global Maritime Fulcrum, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, January 2017 (scroll to page 83)

Nina Silove
Beyond the Buzzword: The Three Meanings of “Grand Strategy”, Security Studies, Volume 27, Issue 1, 2017

Aim Sinpeng
Participatory Inequality in Online and Offline Political Engagement in Thailand, Pacific Affairs, Volume 90, Issue 2, 2017

Debra Smith
So How Do You Feel about That? Talking with Provos about Emotion, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, published online 1 June 2017

Similarly, here is a far-from-comprehensive list of Australian women who tweet on security and many other issues who I recommend following:

Jessie Blackbourn: @JessBlackbourn

Leah Farrall: @allthingsct

Kate Grealy: @kategrealy

Sarah Logan: @circt

Clare Murphy: @ClareAliceMurph

Leanne O’Donnell: @MsLods

Sofia Patel: @laramimi

Alex Phelan: @Alex_Phelan

Natalie Sambhi: @SecurityScholar

Katrina Zorzi: @kmzrz

As mentioned, the list deserves to be much larger, so feel free to suggest more in the comments. It’s also important to remember that women are generally disadvantaged in academia, so many promising scholars don’t get the opportunities they deserve.