Risk, Resilience, and Online Radicalization: Parent and Caregivers’ Toolkit for the COVID-19 Era (funded by/in partnership with the Southern Poverty Law Center). This toolkit offers parents and caregivers strategies and tips to recognize the warning signs of youth radicalization as well as new risks in the COVID-19 era, understand the drivers and grievances that create susceptibility to extremist rhetoric, and intervene more effectively. The toolkit will be launched June 23, 2020 with a webinar and will be followed by an impact study. Tune in here for more details on the webinar in the coming weeks.

Animated Video on Disinformation and Anti-Government Extremism (in partnership with the Bertelsmann Foundation). This 7-minute animated video is part of the non-partisan Bertelsmann Foundation’s democracy-strengthening work and tells the fictionalized story of a man who gets radicalized into a ‘boogaloo’ scene during the COVID-19 shutdown. The video will launch in summer 2020 and is paired with an impact study of 250 participants, funded through an internal rapid response to COVID-19 research competition in AU’s School of Public Affairs. The impact study, led by Professors Cynthia Miller-Idriss and David Malet, will test whether a video-based intervention has an impact on the public’s understanding of anti-government extremism and public health misinformation related to COVID-19.

PERIL is running two projects funded by German foundations (the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation) to map the landscape of current youth intervention approaches related to a) COVID-19 extremist mobilization and b) conspiracy theories in both countries. Reports on these projects will be published in fall 2020.

PERIL is running a number of research projects to empirically test strategies to intervene in the prevention and intervention stages of youth radicalization, including improving resilience pre-exposure as well as building more effective off-ramps to interrupt radicalization processes. This includes current and planned research projects in youth online spaces, the mixed martial arts, online gaming, college campuses, and more, on topics including male supremacy/incels, race science and white supremacist extremism, anti-government extremism, and conspiracy theories.

PERIL is designing e-learning modules and advanced training for probation and pretrial services, law enforcement and other communities engaged in prevention and intervention work related to online radicalization. These e-learning modules include information on signs, symbols and slogans as well as strategies for disengagement and deradicalization.