Domestic Jihadist Threat to Australia and Canada 2000-2020: An Overview

TSAS RESEARCH BRIEF

There is surprisingly little systematic and publicly available information on the nature, scale, and evolution of the Jihadist threat in Australia and Canada. Government responses to specific terrorist incidents and annual reports on the terrorist threat provide little insight into the perpetrators, their methods, and intended targets. More information is available in the media, but the data is episodic, scattered, and sometimes unreliable. A handful of good academic studies have examined specific cases or the overall instances of Jihadist terrorism in Australia and Canada. These studies, however, are now often dated, rely on incomplete data, offer limited analyses, and conflate data on foreign fighters and domestic Jihadist terrorists. This makes it difficult to understand the specific nature and level of the Jihadist threat faced by each country. This Policy Brief summarizes some of the findings from the first comprehensive study of Australian and Canadian Jihadists, for whom arrest warrants were issued for domestic terrorism offences, between 1 January 2000 and 1 January 2020 (139 individuals).

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PUBLISHED IN 2020

TSAS RB 2020-01

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