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Dr. Robyn Torok is a highly experienced researcher, obtaining her first PhD in education investigating how psychiatric power is used within organizations, along with the notion of surveillance and governing of workers and its impacts upon the organisation. To further extend her research into the area of power, surveillance and governing, Dr. Torok is about to submit a second PhD for examination, investigating how psychiatric power and surveillance is used in the online radicalization process. Dr. Torok’s second PhD in Security Science is leading the way in Australia and worldwide in understanding, as well as, developing new models and cutting edge mechanisms on how terrorists use social media to recruit, radicalize, and encourage a radical form of Islam that endorses not just recruits, but martyrs and lone-wolf operations in the West. Dr. Torok’s research includes: online radicalization, counter-terrorism, lone-wolf terrorism, policy, intelligence, combating terrorist use of the internet, eschatology and impacts upon terrorist radicalization, narratives and national security.
ISIS and the Institution of Online Terrorist Recruitment
The rise of ISIS and associated jihadi violence taking place in Syria and Iraq has reverberated widely. The effects can be felt not just in the horrific attacks that took place in Paris in January 2015, but across the Asia-Pacific region as well, including Australia. Public officials and analysts are struggling to understand and devise countermeasures to the recruitment mechanisms employed by ISIS and other violent extremist groups. This essay explores the role that social media has played in ISIS’s efforts to attract adherents.
