Research Statement
Alex Newhouse
My research addresses a central puzzle in the study of political violence: why do social movements embrace violence that is incongruous with, and often harmful to, their stated political aims?
A large literature shows that nonviolent resistance succeeds more often than violence, and conventional accounts of social movements and terrorism treat organizational unity, cohesion, and resource mobilization as necessary conditions for a movement to act. The online extreme right satisfies almost none of these expectations. It is geographically dispersed, organizationally fragmented, and largely leaderless — and it has nonetheless produced a sustained wave of mass-casualty, theatrical violence in which perpetrators reproduce the tactics, texts, and symbols of prior attackers, and in which online communities celebrate, remix, and canonize each attack. That mismatch between theory and observation is the puzzle my work is built around.
My answer is that this is participatory violence: a repertoire in which the production of violent action, and of its meaning, is distributed across a large population of contributors who face low barriers to symbolic contribution and who co-determine the movement’s targets, tactics, aesthetics, and criteria of legitimacy. Participants accrue social, psychological, and political benefits that are decoupled from whether the movement achieves its stated objectives — so a movement can rationally sacrifice coherence and coordination for what participatory violence returns instead: resilience, the persistence of its repertoires and identity through time and space. The agenda that follows from this claim has theoretical, methodological, and substantive components.
Theoretical contribution
I connect two literatures that have largely developed apart: the debate over the strategic logic of political violence, which operates at the level of campaigns and their near-term goals, and the study of movement participants, networks, and cells, which operates in other disciplines. Drawing on participatory democratic theory and media studies of participatory culture, I broaden the conception of movement goals to include individual- and network-level benefits of propagation, cohesion, and mobilization, and I formalize the argument in a model of movement behavior with militants, internal and external audiences, a regime, and its support structures. The model shows why a movement may promote “extra-lethal” violence even when it knows such acts make its immediate goals less likely.
My dissertation then tests the argument across contexts: historically, in the neo-fascist apoliteia of Italy’s Years of Lead; comparatively, in the divergent trajectories of nonviolent and participatory-violent movements in the Arab Spring and in QAnon’s integration with the insurrection attempts of 2021–2023; and computationally, in the online communities of apocalyptic neo-fascism, where celebration and canonization of attackers drive the transmission of the movement’s symbols.
Methodological contribution
Studying these processes requires measuring concepts that surveys and interviews cannot reach at scale, in communities that are hostile to observation. I build transformer-based classifiers to measure latent rhetorical constructs — apocalypticism, canonization — in very large corpora of forum text, and I pair those measures with designs that support causal claims. In my job market paper, a fine-tuned classifier applied to eleven years of 4chan /pol/ posts yields a time series of apocalyptic rhetoric, and intervention analysis shows that this rhetoric rises sharply in the immediate aftermath of mass-casualty attacks. In the dissertation’s final chapter I extend this approach to a longitudinal, multi-platform database of 4chan, Gab, and Telegram, measuring celebration and canonization of attackers and testing whether the participatory characteristics of an attack — disproportionality, theatrics, shareable artifacts — predict them.
I take validation seriously as a substantive, not merely technical, matter: a classifier for a contested political concept is a measurement instrument, and I treat annotation design, inter-coder reliability, and error analysis as part of the argument rather than an appendix to it.
Substantive contribution
My empirical work shows how network structure, ideological coherence, and platform affordances shape when online extremism produces real-world violence. Published work traces the multi-node structure of neo-fascist accelerationism, the formation of extremist identity through performative infighting in gaming communities, and the radicalization risks posed by generative language models. Collectively, this research argues that counter-mobilization efforts aimed at individual groups will underperform, because the relevant unit is the participatory community from which attackers emerge and which gives their violence its meaning.
Forward agenda
The next phase of this agenda extends the framework in two directions. First, to generative AI: I am currently studying polarization and political behavior in large language models under a Humane Studies Fellowship, building on my earlier work on language-model misuse. Second, comparatively: the measurement strategies I have developed for English-language communities are portable, and cross-national comparison of digital radicalization is the natural test of whether platform affordances or national political contexts do more of the explanatory work.
A full PDF version is available on request — alex.newhouse@colorado.edu. See also the research page and the dissertation overview.
Last updated: September 2026