Author Archives: Dr Helene Lavoix (MSc PhD Lond)

The Red (Team) Analysis Weekly 193 – “A Dangerous Folly”

Each week our scan collects weak – and less weak – signals… Read the 5 March scan →  World – This week featured article is Seumas Milne’s “The demonisation of Russia risks paving the way for war” for The Guardian. Milne, by emphasising  how “Politicians and the media are using Vladimir Putin and Ukraine to justify military expansionism” and stressing how it is “a dangerous folly” – which we borrowed as title, perfectly summarises the tragic escalation towards war we are currently living. The anti-Russian sentiment has reached such a paroxysm, supported by analysts, who never use evidence, nor anymore footnotes to substantiate their claims or judgement, and mix good analysis with convenient ones, where inconvenient facts are forgotten, that any attempt to try coming back to better researched …

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The Islamic State Psyops – The Foreign Fighters’ Threat

One of the many issues that needs to be addressed regarding the Islamic State is that it attracts foreign fighters, as abundantly reported in the media. This issue is also one of the focuses of the latest issue of the Islamic State psyops product, Dabiq 7 (12 Feb 2015), as it features in five articles: “Major operations in Libya and Sinai” (foreign fighters from Tunisia and Sudan), pp. 40-41; “Among the believers are men: Abu Qudamah al-Misri” (foreign fighters from the UK), pp. 46-49; “A brief interview with Umm Basir al-Muhajirah” (foreign fighter from France), pp. 50-51; “The good example of Abu Basir al-Afriqi” (foreign fighter from France), pp. 68-71; “Interview with Abu Umar al-Baljiki” (foreign fighters from Belgium), pp. 72-75. This …

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The Red (Team) Analysis Weekly 192

Each week our scan collects weak – and less weak – signals… Read the 26 February scan →  The Weekly is the scan of The Red (Team) Analysis Society and it focuses on national and international security issues.  The information collected is crowdsourced. It does not mean endorsement but points to new, emerging, escalating or stabilizing problems and issues. If …

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The Red (Team) Analysis Weekly 192 – Denying the Islamism of the Islamic State

Each week our scan collects weak – and less weak – signals… We present below some of the most interesting or relevant features for each section. Read the 19 February scan →  World (all matters related to war, international and national security) – The focus this week stems from the White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism currently held in Washington D.C. (see White House Fact sheet). First, in a very “Washingtonian” way, the summit leads to the publication of a host of reports and articles, as think tanks, newspapers, researchers, experts and pundits try to have their voices heard by policy-makers, some of them having been crowd-sourced here and worth checking and reading. Second, the summit forces the various actors to face an issue that …

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Update – Islamic State Psyops – Dar al-Islam 2 and Dabiq 7

(Update 3 Dec 2015: Since this post was published, other issues of Dar al Islam (1 to 7) and Dabiq (1 to 12) – as well as new Islamic States magazines aiming at other countries – were published by Al Hayat – See the Portal to the Islamic State War. Update 16 Nov: The Islamic State claims regarding the attacks on Paris can be found on the – safe – website of Pietervanotsayen). (This post is an update of “The Islamic Pysops – A Framework“, which sets the stage for our series on the Islamic State psyops, their targets, aims, as well as the mindset behind them.)  The Al-Hayat Media Center started producing a new magazine with France as target audience, Dar …

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The Red (Team) Analysis Weekly 191 – Minsk and the Probability of War

Each week our scan collects weak – and less weak – signals… We present below some of the most interesting or relevant features for each section. Read the 12 February scan →  World (all matters related to war, international and national security) – In terms of major issues, increasingly, one week looks very much like the next, as matters get entrenched. However, within each issue, problems emerge, evolve and sometimes coalesce. Joseph Nye, in his small but excellent book Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History, wrote in a part aptly named The Funnel of Choices: “Events close in over time, degrees of freedom are lost and the probability of war increases. But the funnel of choices available to leaders might open up again, and degrees of freedom could …

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The Islamic State Psyops – Ultimate War

The dreadful burning alive of the captive Jordanian pilot by the Islamic State and its video broadcast by Al-Furqan Media Foundation, as well as the reactions it succeeded in eliciting, such as Jordan’s retaliations (e.g. ISIS Study Group, 3 Feb 2015; BBC News, 6 February 2015), show once more the crucial importance to fully consider the Islamic State psyops as they are completely part of the war it wages and of the order it thus aims at establishing. These psyops, beyond the influence they aim at generating (see “A Framework“), offer us a way inside the Islamic State and its Khilafah’s worldview.  Understanding the latter is crucial is we want to fight the Islamic State victoriously, because its belief system and induced actions impact all other actors, be …

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The Red (Team) Analysis Weekly 190 – The Islamic State, Puppet Master of Emotions

Each week our scan collects weak – and less weak – signals… We present below some of the most interesting or relevant features for each section. World (all matters related to war, international and national security) – This week was overwhelmingly dominated by three main issues, the horrendous burning alive of the Jordanian pilot by the Islamic State, its use as psyops products, and more largely the war against the Islamic State, the never abating tension between North America and Europe on the one hand, Russia on the other, along the Ukrainian conflict (with an unusual number of videos on the situation within Ukraine) and the showdown between the new Greek government and the EU (see more details in the economy section, although the potential …

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The Red (Team) Analysis Weekly 189 – Why an anti-Russian “Western” Foreign Policy?

Each week our scan collects weak – and less weak – signals… We present below some of the most interesting or relevant features for each section. World (all matters related to war, international and national security) – With the return of war to Eastern Ukraine, we are witnessing an interesting effort by some authors to try to make sense of a US-led foreign policy and analysis of the world that does not appear to make sense to them, besides, of course, the host of usual anti-Russian articles. The articles in The American Interest  (“Putin’s World: In It To Win It” by Walter Russell Mead) and Salon (“Distortions, lies and omissions: The New York Times won’t tell you the real story behind Ukraine, Russian economic collapse” by Patrick …

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The Red (Team) Analysis Weekly 188 – Beyond the Positivity Mindset, the Islamic State and a Map

Last updated 26 January 2016 Latest updated maps, for the Islamic State and its Khilafah, may be found for Mesopotamia (Iraq and Syria) here and for its global reach here. The text below remains largely true, with variations of course, notably as awareness of the danger created by the Islamic State has suddenly increased after the attacks in …

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