Maura Conway, who heads the DCU-led VOX-Pol research network, described her win as a great feeling, saying, “It’s always good when we get people in humanities, the social sciences having their research recognised.”

Conway has been researching cyberterrorism since the late 90’s, after she developed an interest in exploring the link between globalisation and terrorism. “That was as far as I got with it,” she said, “because i became really taken with this idea of terrorism and the internet and what direction it was going.”

At the time the scholarly idea of what cyberterrorism would be was “an attack on or using the internet for terrorism purposes,” she said. “I’m a bit of a skeptic in that regard.”

Instead Conway thought “the use of the internet for outreach and propaganda by violent extremists” would be much more likely, and that’s how things have played out, she said.

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This article first appeared in The College View newspaper.