Core questions
Questions the programme is designed to make testable
Changing pathways
How has publicly documented digital-pathway involvement varied across terroristic attacks, thwarted plots and CIVM incidents over time?
Case composition
How do AIR evidence levels, ideology, online behaviour, targets, harm vectors and actor characteristics differ across countries and incident categories?
National context
Which compatible digital, institutional, demographic, economic, health, crime and cohesion indicators move together—and where do countries diverge?
Context and cases
Which country-year correspondences warrant further study after coverage, missingness, legal regimes, source changes and ecological inference are considered?
Alternative explanations
How much of an apparent AIR pattern may reflect case selection, digital-source visibility, changing reporting, legal classification or the growth of public online traces?
Prevention and practice
Which findings could responsibly inform policing, intelligence, border security, journalism and prevention without demographic profiling or causal overclaim?
Programme architecture
Connected workstreams with different evidential roles
Five Eyes AIR Case Database
Source-qualified incident records, legal stages, digital-pathway evidence, targets, harm, actor structure and uncertainty.
Five Eyes Social Context Database
Governed country-year indicators with explicit permissions for display, trend, comparison and exploratory association.
AIR framework development
Operational distinctions between lawful participation, CIVM and terrorism, and testable propositions about curation, immersion, reinforcement and mobilisation.
Validation and sensitivity
Semantic consistency gates, independent coding reliability, alternative classification rules, source-coverage analysis and reproducible statistics.
Intelligence, policing and prevention
Implications for threat assessment, online harms, foreign interference, public safety, border practice and democratic resilience.
Teaching and public understanding
Open exploratory tools, annual reporting, quarterly updates and disciplined communication for students, journalists and non-specialists.
Review the bounded Border Security & Public Safety research module →
Current empirical priorities
Validation before stronger inference
- Resolve semantic inconsistencies. Reconcile CIVM eligibility, AIR levels and the separate online-mobilisation field before treating the present case release as launch-final.
- Freeze a coding manual. Convert expert rules into independently applicable decisions with examples, exclusions and uncertainty outcomes.
- Measure inter-coder reliability. Preserve pre-adjudication coding and report agreement by field, including sparse-category and prevalence effects.
- Test sensitivity. Recalculate results under plausible alternative inclusion, AIR, temporal and source-quality rules.
- Model ascertainment. Examine whether recency, source abundance and the increasing availability of online traces explain part of the observed AIR distribution.
- Specify causal designs separately. Any future causal claim requires a design that addresses time trends, clustering, confounding, measurement change and counterfactual exposure.
Research roadmap
Planned evolution, 2026–2029
The roadmap is a programme plan, not a claim that an unpublished output exists or a guarantee that its title and date cannot change.
- 2026
Launch and empirical foundation
- Public research dashboard launch
- Empirical AIR paper
- Practitioner paper
- First AIR Update
- 2027
First annual synthesis
- Toxic AIR
- Annual AIR Report
- Expanded datasets
- 2028
Social-context expansion
- The Social Context of Modern Violence
- International collaborations
- Doctoral research
- 2029
Practitioner maturity
- AIR: Intelligence, Policing and Prevention
- Mature AIR Research Programme
Future collaboration
Reproducible critique is part of the programme
The public data, source registers and methodological documentation are intended to support independent checking, replication, doctoral research and collaboration. Agreement with AIR is not a condition of useful engagement; well-specified null findings, alternative explanations and corrections strengthen the programme.