The impact of conspiracy theories and how to Counter them: they got it under control: reviewing the literature on conspiracy theories and radicalisation to violence
The academic and popular literature on conspiracy theories is, in many ways, unimaginably varied, scattered and overwhelming. As such, this synthesis paper is necessarily selective and focuses on a few key questions: definitional issues around conspiracy theories, debates about what causes people to believe in them, research into their individual and social consequences, and whether there is any evidence about their relationship to extremist radicalisation and violence. The review is limited to streams of research in a variety of fields that may be useful for terrorism scholars’ thinking about how to approach the question of extremism and conspiracism in their own work.