Stephane Baele

Stephane Baele is a researcher at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), where Baele also held a position at the University of Exeter. Baele's work spans the study of violent extremism, terrorism, and political violence, with particular attention to extremist language, online ecosystems, and the role of artificial intelligence in both facilitating and analysing extremist content. Much of this research draws on computational and experimental methods, including corpus analysis, socio-semantic network analysis, and survey experiments, applied to topics such as incel ideology, far-right online communities, and lone-actor terrorism. Baele has also contributed to securitization theory, the ethics of security research, and the broader politics of numbers and metrics in academic and policy contexts.