Hate speech does not operate in a vacuum, and its rise reflects changing political contexts. If we’re serious about fighting hate speech and its violent and destabilizing consequences, we need to identify its earliest manifestations. Babak Bahador offers a hate-speech intensity scale, a strategy that allows us to move beyond the binary approach that dominates current hate speech research. This concept can be operationalized to better identify and understand the evolutions of hate speech before it leads to real-world harms.
Babak Bahador
Babak Bahador is an associate research professor at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, where he teaches a course on Media and Peacebuilding, Humanitarian Communication and directs the Media and Peacebuilding Project. In addition, Bahador directs a peace journalism news service called Peace News. He is also a research fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, where he previously worked full-time as a senior lecturer. Bahador holds a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.