Methodological Challenges for Video Analysis of Right-Wing Terrorist Attacks. The Case of a Live Streamed Attack

What can we learn from video analysis about lone actor right-wing terrorist attacks? Video material of violent events is not a new type of data for scholars in the social sciences. Video platforms, such as YouTube, are full of footage of violent encounters, which stems mainly from journalists, bystanders or CCTV-cameras. Those videos have been used extensively by scholars developing a micro-sociological theory of violence, that more or less neglects the contexts in which these violent situations are embedded. The recent right-wing lone actor terrorist attack in Halle (Germany) imposes a new kind of video data for research on terrorist attacks, because the circumstance of its recording is different. The difference is that the perpetrator recorded and streamed his attack live on the internet. On October 9th, 2019 the perpetrator drove to a synagogue wanting to kill the people inside. In military style clothing and equipped with weapons and explosive devices that he built himself, he tried to enter the synagogue. As his attempt to enter fails he shoots two people and then discards his smartphone and thereby ending the video. Throughout the video he switches from talking to himself in German to talking to an imagined audience in English explaining his motives as well as his discontent about his malfunctioning weapons. Even though the event is preserved by the video, there are certain limits and methodological challenges to video analysis which will be discussed in the paper. While we can learn a lot about the micro-dynamics and bodily rhythms of this attack, additional data has to be taken into account for making sense of these types of attacks, such as the manifest that was uploaded by the perpetrator as well as interviews with witnesses of the incident.