Dr Ana-Maria Bliuc she/her/hers

Ana-Maria Bliuc is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Social and Political Psychology at the University of Dundee, with research that engages with questions relevant to crime and criminal justice.

Her work examines how social identity, polarisation, misinformation, and online harms shape harmful behaviour, political violence, and challenges to institutional legitimacy, with particular relevance for crime prevention, regulation, and justice responses in digitally mediated societies. Using behavioural, computational, and systems-based approaches, she studies how extremist and harmful narratives emerge, spread, and become normalised, and how institutional interventions can both mitigate and inadvertently exacerbate risk.

Ana-Maria’s research is relevant to policy debates on online extremism, foreign information manipulation, democratic resilience, and digital governance, and has been cited in policy documents across multiple countries. Through an interdisciplinary lens, her work contributes to criminological scholarship by linking micro-level psychological processes with meso- and macro-level institutional dynamics, helping to strengthen the theoretical and empirical foundations of crime and criminal justice research in contemporary digital contexts.

Recent Publications: 

Betts, J. M., Bliuc, A. M., & Courtney, D. S. (2026). The effect of charismatic influencers on polarization online: An agent-based modeling approach. Technology in Society, 103179. 

Ylmaz, I., Bliuc, A.M., et al. (2026/in press). Populism in the Age of Social Media: A Systematic Review of Recent Digital Populism Research, New Media & Society.  

Bliuc, A. M., & Muntele‐Hendreș, D. (2025). Narratives of moral superiority in the context of war in Ukraine: Justifying pro‐Russian support through social creativity and moral disengagement. British Journal of Social Psychology, 64(2), e12878. 

Barnett, D. E., Bliuc, A. M., & Cristea, M. (2025). Far-right narratives of online groups: A systematic review of recent cross-disciplinary research. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology. 

Bliuc, A. M., Betts, J. M., Vergani, M., Bouguettaya, A., & Cristea, M. (2024). A theoretical framework for polarization as the gradual fragmentation of a divided society. Communications Psychology, 2(1), 75. 

Bouguettaya, A., Vergani, M., Sainsbury, C., & Bliuc, A. M. (2023). I won’t listen if I think we’re losing our way: How right-wing authoritarianism affects the response to different anti-prejudice messages. Plos one, 18(1), e0280557. 

Iqbal, M., O’Brien, K. S., & Bliuc, A. M. (2024). The relationship between existential anxiety, political efficacy, extrinsic religiosity and support for violent extremism in Indonesia. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 47(11), 1510-1518.