[18] Other members of CESNUR's board include Luigi Berzano, Gianni Ambrosio, Reender Kranenborg, Eileen Barker and J. Gordon Melton.

CESNUR claimed these texts relied excessively on information supplied by the anti-cult movement and criticized them publicly, particularly through a book called Pour en finir avec les sectes.

[29] CESNUR is critical of concepts like mind control, thought reform and brainwashing, asserting that they lack scientific and scholarly support and are mainly based on anecdotal evidence.

[2] In a 2018 history of the academic study of new religious movements, American scholar W. Michael Ashcraft described CESNUR as "the largest outlet currently supporting research on NRMs.

[33] Benjamin E. Zeller noted in 2020 that, while too recently founded to give a proper analysis, the journal's articles tended to disproportionately focus on East Asia.

[2] In 1995, Introvigne argued that Order of the Solar Temple members who died by mass suicide had acted on their own initiative as opposed to being victims of the leader's manipulations.

The testimony garnered attention for Melton's admission on cross-examination that he had publicly made similar claims about Peoples Temple, responsible for 918 deaths in Jonestown, Guyana.

[47] The American evangelical magazine World called Bitter Winter "a thorn in the side" of the Chinese Communist Party, and reported that in a secret document "the Chinese government has called Bitter Winter an 'overseas hostile website' [境外敌对网站] and instructed its intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, to investigate the group.

"[48][49] In a 1996 piece in Charlie Hebdo, French essayist Renaud Marhic accused CESNUR of being "a scientific screen used to relay [Introvigne's] theses to the complacent media".

[53] Michiel Louter writing for Dutch magazine De Groene Amsterdammer opined: "It is difficult to believe that CESNUR-director Introvigne was not up-to-date on her membership in the group".

[54] In the aftermath of the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, CESNUR board member J. Gordon Melton and occasional CESNUR conference speaker James R. Lewis flew to Japan at the expense of Aum Shinrikyo; they then held press conferences in Japan stating their belief that the group did not have the ability to produce sarin and was being scapegoated.

[62][63] He supported the position first presented in articles of the Chinese daily The Beijing News in 2014,[64][65] then advocated in 2015 by Australian scholar Emily Dunn,[66] that the perpetrators were not members of Eastern Lightning at the time of the murder.

[67] However, while Dunn wrote that the two leaders of the group that committed the murder "started out as members of Eastern Lightning (in 1998 and 2007 respectively), [but] they had outgrown it" and were no longer part of the sect in 2014.

[66] Introvigne, based on a different interpretation of the same Chinese sources quoted by Dunn, argued, both in Bitter Winter and in his 2020 book Inside The Church of Almighty God, that they had never been members of Eastern Lightning.

[69] Introvigne, however, suggested in 2018 that China Gospel Fellowship invented the story of the kidnapping as justification for the fact that many of its members, including national leaders, had converted to Eastern Lightning.

[70][71] In his 2020 book, he adopted a more nuanced position, suggesting that China Gospel Fellowship members described as "kidnapping" what was in fact "deception," as they were invited, and went voluntarily, to training sessions without being told that they were organized by Eastern Lightning.

[73] On November 29, 2019, CESNUR co-organized a seminar in Seoul claiming that thousands of members of Shincheonji, a group many in South Korea regard as a cult, had been subject to forcible deprogramming.