Terrorism in Spain

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-99
Author(s):  
Diego Muro
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
The State ◽  
Terrorist Group ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Collective Security ◽  
Security Threat ◽  
Intelligence Services ◽  
Violent Extremism ◽  
Violence Against Civilians

Spain has experienced four waves of terrorism during the twentieth century: anarchist, nationalist, left-wing, and religious. This chapter examines the variety and intensity of terrorist incidents of the last two waves, as well as the counter-terrorist efforts since 1975. The argument is structured as follows: First, the chapter accounts for the longevity of the main campaigns of indiscriminate violence against civilians. Second, it evaluates the interaction between the security and intelligence services and the various clandestine groups, and argues that the process of democratization increased the effectiveness of counterterrorism, particularly against ETA. The section further argues that collective security is a relational act that brings two self-interested actors—the state and the terrorist group—into conflict with each other, and that it is not possible to study campaigns of political violence in isolation. Third, the chapter critically assesses the security threat posed by Salafi jihadist cells, which were responsible for the attacks on Madrid (2004) and Barcelona (2017), and examines the ongoing agenda of countering and preventing violent extremism in Spain.

‘Sympathy for the Devil?’ The West German Left and the Challenge of Terrorism

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-532 ◽  
Author(s):  
KARRIN HANSHEW
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
The State ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The West ◽  
Counter Terrorism ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
The Devil

AbstractIn the 1970s, the West German extra-parliamentary Left struggled to respond effectively to left-wing terrorism and the state powers mobilised against it. This article argues that a shared conception of counter-violence as legitimate resistance helps explain the Left's ambivalent relationship to political violence and its solidarity with militants. The mounting strain on the projects and protest networks of student rebels, older leftists, anti-nuclear demonstrators and feminist activists, however, provoked debate and, eventually, change. Caught between terrorism and counter-terrorism, leftists revised assumptions upon which their commitment to resistance had rested – and reconceived resistance itself as part of everyday, mainstream politics.

scholarly journals The Expansion of Prevent: On The Politics of Legibility, Opacity And Decolonial Critique

2020 ◽  
Vol 100 (100) ◽  
pp. 43-59
Author(s):  
Justin Cruickshank
Keyword(s):  
Political Islam ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
Violent Extremism ◽  
The Uk

It is argued here that the liberal state has authoritarian aspects that are irreducible to the authoritarian aspects of neoliberalism. The argument draws on James Scott's work on modern state ruling through bureaucratic 'legibility', and the decolonial work of S. Sayyid on how a form of political Islam he calls 'Islamism' challenges the west's construction of modernity as an intrinsically western project. The state's need for legibility undermines democracy by seeking to shape political debate and political activity to fit its bureaucratic channels for engagement, and Islamophobia caused by the UK state's reaction to Islamism, shapes how the UK state seeks control via legibility. Prevent expanded in 2011 from focusing on 'violent extremism' to 'extremism', with extremism defined in terms of normative commitments the state takes to be in tension with its conception of 'British values'. The state defined the Muslim population as opaque because they were taken to not be socially integrated. This was used to justify a repressive ubiquitous surveillance based on what is termed here a 'legibility of symptoms'. This was presented, after 2015, as paternalistic 'safeguarding', when workers in public sector bureaucracies became legally obligated to carry out Prevent surveillance. Left-wing and environmental organisations engaged in extra-parliamentary protest are now as defined as potentially extremist. With the expansion of Prevent in 2011, the state created a 'pre-crime' space in civil society that is taken to justify repressive surveillance, presented as paternalistic safeguarding to save individuals 'at risk' of 'radicalisation' from going on to commit criminal acts.

scholarly journals ‘Idle minds’ and ‘empty stomachs’: youth, violence and religious diversity in coastal Kenya

Africa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 90 (5) ◽  
pp. 890-913
Author(s):  
Erik Meinema
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Youth Violence ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Security Threat ◽  
Coastal Kenya ◽  
Violent Extremism ◽  
Religious Coexistence ◽  
Donor Policies

AbstractThis article analyses how concerns about youth and violence intersect with the politics of managing religious coexistence in the coastal Kenyan town of Malindi. During extensive ethnographic research, I noticed that Muslim, Christian and ‘Traditionalist’ leaders, politicians and NGO officials often fear that the ‘idleness’ of young people leaves them susceptible to various immoralities, including political violence and ‘violent extremism’, that threaten peaceful ethnic and religious coexistence. The article explores how these concerns motivate leaders’ attempts to incorporate youth in development and peace projects, and how youth respond to these interventions. These projects are funded by Western donors, who often see ‘radical’ religiosity, especially among Muslim youth, as a security threat. Yet, leaders in Malindi accommodate donor policies to the (coastal) Kenyan context, and tend to understand immoralities and violence as resulting from a lack of religiosity among youth. The article argues that perceptions of ‘idle youth’ as potentially violent threats to peaceful religious coexistence and morality allow leaders to develop a ‘moral religiosity’ that is shared across religious divides. However, the ways in which youth strategically resist or comply with interventions to pacify them demonstrate that they do not necessarily agree with dominant moral and political constellations.

Paramilitarism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uğur Ümit Üngör
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
Institutional Support ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Global Context ◽  
History Of ◽  
Violence Against Civilians ◽  
Legitimate Violence ◽  
Violent Conflicts

From the deserts of Sudan to the jungles of Colombia, and from the streets of Belfast to the mountains of Kurdistan, paramilitaries have appeared in violent conflicts in very different settings. Paramilitaries are generally depicted as irregular armed organizations that carry out acts of violence against civilians on behalf of a state. In doing so, they undermine the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence, while at the same time creating a breeding ground for criminal activities. Why do governments with functioning police forces and armies use paramilitary groups? This book tackles this question through the prism of the interpenetration of paramilitaries and the state. The book interprets paramilitarism as the ability of the state to successfully outsource mass political violence against civilians that transforms and traumatizes societies. It analyzes how paramilitarism can be understood in a global context, and how paramilitarism is connected to transformations of warfare and state–society relations. By comparing a broad range of cases, it looks at how paramilitarism has made a profound impact in a large number of countries that were different, but nevertheless shared a history of pro-government militia activity. A thorough understanding of paramilitarism can clarify the direction and intensity of violence in wartime and peacetime. The book examines the issues of international involvement, institutional support, organized crime, party politics, and personal ties.

Revolution and Non-Violence in Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Imraan Coovadia
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Leo Tolstoy ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Mass Mobilization ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
Robben Island

The dangers of political violence and the possibilities of non-violence were the central themes of three lives which changed the twentieth century—Leo Tolstoy, writer and aristocrat who turned against his class; Mohandas Gandhi, who corresponded with Tolstoy and considered him the most important person of the time; and Nelson Mandela, prisoner and statesman, who read War and Peace on Robben Island and who, despite having led a campaign of sabotage, saw himself as a successor to Gandhi. Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela tried to create transformed societies to replace the dying forms of colony and empire. They found the inequalities of Russia, India, and South Africa intolerable, yet they questioned the wisdom of seizing the power of the state, creating new kinds of political organization and imagination to replace the old promises of revolution. Their views, along with their ways of leading others, are closely connected, from their insistence on working with their own hands and reforming their individual selves to their acceptance of death. On three continents, in a century of mass mobilization and conflict, they promoted strains of nationalism devoid of antagonism, prepared to take part in a general peace. Looking at Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela in sequence, taking into account their letters and conversations, as well as the institutions they created or subverted, placing at the centre their treatment of the primal fantasy of political violence, reveals a vital radical tradition which stands outside the conventional categories of twentieth-century history and politics.

From protection to persecution: Threat environment and refugee scapegoating

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burcu Savun ◽  
Christian Gineste
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The State ◽  
Security Threat ◽  
State Repression ◽  
Host Countries ◽  
Terror Attacks ◽  
Security Crises

The security consequences associated with refugee flows are among the most widely studied aspects of forced migration. While the majority of this research program has focused on how refugee movements affect the risk of political violence, scant scholarly attention has been paid to violence perpetrated against refugees. Building upon the state repression literature, we argue that refugees are particularly vulnerable to the violation of their physical integrity rights in the wake of terrorist attacks in host states. Governments are pressured to respond to security crises but prefer to take actions without jeopardizing public support. In this context, refugee groups can be strategically attractive targets of repression because they lack electoral power and citizens are often supportive of government crackdown against foreigners in times of security crises. Given that leaders have stronger incentives to respond to voters’ demands quickly in democracies, we expect the effect of terror attacks on violence against refugees to be stronger in democratic host states. Using a novel global dataset on anti-refugee violence between 1996 and 2015, we show that refugees are more likely to be exposed to violence by the coercive agents of the state in the wake of security crises. We provide suggestive evidence that the repression of refugees is more consistent with a scapegoating mechanism than the actual ties and involvement of refugees in terrorism. The findings reveal that the well-being of uprooted populations is particularly at risk when host countries face a security threat.

Is economic inequality a universal evil?

2019 ◽  
pp. 91-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rostislav I. Kapeliushnikov
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
The State ◽  
Fair Play ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
The Public ◽  
Discursive Power ◽  
A Current

Using published estimates of inequality for two countries (Russia and USA) the paper demonstrates that inequality measuring still remains in the state of “statistical cacophony”. Under this condition, it seems at least untimely to pass categorical normative judgments and offer radical political advice for governments. Moreover, the mere practice to draw normative conclusions from quantitative data is ethically invalid since ordinary people (non-intellectuals) tend to evaluate wealth and incomes as admissible or inadmissible not on the basis of their size but basing on whether they were obtained under observance or violations of the rules of “fair play”. The paper concludes that a current large-scale ideological campaign of “struggle against inequality” has been unleashed by left-wing intellectuals in order to strengthen even more their discursive power over the public.

Rewriting the Narrative

2019 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
Nicolas G. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Mixed Media ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
The 1960S

A vibrant American Indian art scene developed in California from the 1960s to the 1980s, with links to a broader indigenous arts movement. Native American artists working in the state produced and exhibited paintings, prints, sculptures, mixed media, and other art forms that validated and documented their cultures, interpreted their history, asserted their survival, and explored their experiences in modern society. Building on recent scholarship that examines American Indian migration, urbanization, and activism in the twentieth century, this article charts these developments and argues that American Indian artists in California challenged and rewrote dominant historical narratives by foregrounding Native American perspectives in their work.

Arte ConTexto

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 29-52
Author(s):  
Antonio Bellisario ◽  
Leslie Prock
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Pictorial Representation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Socialist Government ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Military

The article examines Chilean muralism, looking at its role in articulating political struggles in urban public space through a visual political culture perspective that emphasizes its sociological and ideological context. The analysis characterizes the main themes and functions of left-wing brigade muralism and outlines four subpolitical phases: (i) Chilean mural painting’s beginnings in 1940–1950, especially following the influence of Mexican muralism, (ii) the development of brigade muralism for political persuasion under the context of revolutionary sociopolitical upheaval during the 1960s and in the socialist government of Allende from 1970 to 1973, (iii) the characteristics of muralism during the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1980s as a form of popular protest, and (iv) muralism to express broader social discontent during the return to democracy in the 1990s. How did the progressive popular culture movement represent, through murals, the political hopes during Allende’s government and then the political violence suffered under the military dictatorship? Several online repositories of photographs of left-wing brigade murals provide data for the analysis, which suggests that brigade muralism used murals mostly for political expression and for popular education. Visual art’s inherent political dimension is enmeshed in a field of power constituted by hegemony and confrontation. The muralist brigades executed murals to express their political views and offer them to all spectators because the street wall was within everyone's reach. These murals also suggested ideas that went beyond pictorial representation; thus, muralism was a process of education that invited the audience to decipher its polysemic elements.

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