‘Radicalisation: the journey of a concept’, revisited

Race & Class ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 34-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek M. D. Silva
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Security Risk ◽  
Global War On Terror ◽  
The Past ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Global War ◽  
Knowledge Claims ◽  
Governmental Strategy

Over the past decade, radicalisation has emerged as perhaps the most pervasive framework for understanding micro-level transitions towards violence. However, the concept has not only become a dominant policing framework, but also an overarching governmental strategy encompassing surveillance, security, risk and community engagement. The emergence of this strategy has been accompanied by a whole host of analysts, advisers and scholars, who claim to possess ‘expert’ knowledge of individual transitions towards political violence. Revisiting ‘Radicalisation: the journey of a concept’, Arun Kundnani’s 2012 typology of such ‘expertise’ ( Race & Class, doi 10.1177/0306396812454984), the author comparatively examines scholarly developments in relation to ‘radicalisation’ and juxtaposes new knowledge claims with official government counter-radicalisation strategies and funding programmes in the UK, US and Canada to highlight how some of the most problematic knowledge claims continue to influence social policy as we move forward in the global ‘war on terror’.

Unholy Wars: Media Representations of the First Bali Bombings and Their Aftermath

2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Lewis ◽  
Sonya de Masi
Keyword(s):  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Land Bridge ◽  
Global War On Terror ◽  
News Reporting ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Imaginary ◽  
Global War ◽  
Good And Evil

Over the past three decades, the Indonesian tourist island of Bali has been appropriated into the Australian national imaginary. For Australians, Bali has become a neighbourhood playground and psycho-cultural land-bridge to Indonesia and the Asian region. With the emergence of a global ‘war on terror’, Bali has also become a primary battleground, dividing the symbolic claims of the Islamist militants against the Western economic and hedonistic empire. This divide becomes crystallised in the Australian news reporting of the Islamist attacks in Bali of 2002 and 2005. Our research has found a common frame of reference in the reporting of the attacks, most particularly as Australian journalists’ reference to a sense of national history, the ‘9/11 wars’ and Australia's adherence to US foreign policy and cultural hegemony. News reporting tended to subsume the details of ‘Islam’ and Islamic grievance within a more xenophobic rendering of Australian identity and an apocalyptic vision of good and evil.

scholarly journals Managing ‘dangerous populations’: How colonial emergency laws shape citizenship

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (6) ◽  
pp. 557-578 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yael Berda
Keyword(s):  
War On Terror ◽  
Population Control ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
New Democracies ◽  
Security Risk ◽  
Global War On Terror ◽  
Counter Terrorism ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Population Classification ◽  
Global War

This article traces the historical foundations of current security legislation as the matrix of citizenship. Examining Israel’s new Counter-Terrorism Law against the backdrop of security legislation in India, its main proposition is that these laws and their effects are rooted in colonial emergency regulations and the bureaucratic mechanisms for population control developed therein, rather than in the ‘global war on terror’. The article offers an organizational vantage point from which to understand the development of population-classification practices in terms of an ‘axis of suspicion’ that conflates ‘political risk’ with ‘security risk’. Through an account of the formalization of emergency laws, it explains the effects of colonial bureaucracies of security upon independent regimes seeking legitimacy as new democracies by tracing decisions regarding the use of an inherited arsenal of colonial and settler-colonial practices of security laws for population management, particularly mobility restrictions, surveillance and political control. One of the most important of these effects is the shaping of the citizenship of targeted populations by security laws.

Religious Communities and Possibilities for Justpeace

2015 ◽  
pp. 596-612
Author(s):  
Cecelia Lynch
Keyword(s):  
War On Terror ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Global War On Terror ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Prophetic Voice ◽  
Economic Discourses ◽  
Global War

This chapter analyzes religious communities’ role in peacebuilding vis-à-vis dominant political and economic discourses of the colonial past and the postcolonial present. This comparison demonstrates that such dominant discourses—of colonial expansion for “civilizing” purposes in the past, and for neoliberal modes of economic structuring in the context of the global war on terror in the present—entangle both strategic peacebuilders and religious communities. It is critically necessary, therefore, for peacebuilders to practice reflexivity about their own assumptions, connections, and relationships with all actors and processes in the peacebuilding environment. They should constantly interrogate whether and how the experiences of the past shape problems, strategies, and/or attitudes toward societies in conflict in the present. Moreover, religious communities and strategic peacebuilders should reclaim the prophetic voice extant in all religious traditions to challenge more directly the unjust economic, political, and social structures that inhibit the advancement of justpeace.

Iran: The state and terrorism in Iran

2019 ◽  
pp. 363-384
Author(s):  
Ali M. Ansari
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
State Policy ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Global War On Terror ◽  
The Us ◽  
Global War ◽  
The Impact

This paper discusses the role of 'terror' and 'terrorism' as an aspect of state policy in Iran during the twentieth century, looking at its historical context both within Qajar Iran and as an aspect of state policy during there French Revolution. The paper critically assesses Iranian state's relationship with the term, as both a perceived victim and perpetrator, and focusses on the application of political violence against both dissidents and political opponents where the term 'terror' is used in Persian as a synonym for assassination. The paper looks at the various justifications for the use of terror and political violence, the legacy of the Rushdie affair and the impact of the US led Global War on Terror on perceptions within Iran. 

‘WARS ON TERROR’ AND VICARIOUS HEGEMONS: THE UK, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND THE NORTHERN IRELAND CONFLICT

2005 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colm Campbell
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
The United States ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Global War On Terror ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Global War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

The hegemonic position of the United States, and its implication for international law, are rapidly emerging as sites of intense scholarly interest.1It is a truism that the fall of the Berlin wall has been followed by a period of unprecedented American predominance in the military, economic, and political spheres. Replacing the bi-polar certainties of the Cold War is a world in flux, dominated, to a significant extent, by one remaining superpower, or, in the words of the former French Foreign Minister, Hubert Vedrine, by a ‘hyperpower’.2Some though, have emphasised the continuing importance of other loci of (lesser) power in a ‘uni-multipolar’ world.3That this domination posed critical questions for international law was obvious well before the 9/11 atrocities, as the debate over NATO's use of force in Kosovo illustrated. Since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and with the global ‘war on terror’ reaching into ever-increasing spheres, the debate has intensified significantly.

scholarly journals What makes violence martial? Adopt A Sniper and normative imaginaries of violence in the contemporary United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 096701062199722
Author(s):  
Katharine M Millar
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Illustrative Case ◽  
Global War On Terror ◽  
Us Military ◽  
Military Support ◽  
Global War ◽  
Contemporary United States

What makes violence martial? Contemporary militarism scholarship, owing to an analytical overdetermination of the role of military institutions, frequently conflates martiality with violence writ large. Drawing upon the illustrative case of Adopt A Sniper, a US military support charity founded by police officers operating during the global war on terror and intended to help supporters ‘directly contribute to the killing of the enemy’, this article interrogates the intuitive ‘line’ between martial and other, particularly colonial, forms of violence. To do so, I develop the concept of ‘normative imaginaries of violence’ – articulations of intersubjective beliefs; political community; spatial geographies; gendered, sexualized, racialized and classed power relations; and logics of legitimation. Through this lens, and informed by the work of Frantz Fanon, the article demonstrates that though coloniality and martiality are deeply intertwined, they are neither reducible to nor epiphenomenal of each other. Through a juxtaposition of the titular sniper with two additional figures invoked by Adopt A Sniper – the militiaman and the vigilante – I outline a novel, genealogical method that enables us to trace the entangled histories of contemporary violences and identify the implicit politics of ordering at work in existing, often fragmented, analyses of political violence.

scholarly journals Nat Turner after 9/11: Kyle Baker's Nat Turner

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 923-951
Author(s):  
TIM BRUNO
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Visual Rhetoric ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
The Political ◽  
September 11Th ◽  
Global War On Terror ◽  
Racial Formations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Terrorism ◽  
Global War

Scholars have questioned what Nat Turner meant to others in the past; in this article, I question what he means today. Reversing William Andrews's injunction to read “Prophet Nat's” 1831 insurrection through the US's encounter with religio-political terrorism on 9/11, I instead examine the effect September 11th has had on the rebel slave's contemporary afterlife. Ultimately this article asks what cultural work Nat Turner now performs, what his recent depictions tell us about the racial formations of the present. Drawing on comics theory, I parse the visual rhetoric of Kyle Baker's popular and increasingly studied comic Nat Turner, in which Baker tropes Nat Turner as Christ just as Nat Turner himself did in his Confessions. Baker produces an iconic black hero, one who is visually antithetical to racist images of “the terrorist” circulating in post-9/11 discourses. By doing so, Baker safeguards not only Nat Turner but US “blackness” from Islamophobia during the age of the global War on Terror. Finally, by reading Baker's comic alongside other recent, unexamined depictions of the rebel slave, this article updates the archive on Nat Turner and complicates the political possibilities that inhere in other sites of cultural memory.

From Wars of Choice to the Mistakes of Wars: Presidential Decision Making and the Limits of Democratic Accountability

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 532-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Western
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Global War On Terror ◽  
American Military ◽  
The Past ◽  
Policy Selection ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Global War

One does not have to look far to see that much of what has been written over the past 10 years reveals a decade filled with US foreign policy missteps, miscues, and failures. Popular books such as Thomas Ricks's Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006), Jane Mayer's The Dark Side (2008), George Packer's Assassins' Gate (2005), and Bob Woodward's series on “Bush's wars” captured our attention and gave us a first cut on the history of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the “global war on terror.” These riveting accounts provided rich, descriptive insights and exposed the wide range of ideological and bureaucratic feuding, the breakdown—and often deliberate circumventing—of institutional procedures and organizational practices, and the ad hoc and often chaotic process of policy selection. Embedded throughout these narratives is a broader theme that depicts the past decade as an extraordinary period of American foreign policy excess and a dramatic departure from the past.

scholarly journals Making the case for the UK’s drone capability: public relations as a carrier of strategic culture

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-33
Author(s):  
Gareth Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
State Level ◽  
Strategic Culture ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Global War On Terror ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
Interdisciplinary Synthesis ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Global War

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to offer critical analysis of how public relations (PR) were used to justify the use of drones by the UK Government, through the promotion of a distinct strategic culture. The paper locates governmental PR discourse on drones in the UK since 2013 within the strategic culture associated with the global war on terror. Design/methodology/approach The project was based upon critical discourse analysis of the UK governmental PR on drones since 2013, examining press releases, opinion articles by ministers, media relations content, parliamentary statements, news content and other related materials. Findings The analysis led to five discursive themes of persuasive intent in relation to drones being identified, most of which were notably similar to the US governmental discourse on drone policy and deployment. Originality/value The project contributes a novel interdisciplinary synthesis of the communicative aspects of international relations as theorised in the field of strategic culture with the cultural aspects of the state-level PR in order to explain how PR was used to promote and diffuse a strategic culture in which drones are assumed to be the counter-terrorism measure of choice. The conclusion is that governmental PR discourse combines aspects of colonialism with focus on superior technology, remote control and precision of weapons, generating a military and communicative logic that overwhelms the voices of victims and impedes meaningful discussion on the reality of suffering caused by drone deployments.

Counter-Terrorism in the Post-9/11 Era

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rashmi Singh
Keyword(s):  
War On Terror ◽  
Global War On Terror ◽  
Counter Terrorism ◽  
Strategic Vision ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Future ◽  
Global War ◽  
Successes And Failures

This chapter assesses the US-led counter-terrorism response to the September 2001 attacks on the American homeland in order to gauge the successes and failures of the Global War on Terror. It concludes that successes against transnational terrorist threats, as represented by al-Qaida and its affiliates, have been few and far between. Instead, the past decade has been marked by a failure to meet set goals for a number of reasons, including but not limited to: the shifting character of war, the unintended fallouts of the counter-terrorism policies adopted, and an inadvertent strengthening of al-Qaida’s material and ideological capabilities through the US macro-securitisation of the Global War on Terror–all of which point to the absence of a long-term strategic vision. However, our counter-terrorism failures hold crucial lessons for the future and the chapter concludes by outlining how they can enable us to translate our past failures into future successes.

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