Wait and see? Public opinion dynamics after terrorist attacks

We use the occurrence of the London bombings in July 7 2005 during the fieldwork period of the British Social Attitudes Survey to analyse the dynamics of public support for measures curbing core freedoms. We observe no changes of public stances in the first week after the attack. Approval of infringements on privacy and procedural rights surges in the following weeks before stabilizing at an increased level in the medium run. Our findings indicate that the public adopts a wait-and-see attitude when it comes to restrictive counter-terrorist measures. These results run against the hypothesis of an over-reactive citizenry driven by fear. People do not seem to spontaneously demand liberticidal policies, but appear to follow elite cues. Ancillary analyses point to the media as the main source of persuasion.

Living Suspiciously: Contingent Belonging in British South Asian Theater

This article investigates representations of national belonging in British South Asian theater productions after the 2005 London bombings. It identifies a significant yet hitherto underresearched corpus of plays that show the formation of the UK “home front” in the war on terror from the perspective of postcolonial subjects who are deemed threatening rather than worthy of protection. After discussing the construction of British South Asian citizens as suspicious subjects, the article analyzes two plays that offer an extensive consideration of the contingencies of national belonging. It argues that True Brits by Vinay Patel and Harlesden High Street by Abhishek Majumdar dramatize strategies for building, making, or keeping a home in London in spite of the strictures of suspectification and securitization.

Islam and the European Crisis: Reciprocal Discrimination and Co-radicalisation

Tensions around the presence of Muslim minorities in Europe were aggravated when the worldwide wave of Islamic fundamentalism inspired terrorist attacks in Europe, starting with the London bombings in 2005. Events of the last three years in Britain and France have reinforced the fear that Europe faces in Islamism a particularly dangerous form of right-wing radicalism. The discussion of ‘Islamofascism’ has, however, been met by a rival discourse on the intrinsic ‘Islamophobia’ of European societies. Both notions are flawed. Islamism is a novel form of ideological radicalism, and whilst empirical evidence has established the reality of discrimination against Muslims purely on the basis of their religious identity, the failure of some Muslim minorities to integrate and their resultant hostility towards modern European culture cannot be ignored. Since the onset of the crisis of the ‘European project’ triggered by the global financial crisis, this constellation has generated a new risk: a co-radicalisation between Islamism and extreme right-wing political movements traditionally hostile to immigration.

Charlie Hebdo Attack and Discourses of Muslims in British and Danish Newspapers: A cross-cultural critical discourse analysis of four newspapers

A perceived shift to the right when representing Muslims in the press in Europe has beenevident in recent years. Events such as 9/11, the July 2005 London bombings, broaderEuropean discussions and mainstreaming of populist discourses have marked a significant shiftin the media focusing on Muslims living in Europe. This paper outlines the discourses used to represent Muslims, via conducting multimodalcritical discourse analysis. The paper focuses on the 2015 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack andcross-culturally compares four newspapers in two countries – the UK and Denmark. Resultsindicate a recontextualisation of the terrorist attack situating the threat within each country,with newspapers positioned as ‘left’ utilising the same framing and discourses of right leaningnewspapers. This situated threat is demonstrated through discourses framing both countries incontrast to Muslim ‘values’. Furthermore, both countries focus on utilising Muslim ‘voices’who are part of a Star System that are critical of Muslim communities.

The use of experts in journalistic accounts of media events: A comparative study of the 2005 London Bombings in British, American, and Russian newspapers

Drawing on previous research about journalistic news sources, this study explores the use of experts and other sources in coverage of the London suicide bombings (7 July 2005) in British, American, and Russian newspapers. Using content analysis of news reports of these attacks, it assesses the differential usage of information sources across newspapers published in countries with different media systems. The comparative analyses indicate that the use of government officials, non-government experts, and other journalistic sources in this context varies both between and within nations’ media systems. However, despite their media systems-related differences, ideological orientation, and source utilization, the cross-national newspaper coverage of the London bombings often reflected similar themes and a common dialogue that affirmed each nation’s shared mourning and condemnation of the bombings.

Religious motifs within reporting of the 7/7 London bombings in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Poland: A transnational agenda-setting network study

Existing studies have examined the significance of UK media coverage of the 7/7 London bombings. This article seeks to widen this analysis by exploring the coverage of 7/7 in the leading newspapers of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Poland comparatively using a new agenda-setting perspective that is grounded within network analysis. The study is devised to respond specifically to the contrasting arguments about the influence of media globalization versus religion and ethnicity on this reporting. It finds that the diverse approaches to religion within the countries of the analyzed newspapers appear to mitigate the reproduction of shared religious narratives in this reporting. Nevertheless, the analyzed coverage does carry common attributes and these, it argues, can be explained broadly by the influence of a US-dominated ‘lens on terror’.