Time will tell: Defining violence in terrorism court cases

Calculating the potential risk of future terrorist violence is at the core of counter-terrorism practices. Particularly in court cases, this potential risk serves as legitimization for the preemptive criminalization of suspicious (financial) behaviour. This article argues that the preemptive temporality seen in such court cases is a practice of ‘sorting time’ and producing distinct legal definitions around future violence. Building on postcolonial and feminist scholarship on temporality, the article examines preemptive temporality as the material, embodied and multiple engagements with time that are enacted in terrorism court cases. Through the use of empirical data obtained from court observations, court judgements and interviews with legal practitioners, accounts of empirical temporalities are traced to illuminate other forms of violence that until now have been overshadowed by the dominant (and relatively unchallenged) perception of future terrorist threats that is enacted in the courtroom. In this way, the article makes two important contributions. First, it advances the theoretical debate on preemptive security through an examination of how legal and security practices co-produce temporality by defining future terrorist violence. Second, it contributes empirically by showing how temporality is constructed in multiple ways, paying specific attention to temporalities resisting dominating perceptions of future terrorist violence.

Leader Nationalism, Ethnic Identity, and Terrorist Violence

Whether or not nationalism fuels terrorist violence by ethnic groups is an important yet underexplored research question. This study offers a theoretical argument, empirical analysis and a case study. When political leaders such as presidents and prime ministers use nationalism to shore up legitimacy, they threaten the existence of disfavored ethnic groups. In turn, those groups are more likely to respond with terrorist attacks. The author tests this argument using a sample of 766 ethnic groups across 163 countries from 1970 to 2009. The multilevel mixed-effects negative binomial regression results provide evidence that leader nationalism is a significant driver of ethnic terrorism. The detrimental effect of nationalism remains the same after using a generalized method of moments method to account for possible reverse causality. A case study of Sinhalese nationalist leaders versus Tamil Tigers also supports the nationalism and terrorism nexus.

Anger, Anxiety, and Selective Exposure to Terrorist Violence

We examine the political consequence of exposure to widely available video content of terror violence. In a two-wave survey of Americans, we assess who is exposed to, and seeks out, terror-related video content in the first wave and then observe who decides to watch raw video footage of the Boston marathon terror attack in the second. We focus centrally on anxiety and anger as differing emotional reactions to the threat of terrorism and document their influence on exposure to terror violence. Anxiety generates avoidance of violent terror content whereas anger increases its consumption. Moreover, we find that anger increases exposure to violent terror content and in addition enhances support for punitive and retaliatory anti-terrorism policy. We discuss the implications of our findings for the broader dynamics of terrorist violence and the emotional basis of selective news exposure.

Epistemic modes in news production: How journalists manage ways of knowing in hybrid media events involving terrorist violence

In this article, we investigate the challenge of hybrid media events of terrorist violence for journalism and analyse how news organizations manage epistemic modes in such events. Epistemic modes refer to different ways of knowing, which are managed by newsrooms through journalistic and editorial practices. We draw from an empirical study of terrorism-related news production in the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle). Our data consist of thematic interviews ( N = 33) with Yle journalists, producers, and content managers and newsroom observations (14 days) conducted at Yle. The study investigates the data through a grounded theory approach with the aim of creating a theoretical understanding of knowledge production in hybrid media events. The results are drawn from a qualitative content analysis and close reading of the interview data, with the other data sets informing the core analysis. The article identifies seven epistemic modes of relevance to news production in hybrid media events: not-knowing, description, rumoring, witnessing, emotion, analysing and perpetrating. The modes are analysed in relation to three dimensions of crisis reporting: immediate sense-making, ritualizing and transformation back to normalcy. The article finds that although particular epistemic modes are typical to certain dimensions of reporting hybrid, disruptive media events, both the modes and the dimensions also are also merged and intermixed. This condition together with growing amounts of problematic epistemic modes of rumoring, emotion and perpetrating challenge journalists’ epistemic authority in reporting hybrid media events involving terrorist violence.

Governmental Responses to Terrorism in Autocracies: Evidence from China

Autocracies are widely assumed to have a counterterrorism advantage because they can censor media and are insulated from public opinion, thereby depriving terrorists of both their audience and political leverage. However, institutionalized autocracies such as China draw legitimacy from public approval and feature partially free media environments, meaning that their information strategies must be much more sophisticated than simple censorship. To better understand the strategic considerations that govern decisions about transparency in this context, this article explores the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) treatment of domestic terrorist incidents in the official party mouthpiece – the People's Daily. Drawing on original, comprehensive datasets of all known Uyghur terrorist violence in China and the official coverage of that violence, the findings demonstrate that the CCP promptly acknowledges terrorist violence only when both domestic and international conditions are favorable. The authors attribute this pattern to the entrenched prioritization of short-term social stability over longer-term legitimacy.

WEAPONIZATION OF LIVENESS: STREAMING DEATH AS A HYBRID MEDIA EVENT OF TERRORIST VIOLENCE

This paper offers a critical exploration of the notion of liveness and, in particular, the production of liveness in the context of hybrid media event of terrorist violence. With Christchurch mosque attacks of March, 2019, as the empirical context of study, the paper demonstrates i) how the perpetrator produced liveness through the live streaming of the massacre in digital media; ii) how this material circulated in diverse digital platforms; and iii) what kind of struggles emerged around visibility and erasure by way of removal as carried out by different platforms (e.g. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter). The empirical data collection and analysis is based on a method of digital media ethnography. We posit that live streaming of the Christchurch mosque attacks resulted in the weaponization of liveness (Callahan 2017), accelerating the experience of ‘real time’ witnessing of death on multiple levels. While a relatively small number of people watched the massacre take place in ‘real time’ (en direct), a much larger audience captured the ‘re-enactment’ of liveness through the active circulation and sharing of the video on different platforms. This, the paper argues, shapes the hybrid media events of terrorist violence of today not only as a phenomenon of intensified and accelerated death experienced online, but also as a phenomenon that amplifies the process of disgracing and dishonoring the dignity of human life as unique.

Emergency Powers and the Heterogeneity of Terror in Democratic States

Terrorist violence has recently led several states to grant extraordinary powers to the executive. Yet scholars have only recently begun to examine whether the provision of such emergency powers influences the probability of future terrorist attacks. I argue that when democratic states grant emergency powers to the executive, domestic incentives can push leaders to take overly aggressive actions that are counterproductive for reducing future terrorist violence. However, these domestic incentives vary depending on the in-group or out-group nature of the terrorist group. I test this hypothesis using data on emergency power strength, states of emergency, and the frequency of terrorist violence. In a global sample of democratic states, I find that while emergency powers increase future attacks from out-group terror arising from separatist groups, they have no effect on terror from groups that reflect extreme positions within the political order. These results express the conditional nature of executive freedom in combatting terrorism.