Suicide bombing as acts of deathly citizenship? A critical double-layered inquiry
While prevailing terrorism research often asks what we can do to eliminate the threat of suicide terrorism, this article switches the question by asking: what problems might the agency manifested in suicide bombing (even if unlawful and irresponsible) solve for us? In critiquing the sociological pos...
Temporal trends in US counterterrorism sting operations, 1989–2014
How has the US government’s use of counterterrorism sting operations changed over the past quarter-century? Have major terrorist attacks led to more frequent sting operations and/or more frequent entrapment – and if so, have such changes been temporary or longlasting? Have different types of t...
Terror from behind the keyboard: conceptualising faceless detractors and guarantors of security in cyberspace
By reflecting on active public-domain government documents and statements, this article seeks to develop securitisation theory’s articulation of the dichotomy between legitimate and illegitimate violence as it is reflected in British government policy. This dichotomy has (re)developed through a p...
Terrorist rehabilitation: a global imperative
Rehabilitation is to help someone return to normal life by providing education, training, and therapy. Those exposed to and convinced by terrorist ideology do not lead normal lives. They adopt the writings and speeches of ideologues that espouse hatred and transform themselves. Whether they are oper...
The aesthetics of “everyday” violence: narratives of violence and Hindu right-wing women
“Right-wing” movements see significant participation by women who espouse their exclusionary and violent politics while at the same time often contest their patriarchal spaces. Women also serve as discursive and symbolic markers that regularly form the basis of the rhetoric, ideology, actions an...
The consequences of Pakistan’s counterterrorism policies: socio-cultural and political transformation in tribal districts
Counterterrorism (CT) policies are a primary subject in security studies. However, the consequences of their implementation on the socio-cultural milieu of the local populations are rarely explored, particularly in the context of the Global South. This study examines the effect of CT policies on...
The geography of pre-criminal space: epidemiological imaginations of radicalisation risk in the UK Prevent Strategy, 2007–2017
This article explores geographical and epistemological shifts in the deployment of the UK Prevent strategy, 2007–2017. Counter-radicalisation policies of the Labour governments (2006–2010) focused heavily upon resilience-building activities in residential communities. They borrowed from histori...
The inclusion of women in jihad: gendered practices of legitimation in Islamic State recruitment propaganda
Although jihadist terrorist organisations envisage a society divided according to strict gender roles, they have increasingly turned to women in pursuit of their goals. This is a double-edged sword for jihadist groups: while recruitment of women increases the pool of activists, the discrepancy b...
The Malaysian “Islamic” State versus the Islamic State (IS): evolving definitions of “terror” in an “Islamising” nation-state
This article provides a study of how the Malaysian state defines and redefines “terror” as the nature of militancy changes from the Communist insurgency to present day’s Islamist jihadism. Tracing such definitional changes, the article demonstrates how the portrait of a terrorist not only is ...
What about hope? A critical analysis of preempting childhood radicalisatio
A convergence between vulnerability, radicalisation and children has been framed as an emergent category of abuse: “childhood radicalisation”. Focusing on the UK PREVENT programme, this paper explores the ways children have become interrelated with counterradicalisation. While PREVENT engage...
Women who volunteer: a relative autonomy perspective in Al-Shabaab female recruitment in Kenya
Notions of relative autonomy shape the discourse on voluntary recruitment of women and girls to terrorist networks. This article discusses voluntariness of women in Al-Shabaab recruitment, using feminist theories of relational autonomy based on an ethnographic study of sixteen selected Al-Shabaa...
“Talk about terror in our back gardens”: an analysis of online comments about British foreign fighters in Syria
The phenomenon of foreign fighters has become a central issue to the ongoing conflict in Syria. This article explores how members of the public answer the question ‘Why do British citizens join the conflict in Syria’ on social media sites and in response to online news articles. Building upon r...
Theorising the “suspect community”: counterterrorism, security practices and the public imagination
This article considers Hillyard’s first application of the term “suspect community” to the Irish in Britain in the era of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and its more recent application to Muslims in the global war on terror. A review of the application of the term “suspect community...
Security, the War on Terror, and official development assistance
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States and the subsequent declaration of a War on Terror, several international issues have been affected, including the disbursement of official development assistance. This paper examines the connections between development aid, security, and the War...
Constructing “violence-affirming extremism”: a Swedish social problem trajectory
Violent extremism has internationally become an established and highly prioritised social problem. While there is extensive and ongoing international diffusion and coordination, there are national specificities in terms of meanings conferred to this social problem and to the processes of its est...
Preventing radicalisation through dialogue? Selfsecuritising narratives versus reflexive conflict dynamics
Critical scholarship has warned against basing the prevention of terrorism on a concept of ‘radicalisation’ which implies that violence is inherent to Islam, but various approaches disagree on how to base the critique. This article argues for reading counter-radicalisation policies as narrativ...
A shifting enemy: analysing the BBC’s representations of “al-Qaeda” in the aftermath of the September 11th 2001 attacks
This article seeks to explore how the BBC made sense of the alQaeda phenomenon in its flagship “News at Ten” bulletin during the aftermath of the September 11th 2001 attacks. Using Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis, it shows how the BBC’s representations function as a dynamic and contin...
Concepts of dialogue as counterterrorism: narrating the self-reform of the Muslim Other
Since 9/11, the terrorist is often awarded the position of the radical Other: the personified existential threat to the West. The counterterrorism strategy presented by the Danish government describes itself as covering a ‘broad spectrum’ of efforts. It includes an ‘active foreign policy’ in...
Counterterrorism, political anxiety and legitimacy in postcolonial India and Egypt
The post 9/11 global proliferation of counterterrorism legislation is increasingly being interpreted as part of a longer story of colonialism. Scholars have shown how expansive counterterrorism can be interpreted not merely as an exceptional state of violence in situations where the rule of law ...
The limit-experience and self-deradicalisation: the example of radical Salafi youth in Tunisia
This article gives an example of self-deradicalisation from Tunisia. It addresses the potential of radicalised individuals to de-radicalise themselves from within the Salafi doctrine with no external interventions, in comparison with the state’s religious rehabilitation approaches to tackling rad...
How Democracies Respond to Terrorism: Regime Characteristics, Symbolic Power and Counterterrorism
While the academic study of counterterrorism has gained momentum in recent years, it still suffers from major theoretical weaknesses. One of the most prominent shortcomings is an absence of theories that can effectively explain the factors that shape the counterterrorism policies of democratic reg...
Terrorism and Party Systems in the States of India
The incidence of domestic terrorism varies dramatically across the states of India. This study demonstrates that important state-level differences in political party systems help to explain different levels of terrorist activity within the Indian states. Analysis of statistical data on terrorist at...
Racism by Designation: Making Sense of Western States’ Nondesignation of White Supremacists as Terrorists
How can we make sense of Western states’ nondesignation of white supremacists as terrorists compared to other actors engaged in similar political violence? This article offers three arguments and supports them with rich case studies of designation in the United States and the United Kingdom. F...
The Spread of Military Innovations: Adoption Capacity Theory, Tactical Incentives, and the Case of Suicide Terrorism
What explains the adoption of military innovations? In this article, we assess the empirical validity of adoption capacity theory by reconsidering one methodologically important case analyzed by Michael Horowitz: the diffusion of suicide terrorism. We show that, when addressing problems in Horowitz...
Why They Leave: An Analysis of Terrorist Disengagement Events from Eighty-seven Autobiographical Accounts
A deeper understanding of terrorist disengagement offers important insights for policymakers and practitioners seeking to persuade individuals to leave these groups. Current research highlights the importance of certain “push” and “pull” factors in explaining disengagement. However, such stu...
Challenging the youth assumptions behind P/CVE: acknowledging older extremists
Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) interventions are largely based on theories that young people (especially young men) are particularly vulnerable to radicalisation leading to violent extremism. Youth is seen as a vulnerable time of identity formation, separation from family and op...
Preventing radicalisation in Norwegian schools: how teachers respond to counter-radicalisation efforts
This article explores how selected educators respond to the integration of counter-radicalisation efforts into Norwegian secondary schools. Our research participants describe having limited encounters with youth extremism in practice, yet their narratives exhibit a professional responsibility to p...
Radicalisation, counter-radicalisation and countering violent extremism in the Western Balkans and the South Caucasus: the cases of Kosovo and Georgia
Scholarly attention is emerging on the globalisation and proliferation of initiatives and measures in the fields of counterradicalisation and countering violent extremism (Hayes and Kundnani 2018). A multitude of international actors endeavour to provide security norms and governance standards i...
De-radicalisation interventions as technologies of the self: a Foucauldian analysis
De-radicalisation has become increasingly prevalent in the UK as a strategy for tackling the threat of religiously inspired violence/extremism. Recent events, such as the tragic murder of Lee Rigby in May 2013, British citizens fighting in Middle Eastern conflicts, and the emergence of the Islamic S...
How Islamic is al-Qaeda? The politics of Pan-Islam and the challenge of modernisation
This article investigates the contested ideology of al-Qaeda through an analysis of Osama bin Ladin’s writings and public statements issued between 1994 and 2011, set in relation to the development of Islamic thought and changing socio-political realities in the late nineteenth and twentieth centu...
Redefining faith and freedoms: the “war on terror” and Pakistani women
This essay argues that the “gendered attention” afforded to the “war on terror” (WoT), both in the West and in the case of Pakistan, has yielded merely two channels of representation for Muslim women. Women victims of the war have had the opportunity to serve as martyrs of Western imperialis...
A framing-sensitive approach to militant groups’ tactics: the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine and the radicalisation of violence during the Second Intifada
This article examines the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine’s (PIJ) framing to explain the radicalisation and short-term tactical variations of its violent repertoires of action during the Second Intifada. By adopting a framing-sensitive approach, the analysis reveals that PIJ actions should...
Women and Warcare: Gendered Islamophobia in Counterterrorism
Counterterrorism continues to play a central role in international and national security strategies, including an expansion of a controversial programme known as Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). A central aspect of CVE frameworks is the integration of gendered counterterrorism programming and...
Researching rendition and torture in the War on Terror: lessons from a human rights organisation
This article describes some of the main methods and challenges of researching rendition and torture in the war on terror by a Muslim human rights organisation in the United Kingdom. It describes some of the main lessons learned from the past few years of such investigations and reflects on how such ...
The Burqa-clad woman, terror and the postcolony: the Kabul Beauty School and the art of imperial friendship and freedom
The Kabul Beauty School: The Art of Friendship and Freedom (2008) is a memoir written by the American beautician, Deborah Rodriguez. It recounts her individual story in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban and the work Western programs of “economic empowerment” and humanitarian agencie...
Unpacking “glocal” jihad: from the birth to the “sahelisation’ of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
Jihadist groups are often analysed either by looking at their global rhetoric, or by focusing on local grievances. Despite the distinctions made between the global and the local issues, these groups often belong to a complex “glocal jihad,” meaning that the borders between local, national, r...
Reinventing prevention or exposing the gap? False positives in UK terrorism governance and the quest for pre-emption
This article considers the developments within UK counterterrorism strategy between the Prevention of Terrorism Acts (PTAs) and the recent (2011) reworking of CONTEST. It argues that the performance of prevention within British counterterrorism policy has changed to favour pre-emptive measures, depl...
Researching counterterrorism: a critical perspective from the field in the light of allegations and findings of covert activities by undercover police officers
The article addresses some of the key issues that are raised for researchers engaging with counterterrorism police officers and initiatives, when undertaking research. A significant area to explore in this context is, in fact, the issue of relationships with counterterrorism police officers who may ...
Reply to Marie Breen-Smyth, “Theorising the ‘suspect community’: counterterrorism, security practices and the public imagination”
Marie Breen-Smyth’s recent contribution to the “suspect community” debate misunderstands and misrepresents my own and suffers from several other difficulties besides. I’m grateful to the editor of Critical Studies on Terrorism for the opportunity to make this brief reply
‘Fulanis are foreign terrorists’: the social construction of a suspect community in the Sahel
Whilst the triggers of the peasant-pastoralist conflicts in the Sahel region have been explained through factors such as climate change, environmental scarcity, population pressures, urbanisation, political ecology, and the failure of traditional negotiation mechanisms, less scholarly attention ...
Experiencing the war “of” terror: a call to the critical terrorism studies community
The Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) community has produced an important volume of work assessing and critiquing epistemological understandings of the War on (of) Terror. Largely missing from this body of work, however, is the experience of those who are directly impacted by the policies of this glo...
British Muslims and the discourses of dysfunction: community cohesion and counterterrorism in the West Midlands
This article analyses how British discursive representations of Muslims during the last decade were utilised in a local context during the planning stages of a proposed mosque in the West Midlands town of Dudley. Locating the central narratives in dominant national discourses of community cohesion a...
Whole-of-society approach or manufacturing intelligence? Making sense of state-CSO relation in preventing and countering violent extremism in Nigeria
The boundaries of partnership between states and civil society organisations (CSOs), as well as who is counted and who gets to set them, have been the subject of ongoing debate. This discussion has gained particular significance in light of the growing securitisation and tactical engagement of C...
“Trust your instincts – act!” PREVENT police officers’ perspectives of counter-radicalisation reporting thresholds
The UK PREVENT programme aims to address radicalisation by identifying and supporting “at risk” individuals that are deemed vulnerable to extremism. Central to this process is the willingness of professional practitioners to report information to authorities, a duty consolidated through the Cou...
9/11 as a policy pivot point in the security community: a dialogue
Eamonn Grennan, former terrorism and transnational crime analyst with an international organisation, and Harmonie Toros, reader in international conflict analysis at the University of Kent, have worked together for the past several years, primarily as part of a team of academics and policy analys...
The enactment of the counter-terrorism “Prevent duty” in British schools and colleges: beyond reluctant accommodation or straightforward policy acceptance
When Britain imposed the “Prevent duty”, a legal duty on education, health and social welfare organisations to report concerns about individuals identified as at-risk of radicalisation, critics argued it would accentuate the stigmatisation of Muslim communities, “chill” free speech, and exac...
Contested topologies of UK counterterrorist surveillance: the rise and fall of Project Champion
This article empirically analyses the provenance, application and abandonment of Project Champion, a scheme designed to encircle two Birmingham neighbourhoods with surveillance cameras. Locating analysis within the anticipatory turn in social control practices, particular emphasis is placed on how ...
The symbiotic relationship between Islamophobia and radicalisation
This article analyses the conditions of Islamophobia and radicalisation, and the nature of the symbiotic relationship between them. There is an exploration of the identity crises facing young Muslims in relation to endogenous factors, the role and function of various forms of structural and cultura...
Teaching about terrorism in the United Kingdom: how it is done and what problems it causes
This article presents some of the findings of research on issues surrounding teaching terrorism and political violence at UK higher education institutions. It reports the results of a survey of UK institutions of higher education on their responses to government and other pressures in relation to te...
Racial control under the guise of terror threat: policing of US Muslim, Arab, and SWANA communities
Using an analysis of U.S. government policies that have had high impacts on the personal safety and freedom of movement and expression of Arabs, Muslims, and others of Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) origins living in or seeking to migrate to the US, this article argues that these poli...
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