{"title":"The medicalisation of threats, immigration as contagion, and White supremacy in an age of terror","authors":"Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo","doi":"10.1080/17539153.2022.2138990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2022.2138990","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The 6 January 2021 events must be analysed within a broader context than the phenomenon of Trumpism. The attempted coup that brought together (former) members of the military, White supremacist organisations, and regular citizens has a rich genealogy. We trace this genealogy to the events of 11 September 2001 and the homeland security state built in their wake, even as its reach extends further into U.S. history. Post-9/11 discourse became a mechanism for seeking and interpreting perceived threats to the United States and its citizens. Through it, immigration, disease, and White supremacy became intertwined. Perceptions of infectious and biological threats became racialised. With the emergence of the novel coronavirus, President Trump enacted travel bans and routinely referred to the virus as the “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese virus.” Hate crimes against Asians and Asian Americans followed, as this language reinvigorated Orientalist histories. We examine rhetoric about disease over the past twenty years, particularly as it has reinforced militarism and White supremacy, all against the backdrop of 9/11. State constructions of 9/11 and 9/11 memory inform and explain our recent and contemporary terrain.","PeriodicalId":46483,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Terrorism","volume":"43 1","pages":"176 - 191"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87414492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Cambridge history of terrorism","authors":"D. Galimi","doi":"10.1080/17539153.2022.2138992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2022.2138992","url":null,"abstract":"The","PeriodicalId":46483,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Terrorism","volume":"1 1","pages":"412 - 414"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90196148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Politics of Impunity: torture, the armed forces and the failure of transitional justice in Brazil","authors":"M. Pfrimer","doi":"10.1080/17539153.2022.2130155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2022.2130155","url":null,"abstract":"The recent brutal assassination of Brazilian indigenous activist Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips in the Amazon Rainforest by illegal loggers and miners in collusion with the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, illustrates a systematic culture of impunity in Brazil. In legitimising structural violence against the subaltern, including indigenous peoples and defenders of their cause, impunity is at the centre of a vast amount of literature that examines the ties of the military dictatorship’s legacy with quotidian violence in contemporary Brazil. One of the recent publications in this literature is Furtado’s Politics of Impunity: torture, the armed forces, and the failure of transitional justice in Brazil . This book inserts a different perspective into the transitional justice literature by exploring the outcomes and measures of the National Truth Commission (NTC) that has, from 2010 to 2014, belatedly investigated cases of atrocities committed during the Brazilian Military regime (1964–1985). Politics of Impunity focuses on the political process unleashed by revisiting and restoring a past of mass atrocities. It does so by shedding light on the NTC’s consequences in Brazil’s political history, marked by spiralling violence inflamed by the ascendancy of the far-right during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro.","PeriodicalId":46483,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Terrorism","volume":"5 1","pages":"407 - 409"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87770005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Terrorism”, “democracy” and the Spanish 1978 “constitution”: transitional concepts, post-transitional metaphors","authors":"Carlos Yebra López","doi":"10.1080/17539153.2022.2054122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2022.2054122","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that during the Spanish Transition (1975–1982) there was a gradual semantic displacement that would strongly condition subsequent usages of the terms “terrorism”, “democracy” and “Constitution” in mass public discourse as supposedly designating self-evident realities, rather than ontologically unstable and socially constructed entities. While the meaning of these three signifiers had been hotly debated as part of the transitional process, by 1982 “democracy” had been reduced to its understanding as a reform of (rather than a break with) the Franco regime; “terrorism” was consistently used in public discourse as synonymous with sub-State political violence (as opposed to State political violence); and the so-called “Constitution” had assumed the mantle of sacrosanct foundation of the current “democratic” order. Accordingly, since the Spanish Transition, real and fabricated “terrorist” attacks have been constantly instrumentalised to reinforce (the perceived need of protecting) “democracy” by opposition, particularly as enshrined in the 1978 “Constitution”. From the perspectives of cultural sociology and critical discourse analysis, I carry out a critical revisionist account of the classical state-centric views on the transitional period to show how the Spanish post-transitional regime has been built not only despite terrorism, but also through it.","PeriodicalId":46483,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Terrorism","volume":"51 1","pages":"782 - 804"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85852150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Training for catastrophe: fictions of national security after 9/11","authors":"Kristen Skjonsby","doi":"10.1080/17539153.2022.2130164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2022.2130164","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46483,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Terrorism","volume":"14 1","pages":"409 - 410"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72531079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"War on terror 2.0: threat inflation and conflation of far-right and white supremacist terrorism after the capitol “Insurrection”","authors":"Jacob Zenn","doi":"10.1080/17539153.2022.2115218","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2022.2115218","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines more than 100 scholarly, think-tank, government, and media reports and three data-sets and finds that since the 6 January 2021 Capitol “insurrection”, War on Terror (WoT) 2.0 is conflating far-right, white supremacist extremism (WSE), and other terminologies, which have superseded “Islamic extremism” on the U.S government’s radar. Further, distinctions are not being recognised between violent and anti-violent far-right/WSE groups, and especially ideologues, and it is far from certain this phenomenon is “global”, “rising”, or comparable to ISIS. Perpetrators of WoT 2.0 terminological conflations and threat inflations are inter-related and mutually reinforcing, be they media, academics, think-tanks, or government officials, and are continuing WoT 1.0’s legacy, which exhibited its own set of inflations and conflations after 9/11. This article employs primary sources extensively and critical approaches to identify and remedy existing problems in studying far-right/WSE terrorism and proposes policies to more effectively address the rare and primarily “lone actor” lethal attacks of such terrorists while reducing potentialities for repeating WoT 1.0’s excesses.","PeriodicalId":46483,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Terrorism","volume":"24 1","pages":"62 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73742242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Understanding Africa’s terrorism debacle: a critical analysis of counterterrorism in Burkina Faso","authors":"F. K. Atta","doi":"10.1080/17539153.2022.2121365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2022.2121365","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Despite Burkina Faso’s emergence as a strong player in terrorism activity in Africa, the country is practically overlooked by Critical Terrorism Studies scholarship. This article is framed at the intersection of Critical Terrorism Studies and Postcolonialism, investigating how a “critical” examination of the terrorism situation in Burkina Faso could advance our knowledge of terrorism in Africa. In-depth interviews were conducted with senior military officers and security practitioners in and out of Burkina Faso. These interviews, together with political speeches and media reports, were analysed using Critical Discourse Analysis. The study found a bifurcated counterterrorism policy in Burkina Faso with overdependence on “sticks” approaches, yet without the funds or morale to implement them. This is, however, not unique to Burkina Faso, as countries like Nigeria and Kenya have also struggled with the ineffective use of force to tackle terrorism violence. The article argues that the Western-centric post-9/11 global discourse on terrorism transposed and patronised a kind of uncritical terrorism knowledge to African spaces, effectively contributing to the lack of progress in addressing the incessant violence. It recommends to African policy makers to rethink counterterrorism from African philosophical standpoints, view preponderant terrorism knowledge more critically, and adopt context-specific measures against terrorism violence.","PeriodicalId":46483,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Terrorism","volume":"13 1","pages":"23 - 41"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79927742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lived realities and local meaning-making in defining violent extremism in Kenya: implications for preventing and countering violent extremism in policy and practice","authors":"F. A. Badurdeen, Sahla Aroussi, Michaelina Jakala","doi":"10.1080/17539153.2022.2121021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2022.2121021","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Violent extremism is an ambiguous and politically loaded concept, and – at the national level – the parameters used to define it are usually framed by the state, powerful ruling elites, and members of the international community, either directly or indirectly through donor-funded projects. Although different types of violent extremism and extremist movements exist in Kenya, donors and the state often focus on religiously-inspired groups such as Al-Shabaab, the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, and affiliated networks such as the Al-Muhajiroun, Al-Hijra, and Jaysh Al-Ayman. However, at a community level, participants in our body map workshops highlighted gang violence, police brutality, ethnically motivated violence, marginalisation, discrimination, and gender-based violence as priorities in defining violent extremism. We conclude that constructions of violent extremism at the local level are shaped by lived experiences of everyday insecurities influenced by gender, ethnicity, social status, location, and interactions with the state. To effectively address violent extremism in Kenya and beyond, its definition needs to be contextualised in ways that take into consideration local perspectives and everyday experiences of violence and insecurity.","PeriodicalId":46483,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Terrorism","volume":"16 1","pages":"1 - 22"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85877695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intersubjective body mapping for reintegration: assessing an art-based methodology to promote reintegration of foreign terrorist fighters","authors":"Tina Mykkanen","doi":"10.1080/17539153.2022.2119678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2022.2119678","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This research investigates the use of an artistic methodology to explore embodied experiences related to the reintegration of returning Foreign Terrorist Fighters (FTFs). The methodology combines bodily, sensory and cognitive aspects of individual and intersubjective processes – dimensions which have long been neglected in research on reintegration. The research seeks to examine how the artistic body mapping methodology can be used in exploratory and participatory research aiming to promote the reintegration of returning FTFs. The intersubjective body mapping methodology, developed as part of this research, is used and assessed in order to explore its utility for advancing dialogue in addressing challenges related to the reintegration process, including understanding and trust, as experienced by returning FTFs, community members and security personnel in Mombasa, Kenya. The research confirms that the use of intersubjective body mapping is a powerful tool in the context of reintegration, as it serves to enhance understanding for the self and others, which correlates with trust, while allowing for communicating empirical knowledge beyond conventional means.","PeriodicalId":46483,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Terrorism","volume":"35 1","pages":"988 - 1022"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76340784","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}