城市轨道交通安全反恐建设规划研究

城市轨道交通已成为当今各国解决城市交通拥挤最有效的手段。城市轨道交通安全的特点以及当前轨道交通安全反恐建设方面遭遇的困境,需要公安安全保卫部门提前参与到轨道交通建设规划的编制中,要求我们根据危机管理、安全防范理论来构建有实际操作意义的轨道交通安全反恐系统,从而保障轨道交通和谐有序发展,为民众提供便捷、高效的服务。     

我国刑法应增设“恐怖活动罪”——基于新疆“7·5”事件的思考

新疆7·5事件引发了对我国刑法规定的反思。我国刑法缺乏专门的反恐罪名,应将暴力破坏的犯罪类型从刑法分则各章节中分列出来,结合恐怖主义目的,合并设置为专门罪名恐怖活动罪,为反恐怖斗争提供有力的法律依据。     

Change and continuity across the 9/11 fault line: rethinking twenty-first-century responses to terrorism

This article asks the following questions. Which terrorism threats, challenges and responses did key players consider to have been decisively changed by 9/11? On close inspection now, nearly two decades after those attacks, how are we to assess such claims? What did 9/11 really change regarding terrorism and counterterrorism? And what remained unaltered? The article’s central argument is this: some western states exaggerated the extent to which terrorist threats and challenges had been changed by 9/11 and, as a consequence, they did significantly alter some of their responses to terrorism; but at the heart of this ironic process was the tragic reality that, had there been a more serious-minded and historically sensitive recognition of how little had necessarily been changed by 9/11 in terms of terrorist threats and challenges, then the twenty-first-century experience of non-state terrorism would have been much less painful than has been the case in practice.     

Too central to fail? Terror networks and leadership decapitation

ABSTRACT

Leadership decapitation, as a means of hindering the operations and hastening the demise of terrorist organizations, has been the subject of a growing body of research. However, these studies have not examined how an organization’s position in a broader network impacts its ability to weather decapitation. We argue that highly networked organizations possess characteristics that make decapitation less effective. To test this argument, we combine data on leadership decapitation with network data on terrorist organizations and find that well-networked organizations are resilience to leadership decapitation. Our study has implications for our understanding of how terrorist organizations respond to counterterrorism efforts.     

Fragile states and the territory conundrum to countering violent nonstate actors

The concept of controlling territorial space informs Western conventions of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. The Islamic State surprised the West when it recently captured dozens of cities across Iraq and Syria. Eradicating failed states and ungoverned territories vis-à-vis more robust state-building also forms the backbone of U.S. efforts to reduce violence, provide order, and build stronger societies. I argue that clearing territory, while important, should be selectively employed. Greater stateness does not always correlate with reductions in violence, and conversely not all “ungoverned spaces” are terrorist safe havens. A number of these areas are natural, if non-integrated, parts of the international system. Second, I posit that state-building can have its own negative externalities, such as pushing nonstate actors across state borders and thereby externalizing internal conflicts. The policy implications of my theory are twofold: First, territory is often a poor metric to capture military progress in the fight violent nonstate actors; second, fixing failed or fragile states does not always reduce the threat of violence but often just relocates it, as nonstate actors get squeezed out of areas of increasing stateness and move toward areas of weak stateness.     

Marianne’s liberty in jeopardy? A French analysis on recent counterterrorism legal developments

ABSTRACT

This article analyses two recent French counterterrorist legislations (Law No. 2016–386 – hereafter OCT&F law and the Law No 2017–1510 – hereafter the OCT&Flaw) through the lens of distinct yet complementary theoretical frameworks. Combining the State of Exception thesis of Giorgio Agamben, the Enemy Penology as framed by Günther Jakobs as well as the more recent scholarship contributions on Pre-Crime, the article seeks to contribute to the scholarly debate on the use and the consequences of the use of criminal and administrative law in the fight against terrorism. In view of the numerous terrorist attacks that France has faced in recent years, the article aims to provide deeper knowledge of the French case by drawing substantially from the unfamiliar French scholarship. The article argues that the measures recently adopted seem to deepen the exceptional and pre-emptive logic in which potentially dangerous subjects have to be identified as “the enemy” as soon as possible in order to then be contained and dealt with.     

Flesh and steel: antithetical figures in the war on terrorism

The ongoing conflict in the war on terrorism puts two emblematic modes of violence into sharp relief: the drone, as an ostensibly rational, clinical and measured weapon of war, and suicide bombings, frequently portrayed as the horrid deeds of fanatics. In this article, I seek to challenge this juxtaposition and instead suggest that both modalities of killing are part of the same technologically-mediated ecology of violence. To do this, I examine the material-semiotic assemblage of the drone and of the suicide bomber, paying attention to the technological production of each mode of violence, as well as the narratives that render each figure intelligible in the war on terrorism. I argue that the strongly divergent narratives found in Western discourse serve as a politically expedient sense–making device, whereby suicide bombing is pathologised, thereby justifying ever more intrusive violent acts with seemingly rational technologies like the drone. Rather than “solving” the problem of terrorism, this creates counter-productive, or iatrogenic, effects, in which technological mediation escalates rather than diminishes cycles of violence. By way of response, I suggest that a better understanding of the relational nature of violence in the war on terrorism might be gained by reading the two not as antithetical figures, but instead as operating in the same technological key.     

Hit the Core or Weaken the Periphery? Comparing Strategies to Break the Circle of Violence with an Embryonic Terrorist Group: The Case of Galician Resistance

This article studies whether the action-reaction model holds on an “embryonic” terrorist group like Galician Resistance (REGA). After presenting an overview of REGA’s history, structure, financing, terrorist campaigns, and the police measures adopted against them, the text empirically contrasts whether deterrence is an efficient measure in reducing an incipient terrorist group’s actions. Our results show that deterrence does in fact reduce the number of attacks when aimed at the group’s periphery. However, it causes a backlash of new attacks when aimed at the group’s core. In addition, we prove that an increase in the number of attacks also causes a reaction by police forces and a higher number of detentions of core members. Our results give some meaningful insights into the design of counter-terrorism strategies aimed against “embryonic” groups.     

The Disengagement of Indonesian Jihadists: Understanding the Pathways

While much research has been conducted on the radicalization of Muslim militants from Jemaah Islamiyah, its spinoffs, and splinter factions; the historical roots of Indonesian radical movements; and their ideological underpinnings, far less analysis has centered on how and why individual militants may come to disengage from violence. Disengagement is defined as a gradual process through which a member of a terror group, radical movement, gang, or cult comes to reject the use of terror methods in pursuit of their goals. Utilizing original fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2014, with fifty current and former members of Islamist extremist groups in Indonesia, this article will unpack the patterns, pathways, religious considerations, and psychological processes that propel individual militants to turn away from violence.