Topics in terrorism research: reviewing trends and gaps, 2007-2016

ABSTRACT

The topical focus of research on terrorism has frequently been critiqued for being too narrow, too event-driven and too strongly tied to governments’ counterterrorism policies. This article uses keyword analysis to assess the degree to which these issues remain present in the literature on terrorism as represented by the 3.442 articles published between 2007 and 2016 in nine of the field’s leading academic journals. Several fluctuations notwithstanding, research on terrorism has retained a strong focus on al-Qaeda, jihadist terrorism more generally, and the geographic areas most strongly associated with this type of terrorist violence. Results also indicate that the field remains event-driven and consistently underemphasizes state terrorism as well as non-jihadist terrorism, such as that perpetrated by right-wing extremists.     

Beyond the log frame: a new tool for examining health and peacebuilding initiatives

How do we move from identifying ethical principles to enhancing development practice? How can donors and NGOs move beyond the reporting of technical outputs to explore less tangible aspects of their health projects: contributions to rebuilding trust, promoting social cohesion, and enhancing good governance at community level? This article considers these questions in relation to health and peace-building activities in conflicted settings. It describes difficulties facing practitioners and donors seeking to undertake health and peace work, in particular focusing on the lack of appropriate tools for screening, monitoring, and evaluating projects. It critiques the logical framework, a tool commonly used in project planning, monitoring, and evaluation, and considers it alongside a new tool, the Health and Peace Building Filter, which has been designed to reflect on health programming in fragile or conflicted settings. The authors argue that such tools can help to move us beyond focusing on inputs and outputs to examining processes, relationships, and the indirect consequences of aid programmes.     

Normative power Europe and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the EU’s peacebuilding narrative meets local narratives

ABSTRACT

This article conceives the EU’s normative power in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a narrative that projects views of the international system, the EU’s identity as a peacebuilder, and its positions on specific conflict issues. Highlighting the importance of local narratives as cultural filters, this article argues that a high degree of alignment of local narratives with key elements of the EU’s normative power narrative facilitates positive images of the EU as a normative power in peacebuilding, whilst diverging local narratives tend to give rise to more critical views. Yet, the case of Palestine also shows that strong narrative alignment with the EU may encourage high expectations, resulting in critical views about inconsistencies between the EU’s normative aspirations and its actual foreign policy conduct.     

Organised diaspora networks and homeland peacebuilding: the Bosnian world diaspora network as a potential development actor

International donors and development INGOs are increasingly recognising the potential contributions that Diasporas can make to developing countries. However, traditional peacebuilding literature has largely ignored the potential of Diasporas to contribute to post conflict reconstruction in the homeland. This article, therefore, assesses this potential through an examination of the Bosnian World Diaspora Network, created after the recent dispersal of refugees due to the conflict in Bosnia. It concludes that the relationship between, on the one hand, diaspora activities and, on the other, armed conflict and war recovery is considerably less straightforward than has been supposed. However, it does suggest a number of ways in which donors/host lands could assist the coordination of development agencies and diaspora networks.     

Unforeseen and Unaccounted: the European Union,the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland,peacebuilding, and accountability

This article examines the case of the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland's (CFNI) experience as a primary recipient of peacebuilding aid from the European Union (EU) under the Special EU Programmes Body Special Support Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland (SEUPB-EUSSPPR). The case serves as a lens into the tensions that such efforts create for community-based organizations as they seek both to honor their funder's accountability claims and their own needs to ensure legitimacy and efficacy with those with whom they interact so as to secure space and discretion to seek to catalyze social experimentation and learning. This paper argues the Foundation's experience and frustrations with EU accountability claims point up a difficulty with the SEUPB's comprehensive conceptualization of peacebuilding: It tends in practice to favor Union-prescribed aims and objectives over those its ‘partners’ derive from their daily efforts.     

Notes on recent articles

An increasing number of studies in political communication focus on the “sentiment” or “tone” of news content, political speeches, or advertisements. This growing interest in measuring sentiment coincides with a dramatic increase in the volume of digitized information. Computer automation has a great deal of potential in this new media environment. The objective here is to outline and validate a new automated measurement instrument for sentiment analysis in political texts. Our instrument uses a dictionary-based approach consisting of a simple word count of the frequency of keywords in a text from a predefined dictionary. The design of the freely available Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary (LSD) is discussed in detail here. The dictionary is tested against a body of human-coded news content, and the resulting codes are also compared to results from nine existing content-analytic dictionaries. Analyses suggest that the LSD produces results that are more systematically related to human coding than are results based on the other available dictionaries. The LSD is thus a useful starting point for a revived discussion about dictionary construction and validation in sentiment analysis for political communication.     

Notes on recent dissertations

The growing popularity and use of news Web sites around the world provides new possibilities for studying the position of the United States in the world system charted by digital news items. In this article, we look at 35 popular news sites in 10 different languages over a 2-year period, in order to assess the position of the United States in world news as well as to identify possible explanations for it. Our findings show that the United States is by far the most prominent country in the news sites that we studied from around the world, except for the French and Arabic ones. The network structure of news links clearly exhibits its key position as the centerpiece of a global system. Economic factors better explain America's news prominence than political, social, and geographical factors. Yet, none of the many variables we examined could explain the large gap between the news prominence of the United States and that of the rest of the world. We discuss possible reasons for these findings and suggest directions for further studies in the field.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource: network data.]     

Notes on recent dissertations

This article assesses the nature and extent of negative advertising on the Internet in the 1996 U.S. Senate races. As a benchmark for comparison, the use of negative campaigning in other media is outlined. In the aggregate, the Internet is a medium disproportionately characterized by positive campaigning. On the other hand, the candidates with negative campaigning used it a lot. In exploring the rhetoric of negative campaigning, a theoretical distinction between superficially comparative and engagingly comparative is offered and applied to 1996 campaign sites. T he negative campaigning that does occur on the Internet is largely comparative but still falls short of engaged campaign rhetoric.     

Evaluating Spain's Reparation Law

The Reparation Law1 This article follows Aguilar, Balcells, and Cebolla in referring to the Law of Historical Memory as the Reparation Law. Although Aguilar et al. do not specify why they choose this terminology, the term is used here as it better denotes the law's content. Aguilar, Balcells, and Cebolla, ‘Determinants of Attitudes Towards Transitional Justice’, 3. View all notes approved on 26 December 2007 is the latest link in a chain of reparatory measures from the earliest days of Spain's transition to democracy to deal with the legacy of the Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship. Numerous articles have analysed the historical memory movement2 See Encarnación, ‘Reconciliation After Democratization’; and Gálvez Biesca, ‘El proceso’. View all notes and the reasons behind the timing and scope of Spain's reckoning with the past.3 See Encarnación, ‘Reconciliation After Democratization’; Aguilar, ‘Justice, Politics and Memory’, Barahona de Brito, Gonzaléz-Enríquez, and Aguilar, The Politics of Memory; and Blakeley, ‘Digging Up Spain's Past’. View all notes This literature presents the case of Spain as a counterpoint to the received wisdom of the transitional justice literature that successful democratization requires reconciliation. This article contributes to the specific literature on Spain, and the wider transitional justice literature, by focusing on an area which has not yet been analysed: the ‘co-construction’ and content of the Law. Through a comparison of the draft bill and the final Law, this article fills this gap.