Terrorism as theater: Analysis and policy implications

In some regards the production of terrorism resembles the production of culture, especially television and theater. Terrorism is a spectacle produced for viewers, many of whom live apart from the violent staged events. Spectacular theater and the telling of memorable stories are inputs for fundraising and motivating subsequent terrorists. This understanding of terrorist motivation has concrete policy implications.     

Breaking Bad News: Penal Populism,Tabloid Adversarialism and Brexit

This article analyses the role that British conservative tabloid newspapers play in promoting penal populism and delegitimising liberal prison reform initiatives. Principally, we consider how different sections of the British press reacted to the then Prime Minister David Cameron's prison reform speech of 8 February 2016. The analysis illustrates how different newspapers cohered around two diametrically opposing interpretations of the scandalous state of the prison system, reflecting distinctive penal philosophies and moral positions. In the context of penal populism and the populist furies unleashed by the Brexit campaign, the central research finding is that the comparatively passive and equivocal support offered by the broadsheets was no match for the vitriolic attack mounted by the conservative tabloids on the ‘soft justice’ parts of Cameron's prison reform agenda. We conclude by arguing that the stark lesson to be learned is that the scandal‐ridden prison is a particularly toxic issue marked by serial policy failure. Consequently, in a febrile, intermediatised penal populist context, why would any political leader take on the manifest risks associated with embarking on liberal prison reform?     

News Management as News

Abstract

This paper argues that the widely noticed increase in news reports about news management, government publicity and media relations must be seen as a logical outgrowth of a new, modernized and media-centred approach to policy-making and campaigning. It offers a systematic introduction to the concepts of media politics and metacoverage, develops a theoretical model to examine their relationship and applies it to the political communication dynamics of Great Britain. This paper breaks new ground in two respects: it broadens our understanding of what counter-measures media professionals take in response to political news management, and it lays out a comprehensive theoretical scheme of how the mediatization of politics leads to a mediatization of political coverage.     

The Intelligence War on Terrorism

From 1941 to 1944, MI5 faced determined attempts to penetrate Allied Air Forces using trained pilot agents recruited by German Military Intelligence (Abwehr). The mission of these pilot agents was to gather military intelligence and to return to German held territory. This pattern of targeting Allied Air Forces has not been recognized by historians. This article examines MI5's responses to the threat using recently released files in the National Archives.     

Organizing the War on Terrorism

The network of public agencies, private firms, nonprofit organizations, ad hoc groups, and individual volunteers that deals with natural and technological hazards and disasters did a remarkable job of responding to and helping us recover from the September 11th attacks. That national emergency management network, along with the national security and law enforcement networks, provides a foundation for our war on terrorism, helps us mitigate the hazard of terrorism, and improves our preparedness for future violence. However, coordinating the efforts of the networks will be a real challenge for the director of homeland security and his or her state and local counterparts. Coordination will necessitate using legal authority to assure compliance, economic and other incentives to encourage compliance, formal partnerships to encourage collaboration, informal understandings to encourage cooperation, and personal encouragement to influence appropriate action. A top–down, command–and–control approach to the war on terrorism, such as the proposed Department of Homeland Security is intended to provide, may be counterproductive.     

Nuclear Terrorism: Actor-based Threat Assessment

The assumption that policies reducing the proliferation of fissile materials will automatically reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism is fallacious. Even if moderately successful, anti-proliferation initiatives have a limited impact on the illegal flow of nuclear materials and are not likely to prevent the acquisition of nuclear materials by non-state actors. Current policies focus on the containment of fissile materials rather than on non-state-actors that may wish to acquire them. Concentrating principally on management, accounting, storage and transfer procedures, policy-makers seem to ignore the fact that the primary threat of nuclear terrorism stems not from the availability of the materials but from the potential willingness of some groups to acquire them. This article attempts to shift the focus of discussion from state-centric models of analysis to a threat or actor-based model of analysis. In doing so, the article seeks to identify risk factors, which in combination may indicate a willingness by non-state actors to acquire nuclear weapons. In addition it hopes to provide the basis for more effective threat assessments.     

Militarism and Terrorism: The Deadly Cycle

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, destined to strongly influence world politics well into the 21st century, can be understood as part of a larger dialectic linking US militarism and what has become global terrorism. This destructive cycle is likely to deepen as elements of American superpower hegemony--economic, political, cultural and military--become more consolidated, and as the USA continues to pursue its unprecedented and ill-defined war against terrorism. The goal of US ruling elites is to make the world increasingly accessible to capital investment, free trade and corporate domination while simultaneously closing off viable alternatives to the neoliberal New World Order. Here terrorism in its different manifestations amounts to both a striking back at US empire--what might be seen as an especially virulent form of blowback--and the unintended relegitimation of this empire as it helps to bolster the war economy and security state. One of the debilitating consequences of the militarism-terrorism cycle is a further closing off of political discourse in the US in the midst of a resurgent national chauvinism, ideological conformism and militarised culture.     

Four Perspectives on Terrorism: Where They Stand Depends on Where You Sit

The general assumption is that there is one objective and universally applicable conceptualization of 'terrorism'. This position is especially prominent in the United States and other Western countries after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Yet, despite such a view, it is possible to distinguish four specific perspectives or paradigms on terrorism: standard/mainstream, radical, relativist and constructivist. While the standard/mainstream approach remains dominant among academics, intelligence analysts and policy makers, the other positions have exhibited their own adherents. In the end, it will be argued that the constructivist perspective is the most accurate. Since 'terrorism' remains too contentious and disputed a term to achieve universal consensus, the constructivist approach has been the most effective in stressing the decisive role that parochial state and national interests perform in any conceptualization of 'terrorism', especially the strategic and security concerns of the dominant or hegemonic power(s) within the international system.