Healing through Action? The Political Mobilization of Victims of Al Qaeda-Inspired Violence in Spain and the United Kingdom

Spain and the United Kingdom have experienced similar types of political violence. Since the 1960s, both countries have suffered casualties as a result of long-standing ethno-nationalist conflicts as well as terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda–inspired groups. In spite of these similarities, the two countries display a striking variation in the attitudes to victims. In Spain, Associations of Victims of Terrorism have been highly visible and influential, whereas United Kingdom-based organizations have not captured the public's imagination and the attention of policymakers in the same way. Spanish associations of victims have been present in the public sphere and have routinely provided their opinions on counterterrorist policy and appropriate government legislation whereas this sort of political activity is difficult to trace in the United Kingdom. As a result of this puzzle, the article tries to answer the following question: Why are associations of victims of terrorism by Al Qaeda–inspired attacks more influential in Spain than in the United Kingdom? The article will argue that political and sociocultural variables account for the difference. More specifically, the article demonstrates that the experience of both ethno-nationalist and jihadist political violence has affected party systems and cultural frames differently, hence providing distinct sets of political opportunities for victims’ associations to carry out their lobbying strategies.     

Al Qaeda's London Branch: Patterns of Domestic and Transnational Network Integration

This article seeks to shed light on the ongoing debate about the extent of Al Qaeda's involvement in homegrown jihadist conspiracies in the West. Focusing on the London-based jihadist movement in the 1998–2008 decade, the article uses network analysis to test the domestic and transnational integration of Western networks. The evidence stems from an extensive database of individuals involved in jihadist terrorist conspiracies in the West compiled by the authors. Results show that Al Qaeda developed a branch organization in the United Kingdom during that period. A sociogram of U.S.-based networks is indicative of a dispersed topography, and a comparison shows the British model may not be representative of Western networks overall.     

Failed States and the Spread of Terrorism in Sub-Saharan Africa

Plagued by systematic state failure, sub-Saharan Africa's failed states have helped facilitate internationally sponsored terrorist networks and operations. However, until recently, this type of activity was primarily relegated to North Africa and the Horn. But that has begun to change. Now, what was once a seemingly benign terrorist presence in sub-Saharan Africa is starting to transform into a movement, with states such as Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) now lending arms, financial support, and radical militants to the extremist jihadist movement of internationally sponsored terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda. Further, with the recent bombings in Kenya and Somalia, and the failed bombing attempt on a U.S. airliner by a Nigerian national, it is becoming increasingly evident that internationally sponsored terrorist networks have found a permanent home in sub-Saharan Africa and within the hearts and minds of its people, which poses significant challenges for the international community, given the region's patchwork of failed states, where terrorists can easily hide and thrive. Consequently, this study discusses how the conditions of state failure have fostered support for internationally sponsored terrorism in sub-Saharan Africa. Terrorist groups are now actively recruiting more militants from within the region and popular support for extremist acts is on the rise in sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, the article argues sub-Saharan Africa will soon become the site for the next generation of terrorists, and the next wave of terrorist activity.     

Girls as “Weapons of Terror” in Northern Uganda and Sierra Leonean Rebel Fighting Forces

Girls—both willingly and unwillingly—participate in terrorist acts within the context of contemporary wars. These acts range from targeting civilians for torture and killing to destroying community infrastructures so that people's physical and psychological health and survival are affected. Girls witness or participate in acts such as mutilation, human sacrifice, forced cannibalism, drug use, and physical and psychological deprivation. This article focuses upon girls in two fighting forces: the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone and their roles as combatants whose primary strategy is perpetrating terrorist acts against civilians. In analyses of gender and terrorism, girls are typically subsumed under the larger category of female, which marginalizes their experiences and fails to recognize that they possess agency and power.     

The Lebanese Hizballah and Israeli Counterterrorism

This article examines Israel's attempts to weaken and defeat the Lebanese Hizballah. It reviews Hizballah's rise after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Hizballah's successful effort to force Israeli forces to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000, the 2006 war, and Israeli attempts to deter Hizballah. The article argues that Israel has largely failed to defeat Hizballah militarily and politically. Israel's experience offers lessons for how terrorist groups learn, the effectiveness of terrorist attrition strategies against casualty-sensitivity states, the difficulties in coercing terrorist groups, and the importance of an information strategy. Finally, Israel's clash with Hizballah indicates the importance of thinking of groups that are large and multi-faceted from a counterinsurgency paradigm.     

PUBLIC POLICY NETWORKS AND ‘WICKED PROBLEMS’: A NASCENT SOLUTION?

The last two decades have seen a shift in public services organizations from hierarchies to networks. Network forms are seen as particularly suited to handling ‘wicked problems'. We make an assessment of the nature and impact of this shift. Using recent evidence from the United Kingdom (UK) National Health Service (NHS), we explore the nature and functioning of eight different public policy networks. We are also interested in whether there has been a radical transition – or not – from hierarchical to network forms.     

Dhiren Barot: Was He an Al Qaeda Mastermind or Merely a Hapless Plotter?

This article profiles Dhiren Barot, a convert to Islam who was convicted in Britain in October 2006 on charges of conspiracy to commit murder for planning terrorist attacks in the United States and the United Kingdom. Upon his conviction, much of the British press, and many other observers, claimed Barot was a high-level Al Qaeda figure whose plans were on the verge of execution. Other observers, and Barot's defense attorneys, however, argued that these allegations were exaggerated. Barot, they claimed, had done nothing more than sketch vague plans for which he had no funding and was merely being used by the British government as an example in the War on Terror. This article details Barot's life and terrorist activity. It argues that he was a committed jihadi, was likely an Al Qaeda member, and did indeed represent a security threat. Nonetheless, the lack of public information available on his life suggests that certain allegations about his status within Al Qaeda and the immanency of his plans should be treated skeptically. It concludes by considering to what extent Barot fits the profile of other Islamic terrorists.     

The Contours of Al Qaeda's Media Strategy

Al Qaeda has crafted a successful media strategy that is adeptly suited for the war of ideas against the United States. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have demonstrated a great ability to lead plural groups and exploit innovation with the use of technology. This article explores how they have connected with diverse audiences around the world with a constant message. The repetition of their platform themes and use of “message projection opportunities” demonstrate a great understanding of human nature, marketing strategy, global media, and world politics. In line with Prospect Theory, bin Laden and Zawahiri's messaging strategy emphasizes stemming losses over solidifying gains. Only through a better understanding of Al Qaeda's media strategy and all of its strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies can the United States truly recognize what it is up against and begin to construct an effective and comprehensive counter strategy.     

Service-Seeking Behavior,Perceptions of Armed Actors,and Preferences Regarding Governance: Evidence from the Palestinian Territories

Armed non-state actors, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, are visibly engaged in providing social welfare in addition to participating in violence. A number of scholars have suggested that there is a relationship between service provision by terrorist organizations and support from service recipients, and have indicated that terrorist organizations use service provision strategically for this purpose. However, few studies have examined the experiences and opinions of service recipients themselves to understand if services do indeed influence populations' political loyalties and opinions regarding violent activities. Using data from more than 1,000 low to moderate income individuals in Palestine, this study seeks to understand if and how receiving services from a specific organization engenders loyalty to the organization, passive acceptance and/or favorable approval of the organizations' violent activities, and the likelihood of participation in the organization's violent activities. This paper explores if and how provision of aid and “governance” services by armed non-state actors is correlated with various aspects of individuals' experiences of conflict, such as their opinions about the use of violence and various strategies for attaining peace, their fellow community members' likelihood to join armed groups and engage in fighting, and their preferences regarding state structure and legal system.     

The Hybrid Terrorist Organization: Hezbollah as a Case Study

Since 1982, Hezbollah has evolved from a “revolutionary vanguard” terrorist organization bent on violently overthrowing the Lebanese government to a hybrid terrorist organization that uses legitimate political tools to the same end. Today Hezbollah operates on the civilian plane of da’wa, social welfare, and religious education; the military–Resistance plane (jihad); and the political plane. In its drive to dominate Shi’ite society, Hezbollah overcame its chief rival, Amal, and now plays a decisive role in Lebanon's political system and the Middle East. Understanding Hezbollah's emergence as a prototypical hybrid terrorist organization is key to understanding global and local jihad movements.     

Failure and Disengagement in the Red Army Faction

This article examines the factors that have contributed to the end of the Red Army Faction (RAF), and places particular emphasis on the causes and characteristics of individual disengagement of RAF members from the armed struggle. It discusses the evolution, ideology, and decline of each of the three generations of the RAF. The article's contribution is twofold. First, by assessing both contextual- and individual-level factors that led to the group's demise, the article bridges two approaches to analyzing the demise of terrorist organizations—the literature on how terrorism ends and why individuals disengage from terrorism. Second, the article helps build a growing empirical body of work on the demise of terrorist groups that can be used to confirm, challenge, or refine existing hypotheses on how terrorism ends, while formulating new ones. The article concludes that different factors contributed to the decline of each subsequent generation of the RAF. Successful German police efforts played a critical role in thwarting the RAF's first generation. Lack of public support and recruits, due in large part to an escalation of terrorist violence, hastened the decline of the second generation of the group. The third generation suffered from serious interorganizational strife, exacerbated by a government initiative that offered to release those RAF members from prison who renounced terrorism.     

Disaggregating and Defeating Terrorist Safe Havens

Terrorist organizations’ physical safe havens continue to shape the terrorist threat to the United States by extending the groups’ longevity and increasing the threat they pose. As a result, eliminating terrorist safe havens has been a key component of U.S. counterterrorism policy since at least 2001. However, some scholars challenged the post-9/11 policy consensus that terrorists find sanctuary in weak states and so-called ungoverned spaces. This article seeks to bridge this gap between scholarship and policy by offering a typology for disaggregating different kinds of terrorist safe havens. Our typology operates on two axes based on host government will (i.e., the host government's posture toward each group with haven inside its borders), as well as government capability, (specifically whether the host government possesses the specific capabilities needed to oust each group). This intersection of will and capability produces three types of havens. We briefly illustrate each type of haven using the exemplar case study of Pakistan—a location often described as an overarching safe haven, but which is actually home to several sanctuaries—and offer policy recommendations for addressing them. A need exists to disaggregate and identify how the United States can approach haven elimination. This typology and the analysis that stems from it offer a starting point for devising such strategies.     

Belgian and French Foreign Fighters in Iraq 2003–2005: A Comparative Case Study

Efforts to understand the distinction between foreign fighting and domestic terrorist acts have focused for the most part at the macro level. This study investigates if this difference is observed at the network level. The Iraq foreign fighter mobilization, which was significant, both numerically and, in terms of its visibility, is used for this analysis. The participation of Belgian and French foreign fighters is examined due to the perceived level of threat they posed in the period 2003–2005 and while absolute numbers are relatively low, these two countries may have provided just under a quarter of the all European foreign fighters in this period. Observations are generated and then compared to research on domestic attack networks in Europe and the United Kingdom. The article finds that the two networks were involved in foreign fighter activity and did not engage in domestic attack activity. Involvement in domestic attacks occurred at a later time via individuals who had left the network, individuals on the periphery of the original foreign fighter network or individuals who unsuccessfully attempted to engage in foreign fighter activity.     

Managing the Global and Local: The Dual Agendas of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula

On 29 October 2010, authorities in the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates intercepted explosive packages that had been placed on U.S.-bound planes. Less than a year earlier, Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate explosives aboard Northwest Flight 253. These attacks originated and were organized in Yemen under the supervision of a local Al Qaeda affiliate known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. These attacks are a manifestation of the group's growing international ambitions, yet little scholarship on Al Qaeda explores how affiliates with robust ties to Al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan balance their dedication to global and local jihad(s). This article contends that despite its strong ties to Al Qaeda Central and international posture, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula still must maintain local relevance and support. Its ability to do so carries implications for counterterrorism policymakers and the broader Al Qaeda movement.     

Challenges for Effective Counterterrorism Communication: Practitioner Insights and Policy Implications for Preventing Radicalization,Disrupting Attack Planning,and Mitigating Terrorist Attacks

Growing concerns about small-scale, low sophistication terrorist attacks, and the difficulties they present for security services, make public coproduction of security increasingly necessary. Communication to ensure that the public(s) is aware of the role they can play will be central to this. This article, based on interviews with thirty expert practitioners, explores challenges associated with communication designed to prevent radicalization, interdict attack planning and mitigate the impacts of a terrorist attack in the United Kingdom and Denmark. The interplay between these challenges and the contemporary terrorist context are analyzed, highlighting that new, or adapted, communications and approaches may be necessary.     

The Great Convergence and the Logic of One World

A great historical transition is underway from American‐led Globalization 1.0 to Globalization 2.0—the interdependence of plural identities where no one power or alliance of powers dominates. The G‐20 is floundering as the immediate global financial crisis has receded. The United Nations and the old Bretton Woods institutions—the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO—have lost their vigor and are struggling to adjust to the global powershift with the rise of the emerging economies. While Europe is paralyzed as the historic project of integration stalls, the world's two largest economies—the United States and China—are as yet unable to figure out how to share power. The danger now is that the geopolitical vacuum will invite assertions of national self‐interest that will unravel the rules‐based order that enabled stability and prosperity over recent decades. America's leading geopolitical strategist, China's most outspoken strategic thinker and one of Asia's leading global thinkers from Singapore offer their reflections on this state of affairs.     

Al Qaeda's Uncertain Future

This article considers the current state of the Al Qaeda terrorist movement and its likely future trajectory. It considers the principle assumptions both today and in the past about Al Qaeda and how they affect our understanding of the movement and the threat that it poses; Al Qaeda's current capacity for violence; and its ability to plan strategically and implement terrorist operations. The article further identifies nine key change drivers that will likely determine Al Qaeda's fate in the years to come before concluding that, even while the core Al Qaeda group may be in decline, Al Qaeda-ism, the movement's ideology, continues to resonate and attract new adherents. In sum, it argues that Al Qaeda remains an appealing brand most recently and most especially to extremist groups in North and West Africa and the Levant.     

Away From Home: Somali Women's Mediated Entry Into the United Kingdom

Based on in-depth interviews with 26 Somali women refugees, this article discusses structural arrangements around their settlement in the United Kingdom (UK). Their “male-centered” migration can be viewed as a specific form of patriarchal institution where men control women's trajectories. Based on Bourdieu's concept of social capital, I introduce a new category of knowledge capital—supplementary capital—to discuss sociocultural/political stratifications that affect integration of my informants in the UK. I show how a lack of familiarity with the dominant language became central to their integration difficulties. These underexamined problems are key factors in immigration processes.     

Know thy enemy: Hizbullah, ‘terrorism’ and the politics of perception

The labelling career of the Lebanese armed group and political party Hizbullah is an interesting case with which to investigate the epistemological consequences of the politics of naming. Having found itself since its inception in the mid-1980s on the receiving end of mainly US and Israeli policy makers' and analysts' scorn for being an archetypical terrorist organisation, Hizbullah has been surprisingly successful in achieving its stated aims and in enduring the verbal and military onslaught against it. Although it is not the intention here to reduce explanations for Hizbullah's durability to discursive politics, this article suggests that both the labelling of Hizbullah as terrorist and, conversely, its identification as a ‘lebanonised’ political force that is about to make its conversion into an unarmed political party are misleading and incapable of grasping this organisation's complexities. In fact, both ‘terrorist’ and ‘lebanonised’ labels produce a quality of knowledge inferior to that produced by Hizbullah's own conceptualisation of its enemies. But most importantly, the debate on Hizbullah's alleged terrorist nature has obscured several of its traits that many should register before passing judgement on it. Our analysis shows that the variety of institutions Hizbullah has been carefully elaborating and readapting over the past two decades in Lebanon operate today as a holistic and integrated network which produce sets of values and meanings embedded in an interrelated religious and political framework—that of the wilayat al-faqih. These meanings are disseminated on a daily basis among Shi'a constituencies through the party's institutionalised networks and serve to mobilise them into ‘the society of the Resistance’ (mujtamaa’ al-muqawama), which is the foundation of the hala al-islamiyya (Islamic sphere) in Lebanon. Accordingly, any prospect of Hizbullah's transformation away from armed ‘resistance’ should be firmly placed in an analysis of its hegemony among the Shi'a of Lebanon and of the tools it uses to acquire and sustain this status.     

The Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) as Criminal Syndicate: Funding Terrorism through Organized Crime,A Case Study

Scholars have long recognized that terrorist groups have engaged in transnational organized crime activities. But the question that comes up is, “When does a criminal enterprise become a terrorist group or vice versa?” Terrorist groups have used physical violence, participated in weapons and drug trafficking networks, immigrant smuggling, and money laundering. More recently a number of terrorist groups have established what Jonathan White has referred to as “illegal multinational criminal organizations.” This article will examine the convergence of terrorism and organized crime through the prism of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK).