Terrorism in the textbook: a comparative analysis of terrorism discourses in Germany,India, Kenya and the United States based on school textbooks

This study traces the (geopolitical) knowledge on terrorism circulating in Germany, India, Kenya, and the United States based on an analysis of school textbooks. It contributes to the existing literature in three ways. First, it transcends the Western-centrism of International Relations by analysing discourses from the Global North and the Global South. Second, it introduces school textbooks as a crucial object of research in constructivist terrorism studies and International Relations. School textbooks indicate the (geopolitical) knowledge deemed essential in a given society, but are also widely distributed among young people. Third, I address the debate about a presumed homogenization and internationalization of terrorism discourses in recent years. Results show that all four discourses depict terrorists as evil, focus on external non-state groups as perpetrators and associate terrorism with Islam. But there are also considerable differences regarding the relative importance of terrorism as a security threat, the referent object affected and the countermeasures deemed appropriate.     

What Role for the Party Group Leader? A Latent Variable Approach to Leadership Effects on Party Group Cohesion in the European Parliament

Previous research has identified several structural and situational factors that affect party cohesion in parliamentary voting behaviour. The potential role of leadership has been neglected so far. The authors apply a latent variable approach to model leadership effects in roll call votes from the European Parliament (EP), 1979–2001. Other things being equal, their findings suggest that a small but significant 7 per cent share of the total variance in party group cohesion is due to the party group leaders. About 40 per cent of this leader component can be accounted for by their experience inside the European institutions, their career prospects, and their ideological positions.     

Trust and Safety in the Segregated City: Contextualizing the Relationship between Institutional Trust,Crime‐related Insecurity and Generalized Trust

Trust is a crucial asset for any society, and the quest to generate and uphold trust is as crucial as ever. Several contemporary societal developments are proposed as being particularly challenging for upholding and restoring the levels of trust in society, including increasing ethnic diversity, rising inequality and the related geographical segregation. It has been convincingly argued that democratic institutions may generate trust by neutralizing some of these effects. This article explores how the mechanisms of trust differ in segregated, disadvantaged neighbourhoods as opposed to the surrounding general society. The empirical material consists of individual‐level data from a segregated neighbourhood (Vivalla) in a medium‐sized city in Sweden (Örebro), with a random sample from the population of the city (the Vivalla area excluded) as the comparison reference point, representing the general society. In the article, perceived safety is introduced as an important mediator between trust in legal and government institutions and generalized trust, through which the differing mechanisms become evident. In the disadvantaged neighbourhood, it is shown that trust in government institutions has the function of primarily decreasing crime‐related insecurity, which in its turn affects generalized trust. Thus, the relationship is indirect. In the city population, the effect instead goes directly from trust in government institutions to generalized trust. The results suggest that the potentials of different means to build and restore trust are dependent on local context.