Profiling candidate images in televised political spot advertisements for 1984: Roles and realities of presidential jousters at the height of the Reagan Era

Continued growth in the use of televised political spot advertisements in presidential campaigns justifies the increasing attention given to analyzing the role and content of such messages in the larger political system. The 1984 campaign offered a unique opportunity for theorists to investigate the potential for such messages either to reflect accurate images of candidates, or to evoke more dissonant themes between the images of candidates fabricated for the electorate, and the substantive candidates those images are intended to represent. This study analyzed the character attributes presented for ten presidential hopefuls in 201 televised spots, produced for 1984's primary and general election campaigns, and finds that while political spots can offer accurate portrayals of presidential candidates, the role of such messages can be nullified by perceived dissonance in the images they convey about their subjects.     

When Terrorism Goes to Sea: Terrorist Organizations and the Move to Maritime Targets

Terrorist groups are often relatively conservative in their choice of strategy, tactics, and targets, and it is worth asking what characteristics are associated with unconventional behavior. In this article we explore the question of why terrorist organizations move to one type of unconventional attack that has been a focus of concern of policymakers in recent years, namely attacks on maritime targets. Through an investigation of the organizational capacity and ideology of terrorist groups that committed maritime attacks between 1998 and 2005, we argue that this kind of violent behavior is driven by capability. Certain organizational characteristics of terrorist groups—territorial control, involvement in the drug trade, organizational size, and connections with other groups—provide groups with the capabilities that make maritime attacks both realistic and desirable. Terrorist groups' ideology—what they believe, and what their goals are—does not have the same impact, with the possible exception of groups affiliated with al-Qaeda. Our findings have implications for future research.     

Screening terror: Hollywood,the United States and the construction of danger

This paper is concerned with how and with what consequences Hollywood studios have approached the issue of terrorism. By drawing on the literatures of critical terrorism studies and critical geopolitics, a number of films are analysed for the purpose of considering the nature and motivation of terrorists, the objects of their assaults, the geographical location of the actual dramas, and the responses deemed necessary in the face of such apparent dangers. Finally, the paper briefly considers how one segment of film audiences, namely, participants (usually avid fans) who engage via online forums such as the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDb), engage and contest the movies themselves. The movie Rendition (2007) provides a brief example of how fans respond to a film explicitly concerned with terrorism and torture. This is important for considering how people make sense of films above and beyond their role as a highly successful form of entertainment.     

Representations of terrorism and the making of counterterrorism policy

Reflexive approaches not only maintain that representations of danger are socially constructed but also that they relate with political behaviour. Representations of terrorism, for instance, are argued to constitute that danger in distinct ways and thus to make certain counterterror policies possible. This article challenges this popular association of reflexive security studies with constitutive effects. It argues that constitutive argumentation advances an insufficiently tangible argument of effect, and that this conceptual weakness derives from both a problematic foundational social theory and a premature rejection of causation. Drawing on the social theory of Margaret Archer and Roy Bhaskar and a differentiated notion of causation, the article advances a “dialectical causal” framework for the analysis of representations of danger instead. Applying it to contemporary Swiss terrorism politics, the article shows how this framework improves on constitutive argumentation in disentangling the political powers involved in the production and enactment of representations of danger.     

Repression and Terrorism: A Cross-National Empirical Analysis of Types of Repression and Domestic Terrorism

While some scholars have theorized that repression reduces terrorism because it raises the costs of participating in terrorist activity by dissidents, others argue that repression stimulates terrorism by either closing off nonviolent avenues for expressing dissent or by provoking or sharpening grievances within a population. This study investigates these contradictory sets of expectations by considering whether or not different specific types of repression yield different effects on patterns of terrorism in 149 countries for the period 1981 to 2006. By assessing the impact of nine specific types of repression on domestic terrorism, the study produces some interesting findings: while, as expected, forms of repression that close off nonviolent avenues of dissent and boost group grievances increase the amount of domestic terrorism a country faces, types of repression that raise the costs of terrorist activity have no discernible suppressing effect on terrorism.     

反恐防暴指挥方式发展趋势浅析

在日趋复杂激烈的反恐防暴战斗中,指挥理念的更新和指挥方式的变革显得十分重要和迫切。未来反恐防暴战斗将变静态指挥为实时动态指挥、变应急指挥为异地超前指挥、变树状指挥为扁平网状指挥、变计划指挥为快速灵巧指挥、变经验指挥为科学集成指挥。     

Radicalism of the Hopeless: Refugee Flows and Transnational Terrorism

We examine whether refugee flows increase transnational terrorism in states to which refugees flee. Recent studies find that refugee flows contribute to the spread of interstate and civil war, but to a far lesser extent have studies examined how refugee flows could lead to other forms of political violence. We discuss two ways in which refugee flows can lead to transnational terrorism: how conditions in camps contribute to the radicalization of refugees; and how poorly host states treat refugees. We then conduct empirical tests using data on worldwide international refugee flows and transnational terrorism. Specifically, we model the effect of refugee flows on transnational terror attacks within a directed dyad framework to account for characteristics of origin and host states. Using a rare-events logit model, along with count models to check robustness, we find that refugee flows significantly increase the likelihood and counts of transnational terrorist attacks that occur in the host country, even when controlling for other variables. Given the prominence of refugee flows and populations worldwide, the results suggest that states with significant refugee populations and the international community at large should take measures to address the conditions in refugee camps, as well as the treatment of refugees by host states in order to prevent transnational terrorism.     

Networks as strategic repertoires: Functional differentiation among Al-Shabaab terror cells

This article explains variation across the characteristics and structure of Al-Shabaab (AS) networks as a function of strategic repertoires. From a comparison of domestic and transnational AS recruitment and fundraising networks in the United States, the article generates hypotheses about the characteristics and structure of networks and how traits such as brokers, centrality characteristics of nodes, international linkages and use of funds are related to a network's purpose. The implications of these observations are twofold: The nature of a terror organisation's network is indicative of the organisation's strategy; conversely, the organisation's strategy will affect the nature of the network. On the one hand, knowing the function of the network makes it possible to counter it by detecting and debilitating the nodes. On the other hand, knowing the structure of a network makes it possible to surmise its purpose. The article concludes that, from a network perspective, terrorist recruitment and fundraising are distinct problems that require differentiated law-enforcement and security-intelligence approaches.     

Government protection against terrorism and crime

A game theoretic model is developed where a government protects against a terrorist seeking terrorism and criminal objectives. A terrorist can recruit a benefactor providing funds by remaining ideologically pure, or may resort to crime. The model accounts for the players’ resources, unit costs of effort, unit benefit and valuations and contest intensities for terrorist and crime objectives. We determine and quantify how these factors and the government impact a terrorist’s terrorism and crime efforts and relative ideological orientation on a continuum from being highly ideological to being highly criminal. We also consider how the terrorist group is impacted by support of benefactor(s), the central authority’s ability to impose greater sanctions for terrorist activities compared to criminal actions and the ideological orientation of the group’s leadership. We discuss insights from the model and consider a few historical perspectives.