Comment on Dennis P. Culhane et al.’s “public shelter admission rates in Philadelphia and New York City: The implications of turnover for sheltered population counts”

The article here extended reflects on the excessively narrow debate over the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs)' cost-benefit transfer balance which had been raging for a quarter-century before the 2007–2009 financial crisis. That crisis has cast a new light on the actual costs of GSE operations and exposed the unsustainability of some of their benefits for homeownership. After injecting afew new findings into the traditional debate, this comment adds some of what has transpired in recent years and what may be inferred from it so far. Doing so brings additional analysis to bear on the article's conclusion that “the GSEs might not be justified” and “Maybe it is time for them to exit” although most politicians in the past have been disinclined to show them the door.     

Funding Global Public Goods: The Dark Side of Multilateralism

The funding of global public goods, such as climate mitigation, presents a complex strategic problem. Potential recipients demand side payments for implementing projects that furnish global public goods, and donors can cooperate to provide the funding. We offer a game‐theoretic analysis of this problem. In our model, a recipient demands project funding. Donors can form a multilateral program to jointly fund the project. If no program is formed, bilateral funding remains a possibility. We find that donors rely on multilateralism if their preferences are relatively symmetric and domestic political constraints on funding are lax. In this case, the recipient secures large rents from project implementation. Thus, even donors with strong interests in global public good provision have incentives to oppose institutional arrangements that promote multilateral funding. These incentives have played an important role in multilateral negotiations on climate finance, especially in Cancun (2010) and Durban (2011).     

Sectarian Rebellions in Post-Transition Nigeria Compared

The Boko Haram, a radical Islamic group based in north-east Nigeria, has killed over 1,000 people since mid-2011. This article explores the historical origins and structural drivers of Boko Haram and puts them into context. It argues that the Nigerian government's coercive response to Boko Haram has perpetuated a cycle of violence and undermined endogenous sources of moderation based on cultural, institutional, and political conditions. State repression to implement a counter-terrorism strategy has radicalized the group, created incentives to find international sympathizers, and contributes to fragmentation that impedes political solutions. A comparison with rebellions in the oil producing Niger Delta helps identify some barriers to and opportunities for conflict resolution.     

Understanding the media/terrorism relationship: An analysis of ideology and the news in time magazine

Conservative terrorism scholars have made the claim that the media have become a propaganda tool for terrorists and sympathetically portray terrorist activities. This article provides quantitative and qualitative data from Time magazine in 1986 suggesting that this view is mistaken. News production is treated as a social process that both informs and obscures, rather than as a neutral process that simply provides ‘objective’ facts. The results of the investigation reveal seven ways in which ideology is manifested in the terrorism news: semantics, language, headlines, social and historical context, treatment of objectives, trivialization, and amplification of violence. The ideological uniformity and lack of diversity apparent in terrorism news suggests that this kind of treatment results in a lack of understanding of the media/terrorism relationship and serves to support conservative views about the nature of terrorism and appropriate responses to it.     

Framing hostage negotiations: analysing the discourse of the US government and the Islamic State

Since August 2014, there has been a marked increase in the violence perpetrated by the Islamic State against Western hostages. Videos released by the Islamic State depicting the brutal executions of hostages have been circulated widely on social media. This has prompted a dialogue about governments’ policies regarding negotiation with terrorist organisations to secure the release of their citizens held overseas. The United States and Britain, two non-negotiating countries, have faced significant criticism for this policy, which has led to the beheadings of several American and British citizens. This article analyses the discourse of two spokesmen – White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, and British hostage John Cantlie – in framing the issue of hostage negotiations on behalf of their organisations. A grounded theory approach informed by framing analysis is utilised in order to identify dominant discourses employed in White House press briefings and John Cantlie’s videos and articles. This article concludes that, through the deliberate use of discourse, the US government and the Islamic State shape public perception of hostage negotiations in pursuit of distinct policy goals.     

The terrorism of the other: towards a contrapuntal reading of terrorism in India

This article advances an argument for a contrapuntal reading of terrorism using the case study of India. In recent years, the work of Edward Said has received some attention in the field of international relations. As yet, however, most readings of terrorism, either in its traditional form of terrorism studies or in the guise of critical terrorism studies, have not addressed the interface between terrorism and security, drawing on the work of Said. We take his work as a point of departure, enabling the analysis in this article to critique the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis whilst also exploring the relationship between mass casualty terrorism and crowded places. In doing so, we draw attention to the instantiation of a series of attacks in India. The final section of this article pulls the analysis together so as to question the relationship between poverty and resilience.     

The terror/counterterror edge: when non-terror becomes a terrorism problem and real terror cannot be detected by counterterrorism

On the basis of cases such as the recent ban on the building of minarets in Switzerland or the prohibition on wearing a burka in France and the Netherlands, and the passage of terrorism legislation in various European countries in which there has never been a terrorism problem, as well as the recent history of counterterrorism in the United States, this paper examines how non-terror can become a terrorism problem and non-risk ideologically risky, while at the same time the real threats go undetected. The international prominence gained by Spanish Prime Minister Jose María Aznar when the George W. Bush administration declared a worldwide ‘War on Terror’ shows the political capital attached to terrorist risk. Countries may act as if afflicted by a case of ‘terrorism envy’ when non-risk may be perceived as political irrelevance. This paper argues that the dynamics of terrorism/counterterrorism should be seen in the cultural context of taboo while displaying the qualities of the Lacanian edge: a self-generating process that simultaneously links and separates them in a ‘non-relationship’ that is constitutive of the entire phenomenon.     

Why terrorism can,but should not be defined

This article seeks to turn the debate about the definition of terrorism on its head by arguing: (1) that the definitional debate has served to obscure the substantial scholarly consensus that actually exists on what terrorism is; (2) that this consensus is, however, largely unnecessary and irrelevant to the effective use of the term in the heterogeneous contexts within which it is employed; and (3) that by focusing on the quest for a definition of terrorism, terrorism scholars have largely missed the really interesting question about the word, namely, why it is that, given the heterogeneous purposes and contexts for which the word is used, we nonetheless continue to use a single word for all. In other words, how is it that we continue to know terrorism when we see it?     

Issues in teaching terrorism as cultural artefact

From a humanities course on terrorism that focuses on how terrorist ideology and acts are transformed into cultural artefacts, several pedagogical–theoretical issues have emerged: the incongruity of viewing terrorist violence as art; 9/11 as an ahistorical event; the impossibility of defining terrorism; the infiltration (trivialisation?) of terrorism into popular culture; subgenres of terrorist works, each with its own paradigm; and the iconoclastic potential of many terrorist texts and films. These issues have implications for the curricular design of terrorism courses and for the role of instructors – in academia and in the larger community.     

HIGH TIMES FOR HATE CRIMES: EXPLAINING THE TEMPORAL CLUSTERING OF HATE‐MOTIVATED OFFENDING

This research explains the temporal clustering of hate crimes. It is hypothesized that many hate crimes are retaliatory in nature and tend to increase, sometimes dramatically, in the aftermath of an antecedent event that results in one group harboring a grievance against another. Three types of events are used to test and refine the argument: 1) contentious criminal trials involving interracial crimes, 2) lethal terrorist attacks, and 3) appellate court decisions concerning same‐sex marriage. The results from time‐series analyses indicate that contentious trial verdicts and lethal domestic terrorist attacks precede spikes in racially or religiously motivated hate crimes, whereas less evidence is found for antigay hate crimes after appellate court rulings that grant rights to same‐sex partners. The model put forth in this article complements prior work by explaining in part the timing of hate crime clusters.