Counter‐terrorism and the Politics of Aid: Civil Society Responses in Kenya

Against the backdrop of terrorist attacks in 1998 and 2002, Kenya has come under pressure from aid donors and diplomatic circles to co‐operate in achieving the political and military objectives of the War on Terror. The Kenyan government has received legal, technical and financial support to implement new counter‐terrorism structures. However, while these have raised concerns around human rights and the ability of people to come together and organize on shared interests, the response of civil society in Kenya has been muted. It is mainly human rights campaigners, lawyers, Muslim organizations and leaders, and some politicians that have opposed proposed anti‐terrorism legislation. Even fewer groups have spoken out against the government's participation in a regional rendition programme in the Horn of Africa supported by the United States. This weak response reflects the significant ethnic and regional fragmentation that prevails in the country. This article critically examines the impacts of counter‐terrorism in Kenya and civil society responses to these in a shifting political landscape.     

Protest Cycle,Political Violence and Social Movements in the Basque Country

A close look at the groups, organisations and social movements among which a terrorist organisation seeks refuge and support, will provide a fundamental and strategic view of its evolution. By means of the concept of a protest cycle, I analyse the relationship between political violence and social movements in the Basque Country. With the help of Tarrow's fundamental variables in the political structure, to which I have added the degree of consciousness‐raising and mobilisation in civil society, I aim to study the protest cycle of ETA's violence from its social origins at the start of the 1960s, through its consolidation in the 1970s, to its decline from the mid‐1980s onwards. The idea I will defend is that political violence should be seen as a form of collective action directed towards a mobilisation of society, and that its vicissitudes depend on the structure of interactions set up between the armed organisation, social movements and civil society.     

Terror or Terrorism? The “Islamic State” Between State and Nonstate Violence

As a non‐state actor that claims its own territory, the “Islamic State” utilizes a spectrum of very different kinds of coercion and violence. Considering the group's aspirations to govern the territories controlled by it, any clear distinction between uses of force and coercion that states typically claim as their legitimate right, and implement terrorist non‐state violence, tends to blur right before our analytically‐focused eyes. This contribution discusses how the group challenges the distinction between “terror from above” and “terrorism from below” as well as the meaning of the dual character of Daesh's belief system between the ideological and the religious for Daesh's repertoire of violence.     

Greece in the future enlarged European Union

Abstract

For Greece, to be part of the European Communities/European Union, it has always been a constant challenge to the country's international position. Sixteen years of EC membership have had a remarkable political, diplomatic, socio-economic and cultural effect on the country's internal domain. Indeed, EC membership has contributed to the consolidation of democratic internal processes, it has influenced the administrative capacity of the state, it has affected the external political orientation of the country's foreign policy objectives, it has benefited the economy from substantial financial community transfers and it has brought the Greek culture closer to the other western European cultures. Seen from a more critical perspective, BC membership has also produced severe shock effects, as the Greek economy has been increasingly exposed to European trade and the subsequent single market and it keeps on breeding social tensions in the process of economic and monetary integration.     

Comment sortir du ‘terrorisme’? La violence politique et les conditions de sa disparition en France et en République Fédérale d'Allemagne en comparaison 1970–années 1990

Research on political violence and terrorism is usually focused on the origins and the dynamics of violence. This article attempts to overcome the neglect of ways of leaving terrorism. One important hypothesis of this article is that terrorism should be understood as a strategy of communication. How did states and societies face the ‘communicative challenge’ posed by terrorism? This question will be applied to the cases of left-wing terrorism in 1970s and 1980s West Germany and France. In the 1970s, in West Germany, a political dialogue with the left-wing group RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion) seemed to be impossible, whereas in France violent groups engaged with the wider public through public communication. By this way an escalation of violence could be avoided, but in the 1980s French terrorist groups such as Action Directe modelled themselves on the West German RAF: as a consequence, any communication with the state or society was interrupted. At the same time, in West Germany, the question of whether a dialogue with the RAF should be started was at the core of public discussion. Some stated that it would be the only possibility to make them give up, while others rejected any idea of communicating with terrorists. The West German and French cases show us that the communicational situation, especially the degree of integration of the concerned left-wing groups in public discourse, had an important impact on the outcome of violence.     

EU counterterrorism strategy: value added or chimera?

Europe did not wake up to terrorism on 9/11; terrorism is solidly entrenched in Europe's past. The historical characteristics of Europe's counterterrorism approach have been first, to treat terrorism as a crime to be tackled through criminal law, and second, to emphasize the need for understanding the ‘root causes’ of terrorism in order to be able to prevent terrorist acts. The 9/11 attacks undoubtedly brought the EU into uncharted territory, boosting existing cooperation and furthering political integration—in particular in the field of justice and home affairs, where most of Europe's counterterrorism endeavours are situated—to a degree few would have imagined some years earlier. This development towards European counterterrorism arrangements was undoubtedly event‐driven and periods of inertia and confusion alternated with moments of significant organizational breakthroughs. The 2005 London attacks contributed to a major shift of emphasis in European counterterrorism thinking. Instead of an external threat, terrorism now became a home‐grown phenomenon. The London bombings firmly anchored deradicalization at the heart of EU counterterrorism endeavours.     

Enemies of liberty? Nationalism,immigration, and the framing of terrorism in the agenda of the Front National

This paper systematises the framing of the terrorism issue in the programmatic agenda of the Front national (FN) by focusing on nationalism. We argue that the FN's position on terrorism constitutes part of its strategy to justify its anti‐immigrant agenda by offering ideological rather than biological rationalisations for national belonging. To test our argument empirically, we operationalise four categories of nationalism, including ethno‐racial, cultural, political‐civic, and economic, and code official FN materials published in reaction to seven terrorist attacks on French soil during the period 1986–2015. We find that whilst older documents draw on all four categories, Marine Le Pen documents draw almost exclusively on the cultural and political‐civic categories, confirming our argument. Building on the “normalisation” or “de‐demonisation” approach, our nationalism framework presents a distinct theoretical advantage by allowing us to conceptualise the shift in the party's programmatic agenda.     

An Exceptional Response? Security,Development and Civil Society in Spanish Policy after 11‐M

This article considers the ways in which Spanish state institutions responded to the Madrid bombings of 11 March 2004 in the context of the global ‘War on Terror’. It examines three inter‐related arenas of Spanish policy after 9/11 in which security and civil society are invoked in ways that impact upon the country's development agenda toward its southern Mediterranean partners. The first relates to Spain's external relations with its North African neighbours, and in particular the place of migration in shaping these relations over the last decade. The second concerns Spain's political relations with the representative organizations of its own Muslim populations. A third area of analysis pertains to the juridical‐institutional reactions of the state to the 11 March attacks: how have public authorities and civil society been affected and refashioned in the face of jihadist terrorism on the peninsula? The author argues that in each of these domains, the post‐9/11 context generally, and the 11 March attacks in particular, have elicited a securitization of civil society, which has in turn been associated with the country's international relations and domestic politics. Such securitization, however, has only been partially successful, thus vindicating the continuation of ‘politics as usual’ among Spain's state officials and its civil society.     

The Taliban,Public Space,and Terror in Pakistan

Two UK-based specialists on terrorism in Pakistan use empirical evidence to document and analyze the Pakistani Taliban's (Tehrik-e-Taliban) practice of targeting spaces of public interaction for terrorism intended to suppress expressions of public unity and restrict venues for open discussion. In tracing the rise of the Taliban in Pakistan, the authors review the country's history of state and civil society formation, its relations with Afghanistan, and U.S. and Western policy in the region. The authors present timely information and insights that enhance understanding of the recent surge in terrorist attacks on civilians in Pakistan and its ties to the eastward spread of conflict from neighboring Afghanistan.     

Islamist violence and regime stability in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia, homeland of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers of September 11, 2001, experienced low levels of internal violence until 2003, when a terrorist campaign by ‘Al‐Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula’ (QAP) shook the world's leading oil producer. Based on primary sources and extensive fieldwork in the Kingdom, this article traces the history of the Saudi jihadist movement and explains the outbreak and failure of the QAP campaign. It argues that jihadism in Saudi Arabia differs from jihadism in the Arab republics in being driven primarily by extreme pan‐Islamism and not socio‐revolutionary ideology, and that this helps to explain its peculiar trajectory. The article identifies two subcurrents of Saudi jihadism, ‘classical’ and ‘global’, and demonstrates that Al‐Qaeda's global jihadism enjoyed very little support until 1999, when a number of factors coincided to boost dramatically Al‐Qaeda recruitment. The article argues that the violence in 2003 was not the result of structural political or economic strains inside the Kingdom, but rather organizational developments within Al‐Qaeda, notably the strategic decision taken by bin Laden in early 2002 to open a new front in Saudi Arabia. The QAP campaign was made possible by the presence in 2002 of a critical mass of returnees from Afghanistan, a clever two‐track strategy by Al‐Qaeda, and systemic weaknesses in the Saudi security apparatus. The campaign failed because the militants, radicalized in Afghan camps, represented an alien element on the local Islamist scene and lacked popular support. The near‐absence of violence in the Kingdom before 2003 was due to Al‐Qaeda's weak infrastructure in the early 1990s and bin Laden's 1998 decision to suspend operations to preserve local networks. The Saudi regime is currently more stable and self‐confident—and therefore less inclined to democratic reform—than it has been in many years.     

Crisis attack: Impromptu ethnography in the Greek maelstom (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Assailed by mounting debt and increasing economic distress, Greece today is also the target of media representations that emphasize violence and disorder. Michael Herzfeld – who was mugged and tear‐gassed in Athens this past July – argues that these representations are misleading and indeed are part of the problem they seek to explain. The structural violence of an insistent barrage of negative media coverage as well as that of international financial pressures undermines a previously stable and relatively crime‐free country, encouraging new forms – including police and popular racism, physical violence at demonstrations, and acts of petty crime – of what had once been a largely codified and ritualized idiom of aggression. While many Greeks do feel that debts should be paid, increasing economic desperation fuels a different view, and one that can best be interpreted in light of the social values that anthropologists have long studied in Greece: that the country's creditors are violating their own obligations toward Greece and thus deserve to face both default on the massive debt and the public hostility of the Greek people.     

Orthodox violence: “Critique of Violence” and Walter Benjamin's Jewish political theology

This paper deals with the role of Judaism in Walter Benjamin's famous 1921 essay on violence and law, Zur Kritik der Gewalt. Despite the intense attention devoted to this essay, the role of Jewish myth in it has not yet been thoroughly explained. This study contends that the association between what Benjamin termed revolutionary violence and the Jewish messianic tradition, which plays a central role in the evaluation of Benjamin's text, is far more problematic than has hitherto been assumed, and poses a serious challenge, which has not been fully examined in its historical context. Second, this essay claims that the subversive elements that many have supposedly found in Benjamin's text and the attempts to link these elements to messianic traditions are also unconvincing. Third, the paper contextualizes Benjamin's thought within the framework of the Jewish political–theological debate of the period. It contends that Benjamin's theory of law and justice should be understood not as a revolutionary, anti-republican text, as has been generally accepted, but as a secularized conservative orthodox one. In doing so, it seeks to shed light not only on Benjamin's early thinking and its influences, but also on the neglected element of Jewish orthodoxy within the broader topic of political theology.     

Non-violent extremists? Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia

Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI) is a radical Muslim organisation whose origins go back two and a half decades. It espouses an ideology crafted during the 1950s by the Palestinian, Taqiuddin an-Nabhani. Hizbut Tahrir's international leadership exerts control over its Indonesian branch's activities to an extent virtually unprecedented in Indonesian political life. Like other radical Muslim movements, HTI is bitterly anti-Western and rejects capitalism, democracy, liberalism and pluralism. Its objective is to turn Indonesia into an Islamic state that would be merged into a global caliphate or Muslim superstate. Unusually for a radical group, HTI strictly eschews violence, though its rhetoric is often strident and inflammatory. HTI also opposes terrorism, but contrives to depict terrorist attacks that have taken place in Indonesia as the result of Western manipulation and conspiracies. Although HTI retains some elements of the clandestine life it led when it was first set up, it has provoked surprisingly little hostility from the Indonesian political mainstream or security authorities. It is likely to continue to grow and remain the source of a powerful critique of Indonesia's status quo. But this is no guarantee, however, that it will succeed even in the long term in positioning Indonesia for merger into an international caliphate.     

The aftermath of an election crisis: Kenyan attitudes and the influence of individual-level and locality violence

How does violent conflict affect social and political attitudes? To answer this question I pair Kenyan survey and violence data for the time period following the country's December 27th 2007 national election. I find that respondents who personally experienced electoral violence are less likely to express certain forms of inter-personal and institutional trust than those individuals who did not. The association is not universally powerful, however. First, noteworthy differences emerge between populations who relocated as a result of post-election conflict and those who did not. Differences between these groups suggest that internal migration in the wake of tragedy influenced the Kenyan social landscape. In addition to personal exposure to electoral conflict, I test how local level violence may indirectly condition Kenyan political attitudes. Across all models, individual-level exposure to violence has the most consistent influence upon opinions, although district level effects emerge in analyses without survey respondent ethnicity controls. This finding suggests that living in a setting of regional insecurity does not have as important an effect on certain political views as personal victimization.     

The problem with ‘radicalization’: the remit of ‘Prevent’ and the need to refocus on terrorism in the UK

This article questions the utility of the term ‘radicalization’ as a focus for counter‐terrorism response in the UK. It argues that the lack of clarity as to who the radicalized are has helped to facilitate a ‘Prevent’ strand of counterterrorism strategy that has confusingly oscillated between tackling violent extremism, in particular, to promoting community cohesion and ‘shared values’ more broadly. The article suggests that the focus of counterterrorism strategy should be on countering terrorism and not on the broader remit implied by wider conceptions of radical‐ization. This is not to diminish the importance of contextual or ‘root cause’ factors behind terrorism, but, if it is terrorism that is to be understood and countered, then such factors should be viewed within the terrorism‐counterterrorism discourse and not a radicalization‐counter‐radicalization one. The article goes on to consider the characterization of those presenting a terrorist threat to the UK as being ‘vulnerable’ to violent extremism. While it argues that the notion of vulnerable individuals and communities also lends itself to a wider ‘Prevent’ remit, it cautions that the impetus towards viewing terrorism as the product of vulnerability should not deflect us from what has generally been agreed in terrorism studies—that terrorism involves the perpetration of rational and calculated acts of violence.     

Radicalization revisited: violence,politics and the skills of the body

For more than a decade, ‘radicalization’ has been a keyword in our understanding of terrorism. From the outset, radicalization was conceived of as an intellectual process through which an individual would increasingly come under a spell of extremist ideas. This ideological understanding of radicalization still prevails. In a 2015 speech on extremism, British Prime Minister David Cameron, for instance, claimed that the ‘root cause of the threat we face is the extremist ideology itself’. But the way we understand radicalization has specific consequences for the way we manage and fight the scourge of terrorism. Considering recent events, including the November 2015 Paris attacks, the present article sets out to reassess the above‐mentioned intellectualist understanding of radicalization and come up with new suggestions as to how radicalization may be understood today. Initially, the article suggests that ideology is not necessarily a precondition for violence, but that a prior experience with violence is more often a precondition for engaging an extremist ideology. Such experience with violence can be both domestic and international, obtained in Europe or Syria and other conflict zones. In the second part of the article it is argued that although radicalization is often conceived of as an individual process, pathways towards terrorism are inherently social and political. Finally, the article argues that by stressing the importance of ideology and ideological processes, concepts of radicalization have abstracted away from another factor that is pivotal for understanding pathways towards terrorist violence: the skills and capacities of the body.     

The trials and travails of the Islamic State in Pakistan

While Pakistan is in many ways an ideal location for transnational terrorist groups due to state weakness, Islamic State has had difficulty making headway in the country. In this article, the authors argue that Islamic State’s failures in Pakistan are due to competition from other groups. Drawing on the terrorist competition literature and interviews with Pakistani counterterrorism officials, the authors find that the presence of other groups in Pakistan meant there was little demand for what Islamic State offered. Islamic State relied on splinter groups and defectors for recruitment, which alienated mainstream groups and harmed the group’s capacity. Islamic State’s competition problems were exacerbated by its internationalist ideology, which was at odds with that of many groups in Pakistan, and allowed opposing groups to present themselves as reasonable alternatives to other actors. Despite Islamic State’s lack of success, it and its allies have still engaged in extreme violence in Pakistan as a result of attempts to outbid other groups. This article has implications for fighting terrorism in Pakistan and more generally.     

Irish Republican Politics and Violence before the Peace Process, 1968–1994

Analyses of the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland tend to underplay the influence of political strategy in the 1970s, preferring to emphasise militarism. Similarly, the persistence of militarism in the 1980s is often obscured by the attention paid to a ‘new’ republican political orientation. This article seeks to draw attention to the IRA's evolving attitude to the ‘problem’ of Ulster unionism, and republicanism's various estimations of the likely efficacy of violence throughout the period. Republicanism is best understood as a deeply rooted working-class ethno-nationalist movement interacting closely with the other agents of the Northern Ireland conflict: constitutional nationalism, unionism and the British government. ‘Armed struggle’ became a declining asset for republicanism as it came to be seen less as a form of ‘popular guerrilla warfare’ and more as ‘terrorism’. 1 [1] For valuable advice, thanks to Prof. Roy Foster. Opinions expressed are my own. View all notes     

Space,identity politics and resource control in Indonesia's transmigration programme

Indonesia's recent history has revealed the fragility of a national unity created under a political authoritarianism that was itself underpinned by the country's relative economic success. The government's transmigration resettlement scheme has been one particularly powerful mechanism through which the New Order government (under President Soeharto) has sought to achieve unity amidst the country's disparate ethnic groups. By resettling Javanese people, Indonesia's largest and most politically central cultural group, the state has attempted to achieve a presence of the “centre” in the country's “margins”, and in turn, extend a particular imagined geography across the archipelago. This paper examines the spatial politics of this process in one particular region, where transmigration has been coloured by environmental authoritarianism and concerns over the activity of “illegal forest squatters”. It draws on Henri Lefebvre's concept of socially produced space to demonstrate how local people have challenged the spatial authority of the state, and the ways subtle forms of resistance are expressed in agrarian landscapes and livelihood practices in Lampung. The paper concludes by reflecting on the possibilities of linking such resistance to emerging social movements which are beginning to challenge the post-Soeharto government's authority outside Java.     

Entangling alliances? The UK's complicity in torture in the global war on terrorism

The global war on terrorism gives rise to a range of legal, political and ethical problems. One major concern for UK policy‐makers is the extent to which the government may be held responsible for the illegal and/or unethical behaviour of allies in intelligence gathering—the subject of the forthcoming Gibson inquiry. The UK government has been criticized by NGOs, parliamentary committees and the media for cooperating with states that are alleged to use cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (CIDT) or torture to gain information about possible terrorist threats. Many commentators argue that the UK's intelligence sharing arrangements leave it open to charges of complicity with such behaviour. Some even suggest the UK should refuse to share intelligence with countries that torture. This article refutes this latter view by exploring the legal understanding of complicity in the common law system and comparing its more limited view of responsibility—especially the ‘merchant's defence’—with the wider definition implied in political commentary. The legal view, it is argued, offers a more practical guide for policy‐makers seeking to discourage torture while still protecting their citizens from terrorist threats. It also provides a fuller framework for assessing the complicity of policy‐makers and officials. Legal commentary considers complicity in relation to five key points: identifying blame; weighing the contribution made; evaluating the level of intent; establishing knowledge; or, where the latter is uncertain, positing recklessness. Using this schema, the article indicates ways in which the UK has arguably been complicit in torture, or at least CIDT, based on the information publicly available. However, it concludes that the UK was justified in maintaining intelligence cooperation with transgressing states due to the overriding public interest in preventing terrorist attacks.