Community engagement for counterterrorism: lessons from the United Kingdom

This article explores the development of community engagement within the UK's strategy to tackle international terrorism linked to and inspired by Al‐Qaeda, commonly known as CONTEST. It focuses mostly on the ‘Prevent’ strand of the strategy which seeks to prevent radicalization towards violence, reduce tacit support for violence, and increase the resilience of communities to tackle radicalization and extremist messages themselves. Community engagement for counterterrorism also relates to certain aspects of the ‘Pursue’ strand of CONTEST, and these are highlighted. The article outlines the case for a community‐based approach to counterterrorism and outlines a number of the key developments in its emergence from 2005 onwards. It analyses the performance of this aspect of the counterterrorism strategy, pointing to a number of shortcomings in relation to the establishment of partnerships, the integration of the approach, capacity shortfalls at the local level, and the wider challenges of a hostile political and media environment. Written as the new UK coalition government announces a review of the ‘Prevent’ strategy, it offers a number of recommendations for the future direction of this area of policy. It calls for an overhaul in working styles, a focus on people rather than projects, and the need to draw a much clearer line between downstream and targeted ‘Prevent’ work and the broader and longer‐term community development work, with the latter encapsulated within the government's Big Society Programme and aimed at all fragile communities, not just Muslims.     

PLATO'S ATLANTIS ACCOUNT - A DISTORTED RECOLLECTION of the TROJAN WAR

Summary: Parts of the lower town of Mycenaean Tiryns, Greece, became devastated and buried 3-5 meters deep during a torrential flood which coincided with a major earthquake at the transition from Late Helladic IIIB2 to Late Helladic IIIC1 (c. 1200 BC). These catastrophes contributed locally to the rapid demise of the Mycenaean civilization which commenced at this chronological boundary. Such a collapse of an early Greek civilization accompanied by a simultaneous earthquake and flood is described by Plato (Timaeus 25D) in the legendary Atlantis account. Plato's report revolves around a war between an ancient Greek civilization and a mighty force abroad, called Atlantis. If the former coincides with Mycenaean Greece, the most obvious candidate for the latter must be Troy. Hence, the thus far inexplicable story of Atlantis might well represent an Egyptian recollection of Troy and the Trojan War, distorted by transmission and translation.     

Contested Representations: Black women and the St Paul's Carnival

This research focuses on black women's experiences of the annual African-Caribbean carnival in St Paul's, Bristol, as a potential site of resistance. I have chosen to look at how black women challenge conceptions of space on three levels: nationally, locally and within the street. These three spatial levels are permeated by notions of resistance: resistance to dominant notions of Englishness, to representations of place, and to gender roles. I aim to focus on carnival's potential to contest hegemonic discourses, to denaturalise them and to expose them as partial. It is my overall contention that black women challenge the use of space as it is designated on a number of these levels, but that carnival does not enable them to contest their regular gender roles. Through this I hope to develop a 'cultural politics of place', but one which takes account of the intersecting dynamics of 'race' and gender, moving away from a binary model of difference.