This paper makes use of a new development in social psychology, Positioning Theory, the study of the way rights and duties are ascribed, attributed and justified to and by individuals in local social groups. It links this theory with a generally Vygotsky inspired approach to understanding the means by which people are brought into terrorist networks. Focusing on the use of the Internet as a device to bring mentor and novice together, the unique role of chat rooms and (...) personal conversations made possible by the Internet in this psychological process is revealed. Examining Vygotsky's ideas about the influence of a collective identity on the development of individual identities by psychological symbiosis in the Zone of Proximal Development sheds new light on the positioning of terrorist recruits. Incorporating Wittgenstein's concept of hinges into understanding the groundings of individual positions explains how the jihadist form of life turns on the unexamined grounding of beliefs about the non-believers. (shrink)

In my article I defend the claim that terrorism is morally indefensible, irrespective of the religious or political circumstances and motives behind the actions of its agents and sponsors. My argument is based on the indefeasible presupposition of modern civilization and our human rights culture that, like the prohibition against murder in the law of crimes, the deliberate killing of innocent civilian non-combatants—the principle target of terrorists—destroys the cardinal value of the sacrosanctity of all individual human life by making a (...) dignified or rights-respecting, flourishing social life impossible. In my view the Islamist terrorist network of Al Qaeda (and some Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad) offers a paradigm case of modern terrorism due to the success of their attack on the American homeland on 9/11 (2001).Accordingly, I suggest the outlines of a philosophical critique of some common contemporary views which often thwart a common defense against terrorism because they blur the moral clarity of those who ordinarily respect the dignity and basic rights of persons as well as the rule of law. The views I target include a type of moral relativism, a postmodernist perspectivism, and the “Blowback” thesis currently circulating in some official military and political precincts. In addition, I explain why terrorism so deeply offends the law of war and its correlative Just War tradition; and also I reflect on why rights-based democracies must confront terrorism without subverting their own foundations. (shrink)

The Bush administration's military war on terrorism is a blunt, ineffective, and unjust response to the threat posed to innocent civilians by terrorism. Decentralized terrorist networks can only be effectively fought by international cooperation among police and intelligence agencies representing diverse nation‐states, including ones with predominantly Islamic populations. The Bush administration's allegations of a global Islamist terrorist threat to the national interests of the United States misread the decentralized and complex nature of Islamist politics. Undoubtedly there exists (...) a “combat fundamentalist” element within Islamism. But the threat posed to U.S. citizens by Islamist terrorism neither necessitates nor justifies as a response massive military invasions of other nations. Not only does the Bush administration's war on alleged “terrorist states” violate the doctrine of just war, but in addition these wars arise from a new, unilateral, imperial foreign‐policy doctrine of “preventive wars.” Such a doctrine will isolate the United States from international institutions and long‐standing allies. The weakening of these institutions and alliances will only weaken the ability of the international community to deter terrorism. (shrink)

The term “network” is now applied to everything from the Internet to terrorist-cell systems. But the word’s ubiquity has also made it a cliché, a concept at once recognizable yet hard to explain. Network Aesthetics, in exploring how popular culture mediates our experience with interconnected life, reveals the network’s role as a way for people to construct and manage their world—and their view of themselves. Each chapter considers how popular media and artistic forms make sense of decentralized network metaphors (...) and infrastructures. Patrick Jagoda first examines narratives from the 1990s and 2000s, including the novel Underworld, the film Syriana, and the television series The Wire, all of which play with network forms to promote reflection on domestic crisis and imperial decline in contemporary America. Jagoda then looks at digital media that are interactive, nonlinear, and dependent on connected audiences to show how recent approaches, such as those in the videogame Journey, open up space for participatory and improvisational thought. Contributing to fields as diverse as literary criticism, digital studies, media theory, and American studies, Network Aesthetics brilliantly demonstrates that, in today’s world, networks are something that can not only be known, but also felt, inhabited, and, crucially, transformed. (shrink)

International criminal tribunals established by the UN Security Council in the 1990s have been widely acclaimed as active participants in the modern system of dynamic criminal justice. One of their best known achievements is the prosecution of rape and sexual assaults. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) set an example for other tribunals to follow. By interpreting a variety of international laws, the community of international legal professionals has been (...) able to shift the prevailing understanding of rape and sexual violence away from that of an “unfortunate byproducts of war.” Not only has the epistemic community of legal professionals been able to end impunity for these crimes, but case-law of international tribunals has become a basis for subsequent trials at quasi-international tribunals. Decisions of the tribunals have been instrumental in drafting the Statute of the International Criminal Court and can be regarded as an example of the formation of new international norms by means of judicial decisions. (shrink)

This article differentiates between three different axes of conflict in world risk society. The first axis is that of ecological conflicts, which are by their very essence global. The second is global financial crises, which, in a first stage, can be individualized and nationalized. And the third, which suddenly broke upon us on September 11th, is the threat of transnational terror networks, which empowers governments and states. Two sets of implications are drawn: first, there are the political dynamics of (...) world risk society. In an age where trust and faith in God, class and progress have largely disappeared, humanity's common fear has proved the last - ambivalent - resource for making new bonds. Second, the methodological nationalism that preoccupies the sociological imagination has to be overcome and a `methodological cosmopolitism' has to be created. (shrink)

The Political Economy of Terrorism presents a widely accessible political economy approach to the study of terrorism. It applies economic methodology – theoretical and empirical – combined with political analysis and realities to the study of domestic and transnational terrorism. In so doing, the book provides both a qualitative and quantitative investigation of terrorism in a balanced up-to-date presentation that informs students, policy makers, researchers and the general reader of the current state of knowledge. Included are historical aspects, a discussion (...) of watershed events, the rise of modern-day terrorism, examination of current trends, the dilemma of liberal democracies, evaluation of counterterrorism, analysis of hostage incidents and much more. The new edition expands coverage of every chapter, adds a new chapter on terrorist network structures and organization, accounts for changes in the Department of Homeland Security and the USA Patriot Act and insurance against terrorism. Rational-actor models of terrorist and government behavior and game-theoretic analysis are presented for readers with no prior theoretical training. Where relevant, the authors display graphs using data from International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events, the Global Terrorism Database, and other public-access data sets. (shrink)

In the early modern period (16?18th centuries), churches and state administrations alike strove to eradicate Evil. Neither they nor society at large accepted a conceptual differentiation between crime and sin. The two worst kinds of Evil early modern societies could imagine were organized arson and witchcraft. Although both of them were delusions, they nevertheless promoted state building. Networks of itinerant street beggars were supposed to have been paid by foreign powers to set fire in towns and villages. These vagrant (...) arsonists can be regarded as the terrorists of the early modern period. Witches were persons who had allegedly made a compact with the devil. They were thought to randomly use maleficent magic to harm individuals as well as whole regions. When law enforcement agencies and suspicious peasants or townspeople tried to identify persons who might be arsonist terrorists or witches they used the category ?Evil?. Anyone who ignored the behavioral standards of society ever so slightly could be suspected of being utterly evil. The concept of Evil linked petty, commonplace immorality and the worst crimes imaginable to each other and to the mindless hatred of demons. This pre-modern concept of the banality of Evil was called into question by the legal reforms of the 17th century. It was finally rejected by the enlightenment that negated the imagined continuum of Evil. Witches and arsonist terrorists shared a number of characteristics. They were both said to form conspiracies that mirrored everyday society like an evil twin. The crimes they perpetrated lacked any purpose or reason, they were motivated by sheer malice. The worst forms of Evil had certain qualities of an epidemic: Witchcraft and terrorism were supposed to be always on the rise. The evil people were victimizers as well as victims. The imagery of Evil even implied that the evildoers resembled those they were supposed to have harmed. The fear of terrorist vagrants and witches as well as other conspiracy theories can be traced back to the Black Death. The plague of the 14th century not only sparked anti-Semitism. It lend force and credibility to the idea of an irrationally destructive, ever-growing secret organization as the epitome of Evil. (shrink)

In this thought-provoking work, Tony D. Sampson presents a contagion theory fit for the age of networks. Unlike memes and microbial contagions, _Virality_ does not restrict itself to biological analogies and medical metaphors. It instead points toward a theory of contagious assemblages, events, and affects. For Sampson, contagion is not necessarily a positive or negative force of encounter; it is how society comes together and relates. Sampson argues that a biological knowledge of contagion has been universally distributed by way (...) of the rhetoric of fear used in the antivirus industry and other popular discourses surrounding network culture. This awareness is also detectable in concerns over _too much connectivity_, such as problems of global financial crisis and terrorism. Sampson’s “virality” is as established as that of the biological meme and microbe but is not understood through representational thinking expressed in metaphors and analogies. Rather, Sampson interprets contagion theory through the social relationalities first established in Gabriel Tarde’s microsociology and subsequently recognized in Gilles Deleuze’s ontological worldview. According to Sampson, the reliance on representational thinking to explain the social behavior of networking—including that engaged in by nonhumans such as computers—allows language to overcategorize and limit analysis by imposing identities, oppositions, and resemblances on contagious phenomena. It is the power of these categories that impinges on social and cultural domains. Assemblage theory, on the other hand, is all about relationality and encounter, helping us to understand the viral as a positively sociological event, building from the molecular outward, long before it becomes biological. (shrink)

This paper asks how we should regard the laws and customs of armed conflict, and specifically the rule prohibiting the targeting of civilians. What view should we take of the moral character and significance of such rules? Some philosophers have suggested that they are best regarded as useful conventions. This view is sometimes motivated by a "deep moral critique" of the rule protecting civilians: Jeff McMahan believes for example that the existing rules protect some who ought to be liable to (...) attack (on account of their having voluntarily contributed to the injustice or aggression being resisted). He thinks we would be better off with a different principle of discrimination in warfare. But McMahan acknowledges that for the time being we must stick with the rules that we have. The present paper does five things: (1) it explores and takes further some of McMahan's insights about the importance of existing positive law in this area; (2) it argues that some of the features that philosophers find problematic with the rule offering blanket protection to all civilians have to do with administrability; (3) it raises some questions about whether the rule protecting civilians can really be regarded as a convention (and it argues that certainly it cannot be regarded as a "Lewis-convention" in a strict sense); (4) to the extent that the rule can be regarded as conventional, the paper argues that it remains a deadly serious moral rule, partly because of the circumstances of death and destruction in which it operates and which it tries to ameliorate, and partly on account of its fragility. The fifth point is the most important. (5) The rule protecting civilians does not operate in circumstances in which, apart form positive law, civilians like everyone would be liable to attack. The rule operates against a moral background in which all deliberate killing is to be regarded as murder; some deliberate killings (of combatants) are privileged in warfare; but the rule about civilians reflects the fact that this is a strictly limited privilege and that those who target civilians do not get the benefit of it. Changing our view of the default position in this way enables us to better understand the distinctive work that this rule does. (shrink)

Globalization has been one of the most hotly contested phenomena of the past two decades. It has been a primary attractor of books, articles, and heated debate, just as postmodernism was the most fashionable and debated topic of the 1980s. A wide and diverse range of social theorists have argued that today's world is organized by accelerating globalization, which is strengthening the dominance of a world capitalist economic system, supplanting the primacy of the nation-state by transnational corporations and organizations, and (...) eroding local cultures and traditions through a global culture. Contemporary theorists from a wide range of political and theoretical positions are converging on the position that globalization is a distinguishing trend of the present moment, but there are hot debates concerning its nature, effects, and future.2 Moreover, advocates of a postmodern break in history argue that developments in transnational capitalism are producing a new global historical configuration of post- Fordism, or postmodernism as an emergent cultural logic of capitalism (Harvey 1989; Soja 1989; Jameson 1991; and Gottdiener 1995). Others define the emergent global economy and culture as a "network society" grounded in new communications and information technology (Castells 1996, 1997, and 1998). For its defenders, globalization marks the triumph of capitalism and its market economy (see apologists such as Fukuyama 1992 and Friedman 1999 who perceive this process as positive), while its critics portray globalization as negative (see, for example, Mander and Goldsmith 1996; Eisenstein 1998; and Robins and Webster 1999). Some theorists see the emergence of a new transnational ruling elite and the universalization of consumerism (Sklair 2001), while others stress global fragmentation of “the clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1996). Driving “post” discourses into novel realms of theory and politics, Hardt and Negri (2000) present the emergence of “Empire” as producing evolving forms of sovereignty, economy, culture, and political struggle that unleash an unforeseeable and unpredictable flow of novelties, surprises, and upheavals. Discourses of globalization initially were polarized into pro or con celebrations or attacks.. (shrink)

Models of global governance abound: expert governance, networked governance, algorithmic governance, and old-fashioned juridico-political governance vie for explanatory power. This article takes up style as a way of analysing configurations of governance that do not readily fit a particular model of governance. Style is particularly revealing when it comes to deliberately unspecified or over-specified, genre-busting, and bet-hedging ways of imagining governance. The UN’s use of the phrase ‘convening power’ is a case in point. This article looks at how the UN (...) has styled itself as a convening power in the area of counter-terrorism governance. A visual analysis of promotional materials for the UN’s Counter-Terrorism Week suggests that the UN’s self-styling as a convening power is shaped by anxieties as well as aspirations. (shrink)

Propagation of novel linguistic terms is an important aspect of language use and language change. Here, we test how social network size influences people's likelihood of adopting novel labels by examining hashtag use on Twitter. Specifically, we test whether following fewer Twitter users leads to more varied and malleable hashtag use on Twitter, because each followed user is ascribed greater weight and thus exerts greater influence on the following user. Focusing on Dutch users tweeting about the terrorist attack in (...) Brussels in 2016, we show that people who follow fewer other users use a larger number of unique hashtags to refer to the event, reflecting greater malleability and variability in use. These results have implications for theories of language learning, language use, and language change. (shrink)

This article empirically analyzes how victims’ remains were recovered, identified, repatriated, and retained after the World Trade Center terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It does so by asking the question whose body is it. This question brings to the fore issues related to personhood and ownership: how are anonymous and unrecognizable bodily remains given back an identity; and who has ownership of or custody over identified and unidentified human remains? It is in this respect that the article engages (...) with technoscientific and legal, or “technolegal,” trajectories of human remains in the wake of the WTC tragedy. By using the metaphor of “materialization,” it becomes possible to trace how remains are forensically identified and implicated in legal regimes. “Technolegal materialization” as a concept and methodological sensitivity contributes to the current “actor-network theory” -inspired legal scholarship, which tends to focus on legal practices in courtrooms but not those beyond them. In this article, 9/11 victims’ remains are followed from “Ground Zero” to the forensic laboratory and beyond and articulates five instances of technolegal materialization of bodily remains and their past and contemporary existences. (shrink)

One of the most visible symbols of the debate over human rights and national security in the context of the U.S. "War on Terrorism" has been the detainment of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, following the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The controversy concerning the fate of the nearly 600 prisoners demonstrates the emergence of new modes of democratic deliberation over how to strike the balance between rights and security. These new modes (...) of deliberation involve nongovernmental organizations and individuals who function as norm entrepreneurs, by mobilizing public opinion through transnational networks of opinion-makers and policymakers. Transnational networks of norm entrepreneurs have emerged where traditional avenues for foreign policymaking in the U.S. have failed to create a space for meaningful consideration of human rights in the rights/security balance. These traditional avenues are envisioned in the Constitution, which gives the President authority regarding foreign affairs, bounded by checks provided to Congress and the courts. While the goal of the constitutional process is to bring these institutional players into a dialogue, Congress and the judiciary have failed to engage the President in a conversation regarding the balance between human rights and national security. In the absence of initiatives by the government, nongovernmental actors have used communication structures within transnational networks to promote what this Article calls a dialogic approach to enforcement of human rights law. (shrink)

Terror narratives have been characterized by a dialogism where the “normative” I—i.e. the “non-threatening mainstream”—defines and delineates subjects whose identity is centred on their location in the terror network. This is especially so in the case of Asian migrants who settle down in Western countries, as their very identity as Asian locates them at a precarious point in the real or imagined “terror network.” The migrant is no longer the Du, but the Es, imparting an identity to the Ich, where (...) the Ich denotes the “original” citizens of the country. The transactions of the “I” with the “Thou” and the “It” become significant in the context of Asian immigrants in that, for the dominant mainstream, the “terrorist” is an Es/”It” that has gradually marked its transition from the Du/“Thou.” The person of the “terrorist” finds its ontological properties from the gradual movement away from a “Thou” to an “It.” The hitherto unbounded “Thou” is transformed into a definable “It,” by ascribing to her/him a religion, race, colour, nationality and ethnicity. He/she is not confronted, as every “Thou” is, but is rather “experienced” as a source of terror, as an “It.” The paper attempts to explore the transformation of the figure of the “migrant terrorist” from a confronted “Thou” to an “imagined/experienced” “It” through an analysis of New York by Kabir Khan and Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. (shrink)

The first decade of the twenty-first century introduced a cultural shift where terrorism is concerned by making new technologies such as computers and networks available as both tools and targets for exploitation. The current rise in the number of attempts at launching a cyber attack may represent a new generation of “terrorists” and their discontent with governments, private companies, or with other non-governmental groups. Using cyber technologies has many benefits for the user and the potential of causing more damage (...) by a keystroke than a bomb is increasing daily. Despite much recent scholarship on cyber terrorism, however, there continue to be problems not only in defining what cyber terrorism means but in identifying both who are the actors and the panoply of choices actors confront. In this essay, I attempt to clarify these problems by defining key terms and by analyzing the recent escalation in cyber use in the European context. (shrink)

The past three years saw more suicide attacks than the last quarter century. Most of these were religiously motivated. While most Westerners have imagined a tightly coordinated transnational terrorist organization headed by Al Qaeda, it seems more likely that nations under attack face a set of largely autonomous groups and cells pursuing their own regional aims. Repeated suicide actions show that massive counterforce alone does not diminish the frequency or intensity of suicide attack. Like pounding mercury with a hammer, (...) this sort of top-heavy counterstrategy only seems to generate more dispersed and insidious forms of suicide terrorism. Even with many top Qaeda leaders now dead or in custody, the transnational Jihadist fraternity is transforming into a hydra-headed network more difficult to fight than before. Poverty and lack of education per se are not root causes of suicide terrorism. And Muslims who have expressed support for martyr actions and trust in Osama Bin Laden or the late Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin do not as a rule hate democratic freedoms or Western culture, although many despise American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. Rising aspirations followed by dwindling expectations – especially regarding civil liberties – are critical factors in generating support for suicide terrorism. The United States, Israel, Russia and other nations on the frontline in the war on terror need to realize that military and counterinsurgency actions are tactical, not strategic responses to suicide terrorism, the most politically destabilizing and psychologically devastating form of terrorism. When these nations back oppressive and unpopular governments this only generates popular resentment and support for terrorism against those governments and their backers. To attract potential recruits away from Jihadist martyrdom – suicide terrorism's most virulent strain - and to dry up its popular support, requires addressing these grievances before a downward spiral sets in where core meaning in life is sought, and found, in religious networks that sanctify vengeance at any cost against stronger powers, even if it kills the avenger. (shrink)

Moving on after September 11 will require more than just eliminating organized terrorist networks and providing humanitarian aid, crucial as these two interventions are. There is a much larger landscape of multiple devastations in the global south that the global north cannot escape. While socio-economic devastation may not cause terrorism directly, it does promote extreme responses, such as trafficking in people, and can facilitate recruitment of young people for terrorist activity, both random and organized. These multiple devastations (...) need to be addressed - by world and country leaders, by the supra-national system, by NGOs, by global civil society, by corporate economic actors. The article confines itself to the need for governments' action through new specialized multilateralisms and internationalisms. It argues that we can even make a narrow utilitarian case that it is in the global north's interest to address these issues. The particular cases through which the argument is developed are the growing hyper-indebtedness in the global south and the accumulation of contradictions in the immigration regime prevalent in the global north. Examining these is a way of dissecting the nature of the challenge and identifying specific governance deficits. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Classics and Complexity in Walden’s “Spring” M. D. USHER In 1843, two years before Henry Thoreau built his cabin at Walden Pond, the Fitchburg Railroad laid down tracks through the woods near the Pond for its line connecting Boston to Fitchburg. The original Fitchburg Line, at 54 miles long, was, until 2010, the longest run in the present -day MBTA Commuter Rail system. And it is one of (...) the oldest railways in New England. By 1900, fortunes swelled and the Fitchburg’s Hoosac Tunnel Line took passengers and goods westward toward Chicago. The Lake Champlain Route connected Boston to points north like Burlington, Vermont. (See Figure 1.) arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 Figure 1 (left): Advertisement for the Hoosac Tunnel Route in The New England Magazine (Vol. 21, Issue 6, February, 1900). Figure 2 (right): Herbert Wendell Gleason. The Fitchburg Railroad and Walden Pond in winter, Concord, Mass., March 24, 1920. Courtesy Concord Free Public Library. The Railroad was literally a fixture in Thoreau’s landscape. Its tracks pass remarkably close to Walden Pond (Figure 2), and the Fitchburg Line—both its reality and the specter of it—is practically a character in his writing: “I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link,” Thoreau writes in “Sounds,” a chapter of Walden that contains what must be one of the most picturesque odes (or laments) to rail travel and commerce in all of American literature: The engine’s whistle, Thoreau complains, pierces the still silence of his idyllic retreat like a screaming hawk circling a farmer’s field, its billows of steam an ominous harbinger of “this travelling demi-god, this cloud-compeller.”1 Thoreau’s frequent, customary walks into Concord along the railroad tracks took him through a heavily excavated stretch of the line known as the Deep Cut, to which he returned again and again each year in early spring, even after leaving the cabin, to observe and to record his observations. The leaf-shaped sand flows and trickling surface erosion caused by melting frost in the banks of the Deep Cut are elaborately described in Thoreau’s chapter in Walden entitled “Spring,” what Laurence Buell calls the “high point of Thoreau’s epic.”2 And yet, in spite of the universal acclaim of this passage as a literary tour de force, it has not received the full attention it deserves. What warrants fresh consideration first and foremost is “Spring”’s deep-rootedness in classical sources. Many classical influences, allusions, and a good deal of etymological word play have gone so far unnoticed. The chapter is also important because it describes, by intimation, what contemporary scientists now call emergence. Emergent phenomena are properties or behaviors that arise in systems as a result of complex, dynamic interactions amongst constituent parts, including changes to a system brought about by human interventions3—not only, e.g., climate change and wildfires, but also traffic patterns and terrorist networks; kidney function in the body; the rings of Saturn. As he tries to capture the essence of the 114 classics and complexity in WALDEN’s “spring” Deep Cut and interpret its significance, Thoreau adumbrates this concept, but also grapples ingeniously with broader issues of perennial concern—the relationship of Nature to Culture, for example, of Wilderness to Civilization, of Science to the Humanities—making “Spring” not only a probing work of eco-criticism and environmental philosophy, but of scientific reflection and poetic experiment as well. In short, Thoreau’s “Spring” is that rare work of classical reception that transmits both literary and scientific insight. Perhaps at this point, in lieu of accolades, it is best to let Thoreau start speaking for himself. What I offer in the following pages is a commentary on the Deep Cut passage from “Spring.” Classical references and aspects of systems theory will be explained and contextualized as they emerge, as it were, from Thoreau’s text. The whole chapter corresponds to pages 289–308 in Cramer’s edition of Walden—26 paragraphs all told, of which only the relevant ones are printed and annotated here. (Transitions and extraneous material are briefly summarized, as needed, in paraphrase... (shrink)

More than a decade has passed since the tragic events that took place in America in the dramatic day of September 9th 2001. For the first time since the end of the second World War, the United States were being attacked on their own territory, without prior notice, by a non-state military force which was globally organised, for religious and ideological reasons. The terrorist attacks planned and executed by the terrorist organisation Al-Qaeda on American military and civilian targets (...) have reconfigured the international security environment. The author remarks that the security of the European continent is inextricably linked to what happens outside its external borders. Transnational organized crime, illegal human trafficking, illegal migration, traffic of drug, weapons, ammunition and portable vectors, the proliferation of illegal trade of radioactive and other "sensible" technologies, the expansion of terrorist networks – they all represent threats to the Eastern border of Romania and concern the security of the EU Eastern neighbourhood. (shrink)

In the decade since Al-Qaeda, led by the late Osama Bin Laden, attacked America, there has been a resurgence in the debate about the relationship between religion and politics. The global Islamic terrorist networks and their successful operations against various targets around the globe increasingly draw attention to what constitutes the core values of Islamic extremism: the logic of evangelistic strategy, the import and relevance of its spiritual message and consideration of the composite view of life that does (...) not distinguish between sacred and temporal mandates. Suspicions have been fuelled that Islam is incompatible with modern democratic systems and pluralist outlooks. The real cause of Islamic militancy is at once universal and particular. The Nigerian experience of this radical Islamism-Boko Haram-brings home the once “distant” threat to global peaceful co-existence. While there exist arguments regarding the raison d’etre and means or methods of the operations of Boko Haram, the end has been normative; to achieve a purely religious nationalistic system on the basis of the sharia code of ethics. This paper, therefore, critically analyses the historical and philosophical interpretations of Islamic history constructed as an infallible corpus, and how it has been impacted by the democratic vision in Nigeria. It concludes with a consideration of the possibility and practicability of a liberal system at once free and religious in a pluralist and global society. (shrink)

This paper is an effort to critically evaluate Pakistan’s counterterrorism strategy, based on both military and non-military means. The paper argues that the counterterrorism strategy of Pakistan has proved ineffective and counter-productive to combat the homegrown threat of terrorism, unleashed by militant sectarian groups, following the Takfiri ideology. Although Pakistan’s Military claims that the latest on-going security operations, Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan and Khyber-II in Khyber Agency, have succeeded in clearing most of the area, however, the matter of fact is (...) that the security operations have not considerably damaged the ability of terrorists, particularly the Tehrik Taliban Pakistan, to plan and execute terrorist attacks. The terrorists’ network, their strength and structure have until now remained intact. The key to longterm prevention of terrorism, beyond security operations for clearing any area of the militants, is to discontinue the supply chain of terrorists. This requires the creation of a new counter-extremism religious narrative, which will help re-formulate a concrete and effective counter-terrorism strategy of Pakistan to ensure domestic peace and security. (shrink)

Intelligence estimates based on models keyed to frequency and recency of past occurrences make people less secure even if they predict most harmful events. The U.S. presidential commission on WMDs, the 9/11 commission, and Spain's comisión 11-M have condemned the status quo mentality of the intelligence community, which they see as being preoccupied with today's “current operations” and tactical requirements, and inattentive to tomorrow's far-ranging problems and strategic solutions. But the overriding emphasis in these commissions' recommendations is on further vertically (...) integrating intelligence collection, analysis, and operations. Such proposals to further centralize intelligence and unify command and control are not promising given recent transformations in Jihadist networks to a somewhat “leaderless resistance” in the wake of Al Qaeda's operational demise. To defeat terrorist networks requires grasping novel relations between an englobing messianic moral framework, the rootless intellectual and physical mobility of immigrant and diaspora communities, and the overarching conceptual, emotional, and logistical afford- ances of the Internet. Britain's WWII experience provides salutary lessons for think- ing creatively with decentralized expertise and partially autonomous approaches. (shrink)

Today, public health regulation at all levels faces unprecedented challenges both at home and abroad. The September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., by the Al Qaeda terrorist network and the anthrax bioterrorism that followed shortly thereafter have put public health regulation at the forefront of homeland security. The anthrax scare, in particular, has greatly tested the American public health system, calling into question whether the United States and its component states and localities are prepared to (...) handle a major outbreak of infectious disease, such as smallpox, in a future bioterrorist action. While the response of public health agencies was commendable, especially in light of the magnitude of the assaults, it is manifestly clear that the American public health system will be hard pressed to meet similar challenges that may lie ahead.The events of fall 2001 follow a period of major challenges for public health. The AIDS pandemic has killed millions of people throughout the globe, especially in Africa and other parts of the developing world. (shrink)

The general idea of this investigation is to emphasize the elusiveness of the concept of terrorism and the pitfalls of the so-called “War on Terror” by way of confronting, roughly, the reflections made in the immediate following of 9/11 by Habermas and Derrida on the legacy of Enlightenment, globalization and tolerance, with Foucault’s concept of biopolitics seen as the modern political paradigm and Agamben’s understanding of “the state of exception” in the context of liberal democratic governments. The main argument will (...) state that the modern Western individual and the modern terrorist are in a way linked together as products of the same biopolitical network. So I shall argue that religious fundamentalism and international terrorism are not external factors to the Western civilization, nor even some radical late forms of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ threatening the Western ‘way of life,’ but phenomena revealing what we could call, borrowing J. Derrida’s biological metaphor, a “crisis of autoimmunization” of Western neo-liberal democracies. The only long-term solution to the threat of global terrorism would have to involve the “deconstruction” of our common notion of tolerance and the experience of an unconditional hospitality that is actually the inversion of the terrorist action that is threatening us “from within,” according to Derrida. But we cannot reasonably hope for this radical change in our relationship to others unless we aren’t really trying to modify the relationship to the self that is prevalent in contemporary Western societies: a vision of us as self-encapsulated monads or ‘nuclear’ selves, for whom genuine community life is, at the most, only a nostalgic evocation of a past long gone, and the respect for the others, a strategic name for moral indifference. (shrink)

Mark Osiel’s The End of Reciprocity: Terror, Torture and the Law of War provides detailed discussions of a number of important moral and legal issues arising for the United States in its ongoing response to the threats posed by the Al Qaeda terrorist network.Thanks to Andrew Alexandra for comments on this paper. The material in the first section of this critical review is derived from a short review of this book I wrote for the International Harvard Review vol. 31 (...) no. 1 March 2009 p.84. The specific focus is the United States of America (USA) deployed counter-terrorist methods of sustained detention, enhanced interrogation and targeted killing of suspected terrorists.Osiel offers a distinctive and provocative view on these issues, and displays a wide knowledge of relevant literature in a number of fields, including international law, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies. As such, the book ought to be of interest to a wide audience.The book is in four parts. Part One concerns inte .. (shrink)

The social media platform Twitter platform has played a crucial role in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The immediate, flexible nature of tweets plays a crucial role both in spreading information about the movement’s aims and in organizing individual protests. Twitter has also played an important role in the right-wing reaction to BLM, providing a means to reframe and recontextualize activists’ claims in a more sinister light. The ability to bring about social change depends on the balance of these (...) two forces, and in particular which side can capture and maintain sustained attention. The present study examines 2 years worth of tweets about BLM (about 118 million in total). Timeseries analysis reveals that activists are better at mobilizing rapid attention, whereas right-wing accounts show a pattern of moderate but more sustained activity driven by reaction to political opponents. Topic modeling reveals differences in how different political groups talk about BLM. Most notably, the murder of George Floyd appears to have solidified a right-wing counter-framing of protests as arising from dangerous “terrorist” actors. The study thus sheds light on the complex network and rhetorical effects that drive the struggle for online attention to the BLM movement. (shrink)

Combating the identity problem is crucial and urgent as false identity has become a common denominator of many serious crimes, including mafia trafficking and terrorism. Without correct identification, it is very difficult for law enforcement authority to intervene, or even trace terrorists’ activities. Amongst several identity attributes, personal names are commonly, and effortlessly, falsified or aliased by most criminals. Typical approaches to detecting the use of false identity rely on the similarity measure of textual and other content-based characteristics, which are (...) usually not applicable in the case of highly deceptive, erroneous and unknown descriptions. This barrier can be overcome through analysis of link information displayed by the individual in communication behaviours, financial interactions and social networks. In particular, this paper presents a novel link-based approach that improves existing techniques by integrating multiple link properties in the process of similarity evaluation. It is utilised in a hybrid model that proficiently combines both text-based and link-based measures of examined names to refine the justification of their similarity. This approach is experimentally evaluated against other link-based and text-based techniques, over a terrorist-related dataset, with further generalization to a similar problem occurring in publication databases. The empirical study demonstrates the great potential of this work towards developing an effective identity verification system. (shrink)

Patterns in contemporary conflict highlight the failures of traditional views of the relationship between humanity and technology. This paper proposes that modern conflict is characterized by something called “dissimulation,” referring to numerous phenomena together emphasizing the inadequacies of conceiving man as the overseeing creator of technological advancement. It shows rather that man, particularly man in conflict, is always already implicated and concealed within complex technological networks and mediums, wherein humanity is just another player amongst others. This paper diagnoses and (...) defines the condition of “dissimulation” in drone warfare, modern partisanship and terrorism, raising further the question of the conceptualization of a technological object in doing so. It highlights the danger of an observed technological tendency too, particularly in terms of its shaping of contemporary conflict as well as our relationship to space and time. Having considered dissimulation’s characteristic phenomena and effects, a strategy for dealing with it is then suggested. (shrink)

Currently, the Internet information and communication network has become an integral part of human life. People use social networks such as Twitter, VKontakte, Facebook, etc., to establish global contacts, exchange opinions, gain knowledge, etc. The active participation of not only individual users, but also information organizations in the entire world space makes it necessary to develop measures that correspond to modern trends in the development of information and communication technologies to ensure national security, in particular, the organization of events (...) related to countering the strengthening of ideas of extremism and terrorism. Countering the spread of aggressive information on the global network is an urgent problem of society and government agencies, this task is solved by filtering unwanted Internet resources. However, terrorist and extremist groups rationally use web technologies to perform various functions, including information dissemination, propaganda, fundraising and extremist missions. In such a situation, the Internet poses a threat to national security. In this paper, we investigate the issue of creating semantic analysis models to identify extremist messages in the Kazakh language. For the study, a proprietary text corpus was assembled and models based on bigrams and word input methods were proposed. According to the results of experiments, the proposed model shows the highest indicators for evaluating machine learning methods. (shrink)

While in Western discourse terrorism first referred to the “Reign of Terror” imposed by the Jacobin state in France, in recent decades it has become increasingly associated with non-state actors. Studies on the undertheorized concept of “state terrorism” have by and large neglected its role in liberal democratic states. In this essay I attempt to re-establish the link between the state and terror by challenging the Weberian definition of the state as holding “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical (...) force.” In 1990, the European Parliament called upon each of its member states to dismantle the formations popularly known as “Gladio,” the clandestine organizations stationed in NATO countries during the 1950s to counter potential Soviet invasions. Investigations ranging from Italy’s Operation Gladio in 1990 to the recent Ergenekon Affair in Turkey reveal that many terrorist activities were perpetrated by those intrastate clandestine military networks. The aim of the essay is thus to bring the agentival state back into terrorism studies through an analysis of Gladio operations in Cold War Europe. (shrink)

Biopolitics, originally interpreted as the subfield of political science focusing on biological (evolutionary) factors involved in political behavior, has faced conceptual and organizational differences during the forty-year period of its development. It has recently been redefined as the totality of all applications of biology to social and political concepts, problems and practical issues and concerns. In these new terms, biopolitics represents a promising interdisciplinary area of research, whose potential with respect to political philosophy and political science is exemplified by its (...) application to the following issues: (i) Collective violence (war, terrorism, etc.); (ii) Ethnocentrism; (iii) Hierarchies and networks: and (iv) Neurochemical factors of social behavior. The prerequisite for the successof biopolitics is its collaboration with the humanities and social sciences in investigating the multi-level “Homo politicus”. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the analysis of features of functioning of the digital government in the Chinese State in the first decades of the 21-st century and the perspectives of its further development. In this work the authors give a brief description of the essence of phenomenon of digital government in general. The article explores the specific features of this process in the People’s Republic of China in the third millennium. This research examines the influence of functioning of e-government (...) bodies in Сhina on the internal political situation in the country – taking into account such aspects as building a dialogue between authorities and society, perfection of the public service system providing the Chinese citizens with essential public goods, the merits and the demerits of China’s online government are taken into account. This article examines such significant factors in the development of e-government in China as the impact of the global situation at the present stage on international politics and the country’s information security system. This article analyzes the features of the relationship between the Chinese authorities and media corporations operating on the Internet market of the Middle Kingdom, and studies the reasons for the contradictions between them. The study also comprehended strategy of the authorities of the People’s Republic of China in matters of information security of the state, including the active use of Chinese hackers in network conflicts with Western countries, and the actions of special units of the Chinese armed forces created to counter foreign cyber terrorism. (shrink)

The essay considers contemporary surveillance strategies from a Christian ethical perspective. It discusses first surveillance as a form of speech in the light of biblical themes of truthfulness, then draws on principles of subsidiarity and solidarity. Surveillance is dignified as human work whilst its dehumanizing outcomes are challenged. It is concluded that surveillance must contribute to human dignity and that accountability for data must follow a revised model of subsidiarity, appropriate to network rather than linear socio-political relationships. Mutual responsibility for (...) one another's data-image is derived from solidarity which, further, offers a response to the angst of a culture of suspicion. (shrink)

A number of the men who would become the 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. They were pulled over by police officers for speeding or caught by random inspection without a driver’s license. For United States government commissions and the press, these brushes with the law were missed opportunities. For some police officers though, they were of personal and professional significance. These officers replayed the incidents of contact with the 19 men, which lay bare the uncertainty of every (...) encounter, whether a traffic stop, or with someone taking photos of a landmark. Representatives from law enforcement began to design policies to include local police in national intelligence, with the idea of capitalizing on what patrol officers already do in dealing with the general public. Several initiatives were launched, among these, the Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative. Routine reporting of suspicious activity was developed into steps for gathering, assessing and sharing terrorism-related information with a larger law enforcement and intelligence network. Through empirical analysis of counterterrorism efforts and recent scholarship on it, this chapter discusses prevention, preemption, and anticipation as three technologies of security, focusing on how each deals with uncertainty. The Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, this analysis suggests, is an anticipatory technology which constitutes police officers and intelligence analysts as subjects who work in a mode of uncertainty. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to describe the social networks of the Maghrebis in Alicante, some of the problems they face in their daily life, and the role played by the “mosque” as a place not only of prayer but also of mutual help and support. At the same time, the analysis shows that Islamophobia has increased in the city, as it has done in other places in Spain and Europe following the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks, with the (...) resulting rejection of the Maghrebis clearly seen in their relationship with local inhabitants and in some of the local authorities’ political decisions. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the analysis of features of functioning of the digital government in the Chinese State in the first decades of the 21-st century and the perspectives of its further development. In this work the authors give a brief description of the essence of phenomenon of digital government in general. The article explores the specific features of this process in the People’s Republic of China in the third millennium. This research examines the influence of functioning of e-government (...) bodies in Сhina on the internal political situation in the country – taking into account such aspects as building a dialogue between authorities and society, perfection of the public service system providing the Chinese citizens with essential public goods, the merits and the demerits of China’s online government are taken into account. This article examines such significant factors in the development of e-government in China as the impact of the global situation at the present stage on international politics and the country’s information security system. This article analyzes the features of the relationship between the Chinese authorities and media corporations operating on the Internet market of the Middle Kingdom, and studies the reasons for the contradictions between them. The study also comprehended strategy of the authorities of the People’s Republic of China in matters of information security of the state, including the active use of Chinese hackers in network conflicts with Western countries, and the actions of special units of the Chinese armed forces created to counter foreign cyber terrorism. (shrink)

What exactly is complexity science? Two's company, three is complexity ; Disorder rules, OK? ; Chaos and all that jazz ; Mob mentality ; Getting connected -- What can complexity science do for me? Forecasting financial markets ; Tackling traffic networks and climbing the corporate ladder ; Looking for Mr./Mrs. Right ; Coping with conflict : next-generation wars and global terrorism -- Catching a cold, avoiding super-flu and curing cancer ; The mother of all complexities : our nanoscale quantum (...) world ; To infinity and beyond. (shrink)

In 2005, seven European countries signed the so-called Prüm Treaty to increase transnational collaboration in combating international crime, terrorism and illegal immigration. Three years later, the Treaty was adopted into EU law. EU member countries were now obliged to have systems in place to allow authorities of other member states access to nationally held data on DNA, fingerprints, and vehicles by August 2011. In this paper, we discuss the conditions of possibility for the Prüm network to emerge, and argue that (...) rather than a linear ascent towards technological and political convergence and harmonisation, the story of Prüm is heterogeneous and halting. This is reflected also in the early stages of implementing the Prüm Decision which has proven to be more challenging than it was hoped by the drivers of the Prüm process. In this sense, the Prüm network sits uncomfortably with success stories of forensic science . Instead of telling a story of heroic science, the story of Prüm articulates the European dream: one in which goods, services, and people live and travel freely and securely. (shrink)

When advanced technologies of globalization that are closely associated with secular cosmopolitics are opportunistically employed by fundamentalist politico-theologies for their own particular purposes, an essential irresolution of territory, jurisdiction and programmatic projection is revealed. Where some may wish to identify an ideal correspondence between a global political sphere into which multiple differences might be adjudicated and the visual, geographic representation of a single planetary space, this conjunction is dubious and highly conditional. Instead multiple territorial projections and competing claims on space (...) are also generative of the very qualities of the spatial as a political medium altogether. For example, the well-publicized use of satellite-based mapping and telecommunications tools, such as Google Earth, by the terrorist group that attacked Mumbai in November 2008, raises several knotty and important questions about how contrary comprehensive images of the world can make use of one another in ways that undermine the ‘unitotality’ of global territory. It is not that Google and Jihad are ‘equivalent’ or even ‘translatable’, but rather because they are not, they are in practice interoperable. Instead links between urbanism, cosmography, and the socialization of planetary software networks demonstrate the centrality of design to the ongoing fashioning of the territory of territories, the geoscape. (shrink)

The police’s use of facial recognition technologies allows them to verify identification in real-time by mapping facial features into indicators that can be compared with other data stored in its database or in online social networks. Advances in facial recognition technologies have changed law enforcement agencies’ operations, improving their ability to identify suspects, investigate crimes, and deter criminal behavior. Most applications are used in tracking and identifying potential terrorists, searching for abducted and missing persons, and security surveillance at airports, (...) national borders, and large public gatherings. However, for facial recognition technologies to fulfill their potential, they must not only be adopted by the police, but the public must also support their routine use. Using a secondary data analysis of a public opinion survey conducted by the Pew Research Center among a representative sample of US residents (N = 5307), we investigated the factors associated with the public`s expectations about the positive and negative outcomes of the police’s adoption of facial recognition technologies. Our results show that public attitudes to FRT are balanced, indicating awareness of the public for potential advantages, but also disadvantages of police adoption of FRT. Privacy considerations and familiarity with the technology were found to be critical for the explanation of public attitudes expressing both positive and negative expectations from the police adoption of facial recognition technology. Our study contributes to the understanding of the factors associated with public attitudes police’s use of facial recognition technologies. (shrink)

In response to critical discussions of her Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights by William McBride, Omar Dahbour, Kory Schaff, and David Schweickart, Gould grants that globalization and U.S. Empire are intertwined, but she argues that this does not refute that global and transnational interconnections and networks are developing that are in need of substantive democracy. Gould further seeks to clarify two main interpretive misunderstandings of her critics. First, even though she rejects “all affected” as a criterion for determining the (...) participants of institutional decision-making, she does leave room for participation of the “affected” when the fulfillment of their basic rights is at stake. Second, she argues that her vision of democratizing economic institutions is not fundamentallydifferent from the traditional idea of workplace democracy. Other topics addressed are the normative grounding of human rights, the error of reducing human rights to positive law, and the incoherency of the notion that democracy can be imposed by the barrel of a gun. Finally, Gould maintains that empathy, if properly understood, should be extended to terrorists, while we should also strongly condemn their rejection of noncombatant immunity. [Abstract prepared by the Editors.]. (shrink)

Sustaining the military targeting of the everyday sites and spaces of urban life in the contemporary period is a new constellation of military doctrine and theory. In this the spectre of state-vs-state military conflict is seen to be in radical retreat. Instead, the new doctrine is centred around the idea that a wide spectrum of global insurgencies and ambient threats now operates across the social, technical, political, cultural and financial networks which straddle transnational scales while simultaneously penetrating the everyday (...) spaces, sites and circulations of global cities. Such lurking threats are deemed by the latest theorist of ‘asymmetric’ or ‘irregular’ warfare to camouflage themselves within the ‘clutter’ of cities at home and abroad for concealment against traditional forms of military targeting. Addressing the Mumbai attacks through the lens of this emerging constellation of military and security doctrine, this article highlights three important implications of viewing the everyday sites, spaces and circulations of cities as the key strategic ‘battlespaces’ of our era. These involve, first, the way contemporary doctrine views urban terrorist attacks as part of a broad terrain of trans- national organized ‘information operations’. Second, such paradigms prefigure a radical blurring between local and global scales, the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of nation-states, and between policing, military power and state intelligence. And, finally, emerging urban security propagates hyper-militarized perspectives in which every aspect of urban life is transposed as an act of limitless and boundless warfare. (shrink)

The challenges facing the life-worlds of political societies in the Islamic world require a radical shift of perspective that can improve our understanding of the contemporary situation of human rights politics. Not only the classical formulation of secularism, which aims at liberating the public sphere from domination of ‘the sacred’, but also the political-theological approach, which addresses the problems of modernity within the context of a disguised and refurbished dominance of ‘the transcendence’, suffer from and share a basic insufficiency in (...) handling human rights issues. According to these approaches, the basic issue stems from a realignment in relations between logics of the sovereign and the sacred or a redefinition of the position of state against religion. In this article, my object is shifting the scope of discussion concerning the rights beyond this logic of sovereignty by adopting an approach which provides a political ground for discussing the intermingling of religion in the life-world. From my point of view, the first step that should be taken to deepen our understanding of the argument of freedom is to unveil the nature of the sacred within the framework of a power network that longs for control over the whole lives of individuals constituting the society. In this regard, by going beyond the concepts such as fanaticism, fundamentalism or terrorism provided by ‘state mentality’, the significance of lifestyle politics for ‘rights talk’ will become more evident. From this point of view, the detection and critique of a zone of ‘weak citizenship’ constructed through restrictions stemming from the values and norms arising from the perceptions of particular communities organized through family, tradition and justice are essential. Such a critique will pave the way for a radical politicization of lifestyles by way of criteria of the demands for equal respect and dignity. (shrink)

In recent years there has been concern among law enforcement and national security organizations about the use of “anonymous” prepaid mobile phone service and its purported role in supporting criminal and terrorist activities. As a result, a number of countries have implemented registration requirements for such service. Privacy rights advocates oppose such regulatory measures, arguing that there is little practical value in attempting to register prepaid mobile devices, and the issue raises important questions about a citizen's entitlement to anonymity (...) in the ownership of a networked communications device. This article provides an overview of the issue and presents findings drawn from a recent study on prepaid mobile phone regulation in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. The article concludes by suggesting that there are significant problems with the claim that mandatory registration of prepaid mobile phone service is a necessary or an effective regulatory course of action. (shrink)

From climate change, debt, and refugee crises, to energy security, environmental disasters, and terrorism, the events that lead nightly newscasts and drive public policy demand a global perspective. In the twentieth century the world sought solutions through formal institutions of international governance such as like the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the World Bank, but present-day our responses to global realities are often more provisional, improvisational, and contingent. Tracing this uneven history in order to identify principal actors, contesting (...) ideologies, and competing rhetoric, Negative Cosmopolitanism challenges the Kantian ideal of cosmopolitanism as the precondition for a perpetual global peace. Uniting researchers working on contemporary problems with those studying related issues of the past--including slavery, industrial capitalism, and corporate imperialism--essays in this volume scrutinize the entanglement of cosmopolitanism within expanding networks of trade and global capital from the eighteenth-century to the present. By doing so, the contributors pinpoint the ways in which whole populations have been unwillingly caught up in a capitalist reality that has little in common with the earlier ideals of cosmopolitanism. A model for provoking new and necessary questions about neoliberalism, biopolitics, colonialism, citizenship, and xenophobia, Negative Cosmopolitanism establishes a fresh take on the representation of globalization and modern life in history and literature. (shrink)