ABSTRACT Forming part of its wider counter-terrorism apparatus, the United Kingdom’s “Prevent duty” imposes a legal requirement on various sectors to show “due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”. Since its introduction in 2015, the duty has been subject to increasing empirical research, with a particular focus upon the education sector. There has been, however, a distinct lack of scholarly works that specifically explore the issue of far-right extremism within this context, reflected in the often-reluctant policy development in this area. This article directly addresses this gap in research by drawing upon the qualitative experiences of 39 respondents with responsibility for the implementation of the duty within various schools and colleges across Sussex. Thus, through an empirical exploration of the challenges and complexities attached to its enactment, this article is one of the first to offer insights into educators’ negotiations of the duty in relation to far-right extremism. Within the data, three themes were particularly dominant: the normalisation and mainstreaming of far-right narratives; the associated challenges with the implementation of Prevent duty on the ground within classrooms; and considerations around the effective enactment of the duty. The findings demonstrate that addressing far-right extremism within schools and colleges is predictably problematic and closely reflects developments in wider society. It is also argued here that although addressing far-right extremism needs urgent attention, there should be a concerted effort to avoid the same oversights experienced with previous attempts at Prevent-related counter-terrorism.

Gavin Sullivan’s new book, The Law of the List, offers a rich and textured analysis of the emergence, transformation, and counter-terrorism work done by the United Nations 1267 sanctions regime. Fo...

Marco Pinfari, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the American University in Cairo, has produced a monograph which is both well-researched and eminently readable. Spanning centuries ...

The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media takes its place amongst key texts discussing media and terrorism, such as Brigitte Nacos’s Terrorism and the Media and Mass Mediated Terr...

ABSTRACT The Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) community has produced an important volume of work assessing and critiquing epistemological understandings of the War on (of) Terror. Largely missing from this body of work, however, is the experience of those who are directly impacted by the policies of this global phenomenon. By rethinking the War on Terror as an experience of war, I posit a wider understanding, by reassessing its temporal and spatial boundaries, but more significantly, the ways in which it is experienced. By providing a wider understanding of war and expanding our knowledge of its boundaries, I am able to show that those impacted by the policies of the War on Terror can claim to have been subject to an experience of war, even when that experience takes place outside of the war zone. This reflection, however, serves a larger purpose, which is to act as a call to the CTS community to centre the lived experiences of those impacted by the War on Terror in their work and decision-making when engaging with policy and policymakers. This represents a call for an ethical re-centring of CTS scholars to the violence of the War “of” Terror, by reminding us of the many ways in which harm can occur.

ABSTRACT The well-established argument in the literature suggests that the higher state capacity is associatedwith the lower chance of experiencing civil conflict or higherchance of defeating the violent non-state groups. However, theliterature does not sufficiently address how these groups respondto increasing state capacity, and how their responses to that shapethe dynamic of political violence. I investigate the impact of statecapacity on terrorist group termination by exploring the waysterrorist groups respond to increasing state capacity. I argue thatincreasing state capacity might lead to a set of responses fromthe terror group in a way that it might induce the group to producemore terrorist violence to show that the group can still persist. Itmay also encourage the group to provide positive and negativeincentives to its constituents in order to rehabilitate its physicalcapacity to operate, and to prevent a shift of popular support a wayfrom the group towards to the government. Thus, such responsesof the group will decrease the likelihood of its terror campaign. Ialso expect that these arguments are especially relevant for ethnicor religious terror groups. The results of the empirical analysessupport these theoretical expectations.

Over recent years, social scientists have reached something of a consensus on the dominant role of television in a global society, arguing that it not only provides viewers with vital information t...

Turkey’s protracted political conflict – the Kurdish Conflict – continues to destroy the lives of thousands of citizens in the Republic of Turkey. Among many different actors, at the heart of this ...

ABSTRACTThe complexities which beset any attempts to ascribe a foundational ethic to matters of a political stripe are well known, and continue to provoke fierce debate within studies of international relations, geopolitics and security studies. Unsurprisingly, these questions have taken on crucial import within the sub-field of critical terrorism studies (CTS), as authors grapple with the range of counter-terrorism, counter-radicalisation and counter-extremism practices enacted by the Western state as part of an ongoing ‘War on Terror.’ And while much of this scholarship has been invaluable in problematizing the concept of ‘terrorism’ per se, normative questions have proven somewhat more elusive. Through a reading of the film Eye in the Sky, along with its take on the controversial counter-terrorism practice of targeted drone assassinations, this article reiterates the case for an ethical approach which takes radical difference as the basis for any engagement with the Other. Moreover, and following international relations authors of a poststructuralist lineage, it will be argued that supplementing Levinasian ethics with Derridean deconstruction can open up new and useful ways of approaching such seemingly intractable ethical conundrums.

ABSTRACT The employment of female suicide bombers continues to be a trend among terrorist organisations. Due to their sensationalist nature, suicide bombings attract extensive media attention and are often covered through different, though intentional, lenses. While existing literature has identified various frames that the media used to portray female suicide bombers, there is not yet a study focusing on the framing of those affiliated with Boko Haram, an organisation known for its high rate of children and women involved in suicide attacks. Investigating media coverage of suicide bombing events carried out by Boko Haram’s female bombers after the Chibok abduction reveals two prominent frames: the liable agents frame, which is utilised mostly in local sources, and the vulnerable and helpless girls frame, in international sources. While a polarised construction of Boko Haram’s female suicide bombers can have both negative and positive implications, a comprehensive portrayal that treats these women as more than either perpetrators of violence or victims is needed. This can only be accomplished if journalists understand the consequences of their news writing routines and the media sources’ organisational pressures and constraints are adjusted to accommodate a more complex representation of the female suicide bombers in Boko Haram.