Journal articles on the topic 'Counter-terrorism governance'

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1

Sun, Shengkun. "Countermeasures for “East Turkistan” Terrorism." Advances in Social Science and Culture 4, no. 2 (April 26, 2022): p49. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/assc.v4n2p49.

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Under China’s high-pressure counter-terrorism situation, the characteristics of “East Turkistan” terrorist organizations’ looseness, risk liquidity and behavioral uncertainty are becoming more and more obvious, challenging the established counter-terrorism model. To adapt to the new situation and new risks, we must not only rely on military means to suppress East Turkistan terrorism, but also strengthen the social governance of East Turkistan terrorism and dismantle its social base and extremist ideology, so as to break away from the “more counter-terrorism” approach. The more we fight against terrorism, the more we can cut off the root of the development of East Turkistan terrorism.
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Sun, Shengkun. "Countermeasures for “East Turkistan” Terrorism." Advances in Social Science and Culture 4, no. 2 (April 26, 2022): p49. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/assc.v4n2p49.

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Under China’s high-pressure counter-terrorism situation, the characteristics of “East Turkistan” terrorist organizations’ looseness, risk liquidity and behavioral uncertainty are becoming more and more obvious, challenging the established counter-terrorism model. To adapt to the new situation and new risks, we must not only rely on military means to suppress East Turkistan terrorism, but also strengthen the social governance of East Turkistan terrorism and dismantle its social base and extremist ideology, so as to break away from the “more counter-terrorism” approach. The more we fight against terrorism, the more we can cut off the root of the development of East Turkistan terrorism.
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3

Kalyadin, A. "Underestimated Resource of Global Governance." World Economy and International Relations, no. 1 (2014): 21–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.20542/0131-2227-2014-1-21-31.

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The article analyses the UN Security Council‘s leverage to influence military-political processes related to arms control and counter-terrorism, highlighting the need to make fuller use of the UNSC enforcement potential. The author puts forward specific proposals for a more thorough involvement of the UNSC in the global activities to counter WMD proliferation and terrorism in order to improve global governance of international security and to guarantee progress of humanity on the path of sustainable peace and arms reduction. It is argued that Russia, with its traditions in defence of peace and disarmament, is in a position to assume leadership in working out arrangements aimed at efficient functioning of this principal decision-making authority of the international community for managing international security.
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Monar, Jörg. "EU internal security governance: the case of counter-terrorism." European Security 23, no. 2 (December 7, 2013): 195–209. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09662839.2013.856308.

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5

Han, Na, Runhua Tang, and Jianjun Wang. "The Communication Characteristics and Intervention of Terrorism-related Public Opinion An Analysis of Manchester Bombing Terrorist Attack." Tobacco Regulatory Science 7, no. 5 (September 30, 2021): 3671–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.18001/trs.7.5.1.144.

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[Purpose / Significance] The crisis of misinformation will increase in 5G.The spread of terrorism-related information in sudden violent and terrorist incidents in social networks has a great impact on national security and counter-terrorism work. The communication characteristics and impact of terrorism-related information is the guarantee of counter-terrorism work. The construction of counter-terrorism intelligence intervention strategy is in line with the scope of national security, which also is the embodiment of the national security governance system and counter-terrorism capabilities. [Methods/Procedures] Based on the social network analysis method and analyzing the communication characteristic of terrorism-related information and the factors of intervention, this paper proposed an intervention mechanism for terror-related information based on online social network. The proposed mechanism consists of three aspects: communication topic, communication structure and opinion leaders. [Results/Conclusion] The study finds out that we should strengthen the role of opinion leaders in information diffusion of news and government media, in terrorist incident, the network structure is loose and free on the whole, the spread of information influences the network structure and interaction. Government should supervise a real-time control on information emotional trend and hot topic according to different types of network structure characteristics, guiding the positive information and cooling down the harmful ones.
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Morris, P. Sean. "Regulatory counter-terrorism: a critical appraisal of proactive global governance." International Affairs 95, no. 4 (July 1, 2019): 939–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz062.

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7

Aradau, Claudia. "‘Crowded Places Are Everywhere We Go’: Crowds, Emergency, Politics." Theory, Culture & Society 32, no. 2 (January 8, 2015): 155–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263276414562429.

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‘Crowded places’ have recently been problematized as objects of terrorist attacks. Following this redefinition of terrorism, crowds have been reactivated at the heart of a security continuum of counter-terrorism, emergency planning and policing. How does the crowd referent recalibrate security governance, and with what political effects? This article argues that several subtle reconfigurations take place. First, counter-terrorism governance derives the knowledge of crowds from ‘generic events’ as unexpected, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. This move activates 19th-century knowledge about crowds as pathological, while the spatial referent of ‘crowded places’ reconfigures workplaces as crowded places and workers as crowds. Second, new guidance for emergency planning and policing deploys a more rational approach to crowds, put forward in recent psychosocial approaches. These modes of knowledge derive ‘generic crowds’ from normal social relations rather than extraordinary events. Generic events and generic crowds effectively depoliticize crowds, as they exclude a more radical generic politics, in which crowds are not derivable, but negate determination.
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8

CHUTIA, Tribedi. "TAJIKISTAN: AN EVALUATION OF TERRORISM AND COUNTER-TERRORISM POLICIES SINCE INDEPENDENCE." Conflict Studies Quarterly, no. 39 (May 4, 2022): 37–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.24193/csq.39.3.

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Tajikistan, a country overloaded with the horriϐic memory of bloody civil war, an increasingly devastated economy, and the ineradicable misfortune of having long borders with Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, has been reigning consistently by the Emomali Rahmon’s regime for three decades with wide-scale surveillance and draconian acts. Taking advantage of the weak governance, poor military infrastructure and porous border, Islamic extremists and cross border terrorist groups have also been seen persistently deepening their inϐluence in the region either by perpetrating a series of terrorist activities in the terrain or joining Tajik national into their organizations. This paper presents a detailed analysis of how and to what extent terrorism has posed security threats to Tajikistan through examining the Global Terrorism Database and RAND database that includes the numbers and intensity of the terrorist incidents in the territory since independence. It systematically analyses the prominent terrorist groups and, more particularly, the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), which has widened its network in the region. The paper also makes a sincere effort to evaluate the counter-terrorism acts adopted and implemented by Tajikistan. Moreover, the article also examines how the Tajik’s authority constructs state discourse on terrorism by delegitimising social acceptance of the terrorist on the one hand and projecting the state as the severe victim of terrorism on the other. Keywords: Terrorism, Tajikistan, Terrorist Attacks, Counter-terrorism Act, Taliban
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9

Fanta Choramo, Petros. "Acts Considered as Terrorism Crimes and Compatibility of Counter-terrorist Measures to International Standards: In Context of Ethiopia." Athens Journal of Law 8, no. 4 (September 30, 2022): 487–504. http://dx.doi.org/10.30958/ajl.8-4-8.

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Existence of accurate legal definition of terrorism is important for society and for governance to enable successful investigation and prosecution of terrorists within the established judicial system. Without international agreement on a definition of terrorism, it has not been possible to adopt a treaty covering all its forms. In other words, without a clear and precise definition of terrorism, it becomes impossible and impractical to talk about concepts and counter-terrorism measures in one country. Moreover, without a definition for terrorism, how can we define and investigate the correctness of those who practice it are? Further, even though terrorism is a danger to the peace, security and development of the country and a serious threat to the peace and security of the world at large and view of these challenges, the Government of Ethiopia has been exerting the necessary effort to prevent and combat terrorism through enacting and effectively implementing domestic laws, it must in conformity with the human rights law, and international humanitarian law. Thus, the basic objective of this Article was to critically observe and examine definition of terrorism, acts that constitute terrorism and other acts which can be considered as contributory to terrorism crimes under Ethiopian relevant laws adopted to combat terrorism; specially Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism Crimes Proclamation No.1176/2020. Under this article author also critically made analyses on the manner how current Ethiopian government adopted the new counter terrorism law and consideration given to it. Keywords: Definition of Terrorism, Counter Terrorism Movement, Terrorist Acts, Terrorism Crimes, Sub-Ordinate Crimes, Human Rights Approach
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10

Kumar, Rajan, and Biju Thomas. "BRICS in Global Governance: A Gradual but Steady Expansion." Governance and Politics 1, no. 1 (June 2, 2022): 100–113. http://dx.doi.org/10.24833/2782-7062-2022-1-1-100-113.

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BRICS is the most prominent organisation to have emerged in the non-Western sphere in the post-Cold War period. It has crystallised into a formal institution and has begun to play a crucial role in global governance. It has become a visible entity that is increasingly making a mark in global investments, sustainable development, trade negotiations, climate change talks and deliberations on terrorism. The paper focusses on one generic question and three specific questions: First, what purpose does BRICS serve in global governance? Second, has the New Development Bank emerged as a credible source of financing for developing economies? Third, what role has BRICS played in climate change negotiations? And finally, what steps does BRICS take to counter the menace of global terrorism?
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11

Singh, Currun, and Arjun Singh Bedi. "War on Piracy: The conflation of Somali piracy with terrorism in discourse, tactic, and law." Security Dialogue 47, no. 5 (September 30, 2016): 440–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0967010616665275.

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This article argues that since 2005, the global security discourse has confused maritime piracy off the Horn of Africa with terrorism. US and European policymakers and financiers have tapped a vulnerable public imaginary to exaggerate Somali pirates as ‘maritime terrorists’ linked to Al-Shabaab and Al-Qaeda, driving the militarization and legal obfuscation of counter-piracy operations. And while Somali piracy has all but disappeared since 2013, international naval coalitions remain deployed in the Indian Ocean, which is still declared a war risk area. The discursive conflation of piracy and terrorism has thereby launched a tactical War on Piracy that mirrors the War on Terror. While pirates were active, this approach pushed them to become more daring and dangerous in response. Drawing on interviews with piracy stakeholders in Kenya, the article concludes that the tactical extension from counter-terrorism to counter-piracy is unresponsive to the origins, motives, and realities of Somali pirates. The article proposes a shift from military to developmental responses to countering and preventing piracy, with an emphasis on respecting local institutions of law enforcement and governance in Somalia.
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12

Wibisono, Ali A., and Aisha R. Kusumasomantri. "Assessing the Expectations and Limitations of ASEAN-EU Counter-Terrorism Cooperation." JAS (Journal of ASEAN Studies) 8, no. 1 (August 2, 2020): 61. http://dx.doi.org/10.21512/jas.v8i1.6171.

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This research examines the inter-regional security cooperation between ASEAN and the EU with a specific focus on counterterrorism. The research methods are based on a comparison of regional counterterrorism governance between the two regions and a close reading of Plan of Actions for the enhancement of ASEAN-EU relations documents from 2007 to 2018. The results show that CT cooperation is about facilitating a more comprehensive security governance cooperation where European standards and experience are transferred to Southeast Asia for purposes of regional security and diplomatic relations. In addition, this research also shows that EU-ASEAN CT cooperation has not been geared specifically to combat radicalism, or as part of a Counter Violent Extremism program; rather, the inter-regional cooperation has mainly focused on building a common normative framework in responding to terrorism within the corridor of democracy and preempting the terrorist networks from exploiting connectivity networks. Finally, implementation of security and political cooperation between the EU and ASEAN tend to rely on the existing extra-regional dialogue fora within ASEAN as well as direct engagement between the EU and third parties comprising each of the ASEAN states.
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13

Iheonu, Chimere O., and Hyacinth E. Ichoku. "Terrorism and investment in Africa: Exploring the role of military expenditure." Economics and Business Review 8, no. 2 (2022): 92–112. http://dx.doi.org/10.18559/ebr.2022.2.6.

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The aim of this study is to investigate the influence of military expenditure on the relationship between terrorism and investment in twenty-four African countries for the period 2001 to 2018. The study utilizes fixed effects regression with Driscoll and Kraay standard error and cushions the effect of simultaneity and reverse causality using the lags of the regressors as instruments. The empirical results reveal the negative effect of terrorism on both domestic investment and foreign direct investment (FDI). The study further reveals a negative net effect of military expenditure on the relationship between terrorism and investment. Furthermore, it was discovered that a threshold of 2% to 5% of military expenditure in GDP is required for military expenditure to offset the negative effect of terrorism on FDI. The study recommends that counter-terrorism initiatives be tailored more towards inclusive growth policies, increasing access to education, and improving the quality of governance.
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14

Boer, Monica Den. "Counter-Terrorism, Security and Intelligence in the EU: Governance Challenges for Collection, Exchange and Analysis." Intelligence and National Security 30, no. 2-3 (January 22, 2015): 402–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2014.988444.

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15

Tsoukala, Anastassia. "Legitimizing the Shrinking of Democratic Space in Western Liberal Democracies." Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences 2, no. 2 (December 1, 2021): 185–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/25903276-bja10025.

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Abstract This paper aims at making a synthesis of the main discursive schemes at work across Western liberal democracies that have sought to legitimize the introduction of liberty-restricting counter-terrorism policies since the September 11th attacks. Redefinition of the nature of threat, of the attackers’ key features and of endangered values has gone along with the conceptual reversal of the definition of democracy and freedom as political value. The normalization of the ensuing illiberal forms of governance arguably suggests that the shrinking of post-war democratic achievement uncovers above all liberal democracy’s inherent political vulnerability.
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NANCE, MARK T., and M. PATRICK COTTRELL. "A turn toward experimentalism? Rethinking security and governance in the twenty-first century." Review of International Studies 40, no. 2 (June 17, 2013): 277–301. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s026021051300017x.

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AbstractConventional understandings of security cooperation are rooted in the state-centric and materialist assumptions dominant in the Cold War and subscribe to the dictum of the Reagan years, ‘trust but verify’. In today's more complex setting, however, governance arrangements with the most potential to address constantly mutating security threats, such as the concern over nuclear terrorism, may not be those solely designed to ensure compliance, but rather those that are better equipped to identify and solve new problems. This article draws on a burgeoning literature on ‘new’ or ‘experimental’ governance and advances an analytical framework to consider the extent to which states and other actors might be turning toward an alternative set of mechanisms that rely more heavily on non-binding standards and recommendations, peer review, increased participation, and experimentation to generate new knowledge about the challenges they face, even in the ‘hard’ case of security cooperation. It then explores this potential reorientation in two separate, but complementary cases that have emerged as key tools in preventing illicit nuclear proliferation: the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF), which seeks to bolster states' counter-financing of terrorism systems, and the UNSC Resolution 1540 Committee, which guides efforts to fill the governance gaps in the nuclear non-proliferation regime. Although both cases on paper contain more traditional enforcement components, in practice they rely increasingly on experimental governance. The article concludes with an evaluation of the promise and limits of an experimentalist framework in understanding the evolution of governance arrangements in response to a more complex security environment and suggests potential avenues for future research.
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Santen, Emma van. "Combatting organised crime and terrorism in Central Asia." Journal of Financial Crime 25, no. 2 (May 8, 2018): 309–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/jfc-07-2017-0069.

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Purpose This paper aims to examine the shift away from the traditional distinction between organised crime and terrorist groups towards their conceptual convergence under the crime-terror nexus narrative in the context of international security and development policy in post-Soviet Central Asia. It assesses the empirical basis for the crime-terror and state-crime nexus in three Central Asian countries – Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – and argues that the exclusion of the state from the analytical framework undermines the relevance of the crime-terror paradigm for policy-making. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on a literature review of academic research, recent case studies highlighting new empirical evidence in Central Asia and international policy publications. Findings There is a weak empirical connection between organised crime and Islamic extremists, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Hizbut Tahrir, in Central Asia. The state-crime paradigm, including concepts of criminal capture, criminal sovereignty and criminal penetration, hold more explanatory power for international policy in Central Asia. The crime-terror paradigm has resulted in a narrow and ineffective security-oriented law enforcement approach to counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism but does not address the underlying weak state governance structures and political grievances that motivate organised crime and terrorist groups respectively. Originality/value International policy and scholarship is currently focussed on the areas of convergence between organised crime and terrorist groups. This paper highlights the continued relevance of the traditional conceptual separation of terrorist and organised crime groups based on their different motives, methods and relationship with the state, for security and democratic governance initiatives in the under-researched Central Asian region.
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Novikova, Irina. "Terrorism in COVID’s shadow." Urgent Problems of Europe, no. 1 (2022): 180–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.31249/ape/2022.01.07.

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This paper examines the activities of terrorist groups during the COVID-19 pandemic. The author focuses on the comparison between the opportunities offered by the pandemic to terrorist groups and the factors hampering terrorist activities. It could be expected that extremist groups may succeed in exploiting the pandemic to increase recruitment and disruption. But the predicted surge in terrorism did not happen. Coronavirus restrictions disrupted terrorist groups’ operations, travelling and fundraising. However, in some states where the spread of the disease took place in the context of ongoing armed conflict, the terrorist threat has increased. On the whole, the socio-economic consequences of the pandemic had a negative impact on public sentiment, creating a breeding ground for radicalisation on various ideological spectrums. Far-right and Islamist extremist groups have already incorporated COVID-19 into their narratives. The pandemic has provided them with new opportunities to spread extremist propaganda and ideology. The paper shows how terrorist groups have adapted and conducted their activities during the pandemic. Some terrorist and extremist threats have shifted from physical to online environment (communications, financing, propaganda, radicalisation, recruitment, etc.), and a wide range of new technologies and tools have become much more widespread. It is likely that the pandemic, ineffective governance and the withdrawal of Western counter-terrorism contingents from hot zones will contribute to the fact that terrorism (and, in particular, militant Islamism) will remain a global threat within the foreseeable future.
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Müller, Markus-Michael. "Enter 9/11: Latin America and the Global War on Terror." Journal of Latin American Studies 52, no. 3 (June 4, 2020): 545–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022216x20000565.

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AbstractThis article offers an analysis of the transnational discursive construction processes informing Latin American security governance in the aftermath of 9/11. It demonstrates that the Global War on Terror provided an opportunity for external and aligned local knowledge producers in the security establishments throughout the Americas to reframe Latin America's security problems through the promotion of a militarised security epistemology, and derived policies, centred on the region's ‘convergent threats’. In tracing the discursive repercussions of this epistemic reframing, the article shows that, by tapping into these discourses, military bureaucracies throughout the Americas were able to overcome their previous institutional marginalisation vis-à-vis civilian agencies. This development contributed to the renaissance of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism discourses and policies in the region, allowing countries such as Colombia and Brazil to reposition themselves globally by exporting their military expertise for confronting post-9/11 threats beyond the region.
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Eski, Yarin. "The war on meaninglessness: A counter-terrorist self through an absent terrorist other." Ethnography 17, no. 4 (July 24, 2016): 460–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1466138116639984.

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This contribution shall focus on post-9/11 port security, its policing actors and how their occupational, counter-terrorist identity is (re)established. The empirical context of this study is that of operational port police officers and security officers who construct port security in the ports of Rotterdam and Hamburg. Drawing from a multi-sited, ethnographic fieldwork study, specific attention is paid to how operational staff, employed in a highly securitized realm saturated with War on Terror governance, (re)establish their occupational identity through the terrorist other without having ever been confronted, face-to-face, with terrorism. Instead of fighting in a global War on Terror, and given the way they construe their identity through the terrorist other, they endure an everyday War on Meaninglessness.
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Fraihat, Ibrahim, and Taha Yaseen. "Evolving Trends in the Post-Arab Spring Era: Implications for Peace and Stability in the MENA Region." Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 15, no. 3 (July 8, 2020): 331–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1542316620934365.

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The uprisings connected to the Arab Spring have thus far failed to produce social change. The dynamics of these uprisings instead generated a number of trends that are likely to continue to destabilise the Arab world and prevent peace and development. Prevailing trends in the post-Arab Spring era include the prevalence of counter revolutions, widespread violence and armed conflicts, new patterns of alliances, external interventions and thriving proxies, raising sectarian politics, ineffective governance, terrorism, and migration. While these trends have a negative impact on people’s basic demands for socio-economic and political stability and development, they will provide and shape the foundations for other revolutions in the future. To avoid future revolutions and civil wars and stimulate peace and development in the MENA region, those driving patterns of instability will need to be altered.
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Monaghan, Jeffrey. "Security Traps and Discourses of Radicalization: Examining Surveillance Practices Targeting Muslims in Canada." Surveillance & Society 12, no. 4 (June 19, 2014): 485–501. http://dx.doi.org/10.24908/ss.v12i4.4557.

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Security agencies in Canada have become increasingly anxious regarding the threat of domestic radicalization. Defined loosely as “the process of moving from moderate beliefs to extremist belief,” inter-agency security practices aim to categorize and surveil populations deemed at-risk of radicalization in Canada, particularly young Muslims. To detail surveillance efforts against domestic radicalization, this article uses the Access to Information Act (ATIA) to detail the work of Canada’s inter-agency Combating Violent Extremism Working Group (CVEWG). As a network of security governance actors across Canada, the CVEWG is comprised of almost 20 departments and agencies with broad areas of expertise (intelligence, defence, policing, border security, transportation, immigration, etc.). Contributing to critical security studies and scholarship on the sociology of surveillance, this article maps the contours and activities of the CVEWG and uses the ATIA to narrate the production and iteration of radicalization threats through Canadian security governance networks. Tracing the influence of other states – the U.S. and U.K., in particular – the article highlights how surveillance practices that target radicalization are disembedded from particular contexts and, instead, framed around abstractions of menacing Islam. By way of conclusion, it casts aspersions on the expansion of counter-terrorism resources towards combating violent extremism; raising questions about the dubious categories and motives in contemporary practices of the “war on terror.”
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Tellidis, Ioannis, and Anna Glomm. "Street art as everyday counterterrorism? The Norwegian art community’s reaction to the 22 July 2011 attacks." Cooperation and Conflict 54, no. 2 (October 31, 2018): 191–210. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0010836718807502.

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This article looks at a project involving nine internationally acclaimed street artists who agreed to make murals in Oslo, following the 22 July 2011 attacks. Resting on the art project’s aims (‘to promote universal human rights and to counter the intolerance and xenophobia that can give rise to violence and justify terrorism’) and the art community’s reaction, the article argues that street art’s visibility and agency offer alternative ways of thinking about, and approaching, international relations (IR). The article examines the streets as the space where artists express and engage the ‘everyday’; and as the medium that allows artists to bring art to the public (as opposed to galleries or exhibitions the public chooses to visit). We argue that the incorporation of street art’s spatiality and aesthetics into ‘everyday IR’ supports more critical frameworks that (a) expose the exceptional logic(s) of illiberal governance; (b) enable the visibility of marginalised and/or dissenting voices in society; and (c) explore experimental, eclectic and creative approaches of doing/thinking everyday security, community and peace.
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Lindley, Jade. "Criminal Threats Undermining Indo-Pacific Maritime Security: Can International Law Build Resilience?" Journal of Asian Economic Integration 2, no. 2 (August 18, 2020): 206–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2631684620940477.

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Maritime security in the Indo-Pacific region is strategically important to not only the surrounding states, but also those with an interest in its good governance, to support safe passage and natural resources extraction. Criminal threats, such as maritime piracy and illegal fishing, enabled by corruption and the potential for terrorism, undermine regional maritime security and therefore, there is incentive for states to respond cooperatively to secure the region. Drawing on broken windows crime theory, implicitly supporting the continuation of criminal threats within the region may enables exiting crimes to proliferate. With varying legal and political frameworks and interests across the Indo-Pacific region, achieving cooperation and harmonisation in response to regional maritime-based criminal threats can be challenging. As such, to respond to criminal threats that undermine maritime security, this article argues that from a criminological perspective, aligning states through existing international law enables cooperative regional responses. Indeed, given the prevalence of corruption within the region enabling serious criminal threats, harmonising through existing counter-corruption architecture may be a suitable platform to build from.
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McGovern, Mark. "The Dilemma of Democracy: Collusion and the State of Exception." Studies in Social Justice 5, no. 2 (December 24, 2011): 213–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v5i2.988.

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In what sense might the authoritarian practices and suspension of legal norms as means to combat the supposed threat of “terrorism,” within and by contemporary western democratic states, be understood as a problem of and not for democracy? That question lies at the heart of this article. It will be explored through the theoretical frame offered in the work of Giorgio Agamben on the state of exception and the example of British state collusion in non-state violence in the North of Ireland. The North of Ireland provides a particularly illuminating case study to explore how the state of exception—the suspension of law and of legal norms and the exercise of arbitrary decision—has increasingly become a paradigm of contemporary governance. In so doing it brings into question not only the traditional conceptualization of the “democratic dilemma” of liberal democratic states “confronting terrorism” but also challenge dominant paradigms of transitional justice that generally fail to problematize the liberal democratic order. After outlining Agamben’s understanding of the state of exception the article will chart the development of “exceptional measures” and the creation of a permanent state of emergency in the North, before critically exploring the role of collusion as an aspect of counter-insurgency during the recent conflict. The paper will argue that the normalization of exceptional measures, combined with the need to delimit the explicitness of constitutional provision for the same, provided a context for the emergence of collusion as a paradigm case for the increasing replication of colonial practices into the core activity of the contemporary democratic state.
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Dolgoshein, P. S. "Improving the Regulatory Framework for Countering Extremism in the European Union (Case Study of Finland)." Moscow Journal of International Law, no. 1 (March 31, 2021): 89–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.24833/0869-0049-2021-1-89-102.

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INTRODUCTION. The article, using the example of the Republic of Finland, analyzes the activities of the European Union (hereinafter referred to as the EU) to improve the legal regulation of countering extremism. The influence of the EU on the tackling against extremism and radicalism in the Republic of Finland is examined. The role of the EU in countering global threats, the position of Finland in relation to international co- operation in countering extremism and radicalism is assessed. The methods used in Finland to counter violent extremism are being studied.MATERIALS AND METHODS. The article examines the conceptual documents of the UN, EU and Finland; Report of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, an action plan to prevent violent extremism, Commission Staff Working Paper; Comprehensive assessment of the EU security policy; Message from the Commission to the European Parliament, European Council Ninth report on progress towards an effective and genuine Security Union; Finland's response to OHCHR's request for information on how the protection and promotion of human rights contribute to preventing and combating violent extremism; Finland's Chairmanship Program for the Sustainable Europe Sustainable Future program; Decision of the Commission on the creation of the Expert Group of the HighLevel Commission on Radicalization, Report of the Council of Europe Committee on Counter-Terrorism, Anti-Terrorism Profiles Finland, Report of the Government of Finland on human rights for 2014; decisions of the Expert Group of the High-Level Commission on Radicalization; Human Rights Council materials.RESEARCH RESULTS. The author puts forward the thesis that the measures used to counter violent extremism depend on the needs of Member States and require the development of various approaches, depending on specific circumstances. In the addition, there is a common interest in EU member states in further expanding the exchange of experience and close cooperation between various national actors at the pan-European and international levels to counter extremism and radicalism. These measures require the development of new regulatory measures, including international ones. The author believes it is possible and interesting, using the example of the Republic of Finland, to study the level of interaction and cooperation between the Member States and the European Union in the field of im- proving the legal regulation of countering extremism, as well as the measures used in Finland to prevent and combat violent extremism.DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS. In EU Member States, the European Union plays a key role in shaping international cooperation, which includes strengthening the existing governance system and, when necessary, reforming the existing system for preventing and countering violent extremism, subject to the fundamental principles of the United Nations. The Republic of Finland fully supports the efforts of the international community to prevent and counter extremism, through the development of international anti-extremism instruments to help states collectively combat this threat. The educational system of Finland can successfully form the fundamental foundations for countering violent extremism.
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Adianto, Tri, Tihas Citra Buwana, Marcellinus Dicky Pradhana, and Aris Sarjito. "OPTIMIZATION OF GOVERNMENT: TNI AND POLRI ROLES THROUGH GOOD GOVERNANCE CONCEPT IN COUNTERING RADICALISM ISSUES IN INDONESIA." Jurnal Pertahanan: Media Informasi ttg Kajian & Strategi Pertahanan yang Mengedepankan Identity, Nasionalism & Integrity 6, no. 2 (August 11, 2020): 129. http://dx.doi.org/10.33172/jp.v6i2.586.

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<p>Radicalism has become a real threat faced by all countries in the world, including Indonesia. This condition occurs because radicalism is the origin ideology of terrorism which has been confirmed as an extraordinary crime for the world. So, the Indonesian government needs to pay special attention to counter the radicalism issue which is now growing rapidly in Indonesia. This article was written to analyze the Government, the Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI), and the Indonesian National Police (Polri) roles in countering radicalism issues in Indonesia through good governance concept. This article is written based on the result of phenomenology research used literature study approach of various literature that is relevant to the research topic. Based on the study, the results show that the countering process of radicalism issues conducted by the government of the Republic of Indonesia has not been well managed, because there is no strong legal basis concerning radicalism in Indonesia. Additionally, the weak synergy between the TNI and the Polri, which is tasked to countering radicalism issues, is also become an obstacle for eradicate radicalism issues in Indonesia. Therefore, optimizing the role of the Government, TNI, and Polri are needed by prevention, mapping, detention, and contra radicalism actions. On the other hand, those three parties must strengthen their synergy and cooperative in performed their roles in maintaining public security and national security from the dangers of radicalism.</p>
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Ford, Jolyon. "COVID-19, International Human Rights Law and the State-Corporate Complex." Australian Year Book of International Law Online 39, no. 1 (December 9, 2021): 195–213. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/26660229-03901014.

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Abstract Data-driven technologies (such as mobile phone-based tracing apps) have been at the forefront of public health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, we have also seen high-level expressions of concern about how state actions ostensibly in pursuit of public health goals have in fact greatly accelerated existing human rights concerns about newer technologies, especially increased state and corporate surveillance. This article explores issues at the nexus of COVID-19 public health responses, civil-political rights under international human rights law, and the responsible governance of data-driven technologies. In particular, it offers a framework to evaluate the human rights compatibility of tech-assisted COVID-related state measures. The articles also explore analogies between COVID-related measures and post-2001 counter-terrorism actions taken by states in the name of public security. It cautions against exceptional measures becoming hardwired in ways that may unreasonably impact on pre-COVID freedoms. The article argues that the blurring of state and corporate surveillance and data-gathering and the often symbiotic relationship between tech firms and governments (the ‘state-corporate complex’) complicate efforts to assert clear frames of responsibility.
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Callamard, Agnes. "Towards international human rights law applied to armed groups." Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights 37, no. 1 (March 2019): 85–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0924051918822848.

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This lecture explores the place of justice, accountability and remedies in the global agenda against terror, illustrated by a case study on Iraq and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL.) The two international regimes traditionally applicable to the acts of armed groups, including “terrorist groups”, are international criminal law and international humanitarian law. The lecture argues that they carry each strong limitations, such as those related to the ‘‘armed conflict’’ nexus requirement. This lecture shows that a third regime, international counter-terrorism, has developed over the last two decades and become the de facto legal regime for armed non-State actors. This regime has displaced and weakened international humanitarian and criminal law while further eroding victims’ protection and accountability. The lecture further suggests that all three legal frameworks fail to capture the nature of control exercised by armed groups such as ISIL, and the extent of their functions, including those amounting to governance. The lecture argues that such functions can best be apprehended through international human rights law (IHRL). Tracing armed groups’ human rights obligations and legal personality to treaty and customary law, the lecture concludes with proposals to hold armed groups accountable under IHRL as well as possible approaches to strengthen accountability for crimes committed by ISIL.
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Soboleva, E., and S. Krivohizh. "LEADERSHIP IN THE MULTIPOLAR WORLD: CHINA’S STRATEGY IN CENTRAL ASIA." International Trends / Mezhdunarodnye protsessy 18, no. 1 (January 26, 2021): 119–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.17994/it.2020.18.1.60.7.

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In the multipolar world regional powers play an increasingly important role, as they strive to become leaders and shape the regional order. It is a common situation, when in one region several powers compete to become a sole leader, however, other types of interaction also exist for example, asymmetric leadership. Asymmetric leadership denotes a situation when one power does not strive to become a sole leader in one region in all spheres, but the scope and type of its involvement in addressing common problems in the region varies. This paper explores the phenomenon of asymmetric leadership using the PRC policy in Central Asia as an empirical case. The theoretical part of the paper outlines the major points of the leadership theory in international relations, which are later used to evaluate China’s policy in Central Asia. In the empirical part we explore institutions, regional focus, goals and resources of the Chinese initiatives, as well as analyze factors that influence regional strategy of a rising power. In Central Asia the PRC has expressed leadership ambitions in several issue areas, such as non-traditional security, economic cooperation and development assistance, financial governance, and environmental cooperation. However, its strategy has varied from sphere to sphere in terms of institutionalization, overall regional focus, involvement of other regional power, etc. For example, in the sphere of non-traditional security and financial governance, the PRC has initiated the establishment of special institutions, which are absent in other spheres. The case of Central Asia, which has traditionally been Russian sphere of influence, allows us to investigate the possible responses of one regional power to leadership projects of another. Russia plays different roles in Chinese projects in Central Asia: a co-leader in counter-terrorism sphere, a follower in financial governance, a competitor in economic cooperation, and an observer in environmental protection sphere. The role of Russia is determined by the available resources in each area and its own leadership ambitions, as well as the desire of the PRC to maintain friendly relations with Moscow.
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Henning, Johan, and Mignon Hauman. "Fortifying a risk-based approach in the South African AML/CFT process." Journal of Financial Crime 24, no. 4 (October 2, 2017): 520–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/jfc-01-2017-0007.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is evaluate the provisions of Financial Intelligence Centre Act Amendment Bill, 2016 which intends to give effect to the implementation of the envisioned risk-based approach in anti-money laundering/combating financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) processes, as well as the extent to which the provisions address certain technical shortcomings elucidated in 2009 Mutual Evaluation Report concerning South Africa’s AML/CFT’s framework. Design/methodology/approach Sources of information consisted of scholarly articles, articles retrieved from the Web, news reports, reports published by national and international regulatory bodies, legislation and draft legislation. Findings Findings suggest that the South African legislature not only addresses the particular shortcomings specifically highlighted in the 2009 Mutual Evaluation Report comprised by the Financial Action Task Force but also requires the establishment of a framework for the realisation of a risk-based approached in every “risk” scenario and on an on-going basis. Practical implications Accountable institutions will be required to establish and implement a Risk Management and Compliance Program which must provide both the framework and the strategy for the execution of the risk-based approach when establishing a business relationship, during the course of administrating the business relationship as well as when concluding any single transaction in pursuit of the business relationship. Originality/value This paper serves to alert accountable institutions, compliance and corporate governance professionals and AML and counter-terrorist financing practitioners of the risk-based approach South African accountable institutions will be obliged to implement in their AML/CFT processes, the extent to which a risk-based approach must be incorporated and the aspects that must be provided for in terms of the mandated Risk Management and Compliance Program once the Financial Intelligence Centre Act Amendment Bill, 2016 is signed into law.
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Phillips, Sarah G. "Making al-Qa’ida legible: Counter-terrorism and the reproduction of terrorism." European Journal of International Relations 25, no. 4 (April 3, 2019): 1132–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1354066119837335.

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Why did America’s counter-terrorism strategy in Yemen fail to contain al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula in the years prior to the Yemeni government’s collapse in 2015? Moreover, why did the US administration think that its strategy was successful? This article draws from field research in Yemen and a diverse array of other Yemeni sources to argue that the answer lies in the fact that there are two broad, but ultimately irreconcilable, ontologies of what al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula ‘really is’: one legible, organisationally rational and thus governable; and one not entirely so. I argue that by targeting tangible elements of al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (such as its leaders, sources of revenue and bases) in partnership with the Yemeni state security apparatus, the strategy strengthened the group’s less coherent aspects. As a result, Western counter-terrorism practices target a stripped-down, synoptic version of the group while missing, even empowering, the shadowy appendage of state or hegemonic power that animates popular Yemeni discourses. This article is concerned with what al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula looks like when we prioritise Yemeni observations about how it emerged and is reproduced. I argue that seeing al-Qa’ida as at least partly illegible removes counter-terrorism’s obvious targets, making it more suited to quelling anxieties than actually preventing terrorism.
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Amin, Muhammad Ikhsanul, and Rutiana Dwi Wahyunengseh. "Dynamic Governance in Countering Terrorism in Indonesia: A Discourse Network Analysis on Online News Media." KnE Social Sciences, March 15, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.18502/kss.v7i5.10583.

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Countering terrorism involves new challenges amid the increasing use of information technology. This has implications for the emergence of various modes of terrorism that are increasingly disruptive. This research examined the use of dynamic governance in efforts to create dynamic and contextual policies in establishing comprehensive and targeted counter-terrorism programs. Qualitative methods were used with a discourse network analysis approach. The data were collected from online news media sources (Kompas.com and Okezone.com) about content related to countering terrorism between 2018-2020. The results of the study showed that only a few governance actors carried out comprehensive discourse on dynamic governance in countering terrorism. In addition, some of the systematization of the concept caused polemics among the stakeholders involved, so that not all actors were in agreement with the meaning of dynamic governance. This article recommends that, on the one hand, each actor must carry out benchmarking so that they have the same capacity in actualizing the concept of dynamic governance, while on the other hand, the government must pay attention to the participation of each actor in order to ensure a consistent paradigm is used in countering terrorism. Keywords: counter terrorism, discourse network analysis, disruption, dynamic governance, policy contextualization
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Roele, Isobel. "Style Management: Images of Global Counter-Terrorism at the United Nations." Law and Critique, July 31, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10978-022-09330-5.

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AbstractModels 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.
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Dresser, Paul. "PREVENT Policing in Practice—The Need for Evidenced-Based Research." Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, August 29, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/police/paz049.

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Abstract This article examines the PREVENT agenda, part of the UK government’s counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST. Informed by semi-structured interviews conducted with a Special Branch PREVENT team, as well as individuals drawn from various security disciplines, this article highlights several practical barriers to realizing collaborative counter-radicalization. This is important given the third objective of PREVENT: to work with a wide range of institutions where there are risks of radicalization. This article departs from analyses that have examined PREVENT in the context of suspect profiling; rather, the focus is on illuminating the implementation, (re)configuration and performance of PREVENT policing. The article concludes by advocating the necessity for evidence-based research—this proffers pragmatic implications for the governance of counter-terrorism.
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Borelli, Marguerite. "Social media corporations as actors of counter-terrorism." New Media & Society, August 8, 2021, 146144482110351. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/14614448211035121.

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This article discusses the role of giant social media corporations Facebook, Google (YouTube), and Twitter in counter-terrorism and countering violent extremisms (CT/CVEs). Based on a qualitative investigation mobilizing corporate communications as well as a collection of interviews with European stakeholders, it argues that these firms have become actors in this policy area of what is traditionally considered high politics, through their fundamental role in establishing and enforcing the nascent global governance regime on terrorist communications. Since the emergence of the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the studied firms have displayed agency and creativity in their appropriation of this new responsibility, effectively going beyond what was legally required of them. After contextualizing and questioning their involvement, motivated by terrorist exploitation of their services, reputational pressure and the threat of legislation, the article provides an analysis of the firms’ self-regulated commitment to CT/CVE through policymaking, content moderation, human resources, and private multilateralism.
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Asante, Doris. "Civil society and counter-terrorism governance: implementing the WPS agenda in Nigeria." Global Society, September 15, 2022, 1–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13600826.2022.2123306.

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Ahmad, Munir, Muhammad Javad Iqbal Khan, and Zahra Shahid. "Challenges of De-radicalization in Pakistan." Pakistan Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 10, no. 2 (June 30, 2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.52131/pjhss.2022.1002.0236.

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De-radicalization refers to a situation in which a person not only gets radicalized but also follows a route of rhetoric that leads to violent extremism. De-radicalization is the only disease emerging from the turmoil of terrorism. Pakistan is at a crossroads, where religious extremism is thriving every day and the scourge of terrorism is engulfing Pakistan. De-radicalization in the course of counter-terrorism is used as a soft approach without violating the basic ethics of human liberties. Radicalization, intolerance, sectarianism, Islamic militancy, and terrorism are not only spreading quickly over the globe, but they are also negatively impacting Pakistan's social security, religious peace, economics, good governance, democratic reform, and system of education. The study aimed to highlight the gaps and challenges faced by Pakistan during deradicalization.to identify its nature and extent methodological investigation at the local level is accomplished This is a quantitative study to investigate the challenges and strategies for de-radicalization. To gather data primary and secondary sources were used. Pakistan needs to formulate its own, home-based strategies and paths to counter radicalization. Radicalization, administration, extremism, governance, Islamic insurgency, intolerance, violence, and identification are all addressed in this study. The key underlying causes of insurgency and radicalization have been identified, which will aid in the fight against Islamic militancy, radicalism, extremism, and intolerance in Pakistan. The study's findings and recommendations will be used to combat extremism and Islamic insurgency in Pakistan. This work will assist Think Tank experts, scholars, educators, and legislators, who will use the results and suggestions for broader objectives.
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Hogendoorn, EJ. "The Effective Governance Gap in EU Counter-Terrorism and Stabilisation Policy for Somalia." Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism Studies, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.19165/2017.2.06.

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Skare, Erik. "Staying safe by being good? The EU's normative decline as a security actor in the Middle East." European Journal of International Security, November 8, 2022, 1–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/eis.2022.29.

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Abstract The European Union's cooperation with Middle Eastern regimes to counter terrorism and prevent violent extremism has received increased scholarly attention following several terrorist attacks in Europe the last decade. Despite the EU's emphasis on good governance, democracy, and human rights to prevent violent extremism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), I argue that the Union is in fact declining as a ‘normative power’ as it has prioritised a ‘security first’ centred approach. This article demonstrates how the EU's normative projects have, first, appropriated a logic of securitisation; and second, how the Union downplays democracy and good governance in fear of alienating authoritarian key partners in the region. There are consequently inherent limitations to, and contradictions in, the EU's Counter-Terrorism (CT) and Preventing Violent Extremism (PvE) efforts. These conclusions are based on interviews with EU representatives and implementing partners on the ground. The interviews are complemented by an analysis of the scope and focus of the EU's CT and PvE projects. The findings have implications for our understanding of normative powers’ priorities when facing a perceived dilemma of choosing between its security, on the one hand, and its identity and value aspirations, on the other.
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Campbell-Verduyn, Malcolm, and Moritz Hütten. "The Formal, Financial and Fraught Route to Global Digital Identity Governance." Frontiers in Blockchain 4 (May 20, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fbloc.2021.627641.

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How can we understand the progressive, piecemeal emergence of global digital identity governance? Examining the activities of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) - an intergovernmental organization at the center of global anti-money laundering and counter-the-financing of terrorism governance-this paper advances a two-fold argument. First, the FATF shapes how, where and who is involved in developing key standards of acceptability underpinning digital identity governance in blockchain activities. While not itself directly involved in the actual coding of blockchain protocols, the FATF influences the location and type of centralized modes of control over digital identity governance. Drawing on the notion of protocological control from media studies, we illustrate how centralized control emerging in global digital identity governance emanates from the global governance of financial flows long considered by international organizations like the FATF. Second, we suggest that governance by blockchains persistently shapes the ability of the FATF to stem illicit international financial flows. In highlighting both the influence of FATF on blockchain governance and blockchain governance on the FATF, we draw together two strands of literature that have been considered separately in an analysis of the formal, financial and fraught route to global digital identity governance.
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Makki, Muhammad, and Waseem Iftikhar. "Transformation in Political Economy of Post-conflict North Waziristan, Pakistan." Journal of Asian and African Studies, June 4, 2021, 002190962110218. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00219096211021866.

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Post-conflict North Waziristan is experiencing a fundamental shift in the political and economic environment at a very fast pace. This paper examines the complex political economy of post-conflict North Waziristan to assess factors promoting sustainable peace in the region. It identifies the multi-pronged official strategy that is significantly contributing to the transformation of the political and economic environment in the post-conflict setting. These steps include inter alia effective border management to counter illicit trafficking and cross-border terrorism, security sector reforms, improving the mechanism of governance, and diversifying ‘formal’ economic opportunities. The analysis suggests that post-conflict North Waziristan exhibits considerable improvements towards establishing and promoting conditions that are pivotal for sustainable peace.
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Carrapico, Helena. "The External Dimension of the EU’s Fight against Organized Crime: The Search for Coherence between Rhetoric and Practice." Journal of Contemporary European Research 9, no. 3 (November 27, 2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.30950/jcer.v9i3.528.

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Since the external dimension of the European Union’s Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) began to be considered, a substantial amount of literature has been dedicated to discussing how the EU is cooperating with non-member states in order to counter problems such as terrorism, organized crime and illegal migration. According to the EU, the degree of security interconnectedness has become so relevant that threats can only be adequately controlled if there is effective concerted regional action. This reasoning has led the EU to develop a number of instruments, which have resulted in the exporting of certain elements of its JHA policies, either through negotiation or socialization. Although the literature has explored how this transfer has been applied to the field of terrorism and immigration, very little has been written on the externalisation of knowledge, practice and norms in the area of organized crime. This article proposes to bridge this gap by looking at EU practice in the development of the external dimension of organized crime policies, through the theoretical lens of the EU governance framework.
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Heiduk, Felix. "Externalizing the EU’s Justice and Home Affairs to Southeast Asia: Prospects and Limitations." Journal of Contemporary European Research 12, no. 3 (August 4, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.30950/jcer.v12i3.723.

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The transnational security dimension ascribed to many phenomena such as terrorism, drug trafficking, pandemics, or people smuggling has led to increased pressures to increase cooperation across national borders to ‘fight’ or ‘manage’ many of the new, transnational security threats. Against this background the EU has sought to promote its own norms and ideas, policy preferences and its own model of regional cooperation and integration in her external affairs. A number of recent studies have examined the growing potency of the EU to actively promote ideas and policy preferences in its neighborhood as well as with the U.S., however, scant attention has been given to EU cooperation with other regional organizations. By closely examining the EU’s cooperation with ASEAN in two policy fields deemed central within JHA – human trafficking and counter terrorism – this paper seeks not only to broaden the empirical basis of scholarship, but additionally seeks to connect the empirical findings with the wider debate on the EU’s ability to externalize its internal security governance. The study finds that despite numerous declarations and plan of actions, very little policy transfer has actually taken place between the EU and ASEAN. It is argued that any attempt to externalize or transfer policy is met by long-standing ideas and norms, policy paradigms and an established specific modus operandi of regional cooperation within ASEAN itself. This will continue to make nigh impossible any externalization of EU policies to Southeast Asia for the foreseeable future.
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Ibrahim, Yasmin. "Commodifying Terrorism." M/C Journal 10, no. 3 (June 1, 2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2665.

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Introduction Figure 1 The counter-Terrorism advertising campaign of London’s Metropolitan Police commodifies some everyday items such as mobile phones, computers, passports and credit cards as having the potential to sustain terrorist activities. The process of ascribing cultural values and symbolic meanings to some everyday technical gadgets objectifies and situates Terrorism into the everyday life. The police, in urging people to look out for ‘the unusual’ in their normal day-to-day lives, juxtapose the everyday with the unusual, where day-to-day consumption, routines and flows of human activity can seemingly house insidious and atavistic elements. This again is reiterated in the Met police press release: Terrorists live within our communities making their plans whilst doing everything they can to blend in, and trying not to raise suspicions about their activities. (MPA Website) The commodification of Terrorism through uncommon and everyday objects situates Terrorism as a phenomenon which occupies a liminal space within the everyday. It resides, breathes and co-exists within the taken-for-granted routines and objects of ‘the everyday’ where it has the potential to explode and disrupt without warning. Since 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings Terrorism has been narrated through the disruption of mobility, whether in mid-air or in the deep recesses of the Underground. The resonant thread of disruption to human mobility evokes a powerful meta-narrative where acts of Terrorism can halt human agency amidst the backdrop of the metropolis, which is often a metaphor for speed and accelerated activities. If globalisation and the interconnected nature of the world are understood through discourses of risk, Terrorism bears the same footprint in urban spaces of modernity, narrating the vulnerability of the human condition in an inter-linked world where ideological struggles and resistance are manifested through inexplicable violence and destruction of lives, where the everyday is suspended to embrace the unexpected. As a consequence ambient fear “saturates the social spaces of everyday life” (Hubbard 2). The commodification of Terrorism through everyday items of consumption inevitably creates an intertextuality with real and media events, which constantly corrode the security of the metropolis. Paddy Scannell alludes to a doubling of place in our mediated world where “public events now occur simultaneously in two different places; the place of the event itself and that in which it is watched and heard. The media then vacillates between the two sites and creates experiences of simultaneity, liveness and immediacy” (qtd. in Moores 22). The doubling of place through media constructs a pervasive environment of risk and fear. Mark Danner (qtd. in Bauman 106) points out that the most powerful weapon of the 9/11 terrorists was that innocuous and “most American of technological creations: the television set” which provided a global platform to constantly replay and remember the dreadful scenes of the day, enabling the terrorist to appear invincible and to narrate fear as ubiquitous and omnipresent. Philip Abrams argues that ‘big events’ (such as 9/11 and 7/7) do make a difference in the social world for such events function as a transformative device between the past and future, forcing society to alter or transform its perspectives. David Altheide points out that since September 11 and the ensuing war on terror, a new discourse of Terrorism has emerged as a way of expressing how the world has changed and defining a state of constant alert through a media logic and format that shapes the nature of discourse itself. Consequently, the intensity and centralisation of surveillance in Western countries increased dramatically, placing the emphasis on expanding the forms of the already existing range of surveillance processes and practices that circumscribe and help shape our social existence (Lyon, Terrorism 2). Normalisation of Surveillance The role of technologies, particularly information and communication technologies (ICTs), and other infrastructures to unevenly distribute access to the goods and services necessary for modern life, while facilitating data collection on and control of the public, are significant characteristics of modernity (Reiman; Graham and Marvin; Monahan). The embedding of technological surveillance into spaces and infrastructures not only augment social control but also redefine data as a form of capital which can be shared between public and private sectors (Gandy, Data Mining; O’Harrow; Monahan). The scale, complexity and limitations of omnipresent and omnipotent surveillance, nevertheless, offer room for both subversion as well as new forms of domination and oppression (Marx). In surveillance studies, Foucault’s analysis is often heavily employed to explain lines of continuity and change between earlier forms of surveillance and data assemblage and contemporary forms in the shape of closed-circuit television (CCTV) and other surveillance modes (Dee). It establishes the need to discern patterns of power and normalisation and the subliminal or obvious cultural codes and categories that emerge through these arrangements (Fopp; Lyon, Electronic; Norris and Armstrong). In their study of CCTV surveillance, Norris and Armstrong (cf. in Dee) point out that when added to the daily minutiae of surveillance, CCTV cameras in public spaces, along with other camera surveillance in work places, capture human beings on a database constantly. The normalisation of surveillance, particularly with reference to CCTV, the popularisation of surveillance through television formats such as ‘Big Brother’ (Dee), and the expansion of online platforms to publish private images, has created a contradictory, complex and contested nature of spatial and power relationships in society. The UK, for example, has the most developed system of both urban and public space cameras in the world and this growth of camera surveillance and, as Lyon (Surveillance) points out, this has been achieved with very little, if any, public debate as to their benefits or otherwise. There may now be as many as 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain (cf. Lyon, Surveillance). That is one for every fourteen people and a person can be captured on over 300 cameras every day. An estimated £500m of public money has been invested in CCTV infrastructure over the last decade but, according to a Home Office study, CCTV schemes that have been assessed had little overall effect on crime levels (Wood and Ball). In spatial terms, these statistics reiterate Foucault’s emphasis on the power economy of the unseen gaze. Michel Foucault in analysing the links between power, information and surveillance inspired by Bentham’s idea of the Panopticon, indicated that it is possible to sanction or reward an individual through the act of surveillance without their knowledge (155). It is this unseen and unknown gaze of surveillance that is fundamental to the exercise of power. The design and arrangement of buildings can be engineered so that the “surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (Foucault 201). Lyon (Terrorism), in tracing the trajectory of surveillance studies, points out that much of surveillance literature has focused on understanding it as a centralised bureaucratic relationship between the powerful and the governed. Invisible forms of surveillance have also been viewed as a class weapon in some societies. With the advancements in and proliferation of surveillance technologies as well as convergence with other technologies, Lyon argues that it is no longer feasible to view surveillance as a linear or centralised process. In our contemporary globalised world, there is a need to reconcile the dialectical strands that mediate surveillance as a process. In acknowledging this, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have constructed surveillance as a rhizome that defies linearity to appropriate a more convoluted and malleable form where the coding of bodies and data can be enmeshed to produce intricate power relationships and hierarchies within societies. Latour draws on the notion of assemblage by propounding that data is amalgamated from scattered centres of calculation where these can range from state and commercial institutions to scientific laboratories which scrutinise data to conceive governance and control strategies. Both the Latourian and Deleuzian ideas of surveillance highlight the disparate arrays of people, technologies and organisations that become connected to make “surveillance assemblages” in contrast to the static, unidirectional Panopticon metaphor (Ball, “Organization” 93). In a similar vein, Gandy (Panoptic) infers that it is misleading to assume that surveillance in practice is as complete and totalising as the Panoptic ideal type would have us believe. Co-optation of Millions The Metropolitan Police’s counter-Terrorism strategy seeks to co-opt millions where the corporeal body can complement the landscape of technological surveillance that already co-exists within modernity. In its press release, the role of civilian bodies in ensuring security of the city is stressed; Keeping Londoners safe from Terrorism is not a job solely for governments, security services or police. If we are to make London the safest major city in the world, we must mobilise against Terrorism not only the resources of the state, but also the active support of the millions of people who live and work in the capita. (MPA Website). Surveillance is increasingly simulated through the millions of corporeal entities where seeing in advance is the goal even before technology records and codes these images (William). Bodies understand and code risk and images through the cultural narratives which circulate in society. Compared to CCTV technology images, which require cultural and political interpretations and interventions, bodies as surveillance organisms implicitly code other bodies and activities. The travel bag in the Metropolitan Police poster reinforces the images of the 7/7 bombers and the renewed attempts to bomb the London Underground on the 21st of July. It reiterates the CCTV footage revealing images of the bombers wearing rucksacks. The image of the rucksack both embodies the everyday as well as the potential for evil in everyday objects. It also inevitably reproduces the cultural biases and prejudices where the rucksack is subliminally associated with a specific type of body. The rucksack in these terms is a laden image which symbolically captures the context and culture of risk discourses in society. The co-optation of the population as a surveillance entity also recasts new forms of social responsibility within the democratic polity, where privacy is increasingly mediated by the greater need to monitor, trace and record the activities of one another. Nikolas Rose, in discussing the increasing ‘responsibilisation’ of individuals in modern societies, describes the process in which the individual accepts responsibility for personal actions across a wide range of fields of social and economic activity as in the choice of diet, savings and pension arrangements, health care decisions and choices, home security measures and personal investment choices (qtd. in Dee). While surveillance in individualistic terms is often viewed as a threat to privacy, Rose argues that the state of ‘advanced liberalism’ within modernity and post-modernity requires considerable degrees of self-governance, regulation and surveillance whereby the individual is constructed both as a ‘new citizen’ and a key site of self management. By co-opting and recasting the role of the citizen in the age of Terrorism, the citizen to a degree accepts responsibility for both surveillance and security. In our sociological imagination the body is constructed both as lived as well as a social object. Erving Goffman uses the word ‘umwelt’ to stress that human embodiment is central to the constitution of the social world. Goffman defines ‘umwelt’ as “the region around an individual from which signs of alarm can come” and employs it to capture how people as social actors perceive and manage their settings when interacting in public places (252). Goffman’s ‘umwelt’ can be traced to Immanuel Kant’s idea that it is the a priori categories of space and time that make it possible for a subject to perceive a world (Umiker-Sebeok; qtd. in Ball, “Organization”). Anthony Giddens adapted the term Umwelt to refer to “a phenomenal world with which the individual is routinely ‘in touch’ in respect of potential dangers and alarms which then formed a core of (accomplished) normalcy with which individuals and groups surround themselves” (244). Benjamin Smith, in considering the body as an integral component of the link between our consciousness and our material world, observes that the body is continuously inscribed by culture. These inscriptions, he argues, encompass a wide range of cultural practices and will imply knowledge of a variety of social constructs. The inscribing of the body will produce cultural meanings as well as create forms of subjectivity while locating and situating the body within a cultural matrix (Smith). Drawing on Derrida’s work, Pugliese employs the term ‘Somatechnics’ to conceptualise the body as a culturally intelligible construct and to address the techniques in and through which the body is formed and transformed (qtd. in Osuri). These techniques can encompass signification systems such as race and gender and equally technologies which mediate our sense of reality. These technologies of thinking, seeing, hearing, signifying, visualising and positioning produce the very conditions for the cultural intelligibility of the body (Osuri). The body is then continuously inscribed and interpreted through mediated signifying systems. Similarly, Hayles, while not intending to impose a Cartesian dichotomy between the physical body and its cognitive presence, contends that the use and interactions with technology incorporate the body as a material entity but it also equally inscribes it by marking, recording and tracing its actions in various terrains. According to Gayatri Spivak (qtd. in Ball, “Organization”) new habits and experiences are embedded into the corporeal entity which then mediates its reactions and responses to the social world. This means one’s body is not completely one’s own and the presence of ideological forces or influences then inscribe the body with meanings, codes and cultural values. In our modern condition, the body and data are intimately and intricately bound. Outside the home, it is difficult for the body to avoid entering into relationships that produce electronic personal data (Stalder). According to Felix Stalder our physical bodies are shadowed by a ‘data body’ which follows the physical body of the consuming citizen and sometimes precedes it by constructing the individual through data (12). Before we arrive somewhere, we have already been measured and classified. Thus, upon arrival, the citizen will be treated according to the criteria ‘connected with the profile that represents us’ (Gandy, Panoptic; William). Following September 11, Lyon (Terrorism) reveals that surveillance data from a myriad of sources, such as supermarkets, motels, traffic control points, credit card transactions records and so on, was used to trace the activities of terrorists in the days and hours before their attacks, confirming that the body leaves data traces and trails. Surveillance works by abstracting bodies from places and splitting them into flows to be reassembled as virtual data-doubles, and in the process can replicate hierarchies and centralise power (Lyon, Terrorism). Mike Dee points out that the nature of surveillance taking place in modern societies is complex and far-reaching and in many ways insidious as surveillance needs to be situated within the broadest context of everyday human acts whether it is shopping with loyalty cards or paying utility bills. Physical vulnerability of the body becomes more complex in the time-space distanciated surveillance systems to which the body has become increasingly exposed. As such, each transaction – whether it be a phone call, credit card transaction, or Internet search – leaves a ‘data trail’ linkable to an individual person or place. Haggerty and Ericson, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage, describe the convergence and spread of data-gathering systems between different social domains and multiple levels (qtd. in Hier). They argue that the target of the generic ‘surveillance assemblage’ is the human body, which is broken into a series of data flows on which surveillance process is based. The thrust of the focus is the data individuals can yield and the categories to which they can contribute. These are then reapplied to the body. In this sense, surveillance is rhizomatic for it is diverse and connected to an underlying, invisible infrastructure which concerns interconnected technologies in multiple contexts (Ball, “Elements”). The co-opted body in the schema of counter-Terrorism enters a power arrangement where it constitutes both the unseen gaze as well as the data that will be implicated and captured in this arrangement. It is capable of producing surveillance data for those in power while creating new data through its transactions and movements in its everyday life. The body is unequivocally constructed through this data and is also entrapped by it in terms of representation and categorisation. The corporeal body is therefore part of the machinery of surveillance while being vulnerable to its discriminatory powers of categorisation and victimisation. As Hannah Arendt (qtd. in Bauman 91) had warned, “we terrestrial creatures bidding for cosmic significance will shortly be unable to comprehend and articulate the things we are capable of doing” Arendt’s caution conveys the complexity, vulnerability as well as the complicity of the human condition in the surveillance society. Equally it exemplifies how the corporeal body can be co-opted as a surveillance entity sustaining a new ‘banality’ (Arendt) in the machinery of surveillance. Social Consequences of Surveillance Lyon (Terrorism) observed that the events of 9/11 and 7/7 in the UK have inevitably become a prism through which aspects of social structure and processes may be viewed. This prism helps to illuminate the already existing vast range of surveillance practices and processes that touch everyday life in so-called information societies. As Lyon (Terrorism) points out surveillance is always ambiguous and can encompass genuine benefits and plausible rationales as well as palpable disadvantages. There are elements of representation to consider in terms of how surveillance technologies can re-present data that are collected at source or gathered from another technological medium, and these representations bring different meanings and enable different interpretations of life and surveillance (Ball, “Elements”). As such surveillance needs to be viewed in a number of ways: practice, knowledge and protection from threat. As data can be manipulated and interpreted according to cultural values and norms it reflects the inevitability of power relations to forge its identity in a surveillance society. In this sense, Ball (“Elements”) concludes surveillance practices capture and create different versions of life as lived by surveilled subjects. She refers to actors within the surveilled domain as ‘intermediaries’, where meaning is inscribed, where technologies re-present information, where power/resistance operates, and where networks are bound together to sometimes distort as well as reiterate patterns of hegemony (“Elements” 93). While surveillance is often connected with technology, it does not however determine nor decide how we code or employ our data. New technologies rarely enter passive environments of total inequality for they become enmeshed in complex pre-existing power and value systems (Marx). With surveillance there is an emphasis on the classificatory powers in our contemporary world “as persons and groups are often risk-profiled in the commercial sphere which rates their social contributions and sorts them into systems” (Lyon, Terrorism 2). Lyon (Terrorism) contends that the surveillance society is one that is organised and structured using surveillance-based techniques recorded by technologies, on behalf of the organisations and governments that structure our society. This information is then sorted, sifted and categorised and used as a basis for decisions which affect our life chances (Wood and Ball). The emergence of pervasive, automated and discriminatory mechanisms for risk profiling and social categorising constitute a significant mechanism for reproducing and reinforcing social, economic and cultural divisions in information societies. Such automated categorisation, Lyon (Terrorism) warns, has consequences for everyone especially in face of the new anti-terror measures enacted after September 11. In tandem with this, Bauman points out that a few suicidal murderers on the loose will be quite enough to recycle thousands of innocents into the “usual suspects”. In no time, a few iniquitous individual choices will be reprocessed into the attributes of a “category”; a category easily recognisable by, for instance, a suspiciously dark skin or a suspiciously bulky rucksack* *the kind of object which CCTV cameras are designed to note and passers-by are told to be vigilant about. And passers-by are keen to oblige. Since the terrorist atrocities on the London Underground, the volume of incidents classified as “racist attacks” rose sharply around the country. (122; emphasis added) Bauman, drawing on Lyon, asserts that the understandable desire for security combined with the pressure to adopt different kind of systems “will create a culture of control that will colonise more areas of life with or without the consent of the citizen” (123). This means that the inhabitants of the urban space whether a citizen, worker or consumer who has no terrorist ambitions whatsoever will discover that their opportunities are more circumscribed by the subject positions or categories which are imposed on them. Bauman cautions that for some these categories may be extremely prejudicial, restricting them from consumer choices because of credit ratings, or more insidiously, relegating them to second-class status because of their colour or ethnic background (124). Joseph Pugliese, in linking visual regimes of racial profiling and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in the aftermath of 7/7 bombings in London, suggests that the discursive relations of power and visuality are inextricably bound. Pugliese argues that racial profiling creates a regime of visuality which fundamentally inscribes our physiology of perceptions with stereotypical images. He applies this analogy to Menzes running down the platform in which the retina transforms him into the “hallucinogenic figure of an Asian Terrorist” (Pugliese 8). With globalisation and the proliferation of ICTs, borders and boundaries are no longer sacrosanct and as such risks are managed by enacting ‘smart borders’ through new technologies, with huge databases behind the scenes processing information about individuals and their journeys through the profiling of body parts with, for example, iris scans (Wood and Ball 31). Such body profiling technologies are used to create watch lists of dangerous passengers or identity groups who might be of greater ‘risk’. The body in a surveillance society can be dissected into parts and profiled and coded through technology. These disparate codings of body parts can be assembled (or selectively omitted) to construct and represent whole bodies in our information society to ascertain risk. The selection and circulation of knowledge will also determine who gets slotted into the various categories that a surveillance society creates. Conclusion When the corporeal body is subsumed into a web of surveillance it often raises questions about the deterministic nature of technology. The question is a long-standing one in our modern consciousness. We are apprehensive about according technology too much power and yet it is implicated in the contemporary power relationships where it is suspended amidst human motive, agency and anxiety. The emergence of surveillance societies, the co-optation of bodies in surveillance schemas, as well as the construction of the body through data in everyday transactions, conveys both the vulnerabilities of the human condition as well as its complicity in maintaining the power arrangements in society. Bauman, in citing Jacques Ellul and Hannah Arendt, points out that we suffer a ‘moral lag’ in so far as technology and society are concerned, for often we ruminate on the consequences of our actions and motives only as afterthoughts without realising at this point of existence that the “actions we take are most commonly prompted by the resources (including technology) at our disposal” (91). References Abrams, Philip. Historical Sociology. Shepton Mallet, UK: Open Books, 1982. Altheide, David. “Consuming Terrorism.” Symbolic Interaction 27.3 (2004): 289-308. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Faber & Faber, 1963. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Fear. 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London: Allen Lane, 1977. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. Gandy, Oscar. The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997. ———. “Data Mining and Surveillance in the Post 9/11 Environment.” The Intensification of Surveillance: Crime, Terrorism and War in the Information Age. Eds. Kristie Ball and Frank Webster. Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2003. Goffman, Erving. Relations in Public. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. New York: Routledge, 2001. Hier, Sean. “Probing Surveillance Assemblage: On the Dialectics of Surveillance Practices as Process of Social Control.” Surveillance and Society 1.3 (2003): 399-411. Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Hubbard, Phil. “Fear and Loathing at the Multiplex: Everyday Anxiety in the Post-Industrial City.” Capital & Class 80 (2003). Latour, Bruno. Science in Action. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1987 Lyon, David. The Electronic Eye – The Rise of Surveillance Society. Oxford: Polity Press, 1994. ———. “Terrorism and Surveillance: Security, Freedom and Justice after September 11 2001.” Privacy Lecture Series, Queens University, 12 Nov 2001. 16 April 2007 http://privacy.openflows.org/lyon_paper.html>. ———. “Surveillance Studies: Understanding Visibility, Mobility and the Phonetic Fix.” Surveillance and Society 1.1 (2002): 1-7. Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA). “Counter Terrorism: The London Debate.” Press Release. 21 June 2006. 18 April 2007 http://www.mpa.gov.uk.access/issues/comeng/Terrorism.htm>. 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Osuri, Goldie. “Media Necropower: Australian Media Reception and the Somatechnics of Mamdouh Habib.” Borderlands 5.1 (2006). 30 May 2007 http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol5no1_2006 osuri_necropower.htm>. Rose, Nikolas. “Government and Control.” British Journal of Criminology 40 (2000): 321–399. Scannell, Paddy. Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Smith, Benjamin. “In What Ways, and for What Reasons, Do We Inscribe Our Bodies?” 15 Nov. 1998. 30 May 2007 http:www.bmezine.com/ritual/981115/Whatways.html>. Stalder, Felix. “Privacy Is Not the Antidote to Surveillance.” Surveillance and Society 1.1 (2002): 120-124. Umiker-Sebeok, Jean. “Power and the Construction of Gendered Spaces.” Indiana University-Bloomington. 14 April 2007 http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/umikerse/papers/power.html>. William, Bogard. The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Wood, Kristie, and David M. Ball, eds. “A Report on the Surveillance Society.” Surveillance Studies Network, UK, Sep. 2006. 14 April 2007 http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/library/data_protection/ practical_application/surveillance_society_full_report_2006.pdf>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ibrahim, Yasmin. "Commodifying Terrorism: Body, Surveillance and the Everyday." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/05-ibrahim.php>. APA Style Ibrahim, Y. (Jun. 2007) "Commodifying Terrorism: Body, Surveillance and the Everyday," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/05-ibrahim.php>.
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46

Stalcup, Meg. "What If? Re-imagined Scenarios and the Re-Virtualisation of History." M/C Journal 18, no. 6 (March 7, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1029.

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Abstract:
Image 1: “Oklahoma State Highway Re-imagined.” CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using Wikimedia image by Ks0stm (CC BY-SA 3 2013). Introduction This article is divided in three major parts. First a scenario, second its context, and third, an analysis. The text draws on ethnographic research on security practices in the United States among police and parts of the intelligence community from 2006 through to the beginning of 2014. Real names are used when the material is drawn from archival sources, while individuals who were interviewed during fieldwork are referred to by their position rank or title. For matters of fact not otherwise referenced, see the sources compiled on “The Complete 911 Timeline” at History Commons. First, a scenario. Oklahoma, 2001 It is 1 April 2001, in far western Oklahoma, warm beneath the late afternoon sun. Highway Patrol Trooper C.L. Parkins is about 80 kilometres from the border of Texas, watching trucks and cars speed along Interstate 40. The speed limit is around 110 kilometres per hour, and just then, his radar clocks a blue Toyota Corolla going 135 kph. The driver is not wearing a seatbelt. Trooper Parkins swung in behind the vehicle, and after a while signalled that the car should pull over. The driver was dark-haired and short; in Parkins’s memory, he spoke English without any problem. He asked the man to come sit in the patrol car while he did a series of routine checks—to see if the vehicle was stolen, if there were warrants out for his arrest, if his license was valid. Parkins said, “I visited with him a little bit but I just barely remember even having him in my car. You stop so many people that if […] you don't arrest them or anything […] you don't remember too much after a couple months” (Clay and Ellis). Nawaf Al Hazmi had a valid California driver’s license, with an address in San Diego, and the car’s registration had been legally transferred to him by his former roommate. Parkins’s inquiries to the National Crime Information Center returned no warnings, nor did anything seem odd in their interaction. So the officer wrote Al Hazmi two tickets totalling $138, one for speeding and one for failure to use a seat belt, and told him to be on his way. Al Hazmi, for his part, was crossing the country to a new apartment in a Virginia suburb of Washington, DC, and upon arrival he mailed the payment for his tickets to the county court clerk in Oklahoma. Over the next five months, he lived several places on the East Coast: going to the gym, making routine purchases, and taking a few trips that included Las Vegas and Florida. He had a couple more encounters with local law enforcement and these too were unremarkable. On 1 May 2001 he was mugged, and promptly notified the police, who documented the incident with his name and local address (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 139). At the end of June, having moved to New Jersey, he was involved in a minor traffic accident on the George Washington Bridge, and officers again recorded his real name and details of the incident. In July, Khalid Al Mihdhar, the previous owner of the car, returned from abroad, and joined Al Hazmi in New Jersey. The two were boyhood friends, and they went together to a library several times to look up travel information, and then, with Al Hazmi’s younger brother Selem, to book their final flight. On 11 September, the three boarded American Airlines flight 77 as part of the Al Qaeda team that flew the mid-sized jet into the west façade of the Pentagon. They died along with the piloting hijacker, all the passengers, and 125 people on the ground. Theirs was one of four airplanes hijacked that day, one of which was crashed by passengers, the others into significant sites of American power, by men who had been living for varying lengths of time all but unnoticed in the United States. No one thought that Trooper Parkins, or the other officers with whom the 9/11 hijackers crossed paths, should have acted differently. The Commissioner of the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety himself commented that the trooper “did the right thing” at that April traffic stop. And yet, interviewed by a local newspaper in January of 2002, Parkins mused to the reporter “it's difficult sometimes to think back and go: 'What if you had known something else?'" (Clay and Ellis). Missed Opportunities Image 2: “Hijackers Timeline (Redacted).” CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s “Working Draft Chronology of Events for Hijackers and Associates”. In fact, several of the men who would become the 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. Mohamed Atta, usually pointed to as the ringleader, was given a citation in Florida that spring of 2001 for driving without a license. When he missed his court date, a bench warrant was issued (Wall Street Journal). Perhaps the warrant was not flagged properly, however, since nothing happened when he was pulled over again, for speeding. In the government inquiries that followed attack, and in the press, these brushes with the law were “missed opportunities” to thwart the 9/11 plot (Kean and Hamilton, Report 353). Among a certain set of career law enforcement personnel, particularly those active in management and police associations, these missed opportunities were fraught with a sense of personal failure. Yet, in short order, they were to become a source of professional revelation. The scenarios—Trooper Parkins and Al Hazmi, other encounters in other states, the general fact that there had been chance meetings between police officers and the hijackers—were re-imagined in the aftermath of 9/11. Those moments were returned to and reversed, so that multiple potentialities could be seen, beyond or in addition to what had taken place. The deputy director of an intelligence fusion centre told me in an interview, “it is always a local cop who saw something” and he replayed how the incidents of contact had unfolded with the men. These scenarios offered a way to recapture the past. In the uncertainty of every encounter, whether a traffic stop or questioning someone taking photos of a landmark (and potential terrorist target), was also potential. Through a process of re-imagining, police encounters with the public became part of the government’s “national intelligence” strategy. Previously a division had been marked between foreign and domestic intelligence. While the phrase “national intelligence” had long been used, notably in National Intelligence Estimates, after 9/11 it became more significant. The overall director of the US intelligence community became the Director National Intelligence, for instance, and the cohesive term marked the way that increasingly diverse institutional components, types of data and forms of action were evolving to address the collection of data and intelligence production (McConnell). In a series of working groups mobilised by members of major police professional organisations, and funded by the US Department of Justice, career officers and representatives from federal agencies produced detailed recommendations and plans for involving police in the new Information Sharing Environment. Among the plans drawn up during this period was what would eventually come to be the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, built principally around the idea of encounters such as the one between Parkins and Al Hazmi. Map 1: Map of pilot sites in the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Evaluation Environment in 2010 (courtesy of the author; no longer available online). Map 2: Map of participating sites in the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, as of 2014. In an interview, a fusion centre director who participated in this planning as well as its implementation, told me that his thought had been, “if we train state and local cops to understand pre-terrorism indicators, if we train them to be more curious, and to question more what they see,” this could feed into “a system where they could actually get that information to somebody where it matters.” In devising the reporting initiative, the working groups counter-actualised the scenarios of those encounters, and the kinds of larger plots to which they were understood to belong, in order to extract a set of concepts: categories of suspicious “activities” or “patterns of behaviour” corresponding to the phases of a terrorism event in the process of becoming (Deleuze, Negotiations). This conceptualisation of terrorism was standardised, so that it could be taught, and applied, in discerning and documenting the incidents comprising an event’s phases. In police officer training, the various suspicious behaviours were called “terrorism precursor activities” and were divided between criminal and non-criminal. “Functional Standards,” developed by the Los Angeles Police Department and then tested by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), served to code the observed behaviours for sharing (via compatible communication protocols) up the federal hierarchy and also horizontally between states and regions. In the popular parlance of videos made for the public by local police departments and DHS, which would come to populate the internet within a few years, these categories were “signs of terrorism,” more specifically: surveillance, eliciting information, testing security, and so on. Image 3: “The Seven Signs of Terrorism (sometimes eight).” CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using materials in the public domain. If the problem of 9/11 had been that the men who would become hijackers had gone unnoticed, the basic idea of the Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative was to create a mechanism through which the eyes and ears of everyone could contribute to their detection. In this vein, “If You See Something, Say Something™” was a campaign that originated with the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and was then licensed for use to DHS. The tips and leads such campaigns generated, together with the reports from officers on suspicious incidents that might have to do with terrorism, were coordinated in the Information Sharing Environment. Drawing on reports thus generated, the Federal Government would, in theory, communicate timely information on security threats to law enforcement so that they would be better able to discern the incidents to be reported. The cycle aimed to catch events in emergence, in a distinctively anticipatory strategy of counterterrorism (Stalcup). Re-imagination A curious fact emerges from this history, and it is key to understanding how this initiative developed. That is, there was nothing suspicious in the encounters. The soon-to-be terrorists’ licenses were up-to-date, the cars were legal, they were not nervous. Even Mohamed Atta’s warrant would have resulted in nothing more than a fine. It is not self-evident, given these facts, how a governmental technology came to be designed from these scenarios. How––if nothing seemed of immediate concern, if there had been nothing suspicious to discern––did an intelligence strategy come to be assembled around such encounters? Evidently, strident demands were made after the events of 9/11 to know, “what went wrong?” Policies were crafted and implemented according to the answers given: it was too easy to obtain identification, or to enter and stay in the country, or to buy airplane tickets and fly. But the trooper’s question, the reader will recall, was somewhat different. He had said, “It’s difficult sometimes to think back and go: ‘What if you had known something else?’” To ask “what if you had known something else?” is also to ask what else might have been. Janet Roitman shows that identifying a crisis tends to implicate precisely the question of what went wrong. Crisis, and its critique, take up history as a series of right and wrong turns, bad choices made between existing dichotomies (90): liberty-security, security-privacy, ordinary-suspicious. It is to say, what were the possibilities and how could we have selected the correct one? Such questions seek to retrospectively uncover latencies—systemic or structural, human error or a moral lapse (71)—but they ask of those latencies what false understanding of the enemy, of threat, of priorities, allowed a terrible thing to happen. “What if…?” instead turns to the virtuality hidden in history, through which missed opportunities can be re-imagined. Image 4: “The Cholmondeley Sisters and Their Swaddled Babies.” Anonymous, c. 1600-1610 (British School, 17th century); Deleuze and Parnet (150). CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using materials in the public domain. Gilles Deleuze, speaking with Claire Parnet, says, “memory is not an actual image which forms after the object has been perceived, but a virtual image coexisting with the actual perception of the object” (150). Re-imagined scenarios take up the potential of memory, so that as the trooper’s traffic stop was revisited, it also became a way of imagining what else might have been. As Immanuel Kant, among others, points out, “the productive power of imagination is […] not exactly creative, for it is not capable of producing a sense representation that was never given to our faculty of sense; one can always furnish evidence of the material of its ideas” (61). The “memory” of these encounters provided the material for re-imagining them, and thereby re-virtualising history. This was different than other governmental responses, such as examining past events in order to assess the probable risk of their repetition, or drawing on past events to imagine future scenarios, for use in exercises that identify vulnerabilities and remedy deficiencies (Anderson). Re-imagining scenarios of police-hijacker encounters through the question of “what if?” evoked what Erin Manning calls “a certain array of recognizable elastic points” (39), through which options for other movements were invented. The Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative’s architects instrumentalised such moments as they designed new governmental entities and programs to anticipate terrorism. For each element of the encounter, an aspect of the initiative was developed: training, functional standards, a way to (hypothetically) get real-time information about threats. Suspicion was identified as a key affect, one which, if cultivated, could offer a way to effectively deal not with binary right or wrong possibilities, but with the potential which lies nestled in uncertainty. The “signs of terrorism” (that is, categories of “terrorism precursor activities”) served to maximise receptivity to encounters. Indeed, it can apparently create an oversensitivity, manifested, for example, in police surveillance of innocent people exercising their right to assemble (Madigan), or the confiscation of photographers’s equipment (Simon). “What went wrong?” and “what if?” were different interrogations of the same pre-9/11 incidents. The questions are of course intimately related. Moments where something went wrong are when one is likely to ask, what else might have been known? Moreover, what else might have been? The answers to each question informed and shaped the other, as re-imagined scenarios became the means of extracting categories of suspicious activities and patterns of behaviour that comprise the phases of an event in becoming. Conclusion The 9/11 Commission, after two years of investigation into the causes of the disastrous day, reported that “the most important failure was one of imagination” (Kean and Hamilton, Summary). The iconic images of 9/11––such as airplanes being flown into symbols of American power––already existed, in guises ranging from fictive thrillers to the infamous FBI field memo sent to headquarters on Arab men learning to fly, but not land. In 1974 there had already been an actual (failed) attempt to steal a plane and kill the president by crashing it into the White House (Kean and Hamilton, Report Ch11 n21). The threats had been imagined, as Pat O’Malley and Philip Bougen put it, but not how to govern them, and because the ways to address those threats had been not imagined, they were discounted as matters for intervention (29). O’Malley and Bougen argue that one effect of 9/11, and the general rise of incalculable insecurities, was to make it necessary for the “merely imaginable” to become governable. Images of threats from the mundane to the extreme had to be conjured, and then imagination applied again, to devise ways to render them amenable to calculation, minimisation or elimination. In the words of the 9/11 Commission, the Government must bureaucratise imagination. There is a sense in which this led to more of the same. Re-imagining the early encounters reinforced expectations for officers to do what they already do, that is, to be on the lookout for suspicious behaviours. Yet, the images of threat brought forth, in their mixing of memory and an elastic “almost,” generated their own momentum and distinctive demands. Existing capacities, such as suspicion, were re-shaped and elaborated into specific forms of security governance. The question of “what if?” and the scenarios of police-hijacker encounter were particularly potent equipment for this re-imagining of history and its re-virtualisation. References Anderson, Ben. “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography 34.6 (2010): 777-98. Clay, Nolan, and Randy Ellis. “Terrorist Ticketed Last Year on I-40.” NewsOK, 20 Jan. 2002. 25 Nov. 2014 ‹http://newsok.com/article/2779124›. Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II. New York: Columbia UP 2007 [1977]. Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Hijackers Timeline (Redacted) Part 01 of 02.” Working Draft Chronology of Events for Hijackers and Associates. 2003. 18 Apr. 2014 ‹https://vault.fbi.gov/9-11%20Commission%20Report/9-11-chronology-part-01-of-02›. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Kean, Thomas H., and Lee Hamilton. Executive Summary of the 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. 25 Oct. 2015 ‹http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Exec.htm›. Kean, Thomas H., and Lee Hamilton. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. McConnell, Mike. “Overhauling Intelligence.” Foreign Affairs, July/Aug. 2007. Madigan, Nick. “Spying Uncovered.” Baltimore Sun 18 Jul. 2008. 25 Oct. 2015 ‹http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-te.md.spy18jul18-story.html›. Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2009. O’Malley, P., and P. Bougen. “Imaginable Insecurities: Imagination, Routinisation and the Government of Uncertainty post 9/11.” Imaginary Penalities. Ed. Pat Carlen. Cullompton, UK: Willan, 2008.Roitman, Janet. Anti-Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2013. Simon, Stephanie. “Suspicious Encounters: Ordinary Preemption and the Securitization of Photography.” Security Dialogue 43.2 (2012): 157-73. Stalcup, Meg. “Policing Uncertainty: On Suspicious Activity Reporting.” Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases. Eds. Limor Saminian-Darash and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015. 69-87. Wall Street Journal. “A Careful Sequence of Mundane Dealings Sows a Day of Bloody Terror for Hijackers.” 16 Oct. 2001.
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Grossman, Michele. "Prognosis Critical: Resilience and Multiculturalism in Contemporary Australia." M/C Journal 16, no. 5 (August 28, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.699.

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Introduction Most developed countries, including Australia, have a strong focus on national, state and local strategies for emergency management and response in the face of disasters and crises. This framework can include coping with catastrophic dislocation, service disruption, injury or loss of life in the face of natural disasters such as major fires, floods, earthquakes or other large-impact natural events, as well as dealing with similar catastrophes resulting from human actions such as bombs, biological agents, cyber-attacks targeting essential services such as communications networks, or other crises affecting large populations. Emergency management frameworks for crisis and disaster response are distinguished by their focus on the domestic context for such events; that is, how to manage and assist the ways in which civilian populations, who are for the most part inexperienced and untrained in dealing with crises and disasters, are able to respond and behave in such situations so as to minimise the impacts of a catastrophic event. Even in countries like Australia that demonstrate a strong public commitment to cultural pluralism and social cohesion, ethno-cultural diversity can be seen as a risk or threat to national security and values at times of political, natural, economic and/or social tensions and crises. Australian government policymakers have recently focused, with increasing intensity, on “community resilience” as a key element in countering extremism and enhancing emergency preparedness and response. In some sense, this is the result of a tacit acknowledgement by government agencies that there are limits to what they can do for domestic communities should such a catastrophic event occur, and accordingly, the focus in recent times has shifted to how governments can best help people to help themselves in such situations, a key element of the contemporary “resilience” approach. Yet despite the robustly multicultural nature of Australian society, explicit engagement with Australia’s cultural diversity flickers only fleetingly on this agenda, which continues to pursue approaches to community resilience in the absence of understandings about how these terms and formations may themselves need to be diversified to maximise engagement by all citizens in a multicultural polity. There have been some recent efforts in Australia to move in this direction, for example the Australian Emergency Management Institute (AEMI)’s recent suite of projects with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities (2006-2010) and the current Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee-supported project on “Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism” (Grossman and Tahiri), which I discuss in a longer forthcoming version of this essay (Grossman). Yet the understanding of ethno-cultural identity and difference that underlies much policy thinking on resilience remains problematic for the way in which it invests in a view of the cultural dimensions of community resilience as relic rather than resource – valorising the preservation of and respect for cultural norms and traditions, but silent on what different ethno-cultural communities might contribute toward expanded definitions of both “community” and “resilience” by virtue of the transformative potential and existing cultural capital they bring with them into new national and also translocal settings. For example, a primary conclusion of the joint program between AEMI and the Australian Multicultural Commission is that CALD communities are largely “vulnerable” in the context of disasters and emergency management and need to be better integrated into majority-culture models of theorising and embedding community resilience. This focus on stronger national integration and the “vulnerability” of culturally diverse ethno-cultural communities in the Australian context echoes the work of scholars beyond Australia such as McGhee, Mouritsen (Reflections, Citizenship) and Joppke. They argue that the “civic turn” in debates around resurgent contemporary nationalism and multicultural immigration policies privileges civic integration over genuine two-way multiculturalism. This approach sidesteps the transculturational (Ortiz; Welsch; Mignolo; Bennesaieh; Robins; Stein) aspects of contemporary social identities and exchange by paying lip-service to cultural diversity while affirming a neo-liberal construct of civic values and principles as a universalising goal of Western democratic states within a global market economy. It also suggests a superficial tribute to cultural diversity that does not embed diversity comprehensively at the levels of either conceptualising or resourcing different elements of Australian transcultural communities within the generalised framework of “community resilience.” And by emphasising cultural difference as vulnerability rather than as resource or asset, it fails to acknowledge the varieties of resilience capital that many culturally diverse individuals and communities may bring with them when they resettle in new environments, by ignoring the question of what “resilience” actually means to those from culturally diverse communities. In so doing, it also avoids the critical task of incorporating intercultural definitional diversity around the concepts of both “community” and “resilience” used to promote social cohesion and the capacity to recover from disasters and crises. How we might do differently in thinking about the broader challenges for multiculturalism itself as a resilient transnational concept and practice? The Concept of Resilience The meanings of resilience vary by disciplinary perspective. While there is no universally accepted definition of the concept, it is widely acknowledged that resilience refers to the capacity of an individual to do well in spite of exposure to acute trauma or sustained adversity (Liebenberg 219). Originating in the Latin word resilio, meaning ‘to jump back’, there is general consensus that resilience pertains to an individual’s, community’s or system’s ability to adapt to and ‘bounce back’ from a disruptive event (Mohaupt 63, Longstaff et al. 3). Over the past decade there has been a dramatic rise in interest in the clinical, community and family sciences concerning resilience to a broad range of adversities (Weine 62). While debate continues over which discipline can be credited with first employing resilience as a concept, Mohaupt argues that most of the literature on resilience cites social psychology and psychiatry as the origin for the concept beginning in the mid-20th century. The pioneer researchers of what became known as resilience research studied the impact on children living in dysfunctional families. For example, the findings of work by Garmezy, Werner and Smith and Rutter showed that about one third of children in these studies were coping very well despite considerable adversities and traumas. In asking what it was that prevented the children in their research from being negatively influenced by their home environments, such research provided the basis for future research on resilience. Such work was also ground-breaking for identifying the so-called ‘protective factors’ or resources that individuals can operationalise when dealing with adversity. In essence, protective factors are those conditions in the individual that protect them from the risk of dysfunction and enable recovery from trauma. They mitigate the effects of stressors or risk factors, that is, those conditions that predispose one to harm (Hajek 15). Protective factors include the inborn traits or qualities within an individual, those defining an individual’s environment, and also the interaction between the two. Together, these factors give people the strength, skills and motivation to cope in difficult situations and re-establish (a version of) ‘normal’ life (Gunnestad). Identifying protective factors is important in terms of understanding the particular resources a given sociocultural group has at its disposal, but it is also vital to consider the interconnections between various protective mechanisms, how they might influence each other, and to what degree. An individual, for instance, might display resilience or adaptive functioning in a particular domain (e.g. emotional functioning) but experience significant deficits in another (e.g. academic achievement) (Hunter 2). It is also essential to scrutinise how the interaction between protective factors and risk factors creates patterns of resilience. Finally, a comprehensive understanding of the interrelated nature of protective mechanisms and risk factors is imperative for designing effective interventions and tailored preventive strategies (Weine 65). In short, contemporary thinking about resilience suggests it is neither entirely personal nor strictly social, but an interactive and iterative combination of the two. It is a quality of the environment as much as the individual. For Ungar, resilience is the complex entanglements between “individuals and their social ecologies [that] will determine the degree of positive outcomes experienced” (3). Thinking about resilience as context-dependent is important because research that is too trait-based or actor-centred risks ignoring any structural or institutional forces. A more ecological interpretation of resilience, one that takes into a person’s context and environment into account, is vital in order to avoid blaming the victim for any hardships they face, or relieving state and institutional structures from their responsibilities in addressing social adversity, which can “emphasise self-help in line with a neo-conservative agenda instead of stimulating state responsibility” (Mohaupt 67). Nevertheless, Ungar posits that a coherent definition of resilience has yet to be developed that adequately ‘captures the dual focus of the individual and the individual’s social ecology and how the two must both be accounted for when determining the criteria for judging outcomes and discerning processes associated with resilience’ (7). Recent resilience research has consequently prompted a shift away from vulnerability towards protective processes — a shift that highlights the sustained capabilities of individuals and communities under threat or at risk. Locating ‘Culture’ in the Literature on Resilience However, an understanding of the role of culture has remained elusive or marginalised within this trend; there has been comparatively little sustained investigation into the applicability of resilience constructs to non-western cultures, or how the resources available for survival might differ from those accessible to western populations (Ungar 4). As such, a growing body of researchers is calling for more rigorous inquiry into culturally determined outcomes that might be associated with resilience in non-western or multicultural cultures and contexts, for example where Indigenous and minority immigrant communities live side by side with their ‘mainstream’ neighbours in western settings (Ungar 2). ‘Cultural resilience’ considers the role that cultural background plays in determining the ability of individuals and communities to be resilient in the face of adversity. For Clauss-Ehlers, the term describes the degree to which the strengths of one’s culture promote the development of coping (198). Culturally-focused resilience suggests that people can manage and overcome stress and trauma based not on individual characteristics alone, but also from the support of broader sociocultural factors (culture, cultural values, language, customs, norms) (Clauss-Ehlers 324). The innate cultural strengths of a culture may or may not differ from the strengths of other cultures; the emphasis here is not so much comparatively inter-cultural as intensively intra-cultural (VanBreda 215). A culturally focused resilience model thus involves “a dynamic, interactive process in which the individual negotiates stress through a combination of character traits, cultural background, cultural values, and facilitating factors in the sociocultural environment” (Clauss-Ehlers 199). In understanding ways of ‘coping and hoping, surviving and thriving’, it is thus crucial to consider how culturally and linguistically diverse minorities navigate the cultural understandings and assumptions of both their countries of origin and those of their current domicile (Ungar 12). Gunnestad claims that people who master the rules and norms of their new culture without abandoning their own language, values and social support are more resilient than those who tenaciously maintain their own culture at the expense of adjusting to their new environment. They are also more resilient than those who forego their own culture and assimilate with the host society (14). Accordingly, if the combination of both valuing one’s culture as well as learning about the culture of the new system produces greater resilience and adaptive capacities, serious problems can arise when a majority tries to acculturate a minority to the mainstream by taking away or not recognising important parts of the minority culture. In terms of resilience, if cultural factors are denied or diminished in accounting for and strengthening resilience – in other words, if people are stripped of what they possess by way of resilience built through cultural knowledge, disposition and networks – they do in fact become vulnerable, because ‘they do not automatically gain those cultural strengths that the majority has acquired over generations’ (Gunnestad 14). Mobilising ‘Culture’ in Australian Approaches to Community Resilience The realpolitik of how concepts of resilience and culture are mobilised is highly relevant here. As noted above, when ethnocultural difference is positioned as a risk or a threat to national identity, security and values, this is precisely the moment when vigorously, even aggressively, nationalised definitions of ‘community’ and ‘identity’ that minoritise or disavow cultural diversities come to the fore in public discourse. The Australian evocation of nationalism and national identity, particularly in the way it has framed policy discussion on managing national responses to disasters and threats, has arguably been more muted than some of the European hysteria witnessed recently around cultural diversity and national life. Yet we still struggle with the idea that newcomers to Australia might fall on the surplus rather than the deficit side of the ledger when it comes to identifying and harnessing resilience capital. A brief example of this trend is explored here. From 2006 to 2010, the Australian Emergency Management Institute embarked on an ambitious government-funded four-year program devoted to strengthening community resilience in relation to disasters with specific reference to engaging CALD communities across Australia. The program, Inclusive Emergency Management with CALD Communities, was part of a wider Australian National Action Plan to Build Social Cohesion, Harmony and Security in the wake of the London terrorist bombings in July 2005. Involving CALD community organisations as well as various emergency and disaster management agencies, the program ran various workshops and agency-community partnership pilots, developed national school education resources, and commissioned an evaluation of the program’s effectiveness (Farrow et al.). While my critique here is certainly not aimed at emergency management or disaster response agencies and personnel themselves – dedicated professionals who often achieve remarkable results in emergency and disaster response under extraordinarily difficult circumstances – it is nevertheless important to highlight how the assumptions underlying elements of AEMI’s experience and outcomes reflect the persistent ways in which ethnocultural diversity is rendered as a problem to be surmounted or a liability to be redressed, rather than as an asset to be built upon or a resource to be valued and mobilised. AEMI’s explicit effort to engage with CALD communities in building overall community resilience was important in its tacit acknowledgement that emergency and disaster services were (and often remain) under-resourced and under-prepared in dealing with the complexities of cultural diversity in emergency situations. Despite these good intentions, however, while the program produced some positive outcomes and contributed to crucial relationship building between CALD communities and emergency services within various jurisdictions, it also continued to frame the challenge of working with cultural diversity as a problem of increased vulnerability during disasters for recently arrived and refugee background CALD individuals and communities. This highlights a common feature in community resilience-building initiatives, which is to focus on those who are already ‘robust’ versus those who are ‘vulnerable’ in relation to resilience indicators, and whose needs may require different or additional resources in order to be met. At one level, this is a pragmatic resourcing issue: national agencies understandably want to put their people, energy and dollars where they are most needed in pursuit of a steady-state unified national response at times of crisis. Nor should it be argued that at least some CALD groups, particularly those from new arrival and refugee communities, are not vulnerable in at least some of the ways and for some of the reasons suggested in the program evaluation. However, the consistent focus on CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘in need’ is problematic, as well as partial. It casts members of these communities as structurally and inherently less able and less resilient in the context of disasters and emergencies: in some sense, as those who, already ‘victims’ of chronic social deficits such as low English proficiency, social isolation and a mysterious unidentified set of ‘cultural factors’, can become doubly victimised in acute crisis and disaster scenarios. In what is by now a familiar trope, the description of CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ precludes asking questions about what they do have, what they do know, and what they do or can contribute to how we respond to disaster and emergency events in our communities. A more profound problem in this sphere revolves around working out how best to engage CALD communities and individuals within existing approaches to disaster and emergency preparedness and response. This reflects a fundamental but unavoidable limitation of disaster preparedness models: they are innately spatially and geographically bounded, and consequently understand ‘communities’ in these terms, rather than expanding definitions of ‘community’ to include the dimensions of community-as-social-relations. While some good engagement outcomes were achieved locally around cross-cultural knowledge for emergency services workers, the AEMI program fell short of asking some of the harder questions about how emergency and disaster service scaffolding and resilience-building approaches might themselves need to change or transform, using a cross-cutting model of ‘communities’ as both geographic places and multicultural spaces (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan) in order to be more effective in national scenarios in which cultural diversity should be taken for granted. Toward Acknowledgement of Resilience Capital Most significantly, the AEMI program did not produce any recognition of the ways in which CALD communities already possess resilience capital, or consider how this might be drawn on in formulating stronger community initiatives around disaster and threats preparedness for the future. Of course, not all individuals within such communities, nor all communities across varying circumstances, will demonstrate resilience, and we need to be careful of either overgeneralising or romanticising the kinds and degrees of ‘resilience capital’ that may exist within them. Nevertheless, at least some have developed ways of withstanding crises and adapting to new conditions of living. This is particularly so in connection with individual and group behaviours around resource sharing, care-giving and social responsibility under adverse circumstances (Grossman and Tahiri) – all of which are directly relevant to emergency and disaster response. While some of these resilient behaviours may have been nurtured or enhanced by particular experiences and environments, they can, as the discussion of recent literature above suggests, also be rooted more deeply in cultural norms, habits and beliefs. Whatever their origins, for culturally diverse societies to achieve genuine resilience in the face of both natural and human-made disasters, it is critical to call on the ‘social memory’ (Folke et al.) of communities faced with responding to emergencies and crises. Such wellsprings of social memory ‘come from the diversity of individuals and institutions that draw on reservoirs of practices, knowledge, values, and worldviews and is crucial for preparing the system for change, building resilience, and for coping with surprise’ (Adger et al.). Consequently, if we accept the challenge of mapping an approach to cultural diversity as resource rather than relic into our thinking around strengthening community resilience, there are significant gains to be made. For a whole range of reasons, no diversity-sensitive model or measure of resilience should invest in static understandings of ethnicities and cultures; all around the world, ethnocultural identities and communities are in a constant and sometimes accelerated state of dynamism, reconfiguration and flux. But to ignore the resilience capital and potential protective factors that ethnocultural diversity can offer to the strengthening of community resilience more broadly is to miss important opportunities that can help suture the existing disconnects between proactive approaches to intercultural connectedness and social inclusion on the one hand, and reactive approaches to threats, national security and disaster response on the other, undermining the effort to advance effectively on either front. This means that dominant social institutions and structures must be willing to contemplate their own transformation as the result of transcultural engagement, rather than merely insisting, as is often the case, that ‘other’ cultures and communities conform to existing hegemonic paradigms of being and of living. In many ways, this is the most critical step of all. A resilience model and strategy that questions its own culturally informed yet taken-for-granted assumptions and premises, goes out into communities to test and refine these, and returns to redesign its approach based on the new knowledge it acquires, would reflect genuine progress toward an effective transculturational approach to community resilience in culturally diverse contexts.References Adger, W. Neil, Terry P. Hughes, Carl Folke, Stephen R. 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New York: Springer, 2010. 324-326. Farrow, David, Anthea Rutter and Rosalind Hurworth. Evaluation of the Inclusive Emergency Management with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Communities Program. Parkville, Vic.: Centre for Program Evaluation, U of Melbourne, July 2009. ‹http://www.ag.gov.au/www/emaweb/rwpattach.nsf/VAP/(9A5D88DBA63D32A661E6369859739356)~Final+Evaluation+Report+-+July+2009.pdf/$file/Final+Evaluation+Report+-+July+2009.pdf>.Folke, Carl, Thomas Hahn, Per Olsson, and Jon Norberg. “Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30 (2005): 441-73. ‹http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.energy.30.050504.144511>. Garmezy, Norman. “The Study of Competence in Children at Risk for Severe Psychopathology.” The Child in His Family: Children at Psychiatric Risk. Vol. 3. Eds. E. J. Anthony and C. Koupernick. New York: Wiley, 1974. 77-97. Grossman, Michele. “Resilient Multiculturalism? Diversifying Australian Approaches to Community Resilience and Cultural Difference”. Global Perspectives on Multiculturalism in the 21st Century. Eds. B. E. de B’beri and F. Mansouri. London: Routledge, 2014. Grossman, Michele, and Hussein Tahiri. Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism. Canberra: Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee, forthcoming 2014. Grossman, Michele. “Cultural Resilience and Strengthening Communities”. Safeguarding Australia Summit, Canberra. 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.safeguardingaustraliasummit.org.au/uploader/resources/Michele_Grossman.pdf>. Gunnestad, Arve. “Resilience in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: How Resilience Is Generated in Different Cultures.” Journal of Intercultural Communication 11 (2006). ‹http://www.immi.se/intercultural/nr11/gunnestad.htm>. Hajek, Lisa J. “Belonging and Resilience: A Phenomenological Study.” Unpublished Master of Science thesis, U of Wisconsin-Stout. 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Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2000. Mohaupt, Sarah. “Review Article: Resilience and Social Exclusion.” Social Policy and Society 8 (2009): 63-71.Mouritsen, Per. "The Culture of Citizenship: A Reflection on Civic Integration in Europe." Ed. R. Zapata-Barrero. Citizenship Policies in the Age of Diversity: Europe at the Crossroad." Barcelona: CIDOB Foundation, 2009: 23-35. Mouritsen, Per. “Political Responses to Cultural Conflict: Reflections on the Ambiguities of the Civic Turn.” Ed. P. Mouritsen and K.E. Jørgensen. Constituting Communities. Political Solutions to Cultural Conflict, London: Palgrave, 2008. 1-30. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Intr. Fernando Coronil and Bronislaw Malinowski. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1995 [1940]. Robins, Kevin. The Challenge of Transcultural Diversities: Final Report on the Transversal Study on Cultural Policy and Cultural Diversity. Culture and Cultural Heritage Department. Strasbourg: Council of European Publishing, 2006. Rutter, Michael. “Protective Factors in Children’s Responses to Stress and Disadvantage.” Annals of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore 8 (1979): 324-38. Stein, Mark. “The Location of Transculture.” Transcultural English Studies: Fictions, Theories, Realities. Eds. F. Schulze-Engler and S. Helff. Cross/Cultures 102/ANSEL Papers 12. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. 251-266. Ungar, Michael. “Resilience across Cultures.” British Journal of Social Work 38.2 (2008): 218-235. First published online 2006: 1-18. In-text references refer to the online Advance Access edition ‹http://bjsw.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2006/10/18/bjsw.bcl343.full.pdf>. VanBreda, Adrian DuPlessis. Resilience Theory: A Literature Review. Erasmuskloof: South African Military Health Service, Military Psychological Institute, Social Work Research & Development, 2001. Weine, Stevan. “Building Resilience to Violent Extremism in Muslim Diaspora Communities in the United States.” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 5.1 (2012): 60-73. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of Culture: City, Nation World. Eds. M. Featherstone and S. Lash. London: Sage, 1999. 194-213. Werner, Emmy E., and Ruth S. Smith. Vulnerable But Invincible: A Longitudinal Study of\ Resilience and Youth. New York: McGraw Hill, 1982. NotesThe concept of ‘resilience capital’ I offer here is in line with one strand of contemporary theorising around resilience – that of resilience as social or socio-ecological capital – but moves beyond the idea of enhancing general social connectedness and community cohesion by emphasising the ways in which culturally diverse communities may already be robustly networked and resourceful within micro-communal settings, with new resources and knowledge both to draw on and to offer other communities or the ‘national community’ at large. In effect, ‘resilience capital’ speaks to the importance of finding ‘the communities within the community’ (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan 11) and recognising their capacity to contribute to broad-scale resilience and recovery.I am indebted for the discussion of the literature on resilience here to Dr Peta Stephenson, Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing, Victoria University, who is working on a related project (M. Grossman and H. Tahiri, Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism, forthcoming 2014).
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48

Cinque, Toija. "A Study in Anxiety of the Dark." M/C Journal 24, no. 2 (April 27, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2759.

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Introduction This article is a study in anxiety with regard to social online spaces (SOS) conceived of as dark. There are two possible ways to define ‘dark’ in this context. The first is that communication is dark because it either has limited distribution, is not open to all users (closed groups are a case example) or hidden. The second definition, linked as a result of the first, is the way that communication via these means is interpreted and understood. Dark social spaces disrupt the accepted top-down flow by the ‘gazing elite’ (data aggregators including social media), but anxious users might need to strain to notice what is out there, and this in turn destabilises one’s reception of the scene. In an environment where surveillance technologies are proliferating, this article examines contemporary, dark, interconnected, and interactive communications for the entangled affordances that might be brought to bear. A provocation is that resistance through counterveillance or “sousveillance” is one possibility. An alternative (or addition) is retreating to or building ‘dark’ spaces that are less surveilled and (perhaps counterintuitively) less fearful. This article considers critically the notion of dark social online spaces via four broad socio-technical concerns connected to the big social media services that have helped increase a tendency for fearful anxiety produced by surveillance and the perceived implications for personal privacy. It also shines light on the aspect of darkness where some users are spurred to actively seek alternative, dark social online spaces. Since the 1970s, public-key cryptosystems typically preserved security for websites, emails, and sensitive health, government, and military data, but this is now reduced (Williams). We have seen such systems exploited via cyberattacks and misappropriated data acquired by affiliations such as Facebook-Cambridge Analytica for targeted political advertising during the 2016 US elections. Via the notion of “parasitic strategies”, such events can be described as news/information hacks “whose attack vectors target a system’s weak points with the help of specific strategies” (von Nordheim and Kleinen-von Königslöw, 88). In accord with Wilson and Serisier’s arguments (178), emerging technologies facilitate rapid data sharing, collection, storage, and processing wherein subsequent “outcomes are unpredictable”. This would also include the effect of acquiescence. In regard to our digital devices, for some, being watched overtly—through cameras encased in toys, computers, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) to digital street ads that determine the resonance of human emotions in public places including bus stops, malls, and train stations—is becoming normalised (McStay, Emotional AI). It might appear that consumers immersed within this Internet of Things (IoT) are themselves comfortable interacting with devices that record sound and capture images for easy analysis and distribution across the communications networks. A counter-claim is that mainstream social media corporations have cultivated a sense of digital resignation “produced when people desire to control the information digital entities have about them but feel unable to do so” (Draper and Turow, 1824). Careful consumers’ trust in mainstream media is waning, with readers observing a strong presence of big media players in the industry and are carefully picking their publications and public intellectuals to follow (Mahmood, 6). A number now also avoid the mainstream internet in favour of alternate dark sites. This is done by users with “varying backgrounds, motivations and participation behaviours that may be idiosyncratic (as they are rooted in the respective person’s biography and circumstance)” (Quandt, 42). By way of connection with dark internet studies via Biddle et al. (1; see also Lasica), the “darknet” is a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content … not a separate physical network but an application and protocol layer riding on existing networks. Examples of darknets are peer-to-peer file sharing, CD and DVD copying, and key or password sharing on email and newsgroups. As we note from the quote above, the “dark web” uses existing public and private networks that facilitate communication via the Internet. Gehl (1220; see also Gehl and McKelvey) has detailed that this includes “hidden sites that end in ‘.onion’ or ‘.i2p’ or other Top-Level Domain names only available through modified browsers or special software. Accessing I2P sites requires a special routing program ... . Accessing .onion sites requires Tor [The Onion Router]”. For some, this gives rise to social anxiety, read here as stemming from that which is not known, and an exaggerated sense of danger, which makes fight or flight seem the only options. This is often justified or exacerbated by the changing media and communication landscape and depicted in popular documentaries such as The Social Dilemma or The Great Hack, which affect public opinion on the unknown aspects of internet spaces and the uses of personal data. The question for this article remains whether the fear of the dark is justified. Consider that most often one will choose to make one’s intimate bedroom space dark in order to have a good night’s rest. We might pleasurably escape into a cinema’s darkness for the stories told therein, or walk along a beach at night enjoying unseen breezes. Most do not avoid these experiences, choosing to actively seek them out. Drawing this thread, then, is the case made here that agency can also be found in the dark by resisting socio-political structural harms. 1. Digital Futures and Anxiety of the Dark Fear of the darkI have a constant fear that something's always nearFear of the darkFear of the darkI have a phobia that someone's always there In the lyrics to the song “Fear of the Dark” (1992) by British heavy metal group Iron Maiden is a sense that that which is unknown and unseen causes fear and anxiety. Holding a fear of the dark is not unusual and varies in degree for adults as it does for children (Fellous and Arbib). Such anxiety connected to the dark does not always concern darkness itself. It can also be a concern for the possible or imagined dangers that are concealed by the darkness itself as a result of cognitive-emotional interactions (McDonald, 16). Extending this claim is this article’s non-binary assertion that while for some technology and what it can do is frequently misunderstood and shunned as a result, for others who embrace the possibilities and actively take it on it is learning by attentively partaking. Mistakes, solecism, and frustrations are part of the process. Such conceptual theorising falls along a continuum of thinking. Global interconnectivity of communications networks has certainly led to consequent concerns (Turkle Alone Together). Much focus for anxiety has been on the impact upon social and individual inner lives, levels of media concentration, and power over and commercialisation of the internet. Of specific note is that increasing commercial media influence—such as Facebook and its acquisition of WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Instagram, CRTL-labs (translating movements and neural impulses into digital signals), LiveRail (video advertising technology), Chainspace (Blockchain)—regularly changes the overall dynamics of the online environment (Turow and Kavanaugh). This provocation was born out recently when Facebook disrupted the delivery of news to Australian audiences via its service. Mainstream social online spaces (SOS) are platforms which provide more than the delivery of media alone and have been conceptualised predominantly in a binary light. On the one hand, they can be depicted as tools for the common good of society through notional widespread access and as places for civic participation and discussion, identity expression, education, and community formation (Turkle; Bruns; Cinque and Brown; Jenkins). This end of the continuum of thinking about SOS seems set hard against the view that SOS are operating as businesses with strategies that manipulate consumers to generate revenue through advertising, data, venture capital for advanced research and development, and company profit, on the other hand. In between the two polar ends of this continuum are the range of other possibilities, the shades of grey, that add contemporary nuance to understanding SOS in regard to what they facilitate, what the various implications might be, and for whom. By way of a brief summary, anxiety of the dark is steeped in the practices of privacy-invasive social media giants such as Facebook and its ancillary companies. Second are the advertising technology companies, surveillance contractors, and intelligence agencies that collect and monitor our actions and related data; as well as the increased ease of use and interoperability brought about by Web 2.0 that has seen a disconnection between technological infrastructure and social connection that acts to limit user permissions and online affordances. Third are concerns for the negative effects associated with depressed mental health and wellbeing caused by “psychologically damaging social networks”, through sleep loss, anxiety, poor body image, real world relationships, and the fear of missing out (FOMO; Royal Society for Public Health (UK) and the Young Health Movement). Here the harms are both individual and societal. Fourth is the intended acceleration toward post-quantum IoT (Fernández-Caramés), as quantum computing’s digital components are continually being miniaturised. This is coupled with advances in electrical battery capacity and interconnected telecommunications infrastructures. The result of such is that the ontogenetic capacity of the powerfully advanced network/s affords supralevel surveillance. What this means is that through devices and the services that they provide, individuals’ data is commodified (Neff and Nafus; Nissenbaum and Patterson). Personal data is enmeshed in ‘things’ requiring that the decisions that are both overt, subtle, and/or hidden (dark) are scrutinised for the various ways they shape social norms and create consequences for public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society (Gillespie). Data and personal information are retrievable from devices, sharable in SOS, and potentially exposed across networks. For these reasons, some have chosen to go dark by being “off the grid”, judiciously selecting their means of communications and their ‘friends’ carefully. 2. Is There Room for Privacy Any More When Everyone in SOS Is Watching? An interesting turn comes through counterarguments against overarching institutional surveillance that underscore the uses of technologies to watch the watchers. This involves a practice of counter-surveillance whereby technologies are tools of resistance to go ‘dark’ and are used by political activists in protest situations for both communication and avoiding surveillance. This is not new and has long existed in an increasingly dispersed media landscape (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes). For example, counter-surveillance video footage has been accessed and made available via live-streaming channels, with commentary in SOS augmenting networking possibilities for niche interest groups or micropublics (Wilson and Serisier, 178). A further example is the Wordpress site Fitwatch, appealing for an end to what the site claims are issues associated with police surveillance (fitwatch.org.uk and endpolicesurveillance.wordpress.com). Users of these sites are called to post police officers’ identity numbers and photographs in an attempt to identify “cops” that might act to “misuse” UK Anti-terrorism legislation against activists during legitimate protests. Others that might be interested in doing their own “monitoring” are invited to reach out to identified personal email addresses or other private (dark) messaging software and application services such as Telegram (freeware and cross-platform). In their work on surveillance, Mann and Ferenbok (18) propose that there is an increase in “complex constructs between power and the practices of seeing, looking, and watching/sensing in a networked culture mediated by mobile/portable/wearable computing devices and technologies”. By way of critical definition, Mann and Ferenbok (25) clarify that “where the viewer is in a position of power over the subject, this is considered surveillance, but where the viewer is in a lower position of power, this is considered sousveillance”. It is the aspect of sousveillance that is empowering to those using dark SOS. One might consider that not all surveillance is “bad” nor institutionalised. It is neither overtly nor formally regulated—as yet. Like most technologies, many of the surveillant technologies are value-neutral until applied towards specific uses, according to Mann and Ferenbok (18). But this is part of the ‘grey area’ for understanding the impact of dark SOS in regard to which actors or what nations are developing tools for surveillance, where access and control lies, and with what effects into the future. 3. Big Brother Watches, So What Are the Alternatives: Whither the Gazing Elite in Dark SOS? By way of conceptual genealogy, consideration of contemporary perceptions of surveillance in a visually networked society (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes) might be usefully explored through a revisitation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, applied here as a metaphor for contemporary surveillance. Arguably, this is a foundational theoretical model for integrated methods of social control (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 192-211), realised in the “panopticon” (prison) in 1787 by Jeremy Bentham (Bentham and Božovič, 29-95) during a period of social reformation aimed at the improvement of the individual. Like the power for social control over the incarcerated in a panopticon, police power, in order that it be effectively exercised, “had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible … like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception” (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 213–4). In grappling with the impact of SOS for the individual and the collective in post-digital times, we can trace out these early ruminations on the complex documentary organisation through state-controlled apparatuses (such as inspectors and paid observers including “secret agents”) via Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 214; Subject and Power, 326-7) for comparison to commercial operators like Facebook. Today, artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition technology (FRT), and closed-circuit television (CCTV) for video surveillance are used for social control of appropriate behaviours. Exemplified by governments and the private sector is the use of combined technologies to maintain social order, from ensuring citizens cross the street only on green lights, to putting rubbish in the correct recycling bin or be publicly shamed, to making cashless payments in stores. The actions see advantages for individual and collective safety, sustainability, and convenience, but also register forms of behaviour and attitudes with predictive capacities. This gives rise to suspicions about a permanent account of individuals’ behaviour over time. Returning to Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 135), the impact of this finds a dissociation of power from the individual, whereby they become unwittingly impelled into pre-existing social structures, leading to a ‘normalisation’ and acceptance of such systems. If we are talking about the dark, anxiety is key for a Ministry of SOS. Following Foucault again (Subject and Power, 326-7), there is the potential for a crawling, creeping governance that was once distinct but is itself increasingly hidden and growing. A blanket call for some form of ongoing scrutiny of such proliferating powers might be warranted, but with it comes regulation that, while offering certain rights and protections, is not without consequences. For their part, a number of SOS platforms had little to no moderation for explicit content prior to December 2018, and in terms of power, notwithstanding important anxiety connected to arguments that children and the vulnerable need protections from those that would seek to take advantage, this was a crucial aspect of community building and self-expression that resulted in this freedom of expression. In unearthing the extent that individuals are empowered arising from the capacity to post sexual self-images, Tiidenberg ("Bringing Sexy Back") considered that through dark SOS (read here as unregulated) some users could work in opposition to the mainstream consumer culture that provides select and limited representations of bodies and their sexualities. This links directly to Mondin’s exploration of the abundance of queer and feminist pornography on dark SOS as a “counterpolitics of visibility” (288). This work resulted in a reasoned claim that the technological structure of dark SOS created a highly political and affective social space that users valued. What also needs to be underscored is that many users also believed that such a space could not be replicated on other mainstream SOS because of the differences in architecture and social norms. Cho (47) worked with this theory to claim that dark SOS are modern-day examples in a history of queer individuals having to rely on “underground economies of expression and relation”. Discussions such as these complicate what dark SOS might now become in the face of ‘adult’ content moderation and emerging tracking technologies to close sites or locate individuals that transgress social norms. Further, broader questions are raised about how content moderation fits in with the public space conceptualisations of SOS more generally. Increasingly, “there is an app for that” where being able to identify the poster of an image or an author of an unknown text is seen as crucial. While there is presently no standard approach, models for combining instance-based and profile-based features such as SVM for determining authorship attribution are in development, with the result that potentially far less content will remain hidden in the future (Bacciu et al.). 4. There’s Nothing New under the Sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9) For some, “[the] high hopes regarding the positive impact of the Internet and digital participation in civic society have faded” (Schwarzenegger, 99). My participant observation over some years in various SOS, however, finds that critical concern has always existed. Views move along the spectrum of thinking from deep scepticisms (Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil) to wondrous techo-utopian promises (Negroponte, Being Digital). Indeed, concerns about the (then) new technologies of wireless broadcasting can be compared with today’s anxiety over the possible effects of the internet and SOS. Inglis (7) recalls, here, too, were fears that humanity was tampering with some dangerous force; might wireless wave be causing thunderstorms, droughts, floods? Sterility or strokes? Such anxieties soon evaporated; but a sense of mystery might stay longer with evangelists for broadcasting than with a laity who soon took wireless for granted and settled down to enjoy the products of a process they need not understand. As the analogy above makes clear, just as audiences came to use ‘the wireless’ and later the internet regularly, it is reasonable to argue that dark SOS will also gain widespread understanding and find greater acceptance. Dark social spaces are simply the recent development of internet connectivity and communication more broadly. The dark SOS afford choice to be connected beyond mainstream offerings, which some users avoid for their perceived manipulation of content and user both. As part of the wider array of dark web services, the resilience of dark social spaces is reinforced by the proliferation of users as opposed to decentralised replication. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can be used for anonymity in parallel to TOR access, but they guarantee only anonymity to the client. A VPN cannot guarantee anonymity to the server or the internet service provider (ISP). While users may use pseudonyms rather than actual names as seen on Facebook and other SOS, users continue to take to the virtual spaces they inhabit their off-line, ‘real’ foibles, problems, and idiosyncrasies (Chenault). To varying degrees, however, people also take their best intentions to their interactions in the dark. The hyper-efficient tools now deployed can intensify this, which is the great advantage attracting some users. In balance, however, in regard to online information access and dissemination, critical examination of what is in the public’s interest, and whether content should be regulated or controlled versus allowing a free flow of information where users self-regulate their online behaviour, is fraught. O’Loughlin (604) was one of the first to claim that there will be voluntary loss through negative liberty or freedom from (freedom from unwanted information or influence) and an increase in positive liberty or freedom to (freedom to read or say anything); hence, freedom from surveillance and interference is a kind of negative liberty, consistent with both libertarianism and liberalism. Conclusion The early adopters of initial iterations of SOS were hopeful and liberal (utopian) in their beliefs about universality and ‘free’ spaces of open communication between like-minded others. 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