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Though the just war tradition has an ancient pedigree, like any tradition of thought, it is subject to historical highs and lows. Drawing on examples from the history of warfare from the Crusades to the present day, this book explores the limits and possibilities of the moral regulation of war. It focuses on the tensions which exist between war and morality. The moral ambiguity and mixed record of that tradition is acknowledged and the dangers which an exaggerated view of the justice or moral worth of war poses are underlined. The adoption of a 'dispositional' view of ethical life, in which moral character and moral culture play a decisive part, widens and transforms the ethics of war. Realism resists the application of morality to war. Pacifism harms and benefits the just war tradition in about equal measure. In opposition to the amoral and wholly pragmatic approach of the 'pure' realist, the just war theorist insists on the moral determination of war where that is possible, and on the moral renunciation of war where it is not. Moral realism is what the just war tradition purports to be about. Legitimate authority has become entirely subordinated to the concept of state sovereignty. If moderate forms of consequentialism threaten the principle of noncombatant immunity, more extreme or purer forms clearly undermine it. The strategic and the ethical problems of counterterrorism are compounded by the emergence of a new and more extreme form of terrorism.
and money laundering and thus currently contribute to the transformation of war economies through the tracking and investigation of illegal financial transactions (Winer, 2005; Winer and Roule, 2003). Multiple international security bodies are also involved in the tracking and investigation of the illicit side of war economies. Many of these bodies have been set up to deal specifically with the global drug trade, transnational organised crime or global terrorism, but due to the connections between these activities and many war economies, have been or could
: ‘my government let me stay for two years and then they said they wanted me home and I said I can’t because I’m in the middle of a terrorism trial, I want to finish it, and they said, fine, but you’re going to have to give up your job [back home], so I had to quit’ (I48). The impact of forced or voluntary short-term commitments is threefold. First is the problem of recruitment. It is already difficult to get qualified judges and lawyers to leave their homes, families and jobs to come to a conflictaffected zone. Such difficulties are made worse by expecting
global governance missionaries’ (Hozic, 2006: 244). Customs is also seen as a way of preventing the spread of organised crime to Western Europe (Bruggman, 2001) and is further seen as another check against the threat of terrorism in the post-9/11 world (Chaflin, 2006; Heyman, 2004; Megoran, Raballand and Bouyjou, 2005; Walsh, 2006). However, customs assistance has not always had the desired effect and besides not bringing the expected economic benefits (Bartlett and Samardzˇija, 2000), the agenda of installing a modern customs agency based on neo-liberal economic
Since the early 2000s, global, underground networks of insurrectionary anarchists have carried out thousands of acts of political violence. This book is an exploration of the ideas, strategies, and history of these political actors that engage in a confrontation with the oppressive powers of the state and capital. The vast majority of these attacks have been claimed via online communiqués through anonymous monikers such as the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI). The emphasis of the insurrectionary, nihilist-infused anarchism is on creating war-like conditions for opposing capitalism, the state, and that which perpetuates structural violence (e.g. racism, poverty, speciesism, gender roles). To connect the various configurations of post-millennial, insurrectionary resistance, the book explores explore three of its most identifiable components, the FAI, Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF), and emergent networks in Mexico. In his discussion of guerrilla warfare and terrorism, conflict theorist Richard Rubenstein points to a two-stage understanding advocated by Vietnamese leader and military strategist General Vo Nguyen Giap. The book also examines the strategy of Blanquism, the contribution of "classical anarchists," the influence of theorists such as Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee. It seeks to construct the basis for an insurrectionary framework based around a shared politic. The feminist methodology and ethic of research adds a great deal, including a reading of identity politics, standpoint theory, action-orientated research, and embedded, emotive and sincere participatory involvement. The design and methodological intent of the book is to embrace a "militant" form of inquiry which is counter to the project of securitization.
This book assesses the security threat and political challenges offered by dissident Irish republicanism to the Northern Irish peace process. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement failed to end entirely armed republicanism. The movement of Sinn Féin into constitutional politics in a government of Northern Ireland and the eschewing of militarism that followed, including disbandment of the Provisional IRA (PIRA), the decommissioning of weapons and the supporting of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) proved too much for a minority of republicans. This book begins by examining Sinn Féin’s evolution from the margins of political existence to becoming mainstream constitutional players. It then assesses how the compromises associated with these changes have been rejected by republican ‘dissidents’.
In order to explore the heterogeneity of contemporary Irish republicanism this book draws upon in-depth interviews and analyses the strategies and tactics of various dissident republican groups. This analysis is used to outline the political and military challenges posed by dissidents to Northern Ireland in a post-Good Friday Agreement context as well as examine the response of the British state towards continuing violence. This discussion places the state response to armed republicanism in Northern Ireland within the broader debate on counter-terrorism after 9/11.
How can potential future terrorists be identified? Forming one of the four
pillars of the United Kingdom’s counter-terrorism strategy CONTEST, Prevent
seeks to answer, and act on, this question. Occupying a central role in security
debates post-9/11, Prevent is concerned with understanding and tackling
radicalisation. It carries the promise of early intervention into the lives of
those who may be on a pathway to violence.
This book offers an innovative
account of the Prevent policy, situating it as a novel form of power that has
played a central role in the production and the policing of contemporary British
identity. Drawing on interviews with those at the heart of Prevent’s
development, the book provides readers with an in-depth history and
conceptualisation of the policy. The book demonstrates that Prevent is an
ambitious new way of thinking about violence that has led to the creation of a
radical new role for the state: tackling vulnerability to radicalisation.
Foregrounding the analytical relationship between security, identity and
temporality in Prevent, this book situates the policy as central to contemporary
identity politics in the UK. Detailing the history of the policy, and the
concepts and practices that have been developed within Prevent, this book
critically engages with the assumptions on which they are based and the forms of
power they mobilise.
In providing a timely history and analysis of British
counter-radicalisation policy, this book will be of interests to students and
academics interested in contemporary security policy and domestic responses to
the ‘War on Terror’.
Banning them, securing us offers a rich and expansive exploration of the politics
of proscribing – or banning – terrorist organisations in Britain. The book calls
attention to the remarkable, and overlooked, role of proscription debates and
decisions in contemporary UK politics. Using primary empirical research, the
book shows how parliamentary processes of proscribing ‘illegitimate’
organisations is as much a ritual performance as it is a technique for
countering political violence. This ritual, we argue, is a performance of
sovereignty and powerful framing of Britain as a liberal, democratic, moderate
space. Yet, it represents a paradox too. For proscription’s processes have
limited democratic or judicial oversight, and its outcomes pose significant
threats to democratic norms, human rights, political dissent and citizenship
more broadly.
The book breaks important new ground on the politics of
terrorism, counter-terrorism, security and democracy. It will be widely read by
researchers and students across Security Studies, International Relations,
Political Science, History, Sociology and beyond.
"Proscribing peace is the first book to take a systematic look at the impact of
proscription on peace negotiations based on deep empirical research. With rare
access to actors during the Colombian negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia People’s Army (FARC for its Spanish acronym), the book argues
that proscription has made pre-negotiations harder and more prolonged.
The
book critically revisits and extends central concepts of the pre-negotiation
literature: vilification, symmetry and ripeness. It develops a new concept, the
‘linguistic ceasefire’, to understand how negotiations still take place in an
age of proscription. The ‘linguistic ceasefire’ has three main components: 1)
recognize the conflict, 2) drop the ‘terrorist’ label and 3) uncouple the act
and the actor. It removes the symbolic impact of proscription, even if
de-listing is not possible ahead of negotiations.
With relevance for more
than half of the conflicts around the world in which an armed group is listed as
a terrorist organisation, this concept can help explain why certain conflicts
remain stuck in the ‘terrorist’ framing while others emerge from it.
International proscription regimes criminalise both the actor and the act of
terrorism. The book calls for an end to this amalgamation between acts and
actors. By focussing on the acts instead, international policy would be better
able to consider the violent actions both of armed groups and those of the
state. By separating the act and the actor, change -- and thus peace -- become
possible.
This book explores the reasons and justifications for the Chinese state’s campaign to erase Uyghur identity, focusing, in particular, on how China’s manipulation of the US-led Global War on Terror (GWOT) has facilitated this cultural genocide. It is the first book to address this issue in depth, and serves as an important rebuttal to Chinese state claims that this campaign is a benign effort to combat an existential extremist threat. While the book suggests that the motivation for this state-led campaign is primarily China’s gradual settler colonization of the Uyghur homeland, the text focuses on the narrative of the Uyghur terrorist threat that has provided international cover and justification for the campaign and has shaped its ‘biopolitical’ nature. It describes how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was able to successfully implicate Uyghurs in GWOT and, despite a lack of evidence, brand them internationally as a serious terrorist threat within the first year of the war. In recounting these developments, the book offers a critique of existing literature on the Uyghur terrorist threat and questions the extent of this threat to the PRC. Finding no evidence for the existence of such a threat when the Chinese state first declared its existence in 2001, the book argues that a nominal Uyghur militant threat only emerged after over a decade of PRC suppression of Uyghur dissent in the name of counterterrorism, facilitating a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ that has served to justify further state repression and ultimately cultural genocide.