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Introduction This study contends that when the Irish security and intelligence agencies were ordered to re-evaluate national security policy after 9/11 they did so in an atmosphere of heightened financial and political pressures on their organisations. Serious policy weaknesses occurred. Furthermore, several problems of policy persist. In Chapter 3 , the findings of
2 ‘9/11’ and the noise of contemporary fiction In November 2013, Manhattan resident Kenny Cummings sent an email of inquiry to his local newspaper. ‘Have you ever heard from neighbors about the wailing World Trade Center?’, he wrote, claiming that an ‘eerie sound’ could be heard a couple of blocks away from the newly constructed building of One World Trade Center.1 When the email was published, many Tribeca residents confirmed that the sound was real by posting comments and uploading videos of the tower’s ‘wailing’ to YouTube. ‘It’s all the screams of those
the extension of coercive and covert tools for investigation which made use of advances in video surveillance, DNA storage, and tracking. The post-2001 security paradigm has bolstered the powers of police, prosecution, and secret service, whilst substantially diminishing the powers of the judiciary (Oehmichen, 2009 ). As such, whilst 9/11 represented a shift in counter-terrorism discourse and an increase in
People Power revolt, which ended Marcos’ dictatorial regime (Thompson, 1995 ). The 1987 Constitution and subsequent legal instruments provided civil society access to important policy processes. However, the policies and practices of the government that emerged after 9/11 threatened the agency of CSOs and their earlier successes in their engagement with the state. Specifically, in
Although composed before 9/11, Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s My Kinsman, Major Molineux and Thomas Ligotti‘s The Shadow at the Bottom of the World are both prescient in their critique of the impulse of American communities following 9/11 to monumentalise and concretise the nation-state and in particular the remains at Ground Zero. In this essay I discuss Ground Zero as a suggestive trope for the illusiveness of the nation as an imagined community. These complementary Gothic short stories operate as allegory and offer a way of reading how patriotic communities cohered around what remained at Ground Zero and (re)produced it as a site of patriotic performance. A new Gothic trait in our age of terror(ism) is the anxiety over the absence of a stable centre that anchors national continuity. This article places these short stories in conversation with Benedict Anderson,,Étienne Balibar and other theorists who engage critiques of nation-building in order to draw out what is Gothic about the nation-state and to further substantiate how 9/11 revealed the nation-state as a principally Gothic phenomenon.
This paper explores the Gothic videogame Limbo (PlayDead, 2010) in terms of an aesthetic and conceptual precariousness and preoccupation with uncertainty that, I suggest, are particularly associated with the traumatic legacy of 9/11. It engages with Judith Butler s post-9/11 reflections in her work Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004) on the loss of presumed safety and security in the First World. From here, she expresses the potential for shared experiences of vulnerability to inaugurate an ethics of relationality, without recourse to investment in systems of security. I then contrast this with an alternative critical trajectory that emphasises the use-value of such systems over a desire for moral purity. This critical framework is considered in relation to the treatment of vulnerability in Limbo, through its construction of a dialogic relationship between its diegetic game-world and the formal structure of its game-system. The former is found to articulate a pervasive experience of uncertainty, whilst the latter provides a sense of security. I draw upon psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott‘s theories of play and creative living to argue that the tension between game-world and game-system in Limbo creates a model of how uncertainty can be dwelt with, through a precarious balance between the use of systems of security and disengagement from them.
‘I am the least racist person,’ Donald Trump declared. This book unpacks how it is possible for various American administrations to impose discriminatory counterterrorism (CT) and countering violent extremism (CVE) measures on Muslim communities and yet declare that ‘Islam is peace’ or that ‘Muslims are our friends’. The book addresses some of the paradoxes of the securitisation by linking discourses about the role of Muslims in the war on terror in the United States with covert forms of racism. The book is concerned with a securitisation that is covertly rather than overtly expressed, which enables securitising actors like Trump to deny plausibility of racism and claim that they are ‘the least racist person’. The book offers a critique of the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ approaches to CT and CVE and advances an alternative way to understand radicalisation and terrorism by introducing a quantum perspective. Lastly, drawing on the affective turn, the book adds body to the analysis by theorising emotions and affect in the securitisation of Islam. The book argues that this covert securitisation constructs white American subjects as innocent, unprejudiced and living in a post-racial society averse to racism, whilst constructing Muslim subjects as potential terrorists and thus as sites of securitisation. This book is a timely analysis of the securitisation of Islam since 9/11 and presents an original study that contributes to debates on Islamophobia, white fragility and white victimhood, which have proliferated since the rise of far-right (populist) parties in Europe and the US.
This article describes some of the techniques museums use to represent the suffering body in exhibitions. Some display human remains, but much more common, especially in Western museums, are stand-ins for the body. Manikins take many forms, including the wax museum’s hyperrealistic representations, the history museum’s neutral grey figures and the expressionistic figures that represent enslaved people in many recent exhibits. Symbolic objects or artefacts from the lives of victims can serve as counterweights to telling the story of their deaths. Photographs can show horror and the machinery of death, focus attention on individual lives or recreate communities. The absence of the body can call attention to its suffering. All of these techniques can be useful for museums trying to display and teach traumatic histories, but must be used with care and caution.
On the afternoon of September 11 2001 the Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach), Bertie Ahern ordered the ‘heads of the security services of key government departments’ to undertake a complete re-evaluation of measures to protect the state from attack. Hence, underway within hours of the 9/11 outrage in the United States was potentially the most far-reaching review of Irish national security in decades. This book, an academic investigation of Irish national security policy as it has operated since 9/11, provides a theoretically informed analysis of that re-evaluation and the decisions that were taken as a consequence of it up until September 2008. In so doing, it draws on unprecedented access to Ireland's police, security and intelligence agencies; over twenty senior personnel agreed to be interviewed. Questions are raised over the effectiveness of the Irish agencies, the relative absence of naval and airborne defence and the impact on national security of the policy imperative to transform the Defence Forces, particularly the army, for more robust missions overseas. The book also considers the securitisation of Irish immigration policy and the apparent absence of a coherent integration policy despite international evidence suggesting the potential for radicalisation in socially marginalised western communities. Theoretically, the book demonstrates the utility to the analysis of national security policy of three conceptual models of historical institutionalism, governmental politics and threat evaluation.
This article examines the post-millennial popularity of the found footage movie, in particular its engagement with the representational codes of non-fiction media. Whilst the majority of critical writings on found footage identify the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre as a key visual referent, they too often dwell on the literal re-enactment of the event. This article instead suggests that these films evoke fear by mimicking the aesthetic and formal properties of both mainstream news coverage and amateur recording. As such they create both ontological and epistemological confusion as to the reality of the events depicted. Rather than merely replicating the imagery of terror/ism, these films achieve their terrifying effects by mimicking the audiences media spectatorship of such crisis.