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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.
for staff members to be considered potential targets. Further, governments show a certain degree of tolerance towards violations of their own laws that criminalise ransom payments. Following the uproar sparked by its intransigence over the abduction of journalist James Foley, who was executed by the IS in Syria on 18 August 2014, the US government revised its policy. It said families trying everything possible to save a loved one from a terrorist
formulate lessons for the future. In this spirit, this concluding chapter draws out broader lessons of this study both for research and policy. It explores the relevance of the ideas developed in the book for a range of other conflict contexts where armed groups have been listed as terrorist organisations. Research design: 9/11 as a critical juncture The events of 9/11 should be
negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Communist People’s Party-National Democratic Front in the Philippines and the National Liberation Army in Colombia. All these armed groups are proscribed internationally or listed as designated terrorist organisations. The listing of armed groups as terrorist organisations, and negotiation and peace processes have been happening concurrently. Both
contemporary political ritual. So doing, moreover, sheds light upon a number of additional crucial dynamics within contemporary political life, including: the importance – and limitations – of dissent; the performance of cross-party consensus; the preservation and reinforcement of Parliament’s sovereign right to delineate the parameters of legitimate political enterprise; and, the importance of ritual for the constitution of political reality, which includes the construction or making real of newly banned ‘terrorist’ organisations. In order to do the above, we begin by
-recognition of its armed forces as a terrorist organisation to be a severe disruption of previously established inter-state practices. But the case may not be so unique after all. This chapter argues that similar patterns of hybrid recognition practices can also be found in the case of Lebanese Hezbollah. It explores how the recognition of Hezbollah as a somewhat legitimate part, or at least a major player, of Lebanese society and Middle Eastern politics and simultaneous mis-recognition as a transnational terrorist organisation influence conflict dynamics in the region. It
this particular security problematic, it also offers a typology of five types of security question asked within these debates. These questions – of timing, criteria, mechanics, consequences and exclusion – function, we argue, as demands on the government to variously justify, explain, clarify, elaborate and defend the decision to proscribe one or more terrorist organisations. This has implications, we suggest, for thinking through issues of audience and agency within security politics, as well as the temporalities therein. ‘I am somewhat puzzled’ (Alderdice 2008
, arguably, the world’s first terrorist organisation, guided by a strategy of targeted violence and propagandising that set the template for many a terrorist campaign since. This strategy was outlined by Nikolai Morozov, a nihilist who had gone ‘To the People’ with Stepniak, only to be convinced by the latter’s killing of Mezentsov and Zasulich’s attack on Trepov that more direct action against the tsarist state was needed. Morozov laid this vision out in his 1880 pamphlet The Terrorist Struggle . A more sophisticated work
"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.
Docudrama has become centrally important not only in television production but also in film. They require pre-production research and this is a key marker of difference between docudrama and other kinds of drama. In its emphasis on personality, modern docudrama adheres to a US 'made-for-TV movie' mode that Todd Gitlin has described as ' little personal stories that executives think a mass audience will take as revelations of the contemporary'. This book outlines the main legal and regulatory issues that concern docudrama. The sheer proliferation of words and phases coined to categorise forms that mix drama and documentary is in itself remarkable. Phrases, compound nouns and noun coinages have been drawn mainly from four root words: documentary, drama, fact, and fiction. The book discusses the form's principal codes and conventions to which people in a media-literate environment respond, and that they recognise prior to categorising what they watch. Cultures are living things, condensing around 'key words'. Such words mark out points of interest, contestation and anxiety. Griersonian documentary actively embraced an artfulness always likely to be at odds with the recording of 'actuality'. The history of factual drama replays in microcosm the essential differences in emphases between the British and American television systems. Societies under threat from shadowy 'terrorist' organisations offered new templates for the docudramas that eventually fuelled 1990s 'co-pros' of interest to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. The current spectrum of 'intergeneric hybridisation' in film and television can be represented graphically.