Anti-terrorism, citizenship and security

Lee Jarvis, Michael Lister, Michael Lister

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781526133816
  9780719091599
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784991555
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores how different publics make sense of and evaluate anti-terrorism powers within the UK, and the implications of this for citizenship and security. Drawing on primary empirical research, the book argues that whilst white individuals are not unconcerned about the effects of anti-terrorism, ethnic minority citizens (including, but not only those identifying as Muslim) believe that anti-terrorism powers have impacted negatively on their citizenship and security. This book thus offers the first systematic engagement with 'vernacular' or 'everyday' understandings of anti-terrorism policy, citizenship and security. It argues that while transformations in anti-terrorism frameworks impact on public experiences of security and citizenship, they do not do so in a uniform, homogeneous, or predictable manner. At the same time, public understandings and expectations of security and citizenship themselves shape how developments in anti-terrorism frameworks are discussed and evaluated. This important new book will be of interest to researchers and students working in a wide range of disciplines including Political Science, International Relations, Security Studies and Sociology.

1

Anti-terrorism policy in the UK: historical trends and contemporary issues

This is not a temporary emergency requiring a momentary remedy, this will last far beyond the term of my life. (Sir Vernon Harcourt, 1883, speaking of the threat from Fenian terrorism, cited in Staniforth 2013: 3)

Despite the recent – and particularly post-9/11 – upsurge of academic, political and public interest, the issue of terrorism, of course, has a much longer heritage. Indeed, it is now commonplace to note that the term itself derives from the experience of the French Revolution of 1793–94 (Gearson 2002; Chaliand and Blin 2007a): a thoroughly modern invention, perhaps, born of humanity’s growing confidence in its own agency to affect socio-political change (Gray 2003).¹ Yet, as another commonplace reminds us, it is also possible to point to a much deeper history of actions, behaviour and situations that might be called ‘terrorist’, even if the term was not around at the time of their occurrence. The activities of groups from the first century onward, including the Sicarii, Zealots, Thuggee and Ismaili Fedayeen are all regularly discussed in such a way (see Laqueur 2001; Gearson 2002; Chaliand and Blin 2007b; Bobbit 2008) – even if such groups and their violences remain more widely invoked than studied (Rapoport 1984: 659). As Terry Eagleton (2005: 2) puts it: ‘In a broader sense of the word, to be sure, terrorism is as old as humanity itself. Human beings have been flaying and butchering one another since the dawn of time’.

As violences describable as terrorist have a considerable history, so too do governmental efforts to combat, prevent and respond thereto. Our argument in this chapter is that understanding the significance of the UK government’s recent anti-terrorism efforts requires locating these in historical and geographical context. This involves exploring previous anti-terrorism campaigns, as well as contrasting them with the responses of other countries to this ostensible threat. Such an exercise might seem gratuitous given this book’s focus on how citizens think about, articulate and respond to anti-terrorism mechanisms. These ‘vernacular’ conceptions and constructions of anti-terrorism policy might have limited, if any, connection to the geographical and historical trends explored below. Yet, if the UK’s responses to the (perceived) terrorist threat in the early twenty-first century were entirely commensurate with its past responses, or entirely consonant with those of other countries, there would be far less need to consider the public voice. In other words, if there was nothing distinctive about the UK’s anti-terrorism activities since 2001 in particular, there would be far less of note on which to consult British citizens.

As we will argue below, the UK’s response to recent terrorist attacks has been distinctive. Certainly this is the case in comparison with that of similar states, although this is not to suggest that others have not also responded dramatically. The reasons for this are rooted in the UK’s historical experience of countering terrorism, which extends back at least until the late nineteenth century. A good deal of the present-day approach is informed by these struggles in which may be found much of the modern anti-terrorist paraphernalia, including internments, assassinations and far-reaching surveillance programmes (see Hewitt 2008). And yet, despite these continuities, the post-9/11 period, we suggest, has seen both an intensification and extension of these past strategies.

A brief note on terrorism

Defining terrorism is a notoriously problematic enterprise about which a few words here will suffice. As Richard Jackson (2009b: 172) notes, it is almost a ‘cliché’ to point to the essential contestability of the term, and the numerous definitions which abound thereunto. The first edition of the most widely known discussion of this concept (Schmid and Jongman 1988) identified over one hundred definitions nearly thirty years ago. A more recent contribution (Easson and Schmid 2011) listed over two hundred and fifty. Away from the (typically over-complicated) efforts of academia (see Badey 1998), international governmental organisations (IGOs) have also long struggled to formulate their own working definitions (Jarvis 2009a: 7). The United Nations, in particular, is regularly criticised for its failings here, although post-9/11 Conventions, including those on the financing of terrorism, have made some headway in comparison to previous attempts (Harmon 2008: 154).

Part of the challenge with defining terrorism, as Jackson et al. (2011: 101–103) note, is the concept’s pejorative connotations. Terrorism, for the most part, is not a term by which people refer to their own violences. It is, instead, one reserved almost exclusively for ‘what the bad guys do’ (Richardson 2006: 19). Or, as Chomsky (2002: 131) puts it: ‘the term applies only to terrorism against us, not the terrorism we carry out against them’. Winkler (2006) goes further, arguing that terrorism functions as a ‘negative ideograph’: an absolute form of otherness symbolising the negation of everything associated with ‘our’ (here, American) culture. These connotations – and the inconsistency they encourage in the term’s usage – help explain why the question of state terrorism remains so hotly disputed (see Blakeley 2007, 2009; Jackson 2008, 2009a; Stohl 2012; Wight 2012; Jarvis and Lister 2014). While some respond to this contestability by arguing that we should move the terrorism debate beyond the definitional question altogether on meta-theoretical (Jarvis 2009a) or pragmatic (e.g. Laqueur 2003: 238) grounds, others seek instead to identify key characteristics of this phenomenon. An obvious starting point here is that terrorism seems to concern violence, or the threat thereof. A second might be terrorism’s instrumentality, such that the unfortunate individuals ensnared by terrorist violence are killed or maimed to achieve another goal, generally a symbolic or communicative one. As Jackson et al. (2011: 116) argue, ‘Terrorism is an act of exemplary or symbolic violence designed to send messages to a range of audiences.’

This instrumentality is connected to understandings of terrorism as involving the mobilisation of fear to advance goals, whether political, social, ideological or religious. Indeed, Goodin (2006) argues that this – rather than the targeting of civilians, for instance – constitutes terrorism’s distinctiveness, in that its ‘essence lies in its attempt to frighten people for political advantage’ (Goodin 2006: 31). And, if the creation of fear might be thought of as terrorism’s means (Goodin 2006), its desired end is almost always the bringing about of some coveted change in the world. Fromkin (1975: 693–4) makes this point clearly:

Terrorism is violence used in order to create fear; but it is aimed at creating fear in order that the fear, in turn, will lead somebody else – not the terrorist – to embark on some quite different program of action that will accomplish whatever it is that the terrorist really desires ... The terrorist is like a magician who tricks you into watching his right hand while his left hand, unnoticed, makes the switch ... [As such, there is a danger of] concentrating too much attention on preventing terrorist actions and too little attention on foiling terrorist purposes.

If a central aspect of terrorism is the creation of fear for instrumental purposes (see also Rapin 2009), then a reasonable argument may be made that anti-terrorism should, in some way, seek to lessen or reduce fear. An anti-terrorism strategy which either fails to reduce, or worse, heightens, fear should not, perhaps, be considered appropriate or effective. English (2009: 120–121), for example, argues that a key aspect of responding to terrorism involves ‘learning to live with it’ and recognising it as an enduring part of our political reality. Mueller (2005: 496) makes a similar claim in his characteristically forthright terms, arguing, ‘Policies designed to deal with terrorism should focus more on reducing fear and anxiety as inexpensively as possible than on objectively reducing the rather limited dangers terrorism is likely actually to pose’. As he continues, ‘Since the creation of insecurity, fear, anxiety, and hysteria is central for terrorists, they can be defeated simply by not becoming terrified and by resisting the temptation to overreact’ (Mueller 2005: 497).

Despite its longevity, this definitional debate was reanimated in the early twenty-first century by those positing a recent profound qualitative change in the nature of terrorism. This potential transition between ‘old’ and ‘new’ terrorism was widely debated (for an overview, see, inter alia, Duyvesteyn 2004; Neumann 2009; Jackson et al. 2011: 165–170; Bolanos 2013; Duyvestyn and Malkki 2013), in which transformations in the objectives, organisation and violences of terrorist groups were explored (e.g. Simon and Benjamin 2000). Although it was given new urgency by 9/11, the idea that we may be experiencing a ‘new’ terrorism actually came to the fore before that date, particularly in light of mass casualty attacks such as Aum Shinrikyo’s release of sarin gas on the Tokyo underground and the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. In contrast to the nationally organised ‘old’ terrorism, ‘new’ terrorism is often portrayed as transnational in focus; where ‘old ‘ terrorism was perpetrated by hierarchical organisations, ‘new’ terrorism is seen as the product of looser organisational structures, such as networks. The two most defining characteristics of ‘new’ terrorism, however, are first that it is religiously rather than politically motivated (on this, see Gunning and Jackson 2011); and, second, that ‘new’ terrorism demonstrates a desire for high victim counts contra the more limited violence of ‘old’ terrorism. Thus, it is often argued that ‘new’ terrorism works to alter Jenkins’ (1974: 4) aphorism that ‘terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead’ such that ‘new’ terrorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people dead.

Whilst many have critiqued the ‘new’ terrorism thesis (Duyvesteyn 2004; Burnett and Whyte 2005; Spencer 2006; Jackson et al. 2011: 166), this conception of dramatic, qualitative change has undeniably proved attractive to politicians making the case for new and extended anti-terrorism powers (Jarvis 2009b: 65–79). Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair (2001), for example, referred to 9/11 as a ‘turning point in history’ ushering in ‘new and frightening threats’ such that ‘the kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux’. As he subsequently argued at the Bush Presidential Library: ‘the most obvious lesson’ of 9/11 was that there was simply ‘no escape from facing ... and dealing with’ problems such as people using ‘scientific and technological advances’ who ‘have the capacity to destroy’ (cited in Holland 2012: 85). In many ways, this British debate both echoed and complemented that taking place across the Atlantic, and indeed elsewhere (e.g. Holland 2010). There, then National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice (2001) had argued, ‘We commonly hear the refrain that everything changed on September 11th. In many ways that is true.’ And, as President Bush (cited in Jarvis 2009a: 74) subsequently put it:

we learned on that fateful day that America is now a battlefield. It used to be that oceans would protect us. We didn’t have to take certain threats seriously. We could say, well, we can deal if we want to deal with them. But we learned a tough lesson, that the old ways are gone, that the enemy can strike us here at home, and we all have new responsibilities.

In short, and as we should expect, conceptions and problematisations of terrorism are central to the creation and justification of proposed mechanisms for resolving this problem (Doty 1993; Holland 2013). As Crelinsten (2009: 7) argues, ‘How people talk about problems, frame them and conceptualize them often determines what they do about them’.

Countering terrorism

Anti-terrorism, at its most basic level, concerns attempts to oppose, block, prevent and mitigate the damage done by terrorism. Importantly, given the above definitional contestabilities, the majority of literature on anti-terrorism focuses – rather narrowly – on attempts by states or IGOs to prevent attacks by non-state groups. A common feature of this literature is the construction of typologies that differentiate state activities in this area. Art and Richardson (2007: 16–17), for instance, distinguish between political measures such as negotiations, socio-political reforms and increasing international cooperation; legislative and judicial measures, including emergency or ‘temporary’ legislation to detain suspects and access information; and security measures such as military deployments, new organisational structures to disrupt terrorist attacks and measures to ‘harden’ targets.

Crelinsten (2009: 12–14) makes a different distinction between soft and hardline counterterrorism or, as he terms them September 10^th thinking and September 12^th thinking. The former is seen to work within the law, emphasising legal and diplomatic resolutions to complex phenomena, whilst the latter emphasises military responses, which might be unilateral and emphasise pre-emption instead of deterrence and containment. In his more recent work, he further differentiates between coercive, proactive, persuasive, defensive and long-term approaches to countering terrorism, arguing that a comprehensive approach to this threat would take advantage of all five of these logics (Crelinsten 2014). Focusing on policing, yet using similar language, Spalek (2012) distinguishes similarly between ‘hard’ counterterrorism, predicated on surveillance, and ‘softer’ approaches encouraging community engagement. Paul Wilkinson (1977) in his Terrorism and the Liberal State took a similar approach, advocating a ‘hardline approach’ for the liberal state to deal with terrorism, one comprising a combination of politics and diplomacy, the use of law enforcement and the criminal justice system, along with deployment of military power. As he later claimed, this ‘offers a multipronged approach aimed at enabling a liberal democratic state to combat terrorism effectively without undermining or seriously damaging the democratic process and the rule of law, while providing sufficient flexibility to cope with the whole range of threats’ (Wilkinson 2011: 75).² Silke (2011: 3), finally, identifies special legislation, the creation of specialist countert...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Anti-terrorism policy in the UK: historical trends and contemporary issues
• 2 Citizenship and security
• 3 Framing and evaluating anti-terrorism policy
• 4 The impacts of anti-terrorism on citizenship
• 5 Less, more, or otherwise (in)secure? Anti-terrorism powers and vernacular (in)securities
• 6 Framing the security/anti-terrorism nexus
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Focus group topic guide
• Appendix B: UK anti-terrorism measures
• Bibliography
• Index