Trafigura and twitter

Trafigura must have known their attempt to stop The Guardian reporting Parliamentary questions about their oil dumping in the Ivory Coast would soon be exposed on twitter -- as it has been today -- so what is their real reason for getting the injunction? Are they naive or is something else going on?

By Ben O'Loughlin

Power and the imagination

Before 9/11 we had Independence Day. Before 7/7 we had the BBC “what if London was attacked” documentary. Now, a few weeks after I posted about the movie Angels and Demons, featuring terrorists removing anti-matter material from the Cern Large Hadron Collider for nefarious purposes, someone working at Cern has been arrested for having links to Al-Qaeda.

Anything that can be imagined to happen will happen, so to govern is to imagine. Government must be as visionary as the devil. On occasion, what movie directors imagine then happens. What if it is the case too that what governments imagine might happen will happen? This has become an ethical dilemma for policymakers. Governments imagine worst case scenarios because they are responsible for preventing them, and you can't prevent what you can't foresee. Does this mean worst case scenarios will happen? Is it more responsible not to imagine, not to foresee? But what if something happens that's worse than the worst case scenarios policymakers foresee - a failure of imagination? Policymakers' own imaginations have become a source of insecurity to them, and possibly to us.

By Ben O'Loughlin

The jihadist style-journey: Germany’s election and after

A video-letter from a purported al-Qaida soldier calling on Germany to end its military involvement in Afghanistan has heightened security concerns in the country before and after the election. But it is Bekkay Harrach's "western" appearance as much as his message that deserves scrutiny, say Mina Al-Lami & Ben O'Loughlin. 

Read today's article on openDemocracy here.

By Ben O'Loughlin.

Announcement: Strategic Narratives panels at the 2010 ISA Annual Convention

A strategic narrative is a narrative forged by a state with the express purpose of influencing the foreign policy behavior of other actors. This communicative work is particularly critical in periods of transition in the international system when challengers to hegemonic powers emerge, such as the challenge of China, India and the EU to the existing US-led world order. Over the past 12 months a research programme on strategic narratives has been initiated by the NPCU, Centre for European Politics at Royal Holloway, and Centre for Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex. This programme has been recognised by the International Studies Association, which will host two panels on the theme on Saturday 20 February 2010 at the ISA Annual Convention in New Orleans. The first panel presents recent studies of the strategic narrative work undertaken by major powers (and some non-state actors). The second brings together leading figures with experience of policy, media and academia for a roundtable discussion on the ‘battle for influence’ in international affairs.

 

Research Panel: Identity, Persuasion and Strategic Narratives (10.30am)

Papers:

  • Laura Roselle: Communicating Strategic Narratives: Constructing the Post-Cold War International System
  • Alister Miskimmon: The European Security Strategy as a Strategic Narrative: Projecting European Union influence?
  • Karin Fierke: The Body as Strategic Narrative: Self Sacrifice and Power in International Relations
  • Cristina Archetti: Constructing the Al-Qaida Narrative: Media and Communication in the Radicalization process
  • Ben O'Loughlin: Media Diplomacy, Non-Linear Narratives and Digital Emergence
  • Discussant: Andreas Antoniades, University of Sussex

 

Roundtable: The Battle for Influence: Great Powers in the 21st Century (3.45pm)

Participants:

  • Parag Khanna, New America Foundation
  • Philip Seib, University of Southern California
  • Jeffrey Legro, University of Virginia
  • Laura Roselle, Elon University
  • Fabio Petito, University of Sussex
  • Ben O'Loughlin, NPCU
  • Alister Miskimmon, Royal Holloway, University of London

 

For further information please contact Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk.

Tom Hanks on radicalisation

 

I watched Angels and Demons on a plane the other day, the follow up to the Da Vinci Code. Having been at workshops on radicalisation and de-radicalisation all last week, I was surprised to hear the word 'radicalized' spoken by Tom Hanks' character, Langdon. He was explaining to a Catholic official, Richter, how a Catholic purge centuries ago radicalised pro-science enlightenment types called the Illuminati, who have now come back to blow up the Vatican using anti-matter they stole from the Cern large hadron collidor (the ultimate dirty bomb):

Richter: You said they'd be killed publicly.
Robert Langdon: Yes, revenge. For La Purga.
Richter: La Purga?
Robert Langdon: Oh geez, you guys dont even read your own history do
  you? 1668, the church kidnapped four Illuminati scientists and
  branded each one of them on the chest with the symbol of the cross.
  To purge them of their sins and they executed them, threw their
  bodies in the street as a warning to others to stop questioning
  church ruling on scientific matters. They radicalized them. The
  Purga created a darker, more violent Illuminati, one bent on... on
  retribution.

Is 'radicalized' now a taken-for-granted word? That would be something, given that social scientists and security agencies still have little idea how any such radicalisation process might work, in 1668 or today.

By Ben O'Loughlin.

Even radical Muslims rely on bearded stereotypes and BBC to understand Jihadists

New research by the University of Warwick and Royal Holloway finds that neither the general public nor even radical leaning Muslims have any real personal knowledge or understanding of real jihadists and both rely on stereotypes and what they can glean from the mainstream media to inform their understanding of what makes for a radicalised jihadist.
 
How individuals are radicalised to commit violence has become a pressing question in the aftermath of the 7/7 London bombings, the Heathrow bomb plot, and numerous incidents in the UK and elsewhere.  Perpetrators claim to act in the name of religion and for ‘jihad’ in particular. There is a thriving online jihadist media culture offering justifications for this violence. Yet aside from the occasional video statement from Osama bin Laden, or the same endlessly regurgitated clips of a foreign training camp, jihadist media are barely reported on in mainstream news coverage of terror events. Audiences remain largely in the dark about the jihadists who government and officials have told us we are at war against. If they are ‘the enemy’, why are they invisible to us?”
 
The University of Warwick and Royal Holloway research will be launched at a debate at Royal Holloway, University of London on 15 September at a workshop entitled, ‘Media and Radicalisation: Closing Symposium’. The findings will be presented from the two-year study of media and radicalisation led by Dr. Andrew Hoskins at the University of Warwick and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
 
The main findings of the study are:
 
Even jihadist sympathisers feel detached from the Al-Qaeda core. The jihadist media culture is made up of core websites featuring members who are committed without deviation or question to the jihadist campaign. Outside the core is a ‘grey zone’ of individuals who potentially have sympathy for the campaign but question the legitimacy of some violent acts, particularly violence that kills Muslims or civilians. The core members offer little guidance or recognition to potential sympathisers, who have to turn to mainstream media such as BBC or Al-Jazeera to find out what core Al-Qaeda have been doing.
 
Journalists and experts remain uncertain about the nature of ‘radicalisation’. There remains little pattern to who is radicalised – it can be people of different ages, religions, levels of education, and socio-economic class, making prediction very difficult. Mainstream media, which must find facts to report, struggles when few facts are available and security services may be slow to release information. The result is news coverage that ‘clusters’ different signs of radicalisation, often taken from eye witnesses who may be unreliable: “he suddenly grew a beard”, “she became much more religious”, “they always met after Friday prayers”. Since these ‘signs’ apply to large numbers of people, mainstream news coverage may inadvertently contribute to stereotyping, particularly of British Muslims.
 
Ordinary citizens do not trust news about ‘radicalisation’. Government and media portrayals of radicalisation are not credible or trustworthy to many ordinary citizens and UK news audiences are uneasy with the concept of radicalisation in their everyday engagement with politics and religion. So, if de-radicalisation plays a role in counter-terrorism policy in the UK and citizens are not convinced what radicalisation might mean in the first place, this has consequences for the effectiveness of  UK security policy.
 
As new conflicts emerge, radicalised groups and individuals will find new ways to use media to justify violence, while journalists may need greater language skills and religious and cultural knowledge to make sense of them.
 
University of Warwick Sociologist Dr. Andrew Hoskins who led the research said:, “There have long been debates about the practice and the ethics of reporting war, but in the last few years we have seen the rapid emergence of a ‘security journalism’ in the centre of a new relationship between terrorism, news audiences and policy-makers. Our research reveals that news reporting of issues related to ‘radicalisation’ has not helped to clarify its meaning or its legitimacy in the public understanding of Government strategy on terrorism. Perhaps, therefore, Government should drop its rubric of radicalisation altogether”.
 
Dr Akil N Awan added, “the absence of rigorous academic study of causes and processes of radicalisation means that both journalists and news publics have been forced to appropriate the term with little understanding or interrogation of what it actually means. This of course can be enormously useful for governments, who can then employ this ostensibly self-explanatory term to explain the appeal of terrorism to young Muslim males, rather than address genuine structural causes or grievance.”
 
The project involved analysis of the most important jihadist websites from 2004-09, an investigation of mainstream media coverage of events related to radicalisation, and an ethnographic study of audience understandings of radicalisation. Audiences were based on the UK, France, Denmark and Australia.
 
Dr. Ben O’Loughlin, said: “The focus today may be on radicalisation connected to Islam, but as new conflicts emerge in the next decade, we need to understand how those supporting violence for other causes, such as the far right, are using new media to reach potential sympathisers around the world.”
 
Notes:
 
The project is led by Dr. Andrew Hoskins, Director of the Centre for Memory Studies at the University of Warwick. The Launch event has been organised by Dr. Ben O’Loughlin, Co-Director of the New Political Communication Unit and co-organised by Dr Akil N Awan, RCUK Fellow, both at Royal Holloway, University of London. The project website can be found at:
 
The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is the UK's largest organisation for funding research on economic and social issues. It supports independent, high quality research which has an impact on business, the public sector and the third sector. The ESRC’s planned total expenditure in 2009/10 is £204 million. At any one time the ESRC supports over 4,000 researchers and   postgraduate students in academic institutions and independent research institutes.  More at http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk
 
For further information please contact:
 
Dr. Andrew Hoskins Andrew.Hoskins@warwick.ac.uk Tel: 07766 311310
Dr. Ben O’Loughlin Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk Tel: 07957 661308
Dr. Akil Awan Akil.Awan@rhul.ac.uk