Itoitz Rodrigo Jusue

Historically, counter-terrorism's attitude towards women has been complicated, partly because both counter-terrorism and terrorism were for many years considered almost exclusively a male business. This approach has also been reflected in the media's sensationalised representation of women involved in political violence. This chapter explores how women's participation in non-state political violence is still largely explained through traditional conservative notions of sexual difference that characterise women as irrational and highly influenceable, eliminating the possibility of any informed discussion. Focusing on the British case, the chapter shows how the actions of female militants are still bound to gendered narratives and limited to specific frames that generally portray violent women as highly sexualised and pathologised. Depictions of female terrorists and ‘radicalised’ women are based on stereotypes that reinforce the image of women as weak, easily influenced, naïve, driven by romantic emotions, deceitful and in constant need of protection and supervision. From an intersectional perspective, the chapter also explores the orientalist imaginaries of Muslim women who are seen as victims and as individuals lacking empowerment and agency. The discussion highlights ultimately that explanations of women's violence must go beyond myths that explain women's involvement in political violence via a wide range of personal and emotional factors, to examine political motivations and consideration of the complexity of their decisions, and the wider context.

https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80382-255-620231018

Despite recent calls for ‘ordinary’ citizens to become active and responsible as individuals in preventing and countering terrorism and radicalisation in the United Kingdom, little is yet known about how members of the general public make sense of political violence, or about how they think it should be dealt with. Using a bottom-up vernacular security studies approach, this article examines what lay citizens believe about the causes of terrorism and what responses they think are appropriate. Based on qualitative data from one-to-one interviews with members of the public and an analysis based on constructivist grounded theory methodology, the article discusses three key figures that emerged from interviewees’ accounts of terrorism: the vulnerable subject, the radicalised individual and the radicaliser. Overall, the results reveal that a radicalisation framework is dominant in participants’ discourses on terrorism. The article argues that the dominant imaginaries of terrorism identified in this research draw consent towards pre-emptive security practices such as the Prevent duty and de-radicalisation interventions. The discussion problematises the depoliticisation of political violence and the normalisation of illiberal security measures that this conceptualisation of terrorism entails, while stressing the discriminatory character of the social imaginaries of terrorism.

https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231218167

Over the last three decades, there has been a significant growth in media control policies in the UK. Nonetheless, academic literature has so far failed to examine British political elites’ understandings of the relationship between the media and political violence. This article makes an original contribution by conducting a historical comparison of political elites’ discourses on terrorism, the media, and audiences through the analysis of key parliamentary debates in which British MPs discussed the introduction of far-reaching media control measures (i.e. the 1988 Broadcasting Ban and the 2019 Counter-terrorism and Border Security Act). Employing the concept of the “imagined audience”, the analysis, based on a discourse-historical approach (DHA), demonstrates significant differences in how MPs constructed media audiences in these discussions. In 1988, British MPs consistently invoked rational, well-informed, and responsible audiences, whilst thirty years later, constructions of unknowledgeable and easily influenced audiences were discursively deployed by MPs in support of highly restrictive media control measures. The article suggests that this transformation is based on a resurgence of the media “contagion theory” and Islamophobic notions that construct certain sections of the population as vulnerable, irrational, and highly susceptible, in contrast to the intelligent and sensible audiences envisioned by MPs in 1988.

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-023-00249-8

The UK’s Counter-terrorism strategy and its PREVENT programme (focused on stopping vulnerable people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism) has helped position radicalisation at the centre of counter-terrorism policy-making, academic research, and news and current affairs. This interdisciplinary thesis, situated in the field of cultural studies, draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of dispositif to trace the emergence and the establishment of radicalisation as a governing technology and as a social imaginary. Adopting a mixed method approach, including discourse analysis and interviews, this thesis examines radicalisation as a technology of governance embedded in the production and promotion of certain mentalities, conducts, identities, and subjectivities. The thesis examines the transformations that the figure of the terrorist has gone through since the early 2000s in the UK and it stresses the role of the media in the (re)production of imaginaries of terror. The argument overall is that the vocabularies and narratives of radicalisation are disseminated in popular culture and normalised within the population, establishing the new lens through which terrorism and political violence are comprehended and acted upon. The thesis contributes new knowledge by identifying the vulnerable subject, the radicalised individual, and the radicaliser as the new embodiments of abnormality and danger. The thesis also demonstrates how, together with the creation of idealised feminine security roles, myths about women involved in terrorism and political violence have been re-articulated through the narratives of vulnerability to radicalisation. Through an analysis of self-radicalisation discourses that create a causal link between the media and terrorism, the thesis considers how older theories of contagion have been revived and these have resulted in authoritarian measures that further (self)censorship and the criminalisation of speech. The thesis concludes by scrutinising the role of counter-terrorism in the production of agents and in the government of individuals’ conducts through the case study of the “CT citizen” and suggests a relation between the radicalisation assemblage and the acceptance of illiberal measures.

During modernity the idea of ‘amor impossibilis’ [impossible love], originating in the story of Iphis and Ianthé in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was expanded to refer to what we would now call lesbian relationships. Something made this love considered ‘not-possible’ and it seems it referred mainly to an idea of physical incompatibility (which of course could only be understood from certain phallogocentric vision). That gives us clues about other social obstacles that must have intervened in the impossibility of this passion/relationship/love. However, possible-life frames change constantly. Through this article I have wondered what love is and if there are, just as happens with gender, regulatory or normative loves, which operate in this case? Which loves would be intelligible and how do the frames within these normative loves arise, are held, have changed, and are being transformed? The ‘Love’ as a set of imaginary rules is closely related to sex norms that materialise bodies. Thus there is a correspondence between pre-determined loves and the concrete bodies that love. Determined sexual politics promote and bet on certain amorous bonds in ways that preclude others. In this sense, the question is how power shapes the field in which the subjects or the loving bonds between them become possible or how they become impossible. The issue is more complex than the binary scheme where some are prohibited and some are legal. Which love for what policies? Finally, I propose the following question: Could we comprehend the regulations and discourses about tolerance as opposed to institutionalised love? If the mainly neoliberal discourse about tolerance can be understood as regulating policies of the aversion (as Wendy Brown exposed), where do the love stories exist at the margins of hegemonic norms of sexuality?
978-1-84888-391-8

The growing call for public participation in counter-terrorism in Britain is reflected by the number of recent campaigns directed towards different sectors of the population and, increasingly, towards “ordinary” citizens. However, there has been a lack of research examining how counter-radicalisation campaigns seek to target the whole population and have an impact on everyday subjectivities and actions. Drawing on studies on governmentality, this article examines the promotion of the “CT citizen” as a distinctive political agent and social identity embedded in the participation of mass surveillance and the normalisation of pre-emptive security logics. Based on a critical discourse analysis of the most recent official counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation websites and e-learning materials (Let’s Talk About It, Educate Against Hate, Action Counters Terrorism, and the Prevent duty), I show how citizens are being inscribed as counter-terrorism officials through discourses of responsibility, care, awareness, empowerment, and action. This article explores the role of British counter-terrorism in the production of new models of citizenship based on a generalised culture of suspicion and in the participation in security duties previously reserved to the authorities. The discussion highlights ultimately that the securitisation of everyday life and the inscription of individuals in “national security” results in the depoliticisation of both the civil society and political violence.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17539153.2021.2013014

The philosopher Roberto Esposito proposed the paradigm of immunity as an interpretative category which enables an interdisciplinary approach to events that at first sight are thought of as separate domains. Immunization can be understood as a protective response in the face of a risk that has to do with trespassing or violating borders, either these are individual body borders or political body borders. This article explores the immunitary dynamics and seeks to understand one of the most contemporary political axes that is the 'War on Terror' under the light of the immunitarian paradigm. I argue that the terrorist is constructed as a threat –antigen-to a political body and therefore the terrorist/counterterrorist dynamics can be understood within the immunitarian war frame with the self-destructive consequences it involves. This way, following Esposito's work, I will explore other interpretations where the protection of life rejects the negativity the self-other damaging relation implies currently rooted in the counterterrorism regime.

Last year the EU leaving campaign was to a great extent framed by anti-immigration discourses which often claimed the need of taking back the control over ‘our borders’. An unforgettable poster in this campaign was the one made by UKIP party in June 2016 in which “Breaking Point” in huge red letters could be read over an image of migrants and refugees walking. In the poster there is another smaller text saying: “We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders”. The poster was harshly criticized by people from different ideologies, parties and institutions, such as the Conservative party, the Labour party, the Green party and by religious people namely the archbishop of Canterbury. However, why UKIP used a photograph of migrants and refugees crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border in 2015 to defend the UK leaving the European Union? Which kind of feelings and reactions did this discourse provoke to British citizens? Or, on the other hand, which subtle and unconscious fears and ideas did arise and got materialized in this kind of propaganda?
In this paper, I argue that UKIP’s leaving EU campaign poster is placed within a moment of social and political anxiety that these politics of fear (re)produce and at the same time they try to take advantage from. In this manner, I examine the concepts of neurotic fear and neurotic anxiety that Freud (1920, 1988) developed in different works. The opposition between ‘real’ and ‘neurotic’ is useful to understand the logics that the UKIP’s poster involves. Anna Freud’s (1993) theory of defence mechanisms suggests different perspectives to look at how this anti-migration propaganda might work within the British society. Finally, I explore at Theodor W. Adorno’s (2001) influential psychoanalytical ideas on fascist propaganda to better understand the implications of these kind of discourses and strategies. The essay concludes with some crucial political propositions from a psychoanalytic ethics approach made by Chantal Mouffe (2000).

The film World War Z [WWZ] (Marc Foster, 2013) is based on the best seller World War Z: An oral history of the Zombie War (2006) written by Max Brooks. The success and popularity of both, the book and the film, are proof of the contemporary renaissance of the zombies in popular culture that many academics have addressed. As Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro (2011) explain, there is a resurgence of the zombie in popular culture so we can find zombies in popular literature, comic books, video games, performance art, smartphone applications and homemade films, events (as zombie walks), etc. Stefan Dolgert states that “since zombies are merely (rotting) bodies with a barely functioning brain they are the ultimate tabula rasa, waiting as empty vessels to be filled with whatever content a theorist might choose to provide them” (2014:13). In this way, Laura Hubner et al. (2015) emphasize the ‘blankness’ of the zombie texts and they argue that this flexibility to adopt different meanings and narratives that reflect the social anxieties or concerns of a particular historical moment might be the explanation for the durability and the resurgence of the zombies.
This essay situates WWZ in the broad context of the zombies in cinema, and looks at the narrative shifts that have occurred in the stories of the undead. These stories tell us many things about the political issues and anxieties from the social and cultural reality from which they arise. However, these cultural devices are not passive products but they have the power to (re)produce the realities they show as well as they have the potential to deny other possible futures. The paper argues that WWZ and the contemporary narratives of zombie apocalypse can serve us to understand current discourses and mentalities on security, prevention, emergency powers, neoliberalism, resilience, and sexuality and gender politics.

Over the last years and, especially, during the last months, the building of new walls around the states, as well as the reinforcement and control of the borders, have had an enormous political and social presence. Wendy Brown (2010) defends that the phenomenon of building new walls all around the world can be understood as an icon of nation-state sovereignty's erosion. In this way, the loss of the theological sovereignty promised by the nation-states has several consequences for the subjects that fantasize with the protection and containment of walls. Using the category of Homo munitus as the modern subject that both constructs walls and is constructed by them, " making securitization a way of life " and defining a distinction between an "external they" and a "reactionary we" (Brown, 2010 pag.42), I frame these new walls within Roberto Esposito's (2015) immunitarian paradigm. This paradigm is useful to analyse the tensions between community and its opposite, immunity, namely, between the self-preservation and the disintegrative forces of the munus which constitutes the community and poses a menace for the self and the identity. In this sense, I focus on the other side of the tension, on the excessive defensive mechanism that turns into an auto-immunitarian disease that, as Derrida (2003) and Esposito (2010, 2015) proposed, threats to destroy the community.

This paper explores the tensions between community and auto-immunity, between Eros forces that constitute the community and the self-preservation and culture as protective measures or immunitarian mechanisms. My aim is not to draw a parallel between current philosophical theories and analysis, and Sigmund Freud’s (2011) dual instinct’s theories, but to notice some suggestive meeting points as well as some particular insights that can feedback each other and open up new possibilities for their understanding.

Beyond the current desire for walling and protection, this article stresses the disintegrative forces for the community and the drive to death implied in this struggle which has so many material, psychological and political consequences in our everyday life.

Life frames change constantly, cultural scenarios are in unstoppable transformation, so are the sexual and gender roles they variously prescribe. So track these becomes a complex job that requires a lot of imagination and it can not be limited to the analysis of some hegemonic discourses. In this work, I propose to follow a myth maintained and changed through time and space that gives us clues of the strength of the narratives to create and maintain identities, relationships and lives,  and ultimately to make them possible. In the same way that it gives us a glimpse about their transgressive and transformative potential. This research starts with the myth of Iphis and Ianthe in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and ends up with Ali Smith's novel Girl Meets Boy which rewrites this myth. The aim is to notice how frames make some gender and sexualities conceivable or on the contrary, how these are represented as impossible. Stories as alive discourses not only capture the social and cultural reality from which they arise, they also have the power to rewrite, criticize, change, reinforce, and reproduce social realities. This chapter reports on the construction of identities and culture through discourses that shape, and at the same time they are the product of hegemonic fictions that respond to cultural backgrounds. This is not just an inquiry into the past, but an attempt to find some threads that enable us to understand the frameworks of the present, showing the importance of literacy when it comes to establish the framework within some lives are possible and others will take place outside the normality.

Posthumanismoa, humanismoa eta gero datorrena balitz bezala ulertu beharren baina, sub-, inter-, infra-, trans-, pre-, anti- aurrizkiekin talka egiten duen heinean ulertu behar dugula jakinaraziko digu idatziaren hastapenetik. Ikerketa posthumanoek, eta haietatik eratortzen diren planteamendu eta proposamen teoriko-politikoek, «gizaki»aren izaera bukatu eta itxiaren mugak eta egokitasun eza agerian jartzen dituzten heinean ontologia berriei bidea irekitzea ahalbidetzen dutela kontatuko digu. Eta horiekin batera beste mundu, harreman, subjektu, objektu, natura, kultura, genero, izaera, gorputz, etab. posibleei.

En este trabajo analizo cuáles son los supuestos epistemológicos y ontológicos de las recientes Leyes 3/2007 y 14/2012 en torno a la identidad de género y la transexualidad. El presente ensayo explora cómo estas normas forman parte del conjunto de dispositivos de poder y control tecno-biopolítico sobre las vidas de las personas.
Primero realiza un recorrido teórico sobre la construcción de la categorías de sexo y género, y continúa con los derechos sobre identidad de género y orientación sexual reconocidos a nivel internacional. La tesis explora algunas de las distintas posturas y reivindicaciones de los movimientos sociales, y más adelante realiza un breve recorrido por distintas normativas en torno al género en el Estado Español desde 1931. Finalmente termina con un análisis de las leyes española 3/2007 y la vasca 14/2012.

The current meaning and the centrality of the concept of “risk” has to be understood as historically and locally situated. Deborah Lupton (2005) explains that changes in the meaning and use of risk are associated with the emergence of modernity, this is, with the ‘industrialized world’ and the incorporation of capitalism, and the institutions of surveillance and nuclear weaponry (Idem:5). It was during the eighteenth century when the concept of risk began to be ‘scientized’ and it started to be related to new mathematical ideas of probability. By the nineteenth century, the notion of risk started to be located in human beings and in their conduct. This way, it started to be assumed that unanticipated outcomes may be the consequence of human action (Ibid). In this sense, the concept of 'risk' in Western societies is central and to look at the ways in which it operates says a lot about “how we think about ourselves, others, organizations, institutions and governments and the non-human world” (idem:15). Our awareness and knowledge of these risks, and others, contribute to various aspects of subjectivity and social life, including how we live our everyday lives, how we distinguish ourselves and the social groups of which we are members from other individuals and groups, how we perceive and experience our bodies, how we spend our money and where we choose to live and work (idem:14).

This report looks at different theories and ideas on risk. The aim is to examine this naturalized and apparently neutral concept and to consider its complex productive character. First, I explore Ulrich Beck’s classical theory on ‘Risk Society’ (1992) and after, I delve into Mary Douglas’s (2003) research on danger/risk as a political element in the communities. Finally,  risk is approached from theories of governmentality. Although these sociocultural and philosophical approaches to ‘risk’ are radically different, as Lupton (2005) notices, all agree that there are a number of important new features in notions of risk in contemporary societies and that risk has become “a central cultural and political concept by which individuals, social groups and institutions are organized, monitored and regulated” (idem:26). Risk has become an increasingly pervasive concept of human existence becoming a central aspect of human subjectivity. At the same time, the belief that risk is something that can be managed through human intervention is generalized and therefore, “risk is associated with notions of choice, responsibility and blame” (Ibid). For these reasons, a critique of risk will be essential to understand individuals’ and populations’ conducts, governing mentalities and logics in neoliberalism, as well as preventive laws and measures in contemporary societies.

The growing call for public participation in counter-terrorism in Britain is reflected by the number of recent campaigns directed towards different sectors of the population and, increasingly, towards “ordinary” citizens. However, there has been a lack of research examining how counter-radicalisation campaigns seek to target the whole population and have an impact on everyday subjectivities and actions. Drawing on studies on governmentality, this article examines the promotion of the “CT citizen” as a distinctive political agent and social identity embedded in the participation of mass surveillance and the normalisation of pre-emptive security logics. Based on a critical discourse analysis of the most recent official counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation websites and e-learning materials (Let’s Talk About It, Educate Against Hate, Action Counters Terrorism, and the Prevent duty), I show how citizens are being inscribed as counter-terrorism officials through discourses of responsibility, care, awareness, empowerment, and action. This article explores the role of British counter-terrorism in the production of new models of citizenship based on a generalised culture of suspicion and in the participation in security duties previously reserved to the authorities. The discussion highlights ultimately that the securitisation of everyday life and the inscription of individuals in “national security” results in the depoliticisation of both the civil society and political violence. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17539153.2021.2013014

The UK’s Counter-terrorism strategy and its PREVENT programme (focused on stopping vulnerable people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism) has helped position radicalisation at the centre of counter-terrorism policy-making, academic research, and news and current affairs. This interdisciplinary thesis, situated in the field of cultural studies, draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of dispositif to trace the emergence and the establishment of radicalisation as a governing technology and as a social imaginary. Adopting a mixed method approach, including discourse analysis and interviews, this thesis examines radicalisation as a technology of governance embedded in the production and promotion of certain mentalities, conducts, identities, and subjectivities. The thesis examines the transformations that the figure of the terrorist has gone through since the early 2000s in the UK and it stresses the role of the media in the (re)production of imaginaries of terror. The argument overall is that the vocabularies and narratives of radicalisation are disseminated in popular culture and normalised within the population, establishing the new lens through which terrorism and political violence are comprehended and acted upon. The thesis contributes new knowledge by identifying the vulnerable subject, the radicalised individual, and the radicaliser as the new embodiments of abnormality and danger. The thesis also demonstrates how, together with the creation of idealised feminine security roles, myths about women involved in terrorism and political violence have been re-articulated through the narratives of vulnerability to radicalisation. Through an analysis of self-radicalisation discourses that create a causal link between the media and terrorism, the thesis considers how older theories of contagion have been revived and these have resulted in authoritarian measures that further (self)censorship and the criminalisation of speech. The thesis concludes by scrutinising the role of counter-terrorism in the production of agents and in the government of individuals’ conducts through the case study of the “CT citizen” and suggests a relation between the radicalisation assemblage and the acceptance of illiberal measures.