Counter-terrorism

Critically assess arguments, theories, methodologies and findings as outlined by author
Appreciate strengths and weakness of academic text
Criteria:
Critical engagement with chosen article
Excellent comms skills
Demonstrated capacity to work on discipline specific
Sound consideration of audience expectations
Compliance with above features

Structure:
Title of Reviewed article: What would you do? Everyday conceptions and constructions of counter-terrorism

Arguments
• Here you have to mention what is the main point of this article- what are the authors trying to say?
• The article tries to respond to the question If you were in government, what would you do about terrorism?
• It is an exercise of political imagination which provides an insight on the perception on security
• three aims: first, to identify the diversity of counter-terrorism strategies explored by British publics responding to the question If you were in government, what would you do about terrorism? Second, to consider how such strategies are described, framed, and justified in vernacular discussion; and third, to explore the importance of these for contemporary debate on public understandings of (security) politics more broadly.

Theories

• Using contemporary literature on counter-terrorism: Crelinsten, 2009; Donohue, 2008; English, 2009)

• Attidutinal studies of public opinion (qualitative analysis: (e.g. Huddy et al., 2002, 2005, 2007; Stevens and Vaughan-Williams, 2016), this

• Sociological literatures: Jackson and Hall(2013), / Jarvis and Lister (2013a, 2013b, 2014; also Lister and Jarvis, 2013)

Methodologies

• Focus Group Research organized around ethic identities and geographical residence
• 14 groups in 2010 in London, Birmingham, Oldham, Swanswea, Llanelli and Oxforshire
• 81 people: 48 women and 33 men
• Sampling method: purposive / non representative – through a combination of enumeration, snowballing and organization sampling techniques
• Open-ended questions
• Fire core questions – with follow up questions
• Focus of the focus group research was this question: If you were in government, what would you do about terrorism?

Findings

• Analysis: analysis of findings was achieved through a framework approach to qualitative discourse analysis
• encountered far more discussion of preventive rather than responsive mechanisms for addressing this security challenge and a genuine interest in identifying and addressing terrorism’s ‘root causes’.
• Participants identified strategies reflecting on the need to have ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ approaches
• There were competing conceptions to causes of terrorisim
• Competing understandings of the nature of broader socio-political dynamics
•

Strengths
• ‘’One strength of the approach of this article is that identifying political dimensions from a demand-side perspective allows us to infer the underlying cleavages that divide our societies from the dimensions we identify.’’
• wider understandings and discourses around social and political life.

Weakness
• Sampling bias?
• Haven’t’ taken into account the utility of education and foreign policy change

Sample Solution

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