Suchergebnisse

Since 11 September 2001, the War on Terror has dominated global political life. The book takes a critical look at different ways in which the George W. Bush administration created and justified this far-reaching conflict through their use of language and other discursive practices

Abstract
Recent years have witnessed a "vernacular turn" in critical security scholarship centered on everyday constructions of (in)security. In this article, I advance this turn by arguing for greater attention to the role of numbers in non-elite discourse on (in)security. Doing so deepens understanding of the mechanisms and registers through which (in)securities are constructed in the vernacular while conceptually strengthening work on vernacular security through insight from literature on the rhetorical, sociological, and political functions of numbers. To pursue this claim, the article develops a new methodological framework through which to explore the work of numbers in vernacular security discourse before applying it to original focus group data on (counter-)radicalization. From this, I highlight the importance of numerical arguments in vernacular constructions of threat, evaluation of security policies, contestation of dominant security discourses, and performances of security literacy.

Recent years have witnessed a "vernacular turn" in critical security scholarship centered on everyday constructions of (in)security. In this article, I advance this turn by arguing for greater attention to the role of numbers in non-elite discourse on (in)security. Doing so deepens understanding of the mechanisms and registers through which (in)securities are constructed in the vernacular while conceptually strengthening work on vernacular security through insight from literature on the rhetorical, sociological, and political functions of numbers. To pursue this claim, the article develops a new methodological framework through which to explore the work of numbers in vernacular security discourse before applying it to original focus group data on (counter-)radicalization. From this, I highlight the importance of numerical arguments in vernacular constructions of threat, evaluation of security policies, contestation of dominant security discourses, and performances of security literacy.

Recent years have witnessed increasing academic, media, and political attention to the threat of far-right terrorism. In this article, I argue that scholarship on this threat has suffered from two limitations, each with antecedents in terrorism research more broadly. First, is an essentialist approach to this phenomenon as an extra-discursive object of knowledge to be defined, explained, catalogued, risk assessed, and (ultimately) resolved. Second, is a temptation to emphasise, even accentuate, the scale of this threat. These limitations are evident, I argue, within scholarship motivated by a problem-solving aspiration for policy relevance. They are evident too, though, within critical interventions in which a focus on far-right terrorism is seen as an important corrective to established biases and blind spots within (counter-)terrorism research and practice. In response, I argue for an approach rooted in the problematisation and desecuritisation of the far-right threat. This, I suggest, facilitates important new reflection on the far-right's production within and beyond terrorism research, as well as on the purposes and politics of critique therein.