Suchergebnisse

This contribution presents a short overview on the impact of the Capitol Riots riots in Europe. Fear of a similar mass-mediated contagion was explicitly expressed by most of the European leaders. Echoes and acclamation for the riots in the U.S. were indeed heard on websites, QAnon-sites, and within circles of Trump supporters in Europe as well. An earlier storming of the German Reichstag (in 2020) was cited. In the Netherlands, the curfew riots of 24–25 January 2021 also were put into this context. Security agencies and officials in the U.K. and the Netherlands repeated this threat awareness in recent, formal threat assessments.

This article introduces three historical situations where governments, or more accu- rately, specific leaders in office, shaped the international context in dealing with a transboundary crisis—and were in turn crucially affected in their reign by this crisis. The question at stake is: under what conditions did leaders (and their governments) engage in international cooperation to deal with the transboundary crisis at hand, and how did this cooperation impact the development of the crisis? An informed argu- ment is made for combining crisis management research—in particular a model oper- ationalizing conditions for transboundary cooperation—with an applied history per- spective to shed light on the current obstacles to international cooperation in Covid-19 times.

On 30 March 2011, ICCT – The Hague organised an Expert Meeting entitled 'Terrorism Trials as Theatre: A Performative Perspective'. The Expert Meeting applied a performative perspective to three well known and recent trials in different parts of the world: the trials against the Dutch Hofstad Group, the Mumbai 2008 Terrorist Attack Trial and the Guantanamo Military Tribunals. As such, the Expert Meeting did not concentrate solely on the immediate judicial performance of the magistrates and/or the defence; instead, the trials were put in their wider sociological context, adopting notions of social drama and communication sciences. This Expert Meeting Paper is a further adaptation of the Discussion Paper that was used as basis for debate during the Meeting.

In this Research paper, ICCT – The Hague Research Fellow Beatrice de Graaf emphasises the importance of effective communication and performance in the fight against terrorism and the fear it aims to induce. Essentially, terrorists and states are conducting 'influence warfare', a battle to convince and persuade the different target audiences to rally behind them. In this battle of perceptions, the different government agencies need to be aware of the often implicit and unwittingly produced 'stories' they tell to counter those narrated by the terrorists. It is crucial to take in consideration the fact that combating terrorism is a form of communication, as much as terrorism is itself.

In this chapter, terrorism is interpreted as a contested concept: as a discursive frame and a political attribution with the power to transform conflicting political, ideological or religious positions into repertoires of action and governmental practices. Terrorist events will be highlighted inasmuch as they were reported on in the Netherlands, or when threats posed by international terrorist organisations or foreign groups were mediatised within the Dutch context. We will also trace when indigenous Dutch radical groups and individuals triggered national debates – and estimate whether this was followed by national policy decisions and actions or not. As will transpire, the Netherlands were more often than not on the receiving end of international terrorism and global terrorist trends. Yet, there were some instances of terrorist groups and attacks originating in and from the Netherlands, inspired by injustice frames generated on the basis of misgivings about Dutch politics. By and large, the history of terrorism in the Netherlands did follow the trajectories of David Rapoport's 'four waves' of terrorism, albeit with some national characteristics, and always situated within the specific confines of the Dutch national context. In the following, we will trace the introduction, trajectories and translations of terrorism as a concept, discourse and influence on concrete security practices into Dutch politics, society and law – and we will ask ourselves how the double-edged nature of terrorism played out in these interactions.

Since 9/11, the state of the art in counter-terrorism (CT) research, CT measures and CT impacts has taken off. Nevertheless, countering terrorism as a branch of fear management is still a discipline to be developed. In this ICCT Research Paper, authors Prof. Dr. Edwin Bakker and Prof. Dr. Beatrice de Graaf attempt to lessen this gap. The Paper identifies and analyses governmental approaches to managing fear in relation to terrorist incidents. It is a stocktaking approach, offering a preliminary oversight of some central aspects and pointers on the way forward when constructing and testing such a theory.

»Sicherheit und Verschwörung in der Neuzeit«. Security History is a new field in historical research. Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories have attracted since some years great attention, both in historical and in social research. A thorough study of those both opposed and mirroring key phenomena and concepts does not exist. This contribution tries to outline a sketch of the development of their interwoven history, how (imagined) conspiracies challenged new means of security production and vice versa. The main assumption is that a) a translocal public sphere, b) concepts, practices and means of institutionalized security production, and c) developed narratives that contain conspiracy theories only emerge together from the Renaissance onwards. Only if there is a public sphere in which conspiracy theories can circulate anonymously they become themselves an element of historical agency. Security as a leading principle of politics emerges only with the development of the state. The contribution outlines the steps of change from confessional age to Enlightenment, to the Revolutionary age and to Modernity, identifying mainly two important systematic changings which affect the security/conspiracy combination (Emergence of observability alongside the politics/religion and Ancien Régime/ Bourgeois Society distinctions). It finally asks if there is currently happening a third epochal shift of comparable importance.

In this article, the violent threat emerging from "menacing loners" and autonomous cells in The Netherlands is being historicized and contextualized by providing quantitative and qualitative insight into this threat and illuminating some of the most dramatic incidents. Although beyond the core purpose of this mainly empirical article, some tentative remarks will be presented as possible explanation for both continuity and change. We argue that the shift from political violence originating from groups and networks to political violence perpetrated by individuals, and the shift from ideologically motivated violence to performative violence, are both shifts within a continuum, not radical breaks with the past. It is a difference in degree. Further, we argue that these gradual shifts in types of violence can only be understood as dependent on parallel manifestations of counter-policies, technological developments, and broader trends within society, rather than as attributable to indigenous terrorist developments as such. We postulate a shift from ideologically motivated to performative violence, resulting to a large extent from the possibilities offered by the Internet and social media, and from a broader cultural trend defined as the emergence of the "casting society."

In this manuscript, we introduce a theoretical model of climate radicalization that integrates social psychological theories of perceived unfairness with historical insights on radicalization to contribute to the knowledge of individuals' processes of radicalization and non-radicalization in relation to climate change. We define climate radicalization as a process of growing willingness to pursue and/or support radical changes in society that are in conflict with or could pose a threat to the status quo or democratic legal order to reach climate goals. We describe how perceptions of unfairness can play a pivotal role in processes of climate change related radicalization. Without taking any position or judgment regarding climate concerns and associated actions, we suggest that although these behaviors drive many people to participate in peaceful climate protest, they may also lead others to radicalize into breaking the law to achieve their climate goals, possibly in violent ways. This process of climate radicalization, we argue, can be driven by people perceiving certain situations to be blatantly unfair. Specifically, we discuss how radical attitudes and behaviors can be products of perceived unfairness stemming from the past, the future, the immediate social environments of perceivers, as well as those that are spatially distant from them. We further argue that because radicalization processes are shaped by an interaction between individuals and movements, on the one hand, and societal actors and developments, on the other, they tend to develop in non-linear and dynamic ways. We therefore propose that climate radicalization is a (1) dynamic, contingent, and non-linear process, often of an escalating (and sometimes de-escalating) kind, (2) that develops over time, (3) through various interactions between individuals and their contexts, and (4) in which people and groups move back and forth from peaceful protest, through disobedient and unlawful methods, to violent actions. Implications, strengths, and ...

After the Vienna Congress in 1815, the Allied ministers did not return home, but continued their negotiations in Paris. They deliberated on the measure of reparation payments and arrear payments that France owed to the other European states. The new peace also rested on financial securities. The United Kingdom of the Netherlands assumed a large part in these conferences, since through the mass of private claims it was France's largest creditor. In this article we demonstrate how, as one of the essentials of the new concert diplomacy of 1815, smaller powers such as the Netherlands were allowed to weigh in on the Four Powers' deliberations in Paris. The political conundrums regarding these financial securities and reparationshave not been charted and analysed before. Through previously unstudied sources,such as the minutes of the Paris Ministerial Conference, we discuss the influence a secondary power could exert provided they deployed smart financial experts. Under that condition large political and financial gains could be made.

This chapter argues that tsar Alexander's Holy Alliance of 1815 was far less conservative and far more revolutionary than it was later understood to be. To make this point, the chapter reconstructs how this "secret plan" came to be understood as "conservative" and how this reading of the Holy Alliance Treaty was influenced by latter-day interpretations and machinations far more than by its concrete substance at the time. Subsequently, the origins and constitutive elements of the plan are delineated in order to demonstrate that it was a revolutionary amalgam of Christian pietism, semi-scientific Enlightenment theories, and a dose of modern, bureaucratic state centralism. Based on new archival evidence, it will transpire how both Prussian security experts and French semi-scientist scholars contributed to the design of the Holy Alliance. The Holy Alliance contained conservative ingredients, but the liberal and provocative elements stood out—these were however suppressed within a few years by political appropriations by other statesmen.

On 24 August 2012, the judges of the Oslo District Court passed their final verdict in the case of Anders Behring Breivik, declaring Breivik criminally sane and legally responsible for the killing of 77 people during the bombing of government buildings in Oslo and the shooting spree on the island of Utøya on 22 July 2011. This ICCT – The Hague Research Paper examines to what extent the Breivik trial attained the goals of criminal justice: retribution, prevention, restoring democratic order and upholding the rule of law. Furthermore, it aims to determine if the trial contributed to the need for closure in society. The paper concludes that the trial did indeed have a positive impact on the coping mechanisms in Norwegian society and that most Norwegians viewed the trial as a positive counter-weight to the brutality of Breivik's acts. Overall, the trial was viewed as an example of justice and as a trial that upheld the democratic values of Norwegian society – in stark contrast to Breivik's values.