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This book explores citizens’ perceptions and experiences of security threats in contemporary Britain, drawing on perspectives from International Security Studies and Political Psychology. The empirical chapters are based on twenty focus groups across six British cities and a large sample survey conducted between April and September 2012. These data are used to investigate the extent to which diverse publics share government framings of certain issues as the most pressing security threats, to assess the origins of perceptions of specific security threats ranging from terrorism to environmental degradation, to investigate what makes some people feel more threatened by these issues than others, to examine the effects of threats on other areas of politics such as harbouring stereotypes of minorities or prioritising public spending on border control over health, and to evaluate the effectiveness of government messages about security threats and attempts to change citizens’ behaviour as part of the risk management cycle. The book demonstrates widespread heterogeneity in perceptions of issues as security threats and in their origins, with implications for the extent to which shared understandings of threats are an attainable goal. The concluding chapter summarises the findings and discusses their implications for government and public opinion in the future. While this study focuses on the British case, its combination of quantitative and qualitative methods seeks to make broader theoretical and methodological contributions to scholarship produced in Political Science, International Relations, Political Psychology, and Security Studies.

This edited collection surveys how non-Western states have responded to the threats of domestic and international terrorism in ways consistent with and reflective of their broad historical, political, cultural and religious traditions. It presents a series of eighteen case studies of counterterrorism theory and practice in the non-Western world, including countries such as China, Japan, India, Pakistan, Egypt and Brazil. These case studies, written by country experts and drawing on original language sources, demonstrate the diversity of counter-terrorism theory and practice and illustrate how the world ‘sees’ and responds to terrorism is different from the way that the United States, the United Kingdom and many European governments do. This volume – the first ever comprehensive account of counter-terrorism in the non-Western world – will be of interest to students, scholars, students and policymakers responsible for developing counter-terrorism policy.

The politics of attack is an exploration of insurrectionary anarchist praxis, with a particular focus on the rhetoric, discourse, and theory found in communiqués. This book challenges the reader to consider the marginalized ideas put forth by those political actors that communicate through bombs, arson, and broken windows, and who are rejected through the state’s construction of terrorism. When a police station is firebombed, the subsequent discussions focus more on the illegality of the act rather than the socio-political critique the actor put forth. What if we were to embrace the means through which the militant, ‘organic intellectual’ acts, and consider the communiqué’s content, the way one would consider any political text? This inter-textual analysis is presented within a political and historical context, with the hopes of elevating the discussion of insurrectionary praxis beyond notions of terrorism and securitization and towards its application for intersectional challenges to structural violence and domination. In the social war being waged by insurrectionary anarchists, small acts of violence are announced and contextualized through written communiqués, which are posted online, translated, and circulated globally. This book offers the first contemporary history of these post-millennial, digitally-mediated, insurrectionary anarchist networks, and seeks to locate this tendency within anti-state struggles from the past. Through an examination of thousands of movement documents, this book presents the discourse offered by clandestine, urban guerrillas fighting capitalism, the state, and the omnipresent forces of violence and coercion.

This book analyses the Syria crisis and the role of chemical weapons, in relation to US foreign policy. The Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons and their subsequent elimination would dominate the US’ response to the conflict, where these are viewed as particularly horrific arms – a repulsion known as the chemical taboo. On the surface, this would seem an appropriate reaction: these are vile and intolerable weapons, and eradicating them would ostensibly comprise a ‘good’ move. But this book reveals two new aspects of the taboo that challenge this view. First, actors employ the taboo strategically to advance their own self-interested policy objectives. This is in contrast to the highly static and constructivist approaches that have informed conceptualisation of the taboo until now. Far from a situation of normative adherence, this is a case in which the taboo exists as a strategic political resource, used to achieve aims that may have nothing to do with preventing chemical warfare. Second, it is argued that applying the taboo to Syria has exacerbated the crisis. While many expound the benefits of the taboo, it is demonstrated here that the exact opposite is true. The taboo has actually made the conflict significantly worse. As such, this book not only provides a timely analysis of Syria, but also a major and original rethink of the chemical taboo, as well as international norms more widely.