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Key Findings: Non-state armed groups, including violent extremist organizations, self-defense militias, and criminal gangs, are governance providers to local populations in the Sahel to a much greater degree than previously reported in the so-called “ungoverned spaces.” NSAGs provide four key forms of governance: security; justice; political and economic administration; social support and enforcement of social rules, across large sections of Mali, but also in Burkina Faso and Niger. Through this informal governance, NSAGs garner support and legitimacy from local leaders and communities at large. Current Responses: State and international responses have overall ignored this NSAG informal governance and have pursued: 1. a counter-terrorism strategy that is hampered by its failure to take into account the deeply embedded nature of NSAGs in local communities; and 2. a central statebuilding strategy that has so far largely failed to replace or even undermine NSAG legitimacy as governance providers. Relevance to NATO: Any involvement of international organizations in the Sahel needs to go beyond a strict counter-terrorism understanding of NSAGs, including VEOs. Furthermore, local and international actors on the ground warned that any additional involvement should avoid duplicating and undermining existing activities. Thus, any international involvement in the Sahel needs to take a broader vision of NSAG activities – beyond simply seeing them as “terrorists” or “criminal gangs” – and needs to be carefully coordinated with national and international partners.

This chapter examines the potential for talks with Al-Shabaab, identifies potential facilitators and spoilers, and highlights lessons to be learned from past dialogues with Al-Shabaab. Three main conclusions are reached. First, many Somali and international parties agree that there exists some degree of common ground between the Federal Government of Somalia (FGS) and Al-Shabaab. Second, while Somali elders, business leaders, and Muslim-majority countries have been identified as potential facilitators or initiators of a dialogue with Al-Shabaab, such talks require at least non-opposition from key factions in the FGS and Al-Shabaab and more broadly from powerful regional powers who have rejected past agreements. Third, FGS and international actors need to decide whether they want to maintain their focus on facilitating and promoting defections from Al-Shabaab or explore the possibility of comprehensive talks with Al-Shabaab aimed at bringing in the entire armed group.

Individuals who cannot directly express their discontents against an unjust system may instead support groups that disrupt the system through deviant, transgressive or even criminal actions. These groups are defined as 'social bandits', and their actions may be construed as a form of vicarious protest. Very little research has examined what drives individuals' support for social bandits. This thesis focused on hackers, groups operating on the internet often illegally. Seven experiments examined the circumstances in which individuals were more likely to support hackers engaging in disruptive and criminal actions. Experiments 1-2 examined whether individuals were more likely to support hackers that attacked a corrupt (either ingroup or outgroup) authority. Results indicated that individuals legitimized hackers more strongly when they attacked an ingroup corrupt authority. Experiments 3-4 extended these findings focusing on the role of an institution' responsiveness. In two different contexts (online work platform and university), participants who dealt with an institution irresponsive to their grievances were more likely to experience anger and, subsequently, legitimize hackers' attacks. Experiments 5-6 explored the role of schadenfreude. These experiments showed how both government corruption (studies 5 and 6) and low government responsiveness (study 6) may trigger schadenfreude in response to hackers' attack, and stronger support for hackers. Experiment 7 consolidated previous findings and explored the role of identification with an aggrieved group. In this study, low responsiveness elicited anger and schadenfreude, which then predicted increased support for hackers. Results also revealed an interaction effect of identification with an aggrieved group participants belonged to, and emotions on the legitimization of hackers; individuals who identified more strongly with the aggrieved group expressed lower anger and schadenfreude and consequently lower support for hackers (Study 7). Theoretical implications for the emerging field of research on social bandits are discussed, in addition to future directions for research.

Critical Terrorism Studies has produced an important volume of work in assessing and critiquing epistemological understandings of the War on Terror. Largely missing from this body of work, however, is the experience of those who are directly impacted by the policies of this global conflict. By rethinking the War on Terror as an experience of war, I posit a wider understanding of this war, by reassessing its temporal and spatial boundaries. Further, I seek to understand war through the experiences of those impacted by it. By providing a wider understanding of war and expanding our knowledge of its boundaries, I am able to show that those impacted by the policies of the War on Terror, can claim to have been subject to an experience of war, even when that experience takes place outside of the war zone. My work for the last fifteen years has predominantly been based in the field, meeting with those who have survived the impact of global counter-terrorism policies. It is based on the work I have produced out of their stories that this thesis provides an ontological reframing of how war is experienced. By relying on this work, I first show how epistemological constructions of the terrorism 'threat' can become a site of war itself. I then move on to extending our understanding of where the War on Terror might be experienced, beyond traditional notions of a warzone. Third, I present evidence that shifts our knowledge of the starting date of the War on Terror's response to the attacks of 11 September 2001. The point is further made that an individual may be unaware of the existence of a war until they are impacted by its far- reaching policies, even in a country that is not at war. My penultimate contribution in this thesis is to argue that the War on Terror represents a continuum in terms of its language, epistemology and ontology. Finally, I consider my own positionality to the subject of my fieldwork, as a Muslim who has worked for and on the cases of those who are Muslim, within an environment of suspicion.

This thesis analyses the relationship between criminalising political expression and conflict transformation. It begins with a discussion of traditional approaches to researching crime in conflict contexts, arguing that the assumptions of state legitimacy and 'criminal' illegitimacy are particularly problematic in the contested contexts of deeply divided societies. Instead, drawing on critical legal and criminological research, it argues that through considering the process by which such categories of 'crime' are created - criminalisation - it is possible to analyse the contested role they can have. This means taking crime to embody a social construction which contributes towards a wider social reality of crime and the criminal. How this takes effect is through what the thesis describes as the interaction between formal criminalisation - the legal processes which codify and embody legal norms and principles established by a government - and informal criminalisation - the social reality of the formal process which is given expression through the way it is implemented, interpreted, resisted, or accepted by the wider population.\ud \ud From the perspective of conflict transformation, conflict is not the problem but rather encapsulates a problem, and frequently embodies at least part of the solution. Indeed it is through dialogue and communication which transformation can occur (both constructively and destructively), and so the thesis narrowed its focus onto the criminalisation of political expression. Criminalising political expression, therefore, can directly shape the nature of an intergroup conflict in deeply divided societies undermining the ability of actors to find a peaceful resolution to their conflict, or potentially enhancing it depending on how it operates. Accordingly the thesis argues that this can be distinguished into an explanatory typology of three 'targets' of criminalisation: identity, activity, and violence. These, together with the nature of informal criminalisation, have important implications for conflict transformation depending on the context. Through considering four conflict contexts which criminalisation responds towards - namely non-violent movements, collective political violence, negotiations, and peacebuilding - the thesis argues that when criminalisation targets non-violent political expression it will likely undermine conflict transformation in the short and long-term by closing down opportunities for dialogue, contributing towards intergroup polarisation, and dehumanising actors. On the other hand, criminalising political violence may facilitate conflict transformation, but this depends on the legitimacy of criminal justice and the nature of its enforcement. \ud \ud Employing an interpretivist methodology, the research involved an in-depth comparative analysis of the case studies of Northern Ireland and South Africa through poststructuralist discourse analysis and practice tracing, drawing on original interviews with key actors, and archival research. Furthermore, the thesis then employed a small-n study of Belgium, Canada, Turkey, and Sri Lanka to consider how this theoretical relationship between conflict transformation and criminalising political expression applies to crucial, typical, and counterfactual cases. The thesis concludes by discussing the implications these findings have for a number of policy areas including criminalising non-violent extremism and legacy issues associated with criminal records for political offences.

The thesis provides an in-depth investigation of the significance of specific ethical experiences for humanitarian aid work. Following Emmanuel Levinas's and Martin Buber's understanding of ethics as arising from intersubjective encounters, I analyse four contemporary humanitarian aid workers' memoirs, and investigated the experiences humanitarian aid workers describe as being crucial for their humanitarian engagement revealing the nature of the specific encounters in which they arise as an ethical subject. In doing so, I explored three aspects: first, the role of particular experiences for humanitarian aid workers' motivation to work in the humanitarian sector; second, the role of particular experiences for humanitarian aid workers' ability to cope with the challenging nature of their work; and third the commonalities among these experiences.