Search

This paper hypothesizes that Islamic extremists gather and interpret information and experience by participating in communities of practice where veteran militants socialize novices to the norms and practices of jihad; store this knowledge in practices, procedures, and artifacts (including Internet documents and web sites); and select and retain innovations that produce satisfactory results. In other words, Islamists learn, building skills, improving practices, and becoming increasingly difficult for government law enforcers to eliminate. Drawing on the author's fieldwork in Spain and the United Kingdom during the summer and fall of 2007, this paper will increase our understanding of how Islamic militants learn through a comparative case study of extremist networks in both countries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bombings of commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004 and subsequent electoral victory of the "underdog" Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (POSE) raised international awareness of the potential political ramifications of terrorism. Given the POSE's decision to remove Spanish troops from Iraq, it is reasonable to speculate that terrorist activity targets and impacts political decision-making at the highest levels. Do terrorists regularly conceive of national elections as especially important opportunities to pursue their political goals? In this paper, we address this question in the context of the government that most regularly contends with terrorist attacks, Israel. We posit that terrorists optimally seek to engage in violence when it is most likely to influence Israeli political outcomes and decision-making. Thus, we hypothesize that such attacks are likely to increase in periods preceding Israeli general elections, called or otherwise. Empirical tests of this hypothesis across the period 1968-2000 reveal evidence contradicting the hypothesis: terrorist violence, in fact, declines marginally ahead of planned elections and during called elections. One intuitive explanation for this lack of support in the Israeli case (and, in a related manner, the absence of additional terrorist attacks in the US after 9/11) is that terrorists believe that the alternative presented by the opposition party is not palatable enough to step up violent actions before elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the case of Basque separatist movement (ETA) in Spain utilizing a theoretical framework that highlights the influence of human rights conditions in the origins of terrorist activity. The paper provides a historical overview of the Basque movement, highlighting their terrorist activity as well as human rights violations carried out be the state. In our analysis, we go beyond examining the role of the individual or terrorist entrepreneurs in ETA, to examine the attributes at the state and international level, which contribute to terrorism. We posit that terrorism is likely to ferment in middle areas of subsistence and security rights where they feel other options of dissent are limited due to the low levels of political rights. In fact, we argue that the denial of security rights is a necessary condition for terrorist activity. This paper examines the human rights conditions within Spain to ascertain the levels of political, subsistence, and security rights over the years and apply these conditions to the theoretical framework of terrorist activity presented. This analysis will then be compared to our previous cases on the IRA in Northern Ireland and the terrorist activity associated with the Chechen separatist movement. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will be a reflection on the ?logic? of the exception which liberal democratic governments claim they have no choice but to follow to meet a situation of crisis, threat or apprehended threat. The Spanish government has had to face just such a situation after the terrible events of March 11 2004 and has apparently avoided the sort of security paranoia which seized the US after 9/11. True, article 116 of the Spanish constitution provides measures to be taken in case of what it calls a ?state of alert?, ?state of exception? and ?state of seige?, and has repressive legislation in place to deal with Basque terrorism, yet there never was any question of invoking article 116 or of adopting special laws to meet a new source of terrororism. Neither at the level of discourse nor practice, has the Zapatero government opted for the politics of fear. In one area, that of immigration and asylum seekers, it has even gone against the general tendency towards tightening-up which is prevelant in most Western societies. The paper will examine more closely the Spanish situation to see how far this first impression is exact, and to see what this case tells us about how far it is possible to go to escape the logic of the exception, despite strong external and internal pressures. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current wave of fundamentalist terror and the anti-terror response it has generated raise a lot of important questions; questions that have been all too readily glossed over in the hasty turn to rhetoric by powerful people who should at least be think ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The events of September 11, 2001 as well as more recent cases in Spain, Saudi-Arabia, and the Middle East, have shown that terrorism is no longer a phenomenon that can be ignored in the analysis of international affairs. An example of this is the electoral failure of the incumbent party in Spain and the subsequent withdrawal of their troops from Iraq following the train bombings in Madrid. Furthermore, it seems quite apparent that terrorist incidents often generate negative emotional reactions. We have argued elsewhere that negative emotions influence both the processes and outcomes of foreign policy decision-making by reducing the cognitive capacity of the decision maker and by inducing a thematic bias on the process (Geva, Redd & Mosher 2004, Redd, Mosher & Geva 2004). The focus of this study is on the effects of negative emotions on the sensitivity of decision makers to the quality of the information they use to make their choices. Specifically, an experimental procedure is utilized to explore the conditions where decision makers opt to evaluate the reliability (i.e., quality) of each piece of information pertaining to an international crisis or alternatively search for more information and ignore their reliability. Essentially, we ask, "Will the traditional tradeoff between quality and quantity of information faced by decision makers be affected by emotional biases?" The results of the experiment are discussed in terms of the effects of negative emotions on decision thresholds and choice propensity calculations within the cognitive calculus model of foreign policy decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the motivations of former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar for sidelining Spain's traditional alliance with Europe and embracing the U.S. policy in post-September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It offers an overview of the terrorist attacks in Madrid, Spain on March 11, 2004 and the election on March 14. It states that most of the think-tank communities in Brussels, Belgium perceive the Spain-U.S. alliance as negative. It argues that Spain will continue to be loyal to the U.S. unless a conflict arises in the EU.

This paper explores the anxieties and reactions sparked by events, like the transport system terror attacks of 9.11.0l in the USA, 3.11.2004 in Spain, and 7.7.05 in London. As either collections of soft human targets or cargoes of hard-hitting destructiv ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses intelligence co-operation within the European Union from the Maastricht treaty to the Madrid terror attacks. This co-operation has taken place within the policy areas of Justice and Home Affairs and the Common Foreign and Security Policy. Drawing on theories of rational design and historical institutionalism it proposes a model of how we can understand the different developmental paths of the two policy areas. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 9/11 (2001) terrorist acts in U.S. and consequently in Spain (11/03/2003) and UK (07/07/2005) exercised a lot of pressure on the intelligence services to adapt to new threats by looking their past and preparing for the future. On this article, I exami ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks public approval of President Bush?s job performance soared from 51% to 86%; the largest rally around the flag effect ever recorded in the U.S. In contrast, after the 11 March 2004 attacks on the Madrid mass transit system Spanish support for the ruling People?s Party (PP) disintegrated and there was a massive shift of several million voters in favor of the opposition Socialist Party (PSOE). What explains these very different public responses to violent terrorism? I examine the impact of international terrorism in the United States, Great Britain and Israel on public perceptions and opinions, by combining the ITERATE (International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events) dataset of terrorist incidents with public opinion polls from 1979 ? 2004. At its heart terrorism is about fear. While terrorist attacks destroy, maim and kill, the intended audience for these attacks is almost always the larger body politic and the terrorist?s goal is to strike fear into their hearts. I examine the fear-causing impact of terrorism through a useful proxy: public opinion polls. Few scholars have systematically measured public perceptions of terrorism and terrorists, how public opinion is affected by terrorist acts, what the public thinks about government handling of terrorist incidents, or its attitudes toward specific counter-terrorism measures. I fill this void by testing for a relationship between terrorism and public opinion. If such a relationship does exist what theories best explain the causal and temporal mechanisms at work? Do terrorist attacks really have a debilitating impact on a country?s morale or do attacks have the opposite impact, instead of paralyzing the public, rallying them to a central goal? Do the characteristics (lethality, location, target, tactic) of an attack lead to differential impacts? Does this relationship vary over time, by perpetrator, or by country? The answers to these and other questions have important theoretical and policy implications for governments, citizens, and terrorist groups. Governments should be concerned with what the public thinks about terrorism and how the public wants the government to respond. Measuring the public?s reaction to terrorism is also one way to estimate how successful terrorists are at causing fear. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spain?s response to ETA?s actions, in terms of the normative aspect, have been similar to those of other countries dealing with political claims using violent means since the end of the 1970s ; a strong authoritative reaction through the creation of a special « terrorist » law ? entailing restrictions and even the suspension of some fundamental rights with regards to detention, privacy of communications, inviolability of homes - by hardening the procedural and penitentiary system and by the introduction of new criminal incriminations associated to more severe sentences. Though Spain found inspiration in the various antiterrorist legislations in the neighbouring European countries, the country endowed with one of the most impressive judicial antiterrorist arsenal to the point that Spain did not need to adopt any special antiterrorist legislation following the September 11th attacks. This article aims at analyzing the history of the various Spanish anti-terrorist pacts is therefore both the history of a rather performative antiterrorist political line able to redefine the democratic legitimate area and the history of tensions, interferences and political agreements between the Basque Country and the Central Government on the issue of the Basque autonomy but also about the connection to radical nationalism. It is therefore necessary to understand and analyze how the whole political class in Spain came to unanimously condemn ETA, up to the fact that in 2002 Spain provided an instrument to render constitutionally illegal a political party failing to condemn, as a principle ?terrorism?, as other parties would. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]