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Within the context of eliciting partner country cooperation and interests alignment, U.S. presidents and their administrations have a wide array of policy tools at their disposal to mitigate terrorist threats emanating from other countries. Yet, the factors that account for variation in American presidents' and their administrations' specific counterterrorism policy choices to influence target states' behavior remain underexplored. To understand the underlying factors that influence the adoption of different U.S. counterterrorism tools within a given country, and their variation across administrations in the post‐9/11 era, we examine the case of Pakistan—a challenging yet enduring partner in the U.S.‐led Global War on Terror. Categorizing the counterterrorism policies and tools adopted by Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump as punitive or nonpunitive policy decisions, we explore the extent to which each president's policy choices during the Global War on Terror were largely a continuation of predecessors or responded to specific shifting patterns of terrorism within Pakistan. Our study yields important insights regarding the extent to which path dependency or evolving security environments shape choices of counterterrorism tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the recent proliferation of gendered narratives underpinning and shaping counter‐terrorism laws, policies, and practices. Looking specifically at the United Kingdom, there has been shift in the place of women and gender within international and national security discourses and practices, from historic absence to contemporary presence and influence. The article identifies and critiques some of the gendered and racialized tropes through which Muslim women involved in or associated with Islamist terrorism have been represented since the advent of the 'War on Terror'. Gendered narratives that oscillate between infantilizing and demonizing Muslim women underline, and are manifested in, two particularly important shifts in the global counter‐terrorism landscape: the familialization of (Islamist) terrorism and the securitization of the (Muslim) family. These changes – which foreground the importance of the private realm in understanding and countering terrorism, and have turned the attention of the security state to the relationship between private intimacies and public threats – rest on gendered assumptions and have gendered implications. Their power is most clearly seen in the rhetoric of the family judiciary in cases that have recently emerged in the English family courts dealing with the radicalization of children and their construction of three discursive figures: the radicalized girl, the radicalized woman/wife, and the radicalized mother. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post 9/11 global proliferation of counterterrorism legislation is increasingly being interpreted as part of a longer story of colonialism. Scholars have shown how expansive counterterrorism can be interpreted not merely as an exceptional state of violence in situations where the rule of law and guarantees of ordinary civil liberties are suspended, but as a form of law-making that draws upon colonial logics and frameworks of governance. However, a major lacuna in this scholarship is the lack of attention to counterterrorism laws in postcolonial states and their negotiations with colonial logics of law-making. This article makes a postcolonial contribution to Critical Terrorism Studies and International Politics by showing how colonial logics of counterterrorism are repurposed by postcolonial states in comparable ways. By comparing counterterror laws in two postcolonial states, India and Egypt, this article shows how colonial logics intersect with nationalist ideologies, postcolonial anxieties, as well as an attempt by postcolonial states to seek international legitimacy post 9/11 vis-a-vis the War on Terror. In both states, counterterror laws are weaponised to target civil society activists, journalists, and religious, ethnic and other minorities in comparable ways. This article, therefore, challenges the centrality of 9/11 and state of exception/emergency in the framing of counterterror laws. In so doing, it advances knowledge of counterterrorism vis-à-vis postcolonial engagements with colonial epistemes and "normal" practices of security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Militarized policing strategies aiming to identify and nullify risks to national security in Western nations have become central to the biopolitical regulation of racialized populations. While the disproportionate impact of pre-emptive counter-terrorism policing on 'Muslim' populations has been highlighted, the post-racial techno-politics of predictive policing as a mode of securitization remain overlooked. This article argues that the 'war on terror' is governed by a state of crisis that conditions a pre-emptive biopolitics of containment against (unknown) future threats. We examine how predictive policing is progressively dependent on the computational production of risk to avert impending terror. As such, extant forms of counter-terrorism algorithmic profiling are shown to mobilize post-racial calculative logics that renew racial oppression while appearing race-neutral. These predictive systems and pre-emptive actions, while seeking to securitize the future by identifying and nullifying suspects, evasively remake race as risky, thus rendering security indistinguishable from insecurity. Hence, we assert that state securitization is haunted by a profound sense of racialized dread over terrorism, for it can only resort to containing, rather than resolving, the perceived threat of race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terrorism has been often considered to be a subjective label rather than a distinct form of violence. Discourse has played an important role in creating the threat of terrorism, as well as in the legitimisation of counterterrorism level. The importance of studying discourse can thus no longer be denied. This article analysed the character of official discourse on terrorism delivered by Australian prime ministers between 9/11 and the end of 2019, since Australia is one of the countries involved in the War on Terror. The author used the NVivo software to analyse speeches delivered by John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison, and Malcolm Turnbull. She applies Norman Fairclough’s three-level Critical Discourse Analysis to study the character of the speeches, positive and negative emotions which were invoked by the speeches and the connections that were drawn to other discourses. She also analyses the context in which the speeches were delivered as well as the adopted counterterrorism measures that were legitimized in the speeches. The results of the analysis demonstrated that all Australian prime ministers used the terrorism label to some extent, however each of them delivered speeches on terrorism that had a different character. All of the analysed prime ministers, with the exception of Kevin Rudd, also presented emotional discourse on terrorism. The article demonstrates how is the terrorism label portrayed differently by each speaker, and that not all discourse on terrorism has to necessarily be emotional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the political and legal controversies around a counterterrorism programme conducted by the Dutch government to support the so-called moderate groups in Syria between 2015 and 2018. The controversies centred around the question how the Dutch government was able to define and support armed moderate groups in Syria and distinguish them from terrorist organizations. The objective of the article is to take up this question and unpack how the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs constructed and justified their definition of material support for moderate groups deployed in this programme, against existing definitions of terrorism funding and terrorist groups embedded in European counterterrorism financing regulations. Connecting to the debates around materiality in both International Relations and International Law, this article follows the material-semiotic practices through which definitions of terrorism come into being. The empirical analysis draws on interviews with legal professionals, policy documents and court transcripts, and provides a detailed overview of how multiple and even conflicting definitions of terrorism and terrorism financing are constructed by the Dutch state. Taking this interdisciplinary approach to materiality and based on the empirical analysis, I propose that this controversy on defining terrorism and terrorism financing reflects a Eurocentric assumption about the knowledge and responsibilities of the Western state in the War on Terror. While the empirics are grounded in the Dutch context, my analysis is relevant for multiple European countries who engaged in similar operations between 2015 and 2018, as well as for future counterterrorism efforts targeting terrorist groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coastal West African countries are in a threat anticipatory anxiety mode: over the fear that subaltern violent "jihadist" groups (SVJGs) are breaching their borders and heading south from across the Sahel. In Ghana, this fear has led to a build-up of commentaries, political statements, and counter-extremism/counterterrorism programs. This article interrogates the terrorism discourse in this West African country at the intersection of critical security studies and the politics of space, by applying securitisation theory and critical discourse analysis. In what is the most comprehensive academic review of news articles on the terrorism discourse in Ghana yet, I contend that the discourse evokes what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls 'abyssal thinking' and creates cognitive and physical spatial abyssal lines. On the invisible side, insecurity within Ghana gets "normalised" by the discourse. On the visible side, however, SVJGs are securitised as abnormal, foreign, and uniquely threatening. This nature of the discourse effectively places events and conditions in the country that are either terroristic or constitutive of terrorism on the invisible side of Ghana's security priorities. The discourse, therefore, hides much about the reality of insecurity and political violence within the country. These arguments advance the frontiers of security/terrorism knowledge and practice in West Africa by demonstrating the pervasiveness of "global war on terror" systems of representation, two decades after their inception and despite their flaws and adverse implications for human and national security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing Bogost's procedural rhetoric framework in his book Persuasive Games, this article examines Labyrinth, a boardgame that simulates the conflict between the United States and global terrorism. The authors systematically integrate ludology (rules/gameplay) and narratology (narratives/representations) to illustrate how Labyrinth was intentionally designed so that players became active participants in a narrative about how good governance undermines the sources of terrorism and the counterproductive nature of militarized counterterrorism, as well as bear witness to the agency of the Muslim world and the region's political dynamism on the tabletop. This is a very different account of the War on Terror than has previously been studied in the literature, which has focused overwhelmingly on first-person shooter videogames and, in turn, has provided a very limited range of how this conflict can be represented in ludic form. However, Labyrinth is not alone, and the wargames that many players grew up with have given way to a variety of boardgames which approach complex historical or contemporary situations and environments beyond simply killing one's enemies. This represents a diverse, but largely untapped, resource already in the public space and ready to be investigated. Media studies can therefore benefit from considering how boardgames similar to Labyrinth present alternative ways in which the 'real world' has been, and indeed can be, translated through popular culture objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically assesses the UK counter-terrorism strategy and determines the extent to which there is international justice within the War on Terror. It investigates why war crimes are investigated and prosecuted differently, as well as how understandings of what terrorism is varied, according to who the perpetrators are. It argues that new legal mechanisms and institutions need to hold all perpetrators of war crimes accountable, both state and non-state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her book "Gender mainstreaming in counter-terrorism policy: Building transformative strategies to counter violent extremism," Jessica White explores the challenges and benefits of incorporating gender into counterterrorism policies. White argues that gender mainstreaming leads to more effective counterterrorism tools and improves decision-making in the industry. The book includes case studies on USAID and the EU's counterterrorism programs in Kenya and offers policy recommendations based on the findings. White emphasizes the need for a nuanced and inclusive approach to gender in counterterrorism policymaking and highlights the importance of gathering more data on gender in order to advance understanding of human security. Overall, the book provides a comprehensive analysis of the complexities of gender mainstreaming and its impact on counterterrorism policies. [Extracted from the article]

The Caribbean is profoundly under-represented in the prevailing scholarly literature on terrorism and counter-terrorism. Therefore, this research note provides a brief overview of the history of terrorism within the Caribbean context, presents a summary of the existing literature, and then examines the War on Terror's impact in the region. Drawing from a qualitative research study, the analysis concludes that the War on Terror has impacted the region in several ways. For example, countries in the region have implemented new anti-terrorism legislation; made amendments to their immigration systems; implemented counter-terrorism police units; and established a Joint Regional Communication Centre and an Advanced Passenger Information System. Overall, this research note intends to support and encourage more academic discourse regarding the War on Terror and its impact on the Caribbean region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The preemptive turn in counterterrorism has turned future uncertainties into key objects of contemporary security governance. From an empirically grounded perspective, this article contributes with novel insight into the everyday practices of preemptive politics. Focusing on Ghana as a unique case through which to trace how the mobilization of affect accelerates the transnational proliferation of counterterrorism measures and the commodification of future uncertainty, it shows how the global War on Terror has shaped the emergence of counterterrorism in a context characterized by the absence of terrorist attacks on home soil. Exploring how preemption animates outreach activities, simulation exercises, and nighttime patrols, it shows how police officers attempt to make uncertain futures tangible and actionable through practices of imagination and performance. Aimed at assessing terrorist threats that have not (yet) materialized, the article argues that preemptive policing practices cause a conflation of ordinary crime and extraordinary terror that inflates already existing uncertainties and subverts the institutional security logics of preemption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Counterterrorism continues to play a central role in international and national security strategies, including an expansion of a controversial programme known as Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). A central aspect of CVE frameworks is the integration of gendered counterterrorism programming and women into its scope and operations, which has been undertheorized or seen as less consequential compared to examining solely the racialised impacts of such programming. We argue that CVE's incorporation of gendered approaches to counterterrorism, including its use of women's empowerment initiatives, helps it secure traction and political legitimacy among the global community while undermining autonomous community movements. Our research documents the global reach of CVE beyond the US and its incorporation of gender, including tracing the entwinement of CVE with an important UN global initiative, Security Council Resolution 1325: Women, Peace, and Security (WPS). WPS programming draws on soft surveillance tactics that resource communities and invite intel. Alongside hard surveillance, the normalisation of soft surveillance programming allows for the institutionalisation of War on Terror ideologies in social sectors, in turn expanding the criminalisation of social justice movements wary of US militarisation both domestically and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The events of January 6th 2021, and the era of emboldened armed white supremacist violence that surrounded the United States Capitol attack spurred state commitment to counter “white supremacist terrorism.” This unprecedented shift on the part of the federal executive branch, spearheaded by the Biden Administration, redirected War on Terror tools previously fixated on Muslim populations toward new subjects: white supremacist terrorists. The Biden Administration marshaled counter-radicalization policing—the preventative informant-driven surveillance program—as the centerpiece of its white supremacist counterterrorism strategy. Counter-radicalization theory, specifically devised with Muslim subjects in mind, seeks to prevent the process whereby a subject becomes “radicalized,” or ideologically motivated to commit a violent act. This Article begins by analyzing the War on Terror roots of counter-radicalization policing, and the state and societal white supremacy that drove it. Interrogating the entrenched nature of white supremacy within different government institutions highlights the structural realities that impede its enforcement and the harms of extending the powers of the national security apparatus. In addition to examining the enforcement perils tied to white supremacist counterterrorism, this Article introduces the concept of “surveillance relapse.” Surveillance relapse is the probability that counterterror enforcement will revert to principal and historic subjects of surveillance—Muslim and Black communities—because of the deeply racialized understanding of terrorism rooted in the federal and local law enforcement agencies tasked with carrying forward surveillance. This Article examines the critiques of a white supremacist counterterrorism regime through the prism of three surveillance relapse types: stateoriented relapse, circumstantial relapse, and structural relapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001, countries were encouraged to enact domestic legislative changes as part of the Global War on Terror. However, it has been left to the countries themselves to define 'terrorism' and 'terrorist activities'. In this manuscript, we illustrate how liberal democracies and illiberal regimes may have very different understandings of the proper use of domestic counterterrorism (CT) policies. We argue that illiberal states, such as Russia, will likely use CT policy to enhance the ruling regime's goals in ways that liberal states would not. We focus on the critical changes in Russia's CT policy under Putin and demonstrate how Putin-era Russian CT policies have been used indirectly (i.e., in ways that are not explicitly focused on eliminating terrorist threats) to advance the Kremlin's desire to suppress domestic opposition and enhance its political standing both at home and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

President George W. Bush had conflated the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early twenty-first century into a "global war on terror", designating the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal for both conflicts between 2003 and 2005. 3 Biden, "Remarks by President Biden on the End of the War in Afghanistan." It was the nation's longest war, he emphasized, thereby severing one segment of the post-9/11 "war on terror" from all the rest.[1] Whatever this war had been, he made it clear that the use of US deadly military force in the region would continue. [Extracted from the article]

The language and rationale of fighting a war against terrorism echoes the logic of the US-Indian wars, when settler colonists sought to protect the "homefront" from the imagined savage, indigenous frontier. [8] In I The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of the United States i , Kaplan draws on Du Bois's concept of the anarchy of empire to trouble boundaries between "foreign" and "domestic" and, relatedly, of "home" and "abroad." As the United States commemorated its fight against terrorism, my class and I were studying how white supremacist insurgency - terrorism - established the conditions for US democracy for nearly one hundred years after the Civil War. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines how European "returnees" from the conflict in Iraq and Syria are managed by European governance and screening, prosecution, reintegration and rehabilitation (SPRR) processes. It explores the contestations and dynamics among professionals and practitioners involved in SPRR, and how they attempt to manage competing narratives of villain/victim. The article finds that underlying their efforts are different notions of "care" that allow for benevolent control and risk mitigation. The integration of care into governance has unevenly distributed political effects, allowing for the ongoing resilience and adaptability of the war on terror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our article examines counterterrorism trainings for frontline workers as a site of socialization to the high policing métier. Here we build on the notion of the police métier as a term that encapsulates the interactive identities and practices that produce the police world. We twin the police métier with recent scholarship on pluralized policing and surveillance to illustrate how a desire to expand surveillance to plural actors requires a socialization process that recirculates key characteristics, identities, and assumptive worldviews that shape the typically reclusive domains of high policing. Through an ethnographic account of a three-day counterterrorism training workshop for an array of frontline workers, our article analyzes what we consider three key features of socialization within the high policing métier: (1) the recirculation of the "war on terror's" racialized fixation on Muslims and Islam; (2) rationalities of preemption and expanding domains of surveillance; and (3) the sharing fraternal moments through the dehumanization of "outsiders.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 9/11 attacks triggered a paradigm shift in the United States security policy, prioritizing to ensure homeland security and to fight against the terrorism in the new American strategy. The United States invasion of Afghanistan further ravaged the existing fragile state damaging the already crumbling socio-economic and human infrastructure. In addition, the spillover of war into Pakistan started a new era of instability and misery further complicating the socio-economic fabric of the country making it the most vulnerable to terrorism related incidents. The two decades prolonged conflict not only destroyed the economic, social, and political infrastructure in both states, meanwhile mass human rights violations have been committed by the coalition forces under the leadership of the United States. In this context, the present paper investigates human rights abuses through the prism of international human rights law. The study addresses the following questions. (a) To what extent the United States war against terror violates the international law of human rights, and how it helps Washington to reconsolidate the regional hegemony. (b) Whether the war on terror improve the situation of human rights or further aggravate the conditions of civilians in targeted states. The study underlines that the war on terror failed to meet the merit of the right to intervene for self-defense, yet the coalition forces deliberately assimilate the innocent civilians under the vagueanti-terror war rhetoric. In addition, the war serves the United States hegemonic interests in South Asia, as the American presence in Afghanistan and the Indo-United States strategic partnership brought serious geopolitical implications for China and Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the enduring entanglements of counterterror governance and refugee encampment in Kenya. The spectre of "terrorism" and its supposed remedy—"counterterrorism"—have loomed large in Kenyan politics since the 1990s and gained further traction since the country's military invasion and occupation of southern Somalia in 2011. Few other spaces have been associated as persistently with threats to Kenya's national security and sovereignty as the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps in the country's Northern belt, which are popularly depicted as "wombs" of terror. In this article, we analyze the transformation of refugee governance in Kenya under the auspices of the War on Terror and consider how counterterrorism has become a way of governing both refugees and precarious ethnoracialized citizens. We provide a multi-scalar analysis that moves between the scales of global militarization, Kenyan state governance, as well as securitized spaces of camps, checkpoints, and policing. The article concludes that refugee camps are not only gateways for imported global counterterror initiatives, but key sites of locally defined state-making processes in which Kenya's counterterror state is (re)assembled as part of a planetary architecture of humanitarian containment and militarized apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses United States President Joe Biden's approach to intelligence. It evaluates his evolving relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency and the rest of the intelligence community from the early 1970s, when he was elected to Congress, to the early 2020s, when he became the forty-sixth president of the United States. It concludes that, against the ever-changing context of international affairs, from the late Cold War to the global 'war on terror', Biden's approach to intelligence has remained consistent and stable, showing, on the one hand, enthusiasm for the production of national intelligence, and, on the other, a marked uneasiness about paramilitary covert action and the militarization of intelligence. The discussion that follows speaks to a larger debate, dating to the 1940s and still ongoing, in the executive and legislative branches of government, concerning the purposes and proper use of intelligence. This will interest policy-makers, officials and lawmakers responsible for intelligence and oversight, researchers and practitioners in security and intelligence, and scholars of American foreign relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa's security landscape has been experiencing securitised-development practices through counterterrorism activities from donor countries engaged in the 'Global War on Terror' (GWOT). While some African governments continue to 'benefit' from the securitised-development agenda, critiques argue that there are human rights concerns that are connected to the practice of securitised-development. They have emphasised how some African governments and military actors involved in fighting the GWOT are also faced with human rights issues. To explore these issues, the article examines the securitised-development agenda in Kenya and Uganda and its impact on human rights. The article argues that the securitised-development practice is characterised by underlying contradictions involving the fight against terrorism and the accompanying human rights concerns in these countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An American's yearly chance of being killed by a terrorist attack sits at roughly 1 in 3.5 million. Yet, over 40 percent of Americans consistently believe that they or their family members are likely to be a terror victim. Can these inflated estimates of the risks of terrorism be brought closer to reality? With trillions of dollars spent on the "War on Terror," this question is not just theoretically but practically important. In order to investigate, we use an experimental approach assessing whether people update their beliefs about terrorism when given factual information about the relative risks it presents. We find that public fear of terrorism and demand for countering it can be sharply reduced with better information, dropping essentially to pre-9/11 levels after the treatment and staying that way two weeks later. These results suggest that countering the indirect costs of terrorism may largely require providing more context and perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on threat to migrant's safety as border controls with enhanced war on terrorism and mentions alteration by anti and counter-terrorism security protocols. Topics discussed include lack of migration policies motivated by humanitarian aid, migration diplomacy to manage cross-border population mobility and national-identity of Morocco related in asserting sovereignty over Western Sahara.

We present a two‐agent, asymmetric‐information game model featuring a terror organization (Org) and a defending state (State). The Org chooses an aggregate terror input. The State chooses the levels of preemptive measures and redress of grievances of the Org's population, respectively as direct and preventive counter‐terrorism measures. Defining how the war on terror (WoT) may be "lost" or "won," we prove that it is impossible to win the WoT with preemptive measures only, if the marginal cost of these measures is increasing. The optimal response of the State to an increase in terrorism is to increase preemption and grant more grievance redress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In memorialising 9/11, we also recreate an artificial inflection point, as if there were a terrorism "before 9/11" and a terrorism after. Conference papers on "terrorism" abound and interest in issues related to "terrorism" has increased dramatically among scholars in cognate disciplines; degree programmes have been set up; funding opportunities have increased. The mirroring is quite stark: the 2012 special issue (centred on 9/11) opens by revisiting CTS' foundational commitment to interrogate the "subjugated knowledge of terrorism studies" (Jackson [9]). [Extracted from the article]

Counter-terrorism has been described as a "powerful political discourse and a set of institutional practices with its own assumptions, symbolic systems, and rhetorical modes and tropes" (Jackson [8]). In the case of Nigeria, future research should move beyond problematising the impact of counter-terrorism practices on the society or everyday life to identifying local alternatives, approaches, and ways of reconfiguring the increasingly securitised state. [Extracted from the article]

This study adopts a constructivist approach to reveal the function of the dispositive of terrorism in the UN Security Council. While some CTS studies focus on genealogies of terrorism at the UN based on a general "global terrorism" discourse, this study focuses on concrete emergencies. The methodology compares 652 states' deliberations and resolutions during a surge in violence between 2006 and 2009 in four cases: Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel-Palestinian, and Israel-Lebanon. This study argues that the UN discourse in the Security Council on terrorism functions as a way of reifying states, by employing a dyad of self-other, terrorists, and counter-terrorism, which in practice is constructive for state stability and state-building. It bypasses concrete instrumental disputes in favour of a comprehensive approach centred around the sovereign state. This construction sidelines global terrorist organisations such as al-Qaida, and state-terrorists such as Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-terrorism. The centrality of temporality to the meaning and significance of the events of 11 September 2001 became evident very quickly after the attacks. That openness and pluralism should, therefore, run through our theoretical methodological and empirical engagements with temporality and productions thereof, as much as it should through our engagement with (counter-)terrorism discourse, strategy and politics more broadly. It is, though, likely to appeal to those attracted to critical terrorism studies' emancipatory incarnations, particularly where hegemonic accounts of 9/11's temporal significance are linked to morally pernicious outcomes. [Extracted from the article]

Following the terrorist bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania in 1998 and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, Africa was immediately drawn into the global counter-terrorism efforts. This is evident in Susan Rice's comments that Africa is the "soft underbelly for global terrorism" and a "veritable incubator for terrorism's foot soldiers" (Smith [15], 390). Arguably, state actors in Africa have often directed or dictated the tone of terrorism research by engaging various individuals in seminars, symposiums and workshops on security or terrorism. Bart Schuurman underscores the state-centric nature of terrorism studies in a review of 3,442 terrorism articles published between 2007 and 2016 (Schuurman [13]). [Extracted from the article]

As the "war on terror" expands to new frontiers, we reflect on how it is memorialised through statues and monuments that serve to erase the imperialist and racialised violence it has embodied (and continues to embody). Proposed design for the National Monument to Canada's Mission in Afghanistan by Team Stimson (Veteran Affairs Canada [28]) PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 2. For the National Monument to Canada's Mission in Afghanistan, the federal agency, Veterans Affairs Canada, is seeking public input on five shortlisted design ideas (see Figures 1 and 2) which will "commemorate and honour the ultimate sacrifice made by those who were killed in Afghanistan." Canada's actions of memorialisation are striking when considered in the context of the "war on terror's" continued expansion. [Extracted from the article]

This article reflects on how the COVID-19 pandemic is changing and will continue to shape our perception of threats, drawing on the links between the terrorist threat and the threat of the virus. Update on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on terrorism, counter-terrorism and countering violent extremism. [Extracted from the article]

Temporality and counterterrorism in the Philippines I have argued elsewhere (Bugarin, [4]) that America's unilateral declaration of the GWOT was overwhelmingly accepted in the Philippines, as it coincided with the country's prevailing security concerns. Two decades after the September 11 bombings and the consequent declaration of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), challenges characterised by the culture of bureaucracy, inter-agency conflict and lack of interorganisational trust, among others, continue to hinder efforts to address the threat of terrorism in the Philippines. The September 11 attacks and by extension, the GWOT, revitalised the relations between the U.S. and the Philippines through counterterrorism cooperation. [Extracted from the article]

This article contemplates how drug interdiction strategies influence the character of present counterterrorism efforts in the West African Sahel. I argue that the incorporation of drug interdiction strategies within a broader framework of security sector reform represents the emergence of a normative vision of security, which links policing, drugs, and governance. In addition, I suggest that drug expertise has become an important avenue for new ways of pursuing a wide swath of security interventions including counterterrorism projects. Amid numerous critiques of the War on Drugs and increased recognition of the limitations of criminalized approaches to drug use, the Sahel has emerged as a site of experimentation, where the coupling of counterterrorism and anti-drug trafficking strategies provides a way of salvaging remnants of an older style drug war, while also revealing the institutionalization of drug expertise as a mode of security governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decapitation strategies have often been linked to counterterrorism. The existing literature suggests the results of these strategies are mixed. Previous studies suggest that the death of a prominent leader may not necessarily end the crisis; it all depends on the group's infrastructure, ideology, leadership traditions, and extent of its penetration in society. This article takes a critical look at the impact of a recent leadership decapitation in Nigeria. Abubakar Shekau, the leader of the Boko Haram movement in the Lake Chad Basin countries, was killed on 19 May 2021 by a faction of the movement known as the Islamic State of West African Province (ISWAP). This article argues that Shekau's case has paradoxically helped to strengthen ISWAP's position, giving it new recruits and other resources and perhaps most importantly reinforced its position with local communities. This has implications for the Nigerian state, its neighbours and, because of Boko Haram's links to ISIS, the wider war on terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In these chapters, the author guides the reader through the events that led to his pre-charge detention under Operation Minerva; the investigation and judicial process; the questioning that he underwent while in detention; the release without charges and ultimately the legal settlement in 2011. I The Suspect i comprises 33 short chapters, presenting a personal account of the author's arrest under the "Operation Minerva". The following chapters, 21 to 26, elaborate the author's personal story in conversation with the broader global history of counterterrorism and counter-radicalisation policy programmes. [Extracted from the article]

"Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Gloria Anzaldúa's response to 9/11" examines Gloria Anzaldúa's experimental dissertation—a collection of essays, poetry, and art—that she intermittently edited until her untimely passing in 2004. Published and edited in 2015 with annotations by multicultural scholar, AnaLouise Keating, Anzaldúa's final text has not received its fair share of scholarly attention, as most is paid to Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). This article focuses specifically on the first chapter from Luz en lo Oscuro titled "Let us be the healing of the wound," which responds directly to the events of 9/11. Anzaldúa's postnational imaginary, her reflection on Azteca goddesses, and the bilingual nature of her writing set the essay radically apart from the canon of post-9/11 literature in English. Anzaldúa's post-structuralist philosophy of conocimiento —"the potential of knowing within, an awareness and intelligence not grasped by logical thought" (117)—rejects the theory that atrocity is "beyond words," and instead "voices" critiques and complaints that embrace the value of shared vulnerability. "Let us be the healing of the wound," therefore, should also be read in light of Judith Butler's Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), which similarly situates the attacks of 9/11 not in relationship to silencing (via trauma theory) but to the historical precarity of excluded populations in a global community—populations living often in national borderland contexts with long-standing legacies of colonialism and slavery that render their lives both precarious and disposable. As this article indicates, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro deserves more scholarly attention as Anzaldúa's last work and also as an important text in the post-9/11 canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]