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This article explores the obituary as an important, yet neglected, site of everyday security discourse. Through an original analysis of 86 published obituaries of 11 prominent 'terrorists', we offer three arguments. First, obituaries play an important constitutive role in shaping public understanding of terrorism and terrorists. Second, in so doing, terrorist obituaries frequently draw upon and reproduce established constructions of terrorism. Especially important here, we argue, are claims associated with the influential, yet heavily contested, 'new terrorism' thesis that posits profound transformations in the motives, organization and violences of terrorist groups from the late 20th century onwards. Third, notwithstanding the above, the (terrorist) obituary also offers important resources for nuancing and problematizing dominant constructions – such as of 'new terrorism' – in part because of the opportunity for sociopolitical critique afforded by this mnemonic genre. In making these arguments, the article therefore offers new empirical and conceptual insight into the obituary as a genre of everyday security knowledge, and into the mobility and resilience of established security discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the complicity of children's picturebooks in the construction and critique of world politics. Focusing on The Gruffalo , it argues that this spectacularly successful book: (1) stories the international as a pessimistic, anarchical world populated by self-interested, survival-seekers; (2) disrupts this reading and its assumptions through evocation of the social production of threat; and, (3) provides a more fundamental decolonial critique of the international through parochial privileging of its protagonist's journey through a 'deep dark wood'. In doing this, we argue, the book vividly demonstrates the world's susceptibility to multiple incompatible readings, while rendering visible the assumptions, framing, and occlusions of competing understandings of the international. As such, it theorises both world politics and knowledge thereof as contingent and unstable. In making this argument, three contributions are made. First, empirically, we expand research on popular culture and world politics through investigating a surprisingly neglected example of the former. Second, theoretically, we demonstrate the work such texts perform in (re)creating and (de)stabilising (knowledge of) global politics. Third, we offer a composite methodological framework for future research into the context, content, and framing of complex texts like The Gruffalo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]