Author: Security Dialogue

Does Terrorism Work? A History by Richard English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 368pp., £25.00 (h/b), ISBN 9780199607853 The renewed proliferation of terrorism studies that rapidly followed the 9/11 attacks has been well-documented, and the post-9/11 wave that is now nearly two decades old, has focused predominantly on an elusive, universally-accepted definition of terrorism. Efforts… Read more »

‘I’ve been warning my party of its “Muslim problem” for far too long’, wrote Baroness Warsi in July 2018, calling for an inquiry into Islamophobia in the UK’s ruling Conservative Party. Warsi subverted a term coined a year earlier when Trevor Kavanagh, former political editor of the Sun, published a column in that paper posing… Read more »

Is it possible to identify someone who might, one day, go on to commit an act of terrorism? And if it is, is it possible to intervene in order to disrupt or mitigate this potential? These questions have been central to state responses to the “war on terror” and have led to the creation of… Read more »

In recent years, an expanding conglomerate of armed actors is engaged in training operations, targeted killings and manhunts, often outside conventional war zones across the Middle East and Africa. These Western state-led operations mark a shift away from ‘boots-on-the-ground’ deployments towards light-footprint military interventions, and involve a combination of drone strikes and airstrikes, special forces,… Read more »

Founded in 1982, Faslane Peace Camp in Scotland clams to be the longest lived of its kind. Crammed into a small roadside verge, the brightly coloured and ramshackle caravans of the camp are located just a few hundred yards from the razor-wire fences of Her Majesty’s Naval Base Clyde, home to the British Trident nuclear… Read more »

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Russian “troll factories” have been making headlines for some time. First, as the Kremlin’s digital guardians in the Russian blogosphere. Then, as subversive cyber-squads meddling with US elections. While there has been much sensationalist talk about troll brigades, there have also been thorough… Read more »

Crowd surveillance is on the rise. Contemporary emergency and counter-terrorism planning has underlined the vulnerability of crowded places and called for a greater need to understand and manage crowd behaviour in a time of crisis. Accordingly, in the past few years the research and deployment of crowd surveillance technologies have been initiated across the world… Read more »

Critical infrastructure is widely recognized as an immediate and pressing security concern for liberal democracies. Large, dispersed, and highly complex systems like energy grids and transport systems that support today’s way of life were not designed with security in mind and are highly vulnerable to all sorts of disruptions that can have widespread social and economic… Read more »

The spectre of conspiracy looms large in politics and international affairs. We hear of covert Russian interferences in the 2016 US Presidential Elections or of renewed intrigue surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy over half a century ago. Intelligence dossiers, anonymous sources, secret meetings and suspicious connections make up the political world we live… Read more »

In my special issue article “Building Civilian Militarism: Colombia, Internal War, and Militarization in a mid-term Perspective,” I talk about how civilian militarism became a large part of Colombian society over their years of internal conflict and how, within this context, Columbian civil society will be a key player in the success of the current… Read more »