Anne Aly

Fear, Anxiety and the State of Terror

The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon marked the advent of an unprecedented preoccupation with terrorism. Although Australias actual terrorist risk profile remains marginal in comparison with other mortality risks, in times of crisis, the reasoned negotiation of risk is marginalised. Drawing on the findings of qualitative research, this article offers an analysis of how Australians are responding to the threat of terrorism embodied in a developing discourse of the war on terror and how they construct their perceptions of terrorist risk. The findings implicate community fear as a factor that should be considered in the development of counter terrorism strategies that emphasize community engagement as a mechanism for challenging radicalisation in democratic states.

Examining the Role of Religion in Radicalization to Violent Islamist Extremism

In this article, the authors apply the four-phase radicalization model proposed by Silber and Bhatt 1 to a case study of Australias first convicted terrorist, Jack Roche, based on communication with Roche after his incarceration and on a qualitative analysis of his trial. In doing so, they examine the validity of the four-phase model to a case of “home grown” terrorism and dissect the role of religion in the radicalization process. To conclude, the authors find that religion plays a far lesser role in radicalization toward violent extremism than the policy response contends and this has implications for counterterrorism programs that aim to address the drivers of violent extremism.

Veiled Threats: Recurrent Cultural Anxieties in Australia

At the end of the nineteenth century, white Australians found themselves in a turbulent and rapidly changing world. As British settlers in a vast, often-perplexing and under-populated continent, they were increasingly aware that they lived in a crowded and predominantly Asian neighbourhood. Their supposedly empty spaces seemed to invite the unwanted attention of hostile outsiders, fertile soil for speculation about vulnerable borders, invasion and violation. It was commonplace of the period for white females to be considered at once particularly vulnerable and also innocent symbols of the new nation. They needed to be protected against Asian males allegedly bent on conquest and violation. It does not follow that these “invasion narratives”, however persistent, meant that the entire population was disabled by fear and dread, but there is convincing evidence of a deeply embedded cultural anxiety about the destructive possibilities and hostile intentions of Asian outsiders. In this article, the authors examine recent representations of Muslims as hostile outsiders in Australia, focusing in particular on the veil as a marker of female oppression under Islam and a sign of the threat attributed to the Islamic community in Australia. While it would be misleading to propose a simple line of progression from late nineteenth century apprehensions to those a century or more later, there are nonetheless intriguing parallels and recurrent expressions of survivalist anxiety across the period examined in this article.

The policy response to home-grown terrorism: reconceptualising Prevent and Resilience as collective resistance

Abstract The policy response to home-grown terrorism focuses attention on the root causes of terrorism. Such soft approaches to countering terrorism are a necessary element of an effective and comprehensive strategy. The United Kingdoms Prevent strategy, Australias Resilience approach, and the United States Diminish element all share a focus on countering violent extremism on the home front through a policy approach that promotes democratic values, social harmony, and the active participation of Muslim communities. This paper argues that such responses are informed by flawed assumptions that have little or no evidentiary basis and calls for a reconceptualisation of soft counter terrorism as collective resistance against terrorism. It presents the preliminary findings of a qualitative research project that explores how a citizen-driven initiative to build a peace park on the site of the Bali 2002 terrorist bombings constructs a counter-narrative to terrorist propaganda and contributes to sustainable and long-term soft counter terrorism.1

Shifting Positions to the Media Discourse on Terrorism: Critical Points in Audience Members' Meaning-making Experiences

In his essay on encoding/decoding, Hall (1980) acknowledges that events in the broader socio-political context influence the way audiences position themselves in relation to the dominant hegemonic discourse. This article reports on an investigation into how Australian audience members continuously reviewed and shifted their positions to media texts that contributed to an over-arching evolving and changing discourse of terrorism in the Australian popular media. The findings of the study illuminate critical points in meaning-making in relation to the evolving discourse on terrorism. These critical points are not single moments, but rather a series of determinate moments where messages are decoded, subsumed into the range of cultural codes and discourses available to the audience, which are then implicated in the decoding of other messages, and then also subsumed into the cultural codes of the audience.

Report on Australia's first Countering Violent Extremism Symposium

The inaugural Countering Violent Extremism Symposium (CVE 2013) was held in Perth, Western Australia on 21 and 22 November. The Symposium brought together national and international speakers and delegates in Australia to participate in a dialogue on various themes, challenges and opportunities in countering violent extremism. CVE 2013 is an initiative of the Department of Social Science and International Studies at Curtin University, Perth in partnership with People against Violent Extremism, the Centre for Policing Intelligence and Counter Terrorism at Macquarie University, Sydney and the Hedayah International Center of Excellence for Countering Violent Extremism, Abu Dhabi. The Symposium was supported with funding from the Australia and New Zealand Counter Terrorism Committee. This unique partnership between academic institutions, government and non-government organisations represents the spirit of collaboration that drove CVE 2013. It also recognises the growing role of civil society groups in driving CVE efforts and their contributions to both academic research and government policy. The purpose of the Symposium was to initiate dialogue with diverse stakeholders around the current state and future directions for CVE, its approaches and strategies. At a broader, strategic level, the Symposium aimed to highlight some of the parameters of CVE in ways that could inform the future direction of CVE research and practice. It did this by engaging participants across three areas – research, policy and practice – around a range of issues. The Symposium attracted speakers and delegates from civil society, law enforcement, government and academia working across a broad spectrum of areas in CVE including disengagement, rehabilitation, prevention, policy, community policing, intelligence, security, law enforcement, social policy, conflict resolution and academic and action-oriented research. Participants came from across Australia and internationally including New Zealand, East Timor, Indonesia, Sweden, UK, USA, Canada, Singapore, the Philippines, India and the United Arab Emirates. The format incorporated keynote presentations and panel presentations to accommodate a higher number of speakers and opportunities for audience interaction. The speakers and panel members were selected to reflect diversity in approaches with an international focus.

Finding meaning for countering violent extremism

Countering violent extremism (CVE) is a relatively new term primarily adopted by governments to describe a broad range of strategies associated with ‘soft’ approaches to counter terrorism. In the past, these soft approaches were variably designated as ‘social harmony’, ‘social cohesion’ and ‘community resilience’. The notion that communities have an active and important role to play in national security positions civil society at the heart of CVE. In 2009, the first Special Representative to Muslim Communities was appointed by the US Secretary of State tasked with engaging Muslims around the world to counter terrorist ideologies. Special Representative, Farah Pandith, acknowledged the role that communities could play in countering terrorist violence:

Terror, Fear and Individual and Community Well-Being

Fear is often described as an intense human emotion in response to a perceived threat or impending doom. In today’s globalised world where climate change, financial crises and international crime form a new agenda of fear, insecurity and fear have become pervasive forces in the everyday lives of individuals and communities. The terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 ushered in an era of new fears about international terrorism and new debates about security, civil rights and insecurity. Insecurity became transformed from a situational emotional response to a perpetual state of alertness, and terrorism is imagined as an unknown, but impending, doom: where the everyday has become subliminally associated with the threat of terrorism and the increased security presence invokes the spectre of security and amplifies threat in the public imagination. This chapter will explore the fear of terrorism and its impact on community and individual well-being. It is based on a research project on responses to media discourses on fear among Australian Muslim communities and the broader Australian community. The research incorporated Australia’s first Metric of Fear that measured both community and individual perceptions of safety and security in response to the threat of terrorism. The findings reported here indicate that the fear of terrorism extends beyond an individual fear vis a vis being physically harmed in a terrorist attack. The fear of terrorism is also a community fear associated with perceived threat to civil liberties and democratic freedom. For Australian Muslim communities, the fear of terrorism is very much associated with community identity and their status as a community to be feared.