Mia Bloom

Mother. Daughter. Sister Bomber.

Women are increasingly taking a leading role in conflicts by becoming terrorists–specifically,

Organisational adaptation in an activist network: social networks, leadership, and change in al-Muhajiroun.

Social networks are said to facilitate learning and adaptation by providing the connections through which network nodes (or agents) share information and experience. Yet, our understanding of how this process unfolds in real-world networks remains underdeveloped. This paper explores this gap through a case study of al-Muhajiroun, an activist network that continues to call for the establishment of an Islamic state in Britain despite being formally outlawed by British authorities. Drawing on organisation theory and social network analysis, we formulate three hypotheses regarding the learning capacity and social network properties of al-Muhajiroun (AM) and its successor groups. We then test these hypotheses using mixed methods. Our methods combine quantitative analysis of three agent-based networks in AM measured for structural properties that facilitate learning, including connectedness, betweenness centrality and eigenvector centrality, with qualitative analysis of interviews with AM activists focusing organisational adaptation and learning. The results of these analyses confirm that al-Muhajiroun activists respond to government pressure by changing their operations, including creating new platforms under different names and adjusting leadership roles among movement veterans to accommodate their spiritual leaders unwelcome exodus to Lebanon. Simple as they are effective, these adaptations have allowed al-Muhajiroun and its successor groups to continue their activism in an increasingly hostile environment.

Tiocfaidh ár Mná: Women in the Provisional Irish Republican Army

This article seeks to answer the question of who were the women of the Provisional IRA and to assess any demographic patterns of PIRA involvement. We use a multi-method approach to describe the many roles and functions of female members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army from 1970 to 1998. Drawing on a sample of 61 convicted or deceased PIRA members, we outline the shifting socio-demographic and operation profile of these women and how structural, tactical and strategic needs of PIRA accounted for those changes. Women in the Provisional IRA played crucial operational roles throughout the period both front-line and behind the scenes. From the outset of the conflict, women consistently took part in violent operations. We also provide a historical case study of Mairéad Farrells PIRA career to provide further illustrations of these themes in greater detail.

Death Becomes Her: Women, Occupation, and Terrorist Mobilization

In recent years, the relationship between foreign military occupation and the increased likelihood of violent insurgency and terrorism has been asserted (Pape 2005 ) but is far from proven. The actual micro-level dynamics that make the correlation between the two sufficient to warrant extended discussion is even less understood and has led a variety of researchers to examine the micro-level foundations of how the presence of foreign military personnel might exacerbate conflict or provide motivation for the local population to mobilize against the foreign troops in their midst (e.g., Downes 2008 ; Edelstein 2008 )

What's All the Shouting About?

NOT long ago it was fashionable to argue that modernization would reduce, if not eliminate, ethnic hatred. Instead, nationalism appears stronger than ever, and ethnic conflict remains a major global issue. The study of ethnic conflict as a distinct field from nationalism itself is only about twenty years old, gaining wide attention mainly in the last ten. It has grown up primarily in response to the decline over the last half century in the number of interstate wars and the simultaneous rise in the number of internal wars, especially ethnic and religious wars. With the end of the cold war, there was a sudden, if short-lived, upsurge of optimism, especially among liberals, about the ability of the United States and other Western countries to resolve the problems of countries experiencing humanitarian disasters resulting from civil war and other forms of internal strife:

The changing nature of women in extremism and political violence

We remain fascinated by terrorist acts and how seemingly normal people transform into cold-blooded killers. We have certain preconceived notions about who becomes a terrorist and why. Much of the conventional wisdom and preconceived notions are more conventional wisdom that empirically based on reality and facts. Mohammed Emwazi previously known as ‘Jihad John’ an educated middle class British citizen who became notorious for beheading Western aid workers and journalists in Syria surprised many who saw an educated Westernized person with no history of radical views.2 The stereotypes about terrorists include faulty assumptions about sanity, a history of anti social behavior, poverty, or drug and alcohol abuse.3 More often than not, terrorist groups use these assumptions to their benefit. Among the many assumptions about level of education, wealth, and ethnic background inevitably has also been that of gender.

A Review of: “Mark Juergensmeyer. Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, From Christian Militants to Al Qaeda.”

politics’’ at the end of the book, where readers will also find—or be put-off by—the meaning of other, related terms such as ‘‘meta-group,’’ ‘‘parapolitics’’ and ‘‘parastates.’’) Examples of the kinds of policies and strategies that Scott uses to illustrate this thesis include Nixon and Kissinger’s secret support at the behest of American corporate interests for the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, the ‘‘disastrous decision’’ (p. 80) of President Carter under the influence of David Rockefeller to allow the Shah of Iran to receive medical treatment in the US in 1979, and the ‘‘precedent for 9=11’’ that was the ‘‘possible treasonable arrangement’’ (p. 91) between elements of Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party and Shi’a fundamentalists around Ayatollah Khomeini to keep American hostages imprisoned in Iran until Reagan’s inauguration in 1980. Given the book’s ultimate destination, Scott also spends much time examining what he sees as the US’s five ‘‘miscalculations’’ in Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion in 1979, namely, its backing of Islamists over traditionalists; its strengthening of the antecedents of al Qaeda; its use of drugs against the USSR; its recruitment of radical Muslims to attack the USSR directly; and its prolonging of the conflict in attempt to destroy the government of Mikhail Gorbachev. Students of the darker side of US foreign policy will no doubt be more than familiar with this part of Scott’s book, but he is probably right that this is not the case for most American citizens. In the second part of the book Scott turns to the events of 9=11 themselves, or rather to the distortions, suppressed evidence and unanswered questions that he thinks are to be found in the official 9=11 Commission Report. Scott is particularly concerned with the issue of whether it was the Vice-President Dick Cheney and not George W. Bush who was really in charge of the United States during the immediate aftermath of the attacks, and whether Cheney took the opportunity to institute secret continuity of government plans he had been working on since the 1980s. Scott works hard to show that this was indeed the case, but he cannot prove his argument definitively owing to a crucial—and to Scott highly incriminating—‘‘gap’’ in the phone records of that day. Admittedly as the proverbial ‘‘smoking gun’’ this gap is something of a let down, but Scott is surely right to suggest that there is much to be gained from the Vice-President being required to testify under oath about his exact role on 9=11. Much to be gained, although highly unlikely to occur. The final part of the book provides an outline of Scott’s proposals on how to revive and unify American civil society, restore the public state and pursue a more open approach to Islam. Although no doubt heartfelt, anyone who has been convinced by the book’s preceding 245 pages is, I suspect, unlikely to be comforted by his ideas, while those instinctively suspicious of anybody who writes about cabals, shadow governments and conspiratorial skullduggery will have long since stopped turning the pages.

Sebastian Smith. Allah's Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya, New Edition

the insurgency, the book advocates showing resolve, and perhaps the biggest lesson for military planners is to not only plan the urban war, but also for the reconstruction of a village infested with terrorists. Ballard does discuss the destruction of Fallujah and the aftermath of the operation in which thousands of weapons and munitions were stored throughout the city with the largest cache being in a mosque. Coalition forces also discovered the Iraqi civilian victims of the insurgency inside torture rooms designed in basements and bunkers. The book discusses the negative reporting by Al-Jazeerah on Operations in Fallujah. In reading Ballard’s account, there were many heinous crimes the United States found in Fallujah that the insurgency left behind that could have been used to criminalize this movement in world public opinion. In addition, Ballard discusses the competence of the Iraqi Security Forces working with the U.S. forces in clearing Fallujah, something that should have gotten more press coverage. Ballard is critical of the timing by the Coalition Provisional Authority to declare Shiite militant leader Muqtada Al-Sadr an enemy while Coalition forces were dealing with Sunni uprisings in central Iraq. One chapter is devoted to the tactics and progress of the Battle of Najaf against the Mahdi Army in and around graveyards and holy sites. Readers will learn how when one section of Iraq holds off Coalition forces, another section becomes emboldened. Events in Najaf stiffened the resolve of the insurgents in Fallujah to carry out a massive Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) attack involving 300 fighters against a U.S. Marine Armored Assault Vehicle (AAV) Platoon. A little under half of the book discusses Operation Vigilant Resolve and details a success story of Iraqi General Abdul-Qader working effectively with U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps units to retake Fallujah. It is a blow by blow discussion of tactics that is a recommended read for those going to support Operation Iraqi Freedom and for anyone with an interest in the way conflicts will be fought in the Global War on Terrorism.

A Review of: “Mike Davis. Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb”

that laid waste to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, something he regards as both ‘‘dubious’’ and ‘‘troubling’’ [43]); and third, the bitter controversies that have erupted over how the dead—Americans, Iraqis and others—should be depicted during the current war in Iraq, as well as the infamous photographs of the humiliation and torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Underpinning Simpson’s analysis is his sense of death as ‘‘a cultural event’’ (29), but his real concern is about the uses to which the dead of 9=11 have been put; the political and ideological causes they have been made to serve. Challenging the largely uncritical reception accorded the New York Times’ ‘‘Portraits of Grief,’’ for example, Simpson notes how ‘‘formulaic’’ they actually are, ‘‘regimented, even militarized, made to march to the beat of a single drum’’ (23). He is equally critical of the attempts to make the Twin Towers stand as ‘‘a synecdoche for the nation,’’ and of their proposed replacements’ patriotic triumphalism, seeing each process as contributing in key—but again often unexamined—ways to the march to war in Iraq, and to ‘‘the creation of even more dead’’ (40). Above all, Simpson wants us to think about the simplistic and absolutist distinction between ‘‘them and us’’ which has resulted from the terrorist attacks of 9=11, whereby ‘‘terror’’—everywhere and nowhere at the same time—has come to stand as the ultimate ‘‘enemy,’’ the absolute ‘‘other,’’ creating a climate ripe for political manipulation (7–9). One need not agree with Simpson’s arguments in their entirety to be engaged by this thoughtful book—his spirited defense and application of critical theorists such as Derrida, Žižek, and Baudrillard is sure to leave many readers cold, for example—but even those who fundamentally disagree with them are sure to find something of interest in his wide-ranging analysis of the culture of commemoration in the U.S., with its discussion, among other things, of the Battle of Waterloo, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, the sinking of the Titanic, lynching postcards, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and the Oklahoma City bombing. It is certainly a challenging work—in many senses of the term—but it should be of real interest to scholars, graduate students, and perhaps even senior undergraduates who are concerned with coming to terms with (‘‘working through’’ as Simpson would doubtless prefer) the events of 9=11 and their aftermath.

A Review of: “Augustus Richard Norton. Hezbollah: A Short History.”

lah maintained throughout their conflicts, rules which were rarely broken, and which limited the conflict to the mutual loss of relatively small numbers of soldiers= militiamen on either side, until Hezbollah killed several Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two soldiers which brought on the Israeli response of a full scale attack against Hezbollah which escalated into war. Norton does not critically analyze why Hezbollah is currently hoarding so many weapons, and, as documented in a recent United Nations report, has fully replenished its stocks of weaponry, which had been partially depleted during the Summer 2006 war with Israel. Israel fully withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. Why then would Hezbollah take such an actively belligerent stance? The reason is that it is not a resistance movement but an aggressive Islamist one that plans to use violence against Israel because it does not acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as an independent state. This is something which Norton does acknowledge: that the very existence of Israel is anathema to Hezbollah. Norton offers little analysis of Hezbollah’s long term goals regarding Israel, such as further kidnapping of soldiers and attacks on civilians with Katyusha rockets. Norton also does not attempt to assess if Hezbollah has succeeded in achieving its aims of strengthening Islamic faith in Lebanon, and to consider how Hezbollah’s political, religious, and terrorist projects may evolve in relation to new geo-strategic realities. These are questions that deserve to be addressed but go unexplored. In sum, Hezbollah is a thoughtful and illuminating work, that, while suffering from some omissions of information that would help the reader better understand Hezbollah and from some bias in authorial emphasis, offers a concise, elegant, and readable account of the Hezbollah movement and its role in Lebanese society.