Michael Lister

Vernacular Securities and their Study:A Qualitative Analysis and Research Agenda

This article draws on primary focus group research to explore the differing ways in which UK publics conceptualise and discuss security. The article begins by situating our research within two relevant contemporary scholarly literatures: The first concerns efforts to centre the ‘ordinary’ human as security’s referent; the second, constructivist explorations of security’s discursive (re)production. A second section then introduces six distinct understandings of security that emerged in our empirical research. These organised the term around notions of survival, belonging, hospitality, equality, freedom and insecurity. The article concludes by exploring this heterogeneity and its significance for the study of security more broadly, outlining a number of potential future research avenues in this area.

State terrorism research and critical terrorism studies: an assessment†

This article explores the value of scholarship on state terrorism for the critical study of terrorist violences. The article begins by identifying four primary contributions of this scholarship: first, a rethinking of the status and significance of terrorism; second, an unsettling of broader assumptions within International Relations (IR) and terrorism research; third, an ability to locate state violences within pertinent, but potentially camouflaged, contexts; and, fourth, a prioritisation of critique as a responsibility of scholarship. The article’s second section then argues that the purchase of this work could be further extended by greater conceptual engagement with the state itself. In particular, we point to the value of contemporary approaches to the state as a terrain and outcome of social and political struggle, rather than as a singular actor of unitary purpose. Rethinking the state in this way has value, we argue, first, for moving research beyond the identification and typologising of state terrorisms; and, second, for circumventing the perennial problem of identifying intentionality in efforts to designate violences as (state) terrorism.

Stakeholder Security:The New Western Way of Counter-terrorism?

This article explores the ways in which Western states have adapted their counter-terrorism strategies to meet the demands of a post-9/11 era. Focusing on the USA and UK as illustrative case studies, this article charts the emergence of a new, complex topography of security measures aimed at confronting the threat of unconventional violence from above and below. Of particular interest is the construction of a raft of initiatives heavily reliant on the continued participation of citizens for their functioning; a reliance persistently justified by claims to uncertainty, even ignorance, among political elites. To better understand these initiatives and their implications, this article introduces the concept of stakeholder security to refer to the conscription of ordinary individuals into the states security apparatuses; a conscription that positions citizens precariously as simultaneously technologies, subjects and objects of security. The article concludes with a first attempt to trace some of the political and normative issues raised by this new policy framework.

Disconnection and resistance: anti-terrorism and citizenship in the UK

The corroding impacts of anti-terrorism measures on citizenship have been much discussed in recent years. Drawing on qualitative research from the UK, this article argues that citizens do indeed frequently feel that aspects of citizenship – such as rights, duties, identity claims and the ability to participate in the public sphere – have been significantly dampened by developments in this policy area. At the same time, however, participants in our research also articulated a number of strategies through which they or others have sought to resist the logics, exercise and impacts of anti-terrorism powers. These included voicing explicit opposition to particular measures, resisting ‘outsider’ or ‘victim’ subject positions, and a refusal to withdraw from established forms of political engagement. Whilst such resistance should not be overstated, we argue that these strategies emphasise the co-constitutive rather than linear relationship between public policy and citizenship. Anti-terrorism powers do indeed impact upon citizenship claims, for instance in the curtailment of formal rights. Equally, the everyday, lived, experiences and practices of citizenship contribute to, and help shape, the perceptions and understandings of anti-terrorism policy from within the citizenry

Introduction: Europeanization and migration: challenging the values of citizenship in Europe?

A rich vein of analysis and debate has opened up around the notion that citizenship has become, or is in the process of becoming, decoupled from nationality. A range of (interrelated) ideational and material processes are identified as being responsible for this state of affairs. Globalization, in a general sense, the spread of human rights doctrines and norms, Europeanization, and mass migration are all seen to contribute to a situation where key features of citizenship, such as the holding and claiming of rights and political participation, are less solidly tied to nationality. Particularly in Europe, it is argued that citizenship can increasingly be seen as a postnational concept (Soysal 1994). Such arguments have been extensively debated (see Kofman 2002; Schuster and Solomos 2002), to the point where some, such as Eleonore Kofman (2005), have argued that in the post-9/11 security environment, we are seeing a not a decoupling of citizenship from nationality but a recoupling of citizenship and nationality. What is, perhaps, evident is that the spatial relationships that citizenship invokes are undergoing processes of change, particularly in Europe. These processes do not seem, as we shall see, to be linear or additive. In some aspects, the relationship between nationality and citizenship seems to be weakened; yet, in other ways, it is less weakened, than perhaps recast and reconfigured. In many analyses around this issue, the nation state is seen to be the subject of processes such as human rights doctrines and norms, migrations and globalizations. Yet it is also a key actor in these processes, and the impact of national models of citizenship in the way in which citizenship is being transformed should not be overlooked. What is also clear is that the European Union and processes of integration are affecting citizenship, both in terms of a developing European conception of citizenship, and also in terms of how this developing concept impinges and affects national models citizenship. Another key factor in the spatial reconfiguration of citizenship in Europe is migration. Many European countries have seen increases in the rate of migration into their borders (although it is important to note the variations within Europe, as well. Since the mid 1990s, immigration into a number of European countries, such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark, has remained stable, and in Germany even decreased (albeit after large increases in the 1980s and early 1990s). It is mostly the southern European countries that have continued to see increases in immigration rates, see Lister and Pia 2008, pp. 137–139). These developments, though, have had a significant impact on both the national models of citizenship and the development of European citizenship. European states now have sizeable proportions of foreign-born non-citizens residing within their territorial borders. For example, as Palmowski notes in this volume, around 8.9% of the German population are non-citizens, while the figure is 8.3% for the UK (National Statistics 2005). While the time period of residency varies, these populations pose challenging questions for the national models of citizenship. As Joppke notes in this volume, the precise ways in which migration,

What would you do? Everyday conceptions and constructions of counter-terrorism

This article explores findings from focus group research in which UK publics were asked, If you were in government, what would you do about terrorism? After situating our research within contemporary ‘bottom-up’ work on counter-terrorism, we discuss the diversity of answers we received to this question, which included improving education, addressing social fracture, and the need for more punitive counter-terrorism powers. These exercises in public political imagination are important, we argue, for several reasons. These include the questions they pose for widespread claims about public disconnection from (security) politics as well as their likely impact on the everyday lives of our research participants.

Methods, Theories and Evidence: A Reply to Arzheimer

Kai Arzheimers careful and thorough comment upon my earlier BJPIR article raises a number of important issues. While engaging in a thorough critique of the original articles methods, he also points to the (perhaps) inherent problems any quantitative approach may encounter in this area. The consequences of this are that if we wish to assess whether there are social determinants to participation, quantitative methods are limited. In the light of this, after addressing some mis-characterisations in his comment, this reply seeks to provide qualitative evidence that there may well be a link between welfare state institutions and outputs and participation.

From Precaution to Prejudice: Mistakes in Counter-terrorism

This chapter disaggregates the mistakes, errors and miscalculations around counter-terrorism policy. We note the difficulties in assessing when ‘something goes wrong’ in counter-terrorism which centre around the issue of uncertainty. We reflect on how to calculate the impacts of counter-terrorism in objective and subjective terms, before considering specific aspects of counter-terrorism in examples from British counter-terrorism policing and measures. We distinguish three types of ‘mistakes’: ‘genuine’ errors, misapplication of policy and unintended consequences. We consider the effects of such mistakes, in the form of ‘suspect communities’ and the ways in which high-profile mistakes come to shape perceptions of counter-terrorism practices. Given the inherent uncertainty and the seeming decision to prioritise precautionary logics, ‘mistakes’ in counter-terrorism are inevitable.

‘As a woman…’; ‘As a Muslim…’: Subjects, positions and counter-terrorism powers in the United Kingdom:

This article presents findings from original focus group research on the importance of identity claims within public understandings of counter-terrorism across the UK. Following a review of existing literature on the terrorism/counter-terrorism/identity nexus, the article introduces four prominent subject positions inhabited within public articulations of counter-terrorism powers: the ‘Muslim’, the ‘target’, the ‘woman’ and the ‘unaffected’. Positions such as these, we argue, both enable and inhibit particular normative, political and anecdotal claims about counter-terrorism frameworks and their impact upon the body politic. This, we suggest, is demonstrative of the co-constitutive role between counter-terrorism and identity claims. Thus, on the one hand, counter-terrorism initiatives work to position individuals socially, politically and culturally: (re)producing various religious, ethnic and other identities. Yet, at the same time, specific subject positions are integral to the articulation of people’s attitudes toward developments in counter-terrorism. The article concludes by thinking through some of the implications of this, including for resistance toward securitising moves and for citizenship more generally.