Rosalie Atie

Ordinary Cosmopolitans: Sydney Muslims’ attitudes to diversity

ABSTRACT A significant body of research as well as political advocacy outline the difficulties of Muslims living within Western countries. For virtuous reasons this scholarship assumes that Muslims are being prevented from belonging through mechanisms of social exclusion, and, it would follow, are at risk of losing faith in the prospects of harmony and social compact around religious diversity. Yet there is very little evidence that such exclusion generates disaffection and despondency. The emerging scholarship on ‘ordinary cosmopolitanism’ eschews an a priori assumption of exclusion. A survey of 585 Muslims living in Sydney (Australia) derived their attitudes to diversity, racism and national belonging. We critically assessed whether perceived disaffection and incompatibility (non-belonging, radicalisation) were as widespread as public commentaries and some research infers. The results show a very strong level of everyday support for cultural diversity and a rejection of assimilationist impulses, exceeding the average for the general population. This is despite the global Islamophobia attached to terror discourses and to the violent extremism of a minority of Muslims.

Can you use community policing for counter terrorism? Evidence from NSW, Australia

A contested question in the international policing literature is whether it is possible to undertake effective anti-terrorism community policing. The NSW Police Force’s Counter Radicalisation Strategy involved a community engagement initiative that used community liaison officers, mostly working with Sydney Muslim communities. This study reviews the success of this initiative, drawing on data from a survey of Sydney Muslims. The community engagement initiative was found to have direct contact with the community, it was public, and it involved aspects of partnership and relations of depth. For these reasons, the initiative was within the community policing paradigm. There was strong community awareness of the programme, and a majority saw it as successful. There remained pockets of community suspicion and critique, which require attention. The respondents recommended an enhancement of the community policing aspects: more (and wider) contact, visibility and partnership. The findings affirm the utility of community policing for counter-terror work.

Racism and the Affordances of the Internet

This chapter shows how the Internet has become a dangerous place for encounters with racism. It analyses how racists behave online, recognising that not all racism has been constructed by people with overt racist agendas or a conscious sense of antipathy to other races or ethnic groups. It also identifies a range of elements that constitute racist behaviour online and examines situations where racism is experienced by targets, though perpetrators may dispute that they are racist.

Promoting Resilience Through Regulation

This chapter reports on the framework of legal and regulatory channels in place to deal with cyber racism (with specific reference to Australia), to identify how this issue can be tackled more effectively. It offers insights on how to approach the issue of regulation in the future and argues for the strengthening of administrative remedies over criminalisation and strategies for promoting ethical behaviour online, an awareness of human rights and prevention over prosecution.

Conclusion: Future Directions in Building Community Resilience

This chapter provides an in-depth examination of the pathways to resilience, bringing together theoretical models of community development with resilience building and exemplars from a range of situations and countries around the world in relation to online racism. It explores strategies and responses from within communities experiencing racist harassment, as well as collaborating social activists who provide technical capacities and organisational support. In addition, it identifies how governments and corporates have responded, and their roles in contributing to the enhancement of community resilience.

Building Online Communities of Resistance and Solidarity

This chapter provides a framework for building successful online communities that offer solidarity to their members in the face of online racism. The framework looks at the eight different types of online communities, the types of stakeholders driving or empowering them and a range of proactive and reactive strategies they can adopt to tackle cyber racism. This framework is illustrated with in-depth case studies and examples of each type of community and how they can contribute to the creation of online communities of solidarity and resistance.

Researching Cyber Racism: Methodologies and Methods Across Disciplines

This chapter offers a broad description of how the pathway from disciplinary framework to research question, to method, to research outcome operates in the study of cyber racism. That is, how scholars have sought to define the particular characteristics of the Internet and social media in relation to race-targeting hate speech. This is then put in the context of the Cyber Racism and Community Resilience Project in terms of how it has been used to define the research questions and approaches taken to understand the phenomena.

Context: “Cyberspace,” “Race” and Community Resilience

This chapter lays out the broad political economy of race and the Internet. It explores the emergence of the transnational super-corporations within whose structures and through whose products and services racism occurs. It explores how processes of regulation form, are resisted and transform. It also looks at how the cyber world has changed since the major studies undertaken in the first decade of the century have been overtaken by new technologies, new questions of regulation and new environments of racialised conflict and racial empowerment.

How Cyber Users Experience and Respond to Racism: Evidence from an Online Survey

This chapter details the main findings of a survey conducted in December 2013 as a part of the Australian online Cyber Racism and Community Resilience (CRaCR) Project. Over 2,000 Internet users across Australia were surveyed regarding their encounters with cyber racism, the impact of these encounters and their responses to them. This group included targets, witnesses and authors of cyber racism. These survey data indicate that a significant number of Internet users regularly encounter racism online, primarily on Facebook, online news commentary and YouTube; both as targets and witnesses. This research also reveals that a small but prolific group are publishing intentional, exclusionary and hurtful racist content online, which is then being seen by a much wider audience of Internet users.

Racist Narratives Online

The first part of this chapter uses the Australian example to demonstrate the development of contrasting national identity narratives and their interpretation on social media. This includes contextualising the narratives in terms of the historical and political development of Australia as a multicultural nation. The second part of this chapter uses examples from Australia and around the world to explore the discursive strategies employed by exponents of cyber racism to promote their version of national identity narratives. These complementary approaches aim to give insight into the dynamic through which cyber racism can be legitimised through narratives about national identity.