Dangerous or political? Kenyan youth negotiating political agency in the age of ‘new terrorism’

This article examines how the online Kenyan press constructs ‘radicalization’ and how youth challenge these constructions. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) through NVivo, the author analyzed two corpora, one of news texts and the second composed of transcripts from two focus group discussions conducted with youth in Mombasa. The analysis shows the media persistently depoliticize youth by constructing them as a dangerous ‘Other’. In contrast, youth challenge this image by claiming political agency through (re)defining their identities using language and material practices. The construction of actors in discourses of radicalization highlights a specific understanding of radicalism and violence, and impacts framing of the Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) agenda. The author concludes by showing the implications of the different constructions of youth identities and how youth legitimately enact agency within these bounds. This article raises crucial questions on the practices of meaning-making by individuals and media actors.

Intersecting Terrorism Studies

The chapter begins by looking at a feminist conceptualisation of civil disorder as related to gender and the threat of the feminine to public order. Understanding that the feminine is already disordered is important, but so is post-colonialism and Queer theory’s arguments that there are other forms of disorder as well. This idea of disorder as a deviation from power structures aligns nicely with ‘epistemic biases,’ which is both introduced and applied to terrorism. The perspective that terrorism is devoid of any rationality and morality are examples of an epistemic bias. Therefore, the rest of the chapter explores rationality and morality in further depth through the New Terrorism thesis and the Westphalian myth, respectively.

Neuer Terrorismus – Reale Bedrohung oder konstruiertes Forschungsparadigma?

Using a qualitative study, in which she evaluates 142,000 terrorist attacks, the author of this book, Julia Klein, investigates the existence of the research paradigm ‘new terrorism’. She delves into the media, political and academic discourse on this subject and identifies changes in behaviour among terrorist organisations. Her evaluation of the volume of data on terrorist attacks verifies whether a new form of terrorism has existed since the beginning of the 1990s. This also reveals the influence of certain individuals on the debate, and the author is able to demonstrate that, above all, the importance of religion in providing terrorists with an ideological incentive to perpetrate their attacks has been overestimated.

O “Terrorismo Islâmico” sob a ótica do Construtivismo e do Pós-colonialismo | The “Islamic Terrorism” from the standpoint of the Constructivism and the Post-colonialism

Este artigo introduz duas perspectivas críticas no debate sobre o terrorismo, buscando apresentar algumas críticas acerca da categoria, definida na literatura como o novo “terrorismo islâmico”. Portanto, o objetivo desse artigo é aplicar a teoria construtivista crítica e o pós-colonialismo relacionadas a categoria do “terrorismo islâmico”, buscando repensar algumas premissas estabelecidas pela literatura tradicional. Para tal, busca-se investigar, em um primeiro momento, as diferenciações entre um terrorismo tradicional e o novo terrorismo pautado na religião. Posteriormente, será analisado o “terrorismo islâmico a partir das duas teorias propostas. Palavras-chave: Terrorismo Islâmico; Construtivismo; Pós-colonialismo.ABSTRACTThis article introduces two critical perspectives in the debate on terrorism, seeking to present some criticism about the category defined in the literature as the new “Islamic terrorism”. Therefore, the goal of the article is to apply the critical constructivism and the post-colonial theory related to the “Islamic terrorism” category, seeking rethink some premises established by the traditional literature. For this, it seeks to investigate, in the first moment, the differentiations between an old terrorism and the new terrorism, which is based on the religion. Subsequently, “Islamic terrorism” will be analyzed by the two proposed theories.Keywords: Islamic Terrorism; Constructivism; Post-Colonialism.Recebido em 11/02/2019 | Aceito em 10/12/2019