Close encounters: Islam, Modernity and Violence

Lundmark, Fredrik (ed.) Culture, Security and Sustainable Social Development after September 11. Stockholm: Gidlunds, 2004

An essay of how violence has been aesthetized in Occidental culture and how this has been mirrored by various reactions in connection with the destruction of the Twin Towers. The text was a contribution to an anthology written by members of The Working Group for Culture, Security and Sustainable Development of the Centenarian Fund of the Swedish National Bank.

The Journal of Social Psychology, 2005

Solomon, & J. Greenberg, 2003) to investigate people's reactions to the terrorist attacks of 09/11/01. According to the theory, people have a primary need to eliminate or reduce existential terror in response to such horrific events as 9/11. The authors obtained people's reactions to 9/11, an event in which the threat to one's existence was more authentic than those of previous events that were imagined. The authors of the present study collected data two weeks after 9/11 from young adults on a large university campus in the U.S. Midwest. The authors asked participants about their proximal and distal reactions to 9/11 and their reasons or motives for those reactions. The results indicated that the vast majority of participants' proximal reactions to 9/11 were shock and/or disbelief, whereas their distal reactions included performing altruistic or prosocial behavior, searching for meaning or value in life, seeking or sharing information, spending time in talking to others, and making bigoted remarks about Arab Muslims. The main finding was that interpersonal communication is an important means of eliminating or reducing existential terror.

2003

The September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States resulted in a homeland catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude. Thousands of lives were lost, billions of dollars will be spent on disaster recovery, and the social and political consequences of the attacks have been extensive.

Centre for the Study of Political Change, 2002

His main research interests concern the relationship between public opinion and international politics in Western Europe, international crisis and comparative foreign politics.

This is a nice contribution to an area of terrorism studies that has gotten too little scholarly attention-the issue of how countries respond to terrorist attacks". (Max Abrahms-Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, Northeastern University, US) "Serious students of terrorism and state sponsored violence will grapple with the insights by international scholars about how everyday life and social institutions are affected by terrorist acts themselves, as well as the controlling and surveillance practices enacted to combat terrorism. Terrorism in the Global Village is a gem in the expanding study of conflict and social change." (David Altheide-Regents Professor Emeritus. Arizona State University, US). Terrorism has become the defining form of political, ideological and religious conflict of our time. Decades of asymmetric struggle have honed the ability of radicalized factions to attack and destabilize much larger and richer societies, using fear as their primary weapon, while the need to protect these societies has led to an unprecedented extension of the role and reach of the security forces, thereby removing much of the privacy that previous generations could take for granted. The boundaries between organized crime and terrorist networks have become increasingly blurred, as the new generation of terrorists has learned how to reach out through families, personal contacts and the internet to recruit violent and disaffected youth around the world. The threats that we face are now everywhere, and many of them are almost invisible. This has become a struggle of faith, values and belief, and it remains to be seen which will prevail. (Professor Anthony Clayton, MA, PhD, FCAS, FTWAS, CD-University of West Indies, Jamaica)

Platform: Journal of Media and Communication, 2017

This paper explores the impacts of terrorism, and of consequent disability, on three people. Two participants have a direct, and one has an indirect, experience of terrorism, but all have been deeply impacted by their encounter in the physicality of everyday existence. Using storytelling, as described by Hannah Arendt (1998), as the medium for exploring the daily lives of people directly affected by a terrorist attack, I choose here to focus on the ways in which they describe their disability, or their relationship to disability, and the meanings they create around their direct experience of terrorism. I seek to understand the ethical struggles of life after a terrorist attack. I ask how does one live an ethical life, a life that seems 'right' in the eyes of the person concerned? Through two stories, that of "Phoenix", a victim of the 2002 Bali Bombings, and of Gill Hicks, a survivor of the 2005 London bombings, and her partner Karl Falzon, I explore how the long-term physical effects of terrorism play a significant role in the ways victims and survivors reassert themselves into their social world. Part of the agency implicit in the storytelling shared by these participants is encapsulated in the perceptions that these people are survivors, not victims; and this also impacts upon the various ways in which they approach living a good life with a disability and as a visible reminder of the randomness and extraordinary ferocity of terrorist attacks.

Since the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC on 11 September 2001, Muslims or Muslim-looking people in the USA have experienced a significant increase in hostility and hate violence. The anti-Muslim hate crimes have affected the lives of these people of color in significant ways. In this article I seek to recover part of the post-September 11 experiences of American Muslims that were obfuscated by the dominant anti-Muslim master narrative, which conflated the Islamic faith with terrorism and constructed all Muslims as dangerous anti-American outsiders. I explore a way of telling stories about these experiences using the expressive power of geospatial technologies. Using the experiences of a Muslim woman in Columbus (Ohio, USA) as an example, I describe how the technological spaces afforded by geographical information systems (GIS) may be used to illuminate the impact of the fear of anti-Muslim hate violence on the daily lives of Muslim women and to help articulate their emotional geographies in the post-September 11 period.

2021

As the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, we contemplate and reflect on the current social/political imagination of terror(ism) and U.S./Canadian patriotism. For educators seeking to unpack 9/11 and its reverberations, it is important to highlight Islamophobic and anti-Muslim racism, discrimination, prejudice, and violence, as well as to consider Muslim students’ lived experiences. (Re)thinking about whose voices are included (or not) within the nexus of sociopolitical power is an important step toward justice and then rapprochement within and beyond the classroom. We consider this assemblage of articles to be a distinctly communal effort that responds to and attempts to disrupt the (perpetual) echoes of terror(ism) which became amplified by/through the events of 9/11.

2021

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-cps-10.1177_0010414021997162 for Personal Proximity and Reactions to Terrorism by Mattias Agerberg and Jacob Sohlberg in Comparative Political Studies

Handbook: Voices of victims of terrorism, 2015

This handbook is a compilation of experiences shared during the Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) meetings of the Voices of Victims of Terrorism working group (RAN VVT), held from 2012 to 2015. The RAN VVT working group considered how testimonies from victims of terrorism can work as a powerful narrative in countering violent extremism (CVE). Authors : Guillaume Denoix de Saint Marc, RAN VVT working group leader Luca Guglielminetti, RAN VVT working group leader Josée Netten, Foundation Impact/Arq Psychotrauma Expert Group Stéphane Lacombe, AfVT Maarten van de Donk, RAN Secretariat Jerry Galesloot, RAN Secretariat Pomme Woltman, RAN Secretariat