 |
|
 |
|
| home | |
|
|
| publications list | |
|
|
|
|
| presentations | |
|
|
| articles by theme | |
|
|
|
security and terrorism |
|
|
|
science and risk |
|
|
|
|
| articles by publication | |
|
|
|
Spiked |
|
|
|
Times Higher Education Supplement |
|
|
| Bill in the news | |
|
|
| contact Bill | |
|
|
Bill Durodié |
What have we learned from H1N1?
printable
version
First published by Today (Singapore), 13 April 2010
The battle for Thailand’s soul
Far from being a ‘stage army’, the Red Shirts could potentially refresh and reinvent democracy in Thailand.
printable
version
For over a year now, the political scene in Thailand has been in tumult. At the end of 2008, protesters wearing yellow shirts got international media coverage by forcing the closure of the capital city’s two airports. Now, protesters wearing red shirts occupy parts of Bangkok, demanding the resignation of the prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, and fresh elections.
On the evening of Saturday 3 April, the uneasy stand-off between government forces and protesters, which has lasted for a month, spilled over into violence. At the time of writing, more than 20 people, including a Japanese Reuters reporter and four Thai soldiers, have died. Many hundreds more have been injured.
So, who are the Yellow Shirts and who are the Red Shirts, what do they represent, and what significance do they have for politics in Thailand and beyond? To understand what is going on today, it is necessary first to cast a glance back at Thailand’s modern history.
Thailand is often described as the only state in South East Asia not to have been colonised by the European powers. Siam, as the country was once called, achieved this dubious distinction through shedding territory to its south and west (Malaya and Burma) to the British and to its north and east (Laos and Cambodia) to the French. Siam thereby maintained a feudal monarchy that the imperial powers felt comfortable doing business with.
A 1932 military coup, supported by civilian democrats, led to the dissolution of absolute monarchical powers, followed by an abdication in 1938. But the new, uneasy alliance also broke apart, with liberals and radicals being ousted. Indeed, the country was first renamed Thailand in 1939 as a nationalist gesture to exclude those of Chinese origin.
A brief deal with the Japanese during the Second World War returned lands lost to the British and the French. But after the war, the US ensured that the status quo ante prevailed, and used the Kingdom as a platform for launching regional anti-communist operations. This proved a recipe for constant coups and turmoil, which continued, both internally and with aggrieved neighbours, subsequent to the expulsion of US forces in the mid-1970s and until the end of the Cold War in 1989. The end of the Cold War heralded a more concerted transition to democracy.
The current king, Bhumibol Adulyadej, or Rama IX, having come to power in 1946 after the mysterious death of his brother, is now the world’s longest serving head of state. He is widely revered by the Thai people, but his age and failing health have raised issues regarding any succession to his less popular son, Vajiralongkorn.
It is within this context that Thaksin Shinawatra, a former police deputy superintendent, entered into politics in 1994. Typically, for a not-too-well-paid public servant, he started a string of failed businesses on the side before resigning his police commission in 1987. But he hit the big time in 1990, obtaining a 20-year license to deliver Thailand’s first mobile phone services. His business interests gradually grew and were spun out to various members of his family and trusted friends. Thaksin won the first of his landslide election victories in 2001, when he became prime minister of Thailand. He completed a notable full-term in office and was re-elected in 2005 on the back of the highest voter turnout in Thai history.
Thaksin is an unashamedly populist politician. He is like a cross between Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. By combining rural poverty alleviation programmes in the north of the country, where he hails from, with the first universal healthcare scheme – now so successful that medical tourism is one of Thailand’s boom sectors – his success was assured.
Thaksin is also undoubtedly a man of contradictions, promoting micro-credit schemes popular with Western liberals on the one hand, while determinedly, and some might say ruthlessly, quashing Muslim separatists in the south of the country. His draconian campaign to eradicate drugs also met with accusations of human rights abuses by various groups, leading Thaksin to denounce the United Nations, whose envoy he had invited in to assess the situation.
In 2006, while Thaksin was in New York – ironically, to speak at a UN summit – things came to a head. A fresh military coup, supported by old and new elites within the monarchy and the media – who Thaksin had continuously thwarted through reporting restrictions and through setting up various communications empires – swept Bangkok. But upon the restoration of free elections in 2008, the people had the temerity to elect the People’s Power Party, which Thaksin supported from his exile. This was a step too far for the urban elitists, and so protesters wearing yellow, in symbolic allegiance to the king, seized the airports and brought the country to a standstill.
Despite this superficially radical move, it is important to understand that those involved were entirely reactionary in their outlook. Comprised largely of urban intellectuals, and pretty much allowed to take over by the military, their view was that democracy was not for the uneducated masses from the north.
The various protests have been widely viewed merely as disruptive, as damaging Thailand’s reputation and economy. Some Thais who avow themselves as neutral to the conflicts wear pink shirts. But in fact, the protests represent a fundamental struggle that reflects, and will shape, views about popular participation in Thailand and elsewhere.
Having brought the country to a halt, the Yellow Shirts, backed by little more than a political pressure group with influential and wealthy backers – the People’s Alliance for Democracy – managed to get the pro-Thaksin government disbanded through the legal establishment. It was this silent, judicial coup that led to the current mass demonstrations by Red Shirt supporters of Thaksin.
Thaksin has been repeatedly accused of corruption and censorship. On their part, the Eton- and Oxford-educated current prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, and his hastily reconstituted Democrat Party, which includes some of his British-educated chums, are themselves not wholly innocent in this regard. But, far from being a battle between rural populists and urban intellectuals, the conflict has, over the past month, become about much more than that.
Accusations fly that the Red Shirt protesters in Bangkok have been bribed and corralled to act as a stage army. That may be true – the path to democracy is never clear or clean – but the fact is that they are a de facto people’s army. They have sustained over 100,000 people on the streets of Bangkok for a month, held rallies, met with the prime minister and successfully regained control of a media outlet that government forces had occupied and closed down, if only to lose control of it again.
With so many Thais taking matters into their own hands for the first time, and consciously avoiding violence, there is now an opportunity for the political agenda to move beyond Thaksin. The protesters are learning that while they were galvanised into action for the sake of the exiled Thaksin (the Thai judiciary has recently moved to seize his assets), he himself may no longer be central, or even necessary, to realising their ambitions. At the same time, some of the urban elites may lose faith in the current prime minister’s ability to keep control of the situation, leading to more draconian responses which, in turn, may fuel further violence.
What we are witnessing in Bangkok is a transformative moment. How it will end is anyone’s guess. The Red Shirts may be placated by recent official apologies. They may, after their prolonged occupations of certain key streets and government buildings, return to their northern constituencies to observe the Thai New Year this week. Such demobilisation could be dispiriting and fatal.
On the other hand, in democracy, there is strength in numbers, and the Red Shirts may grasp a sense of their own power and steer a very different course. If the protesters prevail, they could offer important lessons in the messy business of politics elsewhere.
First published by spiked, 12 April 2010
Therapy Culture Revisited
printable
version
First published by Report of a workshop organised by the Centre of Excellence for National Security (Singapore), 9 March 2010
Taking off easier than taking over
The emerging economic powers like China and India will find it easier to catch up with the living standards of the West than supersede America as dominant powers.
printable
version
First published by Straits Times, 5 December 2009
Keeping a cool head
printable
version
First published by The Chemical Engineer, 1 December 2009
The US and China: dangers of premature extrapolation
printable
version
First published by RSIS Commentaries, 26 November 2009
The forgotten role of government
In new political times, governments need to find the ideas and ideals to aspire their citizens.
printable
version
‘...a State which dwarfs its men...will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.’ - John Stuart Mill
THE proper role, composition and functioning of the state has preoccupied scholars from the time of Plato right down to the present day.
Understandably, the establishment of order was often highlighted as the primary task of government. It is no different today when protecting citizens from the threat of terrorism, influenza, climate change and economic uncertainty are so central.
But history suggests that what truly motivates people goes beyond the establishment of security. The United States was famously immortalised by Francis Scott Key as ‘the land of the free’ - not ‘the land of the safe’.
People, in all places and at all times, have been prepared to risk it all, in order to be free. We do not just live our lives - as animals do - we lead them. And we do not always take kindly to those who, for whatever benevolent reasons, seek to impose their model of how life should be.
Of course, in a democracy, those politicians who may wish to assert such views are, ultimately, held accountable by the people. But neither they, nor the officials they task with implementing their visions, can ever afford to take this role lightly. The real art of leadership is to ensure that others follow.
Accordingly, winning hearts and minds is as important in the domestic arena as it is in resolving conflicts elsewhere. But it is increasingly evident that for the vast majority of people, the assurance that government is keeping them safe may not be enough to keep them on-side. People look for meaning to life, not just more of it.
The forgotten role of government today is to inspire people, not simply to protect them. In an age marked by the absence of belief in secular ideals, nothing could be more vital. People who believe in a cause or project are far more effective agents of it than those who are coerced or corralled. But to benefit from this power of conviction, there needs to be a concomitant intellectual or ideological engagement that is often absent today.
No state can hope to command and control every action and interaction of its citizens. To do so would lead to paralysis. Indeed, those countries that tried to do so in the last century collapsed from within, as people withdrew their energies and enthusiasms from the projects they were supposed to be supporting. Nothing is guaranteed to accelerate cynicism faster than being told what to do while remaining disengaged.
In fact, in almost all societies today, individuals increasingly encounter each other as free and autonomous agents. They enter into contracts - of employment, of exchange and of marriage - not at the point of a gun, but largely through choice, irrespective of the limitations of their circumstances.
It is precisely these freely-willed and freely-entered-into social relations that oil the complex relations of nations. But individuals need to have a sense of their own potential, as well as that of society, through the prism of having had their imaginations captivated or inspired towards achieving particular goals.
Unfortunately, such goals for society today are most notable by their absence. At the time of the Enlightenment of the 18th century - that period which generated the sense of ourselves as free, equal and autonomous agents - there was little need to spell out the need for inspiration. The tremendous changes and upheavals that occurred then were inspiration enough. They led a young William Wordsworth to write: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven!’
Today, however, in a more quiescent period - one not marked primarily by the removal of kings or concerted challenges to the domination of religious dogma - there may be a need to be more conscious about the need to inspire the citizenry. Ours has been cited as an age of anxiety, but where are the ideas and ideals capable of leading us beyond our narrow existential concern for our own well-being and towards a broader appreciation of the potential of the collective human project?
A recent editorial in this newspaper managed to capture the requisite spirit. Reflecting on the demise of the US-led space race on the 40th anniversary of the moon landings, it argued, ‘Given America’s dithering, it behooves many Asian countries to replicate the spirit of 1969’, before concluding that, far from being a diversion of resources, such adventures exemplified the human spirit and could galvanise a nation.
The choice, so often invoked in our risk-averse times, between freedom and security is a false one. Real security can emerge only from being free and not the other way around. Sadly, today the maxim ‘better safe than sorry’ seems to dominate over that of ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’. It remains to be seen whether the future will be captured by those who would instil absolute safety first or those who understand the need to inspire a nation in order to achieve great things.
First published by Straits Times, 3 August 2009
Eight months on - none really the wiser about Mumbai
INCOSE 2009 International Symposium, Singapore on 20 July 2009
printable
version
First published by presentation to INCOSE 2009 International Symposium, Singapore, 20 July 2009
Understanding radicalization
Part of 'From the Midwest to Mogadishu' debate on the NYT's Room for Debate blog.
printable
version
First published by New York Times, 13 July 2009
H1N1: now is not the time to panic
printable
version
First published by Today (Singapore), 19 June 2009
Religion, radicalism and terrorism
Speech to the 23rd Asia-Pacific Roundtable, Sheraton Imperial Kuala Lumpur Hotel, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
printable
version
At the height of the Mumbai siege last November, one of the perpetrators, Fahad Ullah, used the mobile phone of one of the victims to call India TV and conducted a live interview with two journalists there.
About a minute into their four minute conversation, the two journalists, one male, one female, asked him in turn ‘What are your demands?’. At this point Fahad Ullah answered ‘Wait one minute’ and he was heard consulting with someone else as to their demands.
I find this episode to be one of the most insightful vignettes there is into the nature of contemporary terrorism.
It may well be that all of the perpetrators were from Pakistan originally. They may well have been trained there and even have been controlled by someone there. But even if they were naïve canon-fodder themselves, still, to this day, over six months since the attack, no-one has come forward to claim responsibility for it, or to identify their demands and purposes.
If, as we have consistently been told since 9/11, most of the terrorist incidents we see around the world today are part of some resurgent Islamist conspiracy, then the leaders of this particular atrocity appear to have been somewhat backward about coming forward and highlighting their cause.
Maybe that is because they do not have one? They would certainly not be the first in this position, as what I find most striking about terrorism today is its evident absence of purpose or coherent aims, worldwide.
When I was young, growing up in London, everybody knew exactly what the Provisional IRA wanted. They claimed responsibility for their attacks and never ceased to remind people as to what these were for.
They also understood terrorism to be merely a tactic set within a broader struggle to win hearts and minds politically, within their own communities and beyond. Terror, for them, was a means to achieving this wider political end.
Today, we witness a form of terror that is simply the end in itself. It seeks to serve no greater purpose, and those perpetrating it are quite clearly not attempting to articulate any political arguments to cohere a constituency.
It is precisely this failure to spell out their purpose that has allowed all-manner of pundits, commentators and self-appointed experts to fill the vacuum these nihilist criminals leave behind with their own pet prejudices about what this is all for.
Foremost amongst these has been an assumed association with Islam. Of course, this is sometimes facilitated by the fact that the perpetrators claim this link too. But should we take their claims at face-value?
The American analyst Marc Sageman, and others, have examined how it is that self-styled extremists today are not poor or poorly educated, and neither are they political or particularly pious. They are often born and educated in the West, or at least appear to have become more radical through spending time there.
Few come from the parts of the world they claim to be acting on behalf of. They would have trouble identifying places in the Middle-East given a map. Some met in gymnasiums, rather than mosques and were well-integrated into their local communities, if somewhat self-distancing from them.
Above-all, it would seem, that far from being vulnerable and recruited through the inflammatory rhetoric of a radical mullah, it is they who go in search of a group to join, even rejecting those they see as not being serious enough.
Two of the London bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shezad Tanweer, appear to have visited Pakistan prior to the 7 July 2005 bombings. But these visits, possibly to pick-up tips and some kind of blessing, almost certainly came after their decision to act in the first place. In other words, they were already angry and knew what they wanted to do, and then sought some kind of credibility by going to Pakistan.
They used the language of Jihad and conflict with the West as an excuse to dissimulate their rage against the modern world that they felt so alien from. In other words, Islam, for them at least, was more a motif than a motive. It was the badge of honour they sought to wear, and others do too, that represents many of those who reject the way the world is today.
An academic in London describes Islam as ‘the new Rock ‘n Roll’. When our parents were young, Rock and Roll music was what distinguished them from, and most annoyed, their parents. Maybe, a few years ago in the West, announcing to your parents that you were gay had that effect. Today, it would be to convert to Islam.
Few of these individuals need to have any Islamic background in the first place, although this does provide a ready-made narrative of victimhood and oppression, as well as an excuse for failure and rage, amongst Muslims.
It is quite clear, particularly in the West, that many young Muslim girls who now wear the headscarf, come from families where their mother never did. It is therefore more a statement about social distancing than anything else.
When asked on British television whether wearing a headscarf was some kind of fashion statement, a young Muslim woman, who had previously identified her dislike and rejection of all things Western, retorted ‘It’s about me and my identity. And I don’t like men looking at me’.
This reflects a remarkable confusion. Here was a young woman rejecting the West, using the language of Western identity politics and feminism to do so. Other similar confusions abound.
At the trial of those in England caught as part of Operation Crevice, it transpired that the conspirators, who had acquired a large volume of ammonium-nitrate fertilizer, were hoping to poison the beer of football fans, attack a large shopping mall and blow up what they described as ‘all those slags dancing around’ in nightclubs.
This list of targets is not to be found in the Koran, but it does appear to reflect the exaggerated concerns of contemporary commentators and politicians as to the possible breakdown of our social fabric. They too caricature the behaviour of drunken football fans, suggest that we have become shallow shop-aholic consumers and, at the more conservative end of the spectrum, worry about the antics of young women in nightclubs.
So maybe the self-styled Jihadists have been listening to us a bit too much? Even Osama bin Laden advises White House officials in his writings to read the journalist Robert Fisk rather than, as one might have supposed, the Koran.
He used to focus his rage against Saudi Arabia. After 9/11 when Western journalists presumed it was all about Palestine, he shifted his rantings to that. More recently he has shifted his anger to Iraq and even the refusal of the US administration to sign up to the Kyoto Treaty. This shows quite how parasitic such individuals are on debates that are happening in the West, between Western politicians, academics and commentators.
Maybe it is our own caricature of ourselves that is the problem? Presumably, if we suggest that we are degenerate, decadent, corrupt, confused and spineless, then there will be some, somewhere, who will act upon it?
It may be uncomfortable or unpalatable for some to recall, but when the Twin Towers went down in New York there were quite a few in the West who suggested that America ‘deserved it’.
The day after 9/11, in the supposedly liberal British broadsheet newspaper, The Guardian, the journalist Seamus Milne penned an opinion piece about Americans entitled ‘They don’t know why they are hated’.
Maybe, when Michael Moore’s ‘Stupid White Men’ became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, selling over 300,000 copies in the UK in its first year of publication alone, a few bright minds in the security agencies should have woken up to the extent to which, as a society, we appear to hate ourselves.
I used to note, when I was speaking at conferences in the UK six or more years ago that, if I wanted to find people who were anti-American, anti-Western, anti-modern, anti-progress or anti-science, then I really did not need to go and look for them in the Middle-East. There were plenty in London, some even teaching at our Universities there.
This cultural self-loathing is quite palpable. More recent episodes include respected scientists who have argued that influenza might save the planet from the plague that they describe as humanity, or an environmental columnist who describes flying as equivalent to child abuse, inasmuch as it damages the planet.
With friends like these, who needs enemies? More importantly, this cultural confusion is likely to manifest itself in a myriad of ways. In an age marked by an absence of meaning and the decline of the old collectivities of family, religion and politics to belong to and derive identity from, it is not surprising that all of our young people, and some not so young too, are searching for something to provide purpose to their lives.
Fortunately, only a few will find this in something as destructive as supposed jihadist terrorism. Most will find some positive experience to draw from through their work. Others, whose employment may be less stimulating, pursue all-manner of hobbies, some more obscure than others. At the more problematic end of the spectrum, a growing number of individuals define themselves through some, often self-determined illness identity, such as chronic fatigue, stress and increasingly many others.
There are also some notable parallels between today’s nihilist extremist terrorists and mass high-school killers, in the US and elsewhere. Notably, the Finnish student Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who committed such an atrocity nearly two years ago, was motivated by the writings of a deep-green Finnish ecologist called Pentti Linkola, who thinks that there are too many people on earth. Auvinen thought that he was just doing his bit to save the planet.
The key point here is that instead of worrying about what it is that supposedly ‘radicalises’ people, and then seeking to undermine their narrative, we would be far better off focusing on, and developing, a positive narrative of our own.
Why are some people susceptible to the suggestions of supposedly radical Islam? What is it about these ideas that resonate with them? The answer does not lie in the power and magnetism of the ideas and individuals themselves, but rather in the absence of mainstream alternatives to believe in, that we should be providing them with.
Many are looking for a system of belief, or some structure, rules and purpose, through which to imbue their lives with meaning. It is when we fail to provide this that these individuals look elsewhere, including in distorted versions of religious faiths.
By worrying that they may become ‘extremists’, we then also reveal our own inner moral bankruptcy, as it appears that we are saying ‘you can believe anything you like, just don’t believe it too much’. It is when we have lost faith in our own, secular project, that those who are more passionate and quite often more articulate than ourselves, also appear more principled.
The presumption that there is a necessary link between religion, radicalism and terrorism is just that – a presumption. The evidence is somewhat more vague. Notably, in a report published by the British think-tank, Policy Exchange, a few years ago, called ‘Living Apart Together’ and which examined the experience of young Muslims in Britain, the authors were the first to ask ordinary young Britons the same questions as so many had been asking of Muslims since 9/11.
To the question ‘Do you admire organizations like Al-Qaeda that are prepared to fight against the West?’, 7% of Muslims answered in the affirmative. This may seem a lot, but one should also be circumspect of, particularly young, people displaying a degree of bravado. More significantly however, when the same question was asked of the general population, 3% answered ‘yes’ and, as the authors of the report point out, 3% of 60 million British people is a lot more than 7% of 2 million British Muslims.
Maybe then, it is high-time we addressed some of these wider social elements to the radical nihilist equation? Treating Muslims differently, as many have done since 9/11, not only perpetuates a difference that need not be so significant, but it also continues to fail to address the need for us to develop a narrative of our own as to the kind of society we want to live in, with which we might finally be able to win the hearts and minds of the majority, who really matter, as well as of the few, who might otherwise look elsewhere for a system of meaning.
Recession and unrest: cauldron may not boil over
Discussion of the implications of the recession for social cohesion has been driven by speculative concerns rather than evident trends.
printable
version
First published by Straits Times, 28 May 2009
Recession: impact on security and cohesion
The debate about the implications of the recession amongst officials and security agencies reveals their own lack of confidence.
printable
version
First published by RSIS Commentaries, 25 May 2009
Why Mumbai?
The fact that the target was the Indian city that best captures the sub-continent's aspiration for change and development suggests the perpetrators to have been more influenced by Western nihilism and pessimism than by anything else.
printable
version
First published by RSIS Commentaries, 4 December 2008
Is internet radicalization possible?
Ideas on the Internet do not independently transform people. The Internet is but a medium for communicating ideas that reflects society.
printable
version
First published by RSIS Commentaries, 22 November 2008
Les Attentats de Londres de Juillet 2005: un Nihilisme ‘Made in the UK’
Nous devrions reconnaître les dimensions nationales du terrorisme au Royaume-Uni au lieu d’imaginer que ses causes premières émanent toujours de l’étranger ou reflètent une idéologie étrangère. Il semble refléter également un sens plus large d’aliénation et de confusion qui aurait saisi le monde occidental.
printable
version
First published by La Découverte, 14 September 2008
Front page
Dr Bill Durodié is the Senior Fellow coordinating the Health and Human Security research programme in the Centre for Non-Traditional Security (NTS) Studies of the S.Rajaratnam School of International Studies at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he teaches a course on 'The Politics of Risk' as part of the Masters programme.
He is also an Associate Fellow of the International Security Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House in London, having previously completed three years as Senior Lecturer in Risk and Corporate Security in the Resilience Centre of Cranfield University, part of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. He was previously Director of the International Centre for Security Analysis, and Senior Research Fellow in the International Policy Institute, within the 5* Research Assessment Exercise rated War Studies Group of King's College London.
printable
version
Dr Bill Durodié is the Senior Fellow coordinating the Health and Human Security research programme in the Centre for Non-Traditional Security (NTS) Studies of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, where he teaches a course on ‘The Politics of Risk’ as part of the Masters programme.
He previously coordinated the Homeland Defence research programme in the Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS) there, during which time he organised the 3rd Asia-Pacific Programme for Senior National Security Officers (APPSNO), and the conference ‘Therapy Culture Revisited: The Impact of the Language of Therapy on Public Policy and Social Resilience’, as well as writing policy briefs on various topics pertaining to societal resilience for the Ministry of National Development (MND).
He is an Associate Fellow of the International Security Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), Chatham House in London, having also completed three years as Senior Lecturer in Risk and Corporate Security in the Resilience Centre of Cranfield University, part of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom at Shrivenham. Prior to that he was Director of the International Centre for Security Analysis, and Senior Research Fellow in the International Policy Institute, within the War Studies Group of King’s College London.
His main research interest is into the causes and consequences of our contemporary consciousness of risk. He is also interested in examining the erosion of expertise, the demoralisation of élites, the limitations of risk management and the precautionary principle, and the growing demand to engage the public in dialogue and decision-making in relation to science.
Durodié was educated at the Royal College of Science, part of Imperial College London, the London School of Economics, and New College Oxford, one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. In 2007 he was also awarded a PhD by Public Works from Middlesex University.
He is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). He has previously been a Member of the Society for Risk Analysis, and an Advisory Forum Member of the Scientific Alliance.
Durodié’s work has appeared and been commented on in a wide range of publications, and he is regularly requested to provide expert commentary for television and radio broadcasts. He appeared in the BAFTA award-winning BBC documentary series produced by Adam Curtis: The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear.
A transcript of his September 2006 interview with the Australian broadcaster Robyn Williams for ‘In Conversation’ on ABC Radio National is available here.
A video podcast of his lecture ‘Resilience in the Face of Terrorism’ given on 9 March 2007 at the University of Warwick Business School is available here.
Durodié was one of the founding members of the Manifesto Club, a network of individuals celebrating human achievement and challenging social, cultural and political pessimism.
First published by n/a, 13 September 2008
Securing Electricity: Blackout
Preventing electricity outages from cascading into major international blackouts requires an appreciation of the social dimension of such networks. A focus on extreme possibilities rather than gradual failure, and an emphasis on environmental protection over assuring supply can be the real problem.
printable
version
First published by The World Today, 7 September 2008
China’s helpful role in the new world order
African economies are growing at higher rates than the world economy. China can help deliver some much-needed infrastructure there if it is allowed to. Its influence in the Sudan is more a sign of its weakness than its strength.
printable
version
First published by China Daily, 23 July 2008
China and Africa: A Rewarding Relationship
China has been portrayed as the new imperialist power in Africa, but its investments there are nothing compared to those of the old imperialists. What’s more, its activities are mostly of benefit to all, as opposed to the patronizing preaching of Western NGOs.
printable
version
First published by Times Online, 16 July 2008
A superficial balance
review of China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society, by Daniel A Bell
printable
version
In July 2001, the International Olympic Committee announced their decision that the XXIVth Summer Games in 2008 would be held in Beijing. Since then, and the best part of a generation on since the end of Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, demand for knowledge and insight into all things Chinese far outstrips supply. This has allowed all manner of commentators, interested parties and self-appointed pundits to attempt to seize the high-ground.
China is now mostly in the news because of fears about the environmental damage that 1.3b people hauling themselves out of abject poverty might reap – or, as it is usually perceived, heap upon the rest of us. Alternatively, the modern-day leaders of the ancient Middle Kingdom are castigated for their actions in Africa and Tibet. Many of these critiques are ill-informed, fearing development, romanticising poverty and blaming China for daring to compete.
So when a Western academic, fluent in Chinese and holding a full-time post at China’s prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing writes a book about everyday life in the vast, maelstrom-like, melting-pot in the East, it is bound to get noticed. Like the Economist magazine in May 2007 and Professor Jonathan Spence in his opening BBC 2008 Reith Lecture, Daniel A Bell uses as his framework the apparent return of some aspects of Confucianism to China.
Confucius predates Socrates by about a hundred years and, like Socrates, is largely remembered by what his students wrote. Born into a noble family that had fallen on hard times, Confucius worked his way back to being a moderately senior official. But, failing to find any ruler open to implementing his ideas, he settled into teaching and is now mostly remembered through the Analects, a series of fragmentary sayings or aphorisms attributed to him.
Over the centuries, these gradually became transformed, combining with a more formal legalism, to produce an elaborate system of rules and rituals centered on the benefits of harmony, virtue and loyalty. His notion, dating from feudal times, that all should be judged according to their merit rather than their class, influenced the advent of the Imperial examination system in China which, remarkably, lasted until the creation of the modern state in 1912.
Today, 2,500 years after Confucius, a small book Lunyu Xin De (Reflections on the Analects), emanating from a most unlikely source for promoting what most still see as an old-fashioned patriarchal system – Yu Dan a 42-year-old female media scholar at Beijing Normal University – has become a marketing sensation, selling over 10m copies in less than two years. As Bell points out, the last book to attract so much attention in China was Mao’s Little Red Book.
The problem is of course, that Confucius and the Analects mean all things to all people at the same time. Yu Dan has her interpretation, Bell has his. No doubt President Hu Jintao had his own motives too when in February 2005 he cited Confucius as saying that ‘harmony is something to be cherished’. Other Western analysts and commentators are equally self-motivated when they notice what they see as a possible trend that they are keen to see promoted.
Like pretty much everywhere else on the planet nowadays, China is undergoing a cultural malaise triggered by the end of its recent ideology. This is accentuated by a tremendous pace of development with the concomitant alterations in norms and social structures this inevitably brings. Accordingly, the use of ancient, ill-defined and contested concepts to analyse a highly fluid and disputed situation allows all sides to arrive at conclusions of their own choosing.
Feeding off the Western zeitgeist, Yu Dan’s book is little more than China’s first self-help manual, encouraging people to reduce their expectations and be happy with their lot. The British economist, Richard Layard, the Eton-educated, semi-official happiness guru of the New Labour government would be proud. So too would the vast armies of anti-consumerists, anti-globalists, anti-capitalists and other assorted antis of our modern, disenchanted world.
But for Bell and Professor Jiang Qing – author of the yet-to-be-translated book Political Confucianism – whom he cites favourably, Yu Dan does not go nearly far enough. As they see it, she is just a populist, appealing to the little people, and failing to realise the new Confucianism’s potential for tackling much broader problems. The Bush administration’s failure to sign up to the Kyoto Treaty is thus held to exemplify a failure to harmonise with future generations.
Despite aiming to establish more Confucian Institutes worldwide than there are Alliance Française and Goethe Institutes combined, the Chinese elites, much to Bell’s evident disgust, appear loathe to pay much attention to their supposed experts and intellectuals. Maybe they realise such arguments could backfire, or maybe they are not keen to lie in the same camp as Osama bin Laden, who also castigates the US over its environmental abstentionism.
Undoubtedly, the Chinese Communist Party faces a period of upheaval and uncertainty. In some respects, as Bell notes, the political future there appears more open than it is in the US. Calls for harmony and loyalty from on-high are undoubtedly self-serving. But so too are the liberal appeals to modesty, tolerance and restraint promoted by Bell and other outsiders when advocating a Confucian, rather than a Greek, approach to the Olympics and other pursuits.
‘I’ve learned to question that most sacred of modern Western values’, argues Bell reflecting on his time in the East, ‘rule by the people in the form of one person, one vote’. His book is peppered with condescending sneers at ill-informed, primary-school-educated voters. Confucius himself courted the elites rather than ordinary people within his own lifetime, but ironically these did not want to know, leaving him to become an ordinary teacher.
Whilst meritocracy may well have been a dramatic concept in the feudal world, today it is used as a means to bypass the people. Critics continue to lambast the Chinese over their, often misplaced, human rights and environmental concerns, while simultaneously ignoring, or in Bell’s case even celebrating, the one aspect about contemporary China most in need of reform – its inability to engage democratically with and release the potential of its people.
But those who despair of the popular prejudices of the majority are the people who do most to reinforce them. By side-stepping the need for hard arguments in the face of skeptical opinion, and appealing to experts instead, so the masses are cut off from public debate and ignorance thrives. Fearing that truth is too difficult for ordinary people to handle it is always the elites who, despite sounding moderate and understanding, are those who deny people’s rights.
Expecting little from his own audience, Bell uses a made-up character to promote ‘engaging with the work of Great Thinkers’ without offering the chance of such an engagement. Sadly, his book is littered with too many blatant contradictions, bar-room style observations, personal anecdotes and pet-prejudices to be considered a serious contribution to the literature.
First published by Culture Wars, 20 June 2008
Why ‘deradicalisation’ is not the answer
It's time Jacqui Smith realised that Islamist extremism is not a ‘foreign’ invader of Britain, but rather springs from our own bankrupt culture.
printable
version
On Tuesday, the British home secretary, Jacqui Smith, announced the development of a nationwide ‘deradicalisation’ programme to tackle people who have supposedly been drawn into violent Islamist extremism in Britain. Muslim community groups and councils will be allocated £12.5million, in addition to the £40million the government has already committed to the ‘prevent’ element of the national counterterrorism strategy made public in July 2006. The funding will be used for projects that will ‘challenge and resist’ the ideas and outlooks deemed to have informed recent acts of terror in the UK.
This strategy will fail for the simple reason that the government has yet to fully appreciate what the influences are that they seek to alter. In addition, officials have no idea as to what it is they would wish to alter them to.
The simplistic model that emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 was that the West was confronted by a resurgent form of political Islam emanating from the Middle East and further afield. Subsequent events, including the London bombings on 7 July 2005, led to an almost begrudging recognition that many of the perpetrators of terrorism had been educated in the West, if not born there.
This still allowed for the possibility that their ideas were largely foreign in origin, or that their outlooks were alien to the presumed norms prevailing in the West. Hence the continuing focus on the form that these ideas take – couched in their jihadist rhetoric – or appeals to defending an ill-defined sense of ‘our values’ or ‘our way of life’. The UK government has failed to confront the true content of what these ideas expressed: a rejection of all things Western, rather than a positive affirmation of anything else.
Nor has the government offered an alternative vision of what we stand for as a society, beyond rhetorical references to freedom and democracy. However, the espousal of such values jars with current proposals to extend the period that alleged terrorists may be held without charge (from 28 to 42 days) - from a prime minister, Gordon Brown, who was never elected by the people.
The truth is that the sources of self-styled Islamist terrorism are more likely to be found within our own shores and within our own communities as anywhere else. It may be more likely, for now, that British Asians will act upon these ideas – with the benefit of an enhanced sense of victimhood that they may have picked up within the British education system. But as the steadily increasing number of white faces appearing on the counterterrorism radar suggests, this need not necessarily be true for much longer.
If this sounds rather harsh, let me illustrate what I mean by way of an example. A good friend of mine recently spent a day in the law faculty of a prestigious British university. The distinguished professor she spent time with advised her that nowadays students are not the same as they once were. They were no longer expected to read numerous books, write long essays or memorise case law. Rather, they are presented with handouts of Powerpoint presentations to read and they keep a weblog of their activities.
That evening, my friend attended the Islamic society meeting in the same university. There, she encountered many of the same students she had met earlier in the day (when they had been disinterestedly sending texts on their mobile phones during the law seminars). Now, however, the students appeared eager to learn. The cleric who ran the meeting expected them to recall specific lines from the Koran and to be familiar with all aspects of Islamic jurisprudence.
Maybe somebody should ask Jacqui Smith who here is the ‘radicalising’ influence? Is it the foreign mullah who ran the evening class, demanding attention and commanding respect, or was it the jaded Western intellectual who deep down believes that there is no truth that can be taught, that not too much should be expected of young people nowadays, and who in any case would not wish to damage their ‘self-esteem’ through challenging them in class?
I use this vignette to suggest that the roots of so-called ‘radicalisation’ are much wider and deeper than can be addressed by a prejudicially targeted programme focusing on ill-founded notions as to where such ideas might emanate from. Indeed, rather than targeting Muslim communities and monitoring Islamic society meetings, the authorities would be better off observing and monitoring their own contemporary culture.
Far from there being a layer of vulnerable young Muslims who are preyed upon by various hotheads, what we find, time and again, are passionate, intelligent and energetic individuals who somehow fail to find any meaning or purpose to their lives from within the confines of contemporary Western culture. Most of these are neither disconnected nor alienated from society, and rather than being ‘radicalised’ from the outside, they actively look for something to join. Nick Reilly, the supposed simpleton whose rudimentary device exploded in his face recently in Exeter, is proof that it is almost impossible to ‘recruit’ anyone of note into terrorism.
In short: a few, fairly intelligent people, deprived of a sense of purpose, will go looking for answers in radical Islam. These are Western people looking for some alternatives to the bankrupt intellectual and political culture around them. Those who are apparently ‘recruited’, on the other hand, are mostly idiots.
In focusing on so-called ‘extremists’ and ‘radicals’, the authorities and security agencies manage to miss that which lies right under their nose. What’s worse, the very language they use belies their own difficulty. By accusing someone of being ‘extreme’ or ‘radical’, they effectively give up on any attempt to address the content of what people supposedly believe, targeting instead the extent to which they are held to believe it. This is like saying, ‘I don’t care what it is you believe in, so long as it is not too much’, which in its turn is an admission that they themselves believe in nothing.
At a talk given to the Smith Institute in London on the evening of her announcement regarding the proposed ‘deredicalisation’ programme, Jacqui Smith suggested that ‘lacking a positive vision, al-Qaeda can only define itself by what it opposes’. Talk of projecting yourself on to others! She and her cronies would be better off outlining what kind of Britain it is that they do want to live in, rather than obsessing over a handful of dangerous idiots whose ideas and outlooks would seem entirely unimpressive were it not for the vacuum that they confront.
First published by spiked, 5 June 2008
History: it’s just one bloody thing after another
Having jettisoned political and historical frameworks, Michael Burleigh's story of terrorism combines a lack of insight with excessive prejudice about curry-eating loyalists and headbutting Glaswegians.
printable
version
In a recent interview for the Guardian’s education supplement, historian and writer Michael Burleigh suggested that his decision to leave academia five years ago, after stints, amongst others, at New College Oxford and the London School of Economics, was driven by a determination not to ‘become a guru-like figure’, ‘who surrounded himself with cronies’ and ended up creating ‘clones’ (1).
Judging by his latest book, Blood and Rage – A Cultural History of Terrorism, a more likely explanation is that such is the impoverished nature of his arguments that the only people who were prepared to listen were either cronies or clones. So, while describing women in burqas as ‘black sacks’, or suggesting that ‘headbutting one another’ is ‘a national (sic) pastime in Glasgow’, may appeal to a certain juvenile sense of humour, it is unlikely to endear him to those, as yet un-cloned, constituencies he might wish or need to influence.
One can only presume that he does not care. Over the course of 486 pages on the emergence and development of terrorism, which begins with nineteenth-century Fenians, Nihilists and Anarchists, ends with al-Qaeda, and takes in Italy’s Red Brigades and Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang on the way, there is very little in the way of analysis. Indeed, he openly declares a desire to focus on ‘actions rather than theories’. But in the absence of analysis, his bombastic and belligerent asides become not just tedious - they encourage suspicion as to his reading of events.
It makes for a grating experience. Reading Blood and Rage reminded me of the great Cambridge historian Sir Herbert Butterfield’s famous aphorism – memorably adapted by Alan Bennett in his 2004 play The History Boys – that history is ‘just one bloody thing after another’. Sounding like a breathless and overexcited child who has just come back from a school trip, Burleigh delivers to the reader an un-insightful and somewhat random list of things that happened. Nowhere, other than in a short passage by Nelson Mandela, is there any attempt to explain how ideas and events may be shaped by context or will.
What really betrays Burleigh’s approach is the subtitle to his book: ‘A Cultural History of Terrorism’. That is, it’s history with the society and politics taken out. With no attempt to engage with the ideas and aspirations that motivated his assorted protagonists, be it the Basque ETA or Algeria’s FLN, or any attempt to appreciate the circumstances in which groupings found themselves, it is little wonder that Burleigh’s narration appears as a sequence of inexplicable events. Burleigh is left instead with just their actions to describe – mysterious, dangerous and impenetrable.
Annoyingly, this also means that even a reactionary like Burleigh effectively lets those who resort to acts of terror off the hook. To him they have become addicted to violence or, as he dubiously proposes, ‘are morally insane’, in which case they can hardly be held culpable.
With less sophistication and reason than the succession of mediocrities occupying the role of British home secretary, his rant continues, page after page after page. In the Daily Telegraph he continued his moan: ‘there are people in this country …who despise our way of life and seek to change it for all time.’ (2) But which people and what way of life?
Like many others, his prejudices encourage him to see such forces as largely emanating from far-flung places and foreign outlooks, in other words, ‘over there’. Yet closer scrutiny of his own invective would reveal to him the vast list of domestic enemies that exist among the ‘liberal elites’. These are variously castigated as ‘fervent human rights lawyers’, ‘loathsome academic[s]’, ‘fanciful journalists’, ‘celebrity useful idiots’ and other ‘well-to-do apologists’. He may have a point, but unable to engage with the breadth and depth of this cultural conflict on the homefront, he simply dismisses it and comes across as a grumpy old man.
At every turn, whether it is in the Middle East, North Africa, Italy, Germany or the UK, he resorts to the tired and trite notion that the roots of terror lie in the rapid expansion of higher education without a concomitant development of employment opportunities. This growth may well have presented him with students less sympathetic to his cheap caricatures of Northern Ireland’s loyalists as people whose ‘idea of an exotic meal was to add curry sauce to a bag of chips, while venturing as far as Tenerife for their first overseas holiday’. But this supposed explanation is unlikely to be ‘the actual source of anger on the part of young Muslims’, as he suggests on his website (3).
Almost inevitably, amidst so much manure, the odd flower of insight blooms. But his apercus could have resulted in a 20-page essay rather than a 500-page book. One of the most useful bits, stemming from his rampant, yet oddly anachronistic anti-left wing prejudices, is a useful section - unusual to books covering Islamist terrorism - detailing the role and barbarity of the Mujahideen in Bosnia, as well as how their actions were supported or ignored by Western radicals.
Elsewhere, he astutely describes terrorists as ‘juvenile fantasists’ and ‘self-styled victims’ whose ‘misdirected or frustrated altruism’ makes them ‘too eager to repudiate themselves’ through their actions, hoping thereby to ‘overcome the boredom and purposelessness of their own lives’.
He also usefully debunks many illusions as to the supposed uniqueness of the threats we face today – simultaneous attacks, suicide bombings, bomb-making manuals, training camps and the targeting of information networks – as well as the overreaction of the authorities to these threats. His detailing of the sheer number and intensity of terrorist attacks in the not too distant past also acts as a reality check.
Yet, despite seeing through Islamism as a pose, he is still driven, through his refusal to see the origins and parallels for this within the West, to describe the contemporary crop of self-styled Islamist losers, plotting terrorist outrages from their bedrooms in east London, as somehow presenting ‘an existential threat to the whole of civilisation’. This seems like a tall order, but one somehow befitting a former academic left howling to the barking of Barking.
Senior figures in the world of national security today call for a new narrative of resilience to be developed in the face of these supposed threats. It is possible that Burleigh may seem to them to offer a little of what they need. But while history is always contested, his story is simply a fanciful myth, unable to engage or captivate a broader community, as real resilience and proper history would.
In the end, Burleigh abdicates all responsibility by suggesting that ‘the battle with jihadism will only be won by Muslims themselves’. In fact, he laments that ‘it is difficult to see how things can be rectified’, comparing contemporary counterterrorism initiatives to an endless game of ‘whack a mole’. Unable to engage in, let alone win, the battle of ideas, as has happened before, Burleigh will simply be left alone with his cronies and his clones.
Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, by Michael Burleigh is published by Harper Press.
(1) Michael Burleigh: The reluctant guru, Guardian, 11 March 2008
(2) See Michael Burleigh’s website here.
(3) Actions speak loudest to terrorists, Mr Brown , Telegraph, 15 November 2007
First published by spiked, 30 May 2008
Worst-case scenarios
review of Worst-case scenarios, by Cass R. Sunstein
printable
version
First published by International Affairs, 8 May 2008
Democratizing technology
Review of Democratizing technology: risk, responsibility & the regulation of chemicals, by Anne Chapman
printable
version
First published by Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development, 1 March 2008
Death of the warrior ethos
Weaving a path from Achilles to Rambo via Shakespeare and Tolstoy, Christopher Coker’s insightful new book captures the increasing demonisation of war – even ‘good wars’ – and the denigration of honour, duty and glory.
printable
version
In his 1998 BBC Reith lectures, ‘War and Our World’, the military historian and journalist John Keegan described war as ‘collective killing for a purpose’ (1). It is hardly surprising, then, that societies in which a spirit of solidarity has been diminished, the necessity to fight dismissed, and attempts to impart a sense of direction or meaning discredited, are unable to celebrate their wars and their warriors.
Primarily, of course, it is the ‘killing’ part of Keegan’s definition that contemporary societies feel uncomfortable with, or reject outright, rather than the ‘collective’ or ‘purpose’ elements, which many would dearly like to rediscover while remaining sceptical about some of their earlier incarnations. But it is precisely the absence of these latter factors that have served to create confusion about the former.
Anyone wishing to pay tribute to warriors today, or to compose a paean to war as ‘a test of, and testament to, a nation’s resilience’, would be ill-advised to do so. Christopher Coker, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, has done the next best thing. His book The Warrior Ethos, while imbued with a sense of loss, also appropriately captures the ambivalence and ambiguity of our times.
Despite copious notes and references, this is far from being an academic text. In parts The Warrior Ethos feels more poetic than polemic, as Coker endeavours to weave a path from Achilles to Rambo via Shakespeare and Tolstoy. His sense that the spirit of an age can be captured through its literature and culture, rather than historical and political analysis alone, proves most rewarding, especially in revealing what has changed.
It is not simply a lost world that is unravelled, but lost words, too. ‘Honour’, ‘Duty’ and ‘Glory’ lose their meaning, and their use, if we forget the past, dismiss the present and refuse to face up to the future. ‘Heroism’, stripped of its subjective factor, appears merely to be bred-in, or institutionalised. Alternatively it is pathologised, as a self-serving and dangerous obsession, or worse, as the sad struggle of trauma victims.
Henry V’s decisive defeat of the French at Agincourt in 1415, as well as Shakespeare’s account of it with the infamous ‘band of brothers’, can now be portrayed as being about people suffering from ‘a centuries-old “deception” about the glory of war’. Inverting this new orthodoxy, Coker reveals brilliantly how ‘we tend to deprive them of the fullness of their lives in order to support and sustain the smallness of our own’.
It is our contemporary construction of events that can transform these historic episodes from being ‘full of meaning’ to being seen as a ‘futile waste’. In that sense, the postmodern disposition towards not taking anything too seriously is quite disabling, even in the absence of any enemy we may face. But we should be clear, that this ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ (2), stems from an interpretation of the world rather than being inherent.
‘All of us in the Western world come from a culture which doubts its own first principles’, rails Coker. So freedom must be fought for afresh in each generation. Stuggle, too, despite its rejection by those of sensitive dispositions, is also a necessity in nature. ‘Only in the last thirty years have we begun to imagine living at peace with nature’, he notes, yet increasing numbers seem to be forgetting this at their peril.
War, like all struggles, is transformative, both for the individuals concerned and for society. Little wonder then, that societies which – despite their rhetoric – fear change, rejecting the uncertainties it creates and endlessly seeking to control risks, should have such qualms about it. Fighting forces them to take a view of the future, regardless of whether they prefer the present or believe in any particular cause.
This transcendental element of existence is most acutely felt by warriors, who are asked to be willing to sacrifice themselves for the ‘greater good’ – another unfashionable concept, and one invoked by The Military Covenant that has only relatively recently been codified and released (3). But again, a ‘greater good’ presumes a ‘collective’ with a sense of ‘purpose’, despite these being noticeable by their absence today.
Coker does not romanticise killing, although, like a recent report accusing the British Army of glamorising warfare (4), he notes a growing reluctance in military circles to use the ‘K’ word. The preference for euphemisms, such as ‘engage’ or ‘suppress’, can rightly be interpreted as defensive. As in animal testing laboratories, when researchers avoid the ‘K’ word, or claim to prioritise ‘welfare’, their evasion allows opponents to run riot.
It was enlightened modernity itself that put paid to Homeric heroes such as Achilles who, living in an unfettered Hobbesian ‘state of nature’, could go about butchering their opponents with little sense of remorse. The modern warrior is accountable to society, choosing to fight for a shared interest. We are not driven mindlessly into feuds through genetic blood ties, but determine our course by our own reason.
But society, suggests Coker, by sanctioning its warriors’ actions, simultaneously removes the determination of their destiny from them. This suppression of the one to the many works so long as there are many who wish to be one, and so long as all parties trust one another and themselves. If these bonds are broken, a vast array of legal codes is imposed upon would-be warriors to patrol their actions and even their thoughts.
In addition, the American cultural historian Paul Fussell suggests that the attenuation of religious belief in the modern world contributed to making modern war and especially death much harder to bear than in the past (5). ‘How does a society cope with death when it no longer dreams of eternity?’ asks Coker, noting how it has been turned into a risk to be avoided, thereby robbing it, and life, of their significance.
The error is to measure life in terms of risk at all. Life, argued Freud, loses its interest when death may not be risked (6). Another way to put it is that there is more to life than mere existence through risk management. As Coker argues, ‘Reason serves the passions; it doesn’t suppress them.’ Yet, in recent years, the military has tied itself in knots assessing risks, thereby encouraging its detractors to do likewise (7).
Take one example, the tragic deaths from gunshot wounds of four young soldiers at the Princess Royal Barracks in Deepcut, England, between 1995 and 2002. This has now led to, by one count, 17 separate inquiries, including those by members of parliament, the Ministry of Defence, the Official Review, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, and a two-year independent review of the various re-investigations (8). No wonder the military feels paralysed.
Meanwhile, the West’s enemies in the ‘war on terror’ claim to embrace death. But suicide bombers are not warriors, proposes Coker, because they are not accountable to society. The problem here is to take them at face value, or to view them as that different to us in the first place. It is not just the Ummah that is not consulted nowadays, but the self-disenfranchised millions in Western democracies, too.
Maybe, in the absence of a cohering society, we are all afflicted by a form of nihilism to some degree. Coker cites Nate Fick in his memoir of the Second Gulf War exclaiming: ‘Death before dishonour. Marines tattoo it on their forearms, but these fuckers [the Iraqis] live it.’ (9) Other, more dispassionate observers, however, characterise self-styled jihadists as making a lot of noise but saying very little, and as having a passion for self-publicity.
Image influences reality, but is limited too, notes Coker. He sees how today’s ‘Jarheads’ are more likely to style themselves upon one-dimensional Hollywood heroes, hip hop and the lyrics of Marilyn Manson, than to have read or appreciated the psychological depth of Greek epic poetry, and bemoans the ‘bad ass’ influence within the US military of those for whom Tupac Shakur is a more familiar figure than Abraham Lincoln (10).
This is a lazy caricature, for while not describing Iraqis as ‘motherfuckers’ or themselves as ‘cool because we’re so good at blowing shit up’, it is the elites who are confused in the current period. They fail to lead for lack of purpose or belief in themselves. And contrary to Coker’s assertions, films do capture mythical dimensions and transcendence, as epics like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Pan’s Labyrinth prove.
He is also in danger of overstating the role of technology. Coker seems mesmerised by the world of cybernetic warriors and unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs). Quite how much he knows of the ‘hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis’ is anybody’s guess. True, such developments impact on the conduct of war, but it is the loss of confidence in humanity that drives these developments, rather than the other way around.
Technology need not erode tradition and myth, as he suggests. If, for myth, we read a self-affirming narrative that inspires, instructs, enables and connects, as he proposes, then this necessitates the engagement of human passions. For tradition, we could prioritise the truth, as we see it, one that has to be fought for and engaged with, not just imparted. This is the business of politics, not technology or management.
‘Theory’, wrote Marx, ‘becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses’ (11). It is the inability of the elites today to appreciate the material power of ideas, let alone fight for them, that leave them unarmed, looking to technology or management to fill the gap. Ensuring ideas ‘grip the masses’, and become the truth, combining objective evidence with subjective will, is a labour of love entirely alien to them.
There is a real irony, then, in the US military having now introduced a ‘Warrior Ethos’ programme across its force, from basic training to the Army War College, to remind its personnel as to what is expected of them. Like ‘citizenship classes’ in the UK, this seems doomed to fail where it is most needed – at the level of lived ethos as opposed to paper exercises where, unlike on the battlefield, targets are readily met.
The British military is not immune to such instrumental trends. Reports highlight how a career in the Armed Forces ‘equips people with skills and qualifications that can be transferred to civilian life’ (12), or provide ‘an opportunity that may have been denied in civilian life’ (13). In general, the approach is one that emphasises what people can get out of the military, rather than what they will need to give.
Unsurprisingly, then, with such confusion at large across society, as well as embedded in the ranks of the military, Coker identifies how a ‘Therapy Culture’ further confuses matters. It acts as an ‘invitation to infirmity’, he proposes, noting ‘we heal psychic wounds when we are able to give meaning to our experiences. Clearly, if an experience is deemed ‘meaningless’, then ‘so is the pain and suffering that results’.
We are now a long way away from George C Scott’s portrayal of the great American General, George Patton. Talking about war at the start of the 1970 movie, he is depicted as confessing, ‘I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than my life’. Nowadays, it is journalists who self-depict themselves as the real heroes of war, risking it all in search of ‘the truth’ and without killing anyone to boot (14).
There is no glory in killing but, as Plato reminds us, ‘What makes us human … is not nature or nurture but our capacity to rise above both’. If we do not want, as Nietzsche warned, to find the abyss looking into us when we look into it (15), then it is high time we were reminded of these few basic truths. The fight for truth and for freedom is essential, and Coker’s book goes some way towards highlighting this.
The Warrior Ethos: Military Culture and the War on Terror by Christopher Coker is published by Routledge.
(1) War and Our World: The Reith Lectures 1998, John Keegan, Hutchinson, 1998, p.2
(2) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard, Manchester University Press, 1984, p.xxiv
(3) Soldiering – The Military Covenant, Army Doctrine Publication Volume 5, 2000
(4) Informed Choice? Armed Forces Recruitment Practice in the United Kingdom, David Gee, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, 2007
(5) The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern Warfare, Paul Fussell, Scribner, 1991, p.24
(6) Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, Paul Ricoeur, New Haven, 1970, p.329
(7) Informed Choice?, op. cit.
(8) Breaking the Covenant: Governance of the British Army in the Twenty-First Century, Anthony Forster, International Affairs, 2006, Vol.82, No.6, p.1048
(9) One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, Nathaniel Fick, Houghton Mifflin, 2005, p.82
(10) Generation Kill: Living Dangerously on the Road to Baghdad with the Ultra-Violent Marines of Bravo Company, Evan Wright, Bantam 2004
(11) A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx, 1844
(12) Ministry of Defence Responds to Independent Report ‘Informed Choice?’ on Armed Forces Recruitment Practice in the UK, Government News Network, 7 January 2008
(13) House of Commons Defence Committee, Duty of Care (Vol.1), The Stationery Office 2005, p.5-6
(14) This Man’s Army: A Soldier’s Story from the Front Line of the War on Terrorism, Andrew Exum, Gotham, 2005, p.233
(15) Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886
First published by spiked, 29 February 2008
Home-grown nihilism: the clash within civilisations
What is it that propels young men from Birmingham, Burnley, Leeds or Luton – individuals with no tangible connection to Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Bosnia, Chechnya or anywhere else much beyond these shores – to choose to be, or to support, terrorists?
printable
version
First published by Defence Academy Journal, 14 February 2008
Between Iraq and a hard place
In an otherwise usefully myth-debunking work on risk management in an age of war, there is no admission that debate on the invasion must go beyond cost-benefit analysis.
printable
version
Upon reaching the final page of University of Chicago professor Cass Sunstein’s latest book on risk, two reasonable assumptions can be drawn as to his political (he would probably say ethical) persuasions - first, that he opposed military intervention in Iraq in 2003, and, second, that he favours far-reaching international action on climate change.
These are both perfectly respectable, if debatable, positions. It seems, however, as if this distinguished-service professor of jurisprudence, like many others across the political spectrum nowadays, is rather loath to debate things. Rather, he is in search of a technical tool to decide matters for us. Sunstein has found this in risk management.
He starts off well enough, wanting to steer us on a course between the opposing perils of inaction and overreaction in the face of potentially catastrophic risks.
The US, unlike Europe, he proposes, has developed an exaggerated fear of terror attacks while simultaneously underestimating the consequences of global warming. Why is this?
His book, aimed at a wide audience, usefully debunks a number of myths along the way. American Republicans are not as intransigent as is often made out. He reminds readers that it was the US that originally led the charge on combating climate change, while Europeans developed the precautionary principle, invoked in going to war in Iraq.
As others have done before him, Sunstein shows how little logic there is in precaution. Variously used to justify both action and inaction, its consequences can be as uncertain as the uncertainties it is called upon to ward against. Hence, for Sunstein, war in Iraq to reduce the risk of terror would always create new risks that we would then have to live with.
But this is where the analysis of a Chicago Law School lawyer is exposed as being as limited as those of both the pro-war and anti-war lobbies. Iraq should have been about more than calculating risk-risk tradeoffs. Political principles, such as state sovereignty, were at stake too. And no risk-management process can defend these.
Unlike others who may read this book, I have no problem with the use of cost-benefit analysis or future discounting, although, as Sunstein accepts, neither is an exact science. However, when to the best of our abilities all the facts and pseudo-facts are in, decision-making in a democracy still remains a politically contested arena.
It is never just information that determines policy, but rather how that information is interpreted through particular outlooks. Hence, absence of evidence for weapons of mass destruction might mean that they are not there, or that they are extremely well hidden. Either way, facts become secondary to the framework we apply to the world.
Citing the work of Paul Slovic and others, Sunstein reveals his own preference for the influence of emotional and psychological factors over cultural and sociological ones. In this regard he is in tune with the times. A society that is little more than an aggregate of individuals has trouble conceptualising the import and impact of broader forces.
Thus it is almost as an afterthought that he notes in his conclusions: “Of course, well-organized groups, the media and political leaders have power to influence the underlying dynamics.” But there is precious little about these in the remaining pages. Perhaps they could serve as the subject for a future book?
In fact, Sunstein unconsciously reveals the answer to the problems he addresses very early on in the book. Whenever he worried as a child, his mother would ask: “What’s the worst that could happen?” Sunstein confides that “her confidence was contagious”. It is precisely societies without confidence that obsess about worst-case scenarios.
Worst-Case Scenarios, by Cass R. Sunstein is published by Harvard University Press.
First published by Times Higher Education Supplement, 31 January 2008
Gordon Brown’s state of terror
The UK prime minister's vision for counterterrorism would involve reorganising the whole of society around precaution and fear.
printable
version
The British prime minister’s announcement of new security measures, and his promotion of wide-ranging new partnerships to root out extremism in the United Kingdom, confirms that counterterrorism is fast becoming one of the main organising principles of society in the twenty-first century.
Gordon Brown used the annual security statement to parliament to announce a wide range of new proposals for combating terrorism. In a packed House of Commons, he presented both hard measures – increased surveillance, checks, barriers and monitoring – as well as softer ones designed to win the hearts and minds of those who might be tempted by terror.
On the same day, a related article by him in the tabloid Sun newspaper, entitled ‘I need YOUR help to beat terrorists’, sought to drive the message home. This was, he proposed, ‘a generation-long challenge’, that would require a partnership ‘with everyone’. He concluded, for those who had still not absorbed the breadth or gravity of the situation, with a piece of over-inflated, pseudo-Churchillian prose exhorting us to ‘fight street by street, community by community and year by year’.
But his actual proposals look anything but brave or combative. Rather, they are a concession and a gift to the handful of nihilistic, self-styled, radical Islamists, fantasists and wannabe terrorists whose actual impact on British life, were it not for such grandiose and vacuous security responses, remains largely marginal.
In fact, Brown’s mantra on the need for ‘physical barriers’ is the perfect metaphor for the authorities’ inability to tackle this limited threat either intellectually or emotionally. Unwilling to believe that the nation is not about to crumble in a heap of cowering vulnerability, and unable to provide any grand vision of why British society is worth defending, Brown hides behind steel doors and blast-proof windows.
Last summer, after failed attempts by alleged al-Qaeda sympathisers to detonate gas canisters at a London nightclub and Glasgow Airport, the new prime minister, less than 24 hours in the post, asked the former head of defence intelligence and the Navy, Sir Alan West, to conduct a review of security in public places. Sir Alan’s report back, now in his new capacity as Labour minister for security, formed a key part of these proposals, arguing, amongst other things, for the designing, or redesigning, of public spaces and buildings – specifically airports, major railway stations, shopping centres and sports facilities – to deter future terrorists, or to mitigate their possible impact.
As I have argued on spiked before, this focus on managing risks, rather than projecting a sense of positive purpose, reflects a defeatist attitude that can only encourage those who would want to have a go. This outlook deflects society from clarifying and pursuing any grand broader aims and objectives (see Britain’s bunker mentality, by Bill Durodié). Turning ourselves into some kind of Fortress Britain offers an easy win to the small number of cack-handed idiots we truly confront. Bombing civilisation out of existence is an impossible task, but turning society in on itself has been achieved far too easily.
Now, according to the new proposals, planners and architects will be required to consider their designs from a counterterrorist perspective, relocating windows to reduce the risk should they shatter, placing obstacles on pavements to prevent vehicle-borne devices and not building underground car parks – a restriction guaranteed to warm the heart of many environmentalists. In fact, such buildings have successfully been designed previously. They were called castles. But whilst functional, they were never the emblems of a free and open society such as ours.
Such measures have not been forced upon us through the activities of hardened terrorists – the prime minister noted in his speech that ‘no major failures in our protective security have been identified’. It is the new ethos of precaution that has been adopted throughout government that is driving these proposals. In effect, this argues that in all instances of uncertainty or doubt, society should be reorganised along the lines of the worst that might happen, applying an ‘act first, find the evidence later’ principle of organisation.
Far from suffering from ‘a failure of imagination’, the criticism levelled at the US security services by the 9/11 Commission report, it would seem now that officials and politicians seem keen to imagine rather too much. ‘Terrorism can hit us anywhere from any place’, argued Brown in the Sun. As such limitless possibilities might mean attacks beyond the major public buildings and places his security minister’s report addressed, the prime minister, in his speech to the Commons, also offered ‘updates’, ‘more detailed advice’ and ‘greater vigilance’ for other, less prominent places, such as shops, schools, hospitals and places of religious worship.
This support will be backed up by guidance and training from 160 counter-terrorism advisers who will clearly have very busy jobs. To help them in their thankless task of spreading the Gospel of Doom across the entire nation, local authorities will also now be mandated, as part of their performance framework, to assess the measures they have taken to counter terrorism. Judging by the way such targets tend to be usurped by those who are called upon to enact them, it is likely that any minor act, such as watering the hanging flower baskets that adorn many city centres, will now be counted as a possible opportunity for deterring terror.
More insidiously, Brown hopes to engage young people in opposing so-called ‘extremist influences’ not just in schools and colleges - which, over recent years, have already been turned into social engineering outlets - but also ‘through the media, culture, sport and arts’. The British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Sport England, Tate Britain and Arts Council England have already signed up to such initiatives.
Once upon a time, it was just the former education secretary, Charles Clarke, who thought that ‘education for its own sake is a bit dodgy’. Now, it appears, Gordon Brown and others are proposing we all go much further than that. Culture for its own sake, sport for its own sake and the arts for their own sake, without a good dose of anti-radicalisation thrown in for good measure, are all a bit dodgy, too, it would seem.
In short, British society is to be reorganised around precaution and the fear of terrorism. Everything we do, from the buildings we use to the ideas that are taught, will be informed by the risk of a handful of nihilistic nutters blowing us all to smithereens. Society will be built - often literally - in fear of the uncommon enemy rather than to further the common good.
A youth panel to advise the government was also announced. By this logic, it is the government that is in need of support. That may not be too far from the truth. Lord West has already had to make an embarrassing U-turn regarding his endorsement, or not, for longer periods of detention without trial. West explained away his unfortunate public disagreement with the prime minister as the act of a ‘simple sailor’.
While the UK government is keen on advising President Musharraf of Pakistan as to the need to end his state of emergency, the British authorities will nevertheless seek to use their own set of emergency powers to achieve the goal of holding suspects without charge for longer than is currently allowed. Without some kind of permanent emergency in Britain today, there would be little to talk about.
First published by spiked, 15 November 2007
White Paper on Security of European Electricity Distribution
How the threat to security of electricity supply from blackouts may be mitigated through improved training at the level of transmission system operators.
printable
version
First published by UNDERSTAND, 1 August 2007
Fear and terror in a post-political age
The London bombings in 2005 seem more akin to the Columbine high-school massacre and other such incidents; they have less to do with imams and mullahs and far more in common with the dystopian views of numerous commentators who criticise Western society today.
printable
version
First published by Government and Opposition, 7 July 2007
Homegrown nihilism - the clash within civilisations
Terrorism reflects a wide spectrum of causes and beliefs. Individuals who trained in camps in Afghanistan have different motivations from those who act out of a sense of vengeance in the Gaza strip. Some groups may hold global pretensions, but most have amore limited, regional focus. What it is that propels young men from Britain – individuals with no tangible connection to anywhere else much beyond these shores – to choose to be, or to support, terrorists?
printable
version
First published by The Smith Institute, 14 May 2007
A cultural revolution at Tate Liverpool
Free of Western pessimism, the young Chinese artists on exhibition in Britain are witty and experimental.
printable
version
In the Gospel according to John, Pontius Pilate is held to have asked Jesus ‘What is truth?’ That question lies at the heart of a major UK exhibition of contemporary Chinese art – The Real Thing.
How do we know anything? The Chinese say that the height of Mount Everest is 8,848m, so when in 1999 an American GPS reading pegged it at 8,850m the radical artist Xu Zhen organised an expedition to the mountain to bring back the top part of the summit and put it on display in Shanghai, thereby restoring the mountain to its ‘real’ height. This provoked outrage among foreign correspondents in China, especially when experts confirmed that Everest was indeed shorter than had been assumed.
The pinnacle of Everest in a refrigerated cabinet, along with expedition maps, equipment and a video of the team sawing off the peak and sliding it down the mountain - together with before and after shots - are now on display for all to see in the exhibition at Tate Liverpool as ‘8848 Minus 1.86’.
Or are they? Was it all an elaborate hoax by citizens of a country that once banned irony? Who is having the sense of humour failure now? How tall is Everest really? How do we know? Does it change? Does it matter?
Chinese art, like China itself, is too vast to be contained or pigeonholed. This allows critics to project whatever they want on to it. If they see China to be out of control and rapacious then they are more likely to fall for the Everest scam. If they see it as suffering from the tremendous upheavals of rapid industrialisation then they will read misery and drudgery in the faces of factory workers who would otherwise have toiled in the fields.
What is the real thing when it comes to China? The co-curators of the exhibition should be commended for daring to ask the question, even if the answer is full of contradictions and ambiguities, ‘the real thing’ oscillating as it does between an aspiration towards authenticity on the one hand and the Coca-Cola slogan on the other - which is perceived by many as a metaphor for the dangers of unfettered consumerism.
Outside the exhibition, in Albert Dock itself, floats a 7m high model of Russian constructionist Vladimir Tatlin’s ‘Monument to the Third International’ of 1919. Except that Ai Weiwei has remodelled the replica as ‘Working Progress (Fountain of Light) 2007’, transforming it into an illuminated chandelier that glistens on the water to celebrate ‘the enlightened thinking behind Lenin’s theories’ - distinguishing these from the system that sent Weiwei’s own family into exile during the Cultural Revolution.
Inside the exhibition hall Qiu Zhijie also references the past in his ‘Railway from Lhasa to Kathmandu’. In 1863, a 33-year-old Indian, Nain Singh, was tasked by the Royal British Engineers to map out Tibet in precise 33inch strides whilst concealing his purpose from onlookers by using prayer beads to keep count. Qiu has completed the journey in reverse, wearing ankle chains separated by 33inches and collecting local artefacts along the way that he smelted into railway tracks now suspended in the air, to symbolise the completion of the highest railway in the world, which opened in 2006.
It is as if both these artists are pointing to the fact that neither the Soviet Union nor the British Empire quite completed their plans. Only now might it be possible to fulfil Tatlin’s vision. Ai Weiwei should know as he is working with the engineers Ove Arup to build a similar structure for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Qiu Zhijie states directly that the opening of the railway would have more impact on these remote parts than the British Empire or the Chinese imposition of sovereignty on Tibet in 1959.
Nearby Wang Wei has made a video of a walled space built by migrant labourers in Beijing as part of his exhibition in the 798 Space of the Dashanzi Art District. What is he saying?
Is this a new construction within an old building that finally gets pushed down by those that made it, representing the possible fragility and futility of the new China? Or is it an old construction (using recycled bricks that arrive on donkey-drawn carts) within a newer space (built of steel and concrete) even though the space itself is reclaimed from a former machine tool factory? Wang wanted to highlight the workers’ plight in a period of constant churning and the creation of new divisions, symbolised by the wall. But his views on this and what it means may be very different to ours.
The opening exhibit itself is a play on our sense of reality. Arriving from the brightly lit gallery you walk onto a grey and dreary factory floor, populated by vast grinding machines and heavy metal ring sections over 30cm thick and a metre in length. Zhuang Hui’s ‘Factory Floor’ is eerily silent. Where are the workers? And why have they abandoned their lunch on the floor? Based on his real experience of working in ‘The East is Red Tractor Factory’ the exhibit recalls an incident when workers rushed off to the aid of an injured comrade.
Except that the meticulously recreated walls, complete with graffiti and grime, as well as the machines, chains, steel sheets and drums are all made of polystyrene, carefully and painstakingly painted to appear like the real thing. Like Everest, it fools the casual observer, but unlike much contemporary art elsewhere in the world it makes no pretence to being something it is not on any supposedly deeper level.
Elsewhere in this collection of mostly young artists, all of whose work has been completed since 2000, a sense of mirth abounds. Wang Peng locked his friends and guests into a gallery space with a padlock for which he did not have the key. How would they cope? Now the film of their reactions is the exhibit, although they did not know this at the time. More amusingly maybe, Wang is also found being filmed walking through New York and Beijing trailing a ball of string that unravels from a hole in the back of his jacket. ‘Passing Through New York 1997’ and ‘Passing Through Beijing 2006’ explores the respective reactions of passers-by, traffic and officials as they literally get caught up in his journey. Is there a difference? You decide.
Some exhibits, such as Yang Shaobin’s series of paintings, ‘800 Metres’, examining workers in a coalmine, are undoubtedly bleaker (and weaker) than others. China suffered fatal accidents in 30 mines in 2005. No one should imagine that development has not come at a cost. But is it one worth paying? Certainly the presumption by the curators that Wang Gongxin’s exhibit ‘Our Sky is Falling!’ should be read as an indictment of change appears unduly negative: a family stare in wonder as their roof caves in - but their faces neither suggest fear nor anger.
Cao Fei’s video of workers at the Osram lighting factory in Foshan was previously exhibited as part of the China Power Station: Part 1 exhibition put on by the Serpentine Gallery at Battersea Power Station in 2006 and previously reviewed on spiked (see Reawakening the ‘yellow peril’ by Tristan Edmondson).
This beautiful work can be read in many different ways. The tedium of factory work may not appeal to the artistic sensitivities of some Western cultural commentators. An appreciation of a world without light seems beyond them. But the final part of Fei’s video, ‘Whose Utopia? What are you doing here?’ entitled ‘My Future is not a Dream’, suggests hope and aspiration for a bright future among those who, for now, toil to light up the new China.
In many ways ambition and ambiguity are the key themes running through this exhibition. The works themselves are not necessarily typical of the artists. As Simon Groom, head of exhibitions at Tate Liverpool, notes in his introduction to the catalogue: ‘[M]any commentators on Chinese art are often bewildered by the variety of work an artist is capable of producing; works that might appear to lack consistency or logical connection between them, so opening them to accusations of unevenness, or lack of authenticity.’
But why should these artists be consistent, and who demands authenticity? China is a dynamic, exciting and rapidly changing society. This art reflects that. In his introduction, Xu Zhen, the man who would move mountains, urges us ‘not to seek out a logic that’s not there’, as well as stating boldly that ‘We’ll make better exhibitions next year...’. In the last of his Theses on Feuerbach, written in 1845, Karl Marx wrote; ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’. Replacing the word ‘philosophers’ with ‘Westerners’ in the above might provide an apt description for the ambitions behind The Real Thing.
In the run-up to its China Week in 2005, the BBC ran a series of interviews with young Chinese people. One of them, Jeff Qiang, remarked: ‘I know one day we will be the greatest power in the world. We all believe that.’ (2) The Real Thing suggests Chinese artists lack none of this self-belief and seem to be willing to explore almost anything, in any medium, including the meaning of meaning. Instead of trying to discover an authentic Chinese ‘voice’, Westerners would do well to be inspired by their ambition.
The Real Thing: contemporary art from China runs at Tate Liverpool until 10 June 2007 (further details and booking).
(1) China’s middle class revolution, BBC News, 11 October 2004
First published by spiked, 11 April 2007
Is London still stressed out about 7/7?
A survey claiming that 11 per cent of Londoners were ‘substantially stressed’ by the bombings raises more questions than answers.
printable
version
I have an interest to declare. My partner is one of those who lost a good friend in the terrorist bombings in London on 7 July 2005. Miriam Hyman was on the bus at Tavistock Square when the youngest of the suicide bombers, Hasib Hussain, detonated his device about an hour after the three other attacks on the London Underground.
Is my partner affected? Undoubtedly. Bereavement is painful, and it is felt individually in a way that few others can appreciate. Loss hurts. And loss of a young life brought about by such an ultimately pointless act as 7/7 can hurt even more (1).
So does my partner (a) feel upset when reminded of what happened; (b) have repeated thoughts about what happened; (c) have difficulty concentrating; (d) have trouble falling asleep; or (e) feel irritable or angry? Definitely. Yet now, answering ‘yes’ to having experienced any of these feelings in the aftermath of 7/7 indicates the presence of ‘substantial stress’, according to a team of researchers at King’s College and University College, London, in a survey conducted shortly after the 2005 attacks and now published in full.
Never mind the fact that most of us could answer ‘yes’ to at least (c), (d) and (e) every now and then – the conclusions of the research team, as presented in the British Journal of Psychiatry and reported in the Sun newspaper yesterday, are held to indicate that 11 per cent of the British population have suffered from persistent and substantial stress as a result of 7/7 (2).
The researchers first telephoned 1,010 Londoners 11 to 13 days after the 7/7 bombings and asked them about their feelings and thoughts; they then carried out a follow-up survey of 574 Londoners between seven and eight months after the bombings. In the first survey, they found that around a third of respondents were suffering from ‘substantial stress’ as a result of the bombings; by the time of the second survey, that had fallen to around 11 per cent of Londoners.
There seems to be a definitional problem in some of the language used. How upset does one need to be in order to be suffering from ‘substantial stress’? Using non-specific terms to explain an ill-defined concept like ‘stress’ is a formula that allows one to conclude pretty much anything, according to prevailing prejudices. The researchers themselves are not unaware of this problem. In their paper they argue: ‘It is reasonable to question whether our measure of substantial stress might have produced an artificially inflated prevalence estimate.’ (3) Tucked away in the ‘Limitations’ section of the paper, this caveat did not make the headlines.
If respondents answered yes to any of the questions (a) to (e) listed above, then they were judged to be suffering from ‘substantial stress’. Most said yes to the first question: ‘Do you feel upset when something reminds you of what happened?’ If you remove the yes responses to this question from the overall survey, then the percentage number of those who suffered from persistent and substantial stress falls from 11 per cent of the population to five per cent of the population.
It is somewhat surprising that the researchers, among the myriad questions they asked, did not enquire about the influence of media images and reporting of 7/7 on people’s views of the terrorist event. We are informed about the respondents’ age, gender, social class, working status, residential location, housing tenure, ethnicity, religion, income and parental status, but no mention is made of what media they follow and what kind of media images and claims they consumed post-7/7.
Those who have a link to individuals directly affected by the bombing will know that the constant reappearance of references to the attacks in the news, and particularly images of the blown-up bus (the other Underground incidents did not provide a similarly iconic image), often reminds them of what happened and leaves them feeling upset.
Feelings and perceptions are usually a poor guide for social research. For example, numerous surveys of both ordinary people and public figures in the US have consistently shown a high degree of expectation that there will be a terrorist attack in the coming months; such an attack has not come to pass. This shows that expectations can be wrong – and policy built on misplaced expectations can be disastrous.
As I have argued elsewhere, as more money has been spent on the ‘war on terror’, and as more measures are put in place to protect people from an allegedly big terrorist threat, the more people’s awareness about terrorism is raised and the more ‘stressed’ they seem to feel about it (4). Many in the British media and the authorities seem loathe to ‘let go’ of the 7/7 bombings, instead revisiting them as symbols of evil and as a justification for various legal measures. This institutionalisation of 7/7 and its effects no doubt has an impact on how people feel about the event. Could it be that society itself is prolonging the impact of terrorism on the population, by elevating terrorism to the main issue of the day and working from the presumption that it will have a long-lasting and damaging emotional impact on those who experience it?
At the same time, as the sociologist Frank Furedi has pointed out, people’s individual identities are increasingly fragile today. There is a widespread assumption that people are vulnerable and open to suffering from stress and other mental problems (5). It is notable, for instance, that those who took part in the 7/7 stress surveys were older and wealthier than non-respondents, and were less likely to have previously reported being stressed.
No doubt, some affected by 7/7 will have needed the support of psychiatrists to come to terms with their loss. But the growing presumption among professionals is that significant numbers of us have been affected somehow – a presumption which, sadly, this research will have done little to question. Ironically, those truly needing support may find it more difficult to receive it, given that we now have a situation where everyone involved in an incident is encouraged to seek counselling.
Professor Simon Wessely, a leading and insightful psychiatrist at King’s College London, tells people that whatever they do after an emergency, they should not give their name to the media. Otherwise they will never be able to ‘let go’ as the various anniversaries of the incident will bring a fresh round of calls to remember and reflect. Maybe we could add that nor should you give your name to ‘boffins’; certainly when research is carried out along these kinds of uncritical lines, the benefits are far from obvious.
(1) See The truth about 7/7 – it was meaningless, by Brendan O’Neill
(2) ‘Over 10% suffering 7/7 stress’, The Sun, 2 April 2007
(3) ‘Enduring consequences of terrorism: 7-month follow-up survey of reactions to the bombings in London on 7 July 2005’ by Rubin, G.J., Brewin, C.R., Greenberg, N., Hughes, J.H., Simpson, J. and Wessely, S., British Journal of Psychiatry, Vol.190, pp.350-356, 2007
(4) Panic in the Streets, New Humanist, May 2004
(5) Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Anxious Age by Frank Furedi, Routledge, 2003
First published by spiked, 3 April 2007
Resilience in the face of terrorism
A video podcast of a lecture on the roots of modern terrorism and the issue of risk.
printable
version
First published by University of Warwick Business School, 9 March 2007
Global terrorism: what should we really fear?
The immediate problem posed by terrorists remains extremely small. But there remains the far larger problem of defining who we are, what values we uphold, and where we intend to go in the twenty-first century.
printable
version
First published by Britain Today, 1 March 2007
PRESENTATIONS
List of Bill's presentations
printable
version
2009
Has Asia Been Resilient to Natural Disaster Events
and/or to Terrorist Attacks?
Anti-Terrorism International Working Group Panel
INCOSE 2009 International Symposium, Singapore, 20 July 2009
The Nexus between Religion, Radicalism and Terrorism: How Real?
23rd Asia-Pacific Roundtable
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2 June 2009
Keeping the threat of Bioterrorism in Perspective
Biocontainment, Biosafety and Biosecurity 2009
Institution of Chemical Engineers, One Portland Place, London, 28 April 2009
Risk, Resilience and Countering Terrorism
Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, UK¸ 24 April 2009
Countering Internet Radicalisation in South-East Asia
Goodwood Park Hotel, Singapore, 23 April 2009
Building Social and Psychological Resilience
3rd Asia-Pacific Programme for Senior National Security Officers
Civil Service College, Singapore, 21 April 2009
Concepts and Theories of Risk Management
3rd Asia-Pacific Programme for Senior National Security Officers
Civil Service College, Singapore, 20 April 2009
Home-Grown Nihilism versus Islamist Terrorism
Singapore Management University, Singapore, 16 March 2009
Addressing Youth Alienation and Preventing Radicalisation
The High Commission of Canada, Singapore, 5 March 2009
Debating Matters India - Question Time
British Council, New Delhi, 16 January 2009
How and Why the West became Paralysed by Fear
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 15 January 2009
Global Terrorism or Home-Grown Nihilism?
Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi, 14 January 2009
2008
China’s role in Africa
Battle for China Conference
Norton Rose, London, 12 July 2008
The Sociological basis for Trust
Trust in Me
Royal Institution, London, 30 June 2008
Risk Management in a Post-Political Age
Police Service of Northern Ireland C3 Conference
La Mon Hotel and Country Club, Belfast, 1 April 2008
Home Grown Nihilism
What is a Time of Terror?
University of Antwerp, Belgium, 29 February 2008
Obsessions with the Unknown
Intelligence, Evidence and the Construction and Management of Risk
Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick, 6 February 2008
When Health Scares become our Daily Meal
The Amigo Society Lunchtime Talk
Radisson SAS EU Hotel, Brussels, 15 January 2008
2007
Home Grown Nihilism
UCL Centre for Security and Crime Science Seminar
University College London, London, 4 December 2007
What are the Barriers to Science in the 21st Century?
Battle of Ideas Conference
Royal College of Art, London, 28 October 2007
Iraq – What Next?
Battle of Ideas Conference
Royal College of Art, London, 27 October 2007
The Domestic Security Environment
The Future of British Defence Policy
Joint Services Command and Staff College, Shrivenham, 13 October 2007
This House Believes that Current US Foreign Policy Cannot Win the War on Terror
Durham Union
University of Durham, 12 October 2007
Terrorism: How worried should we be?
Brighton Salon
The Terraces, Brighton, 10 October 2007
Chemical and Biological Weapons as Public Concerns: The Role of the Media
Countering Chemical and Biological Weapons Proliferation
Wilton Park, West Sussex, 30 September 2007
Science and Risk
Aerosols 2007
Manchester Central, Manchester, 20 September 2007
Misunderstanding the Meaning of Contemporary Terrorism
Interrogating Terror Conference
University of Brighton, 12 September 2007
Addressing Risk Perceptions: the Role for Industry
From SMEs to Multinationals: Trends, Best Practices and Future Perspectives
A.I.S.E. General Assembly, Amsterdam, 14 June 2007
Security and Government
Britain and Security
Chatham House, London, 13 June 2007
The Broader Cultural Context
Terrorism: Is Our Way of Life Under Threat?
Dauntsey’s School, Wiltshire, 12 June 2007
The Science of Risk
Cheltenham Science Festival
Town Hall, Cheltenham, 8 June 2007
Domestic Terrorism
Parliamentary Inquiry into Tackling Terrorism
Committee Room 15, Houses of Parliament, London, 5 June 2007
Home-Grown Nihilism: The Clash Within Civilisations
Terrorism in the UK: A workshop on Radicalisation
Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, London, 2 May 2007
The Concept of Risk
Inaugural Design Against Crime Lecture
University of the Arts, London, 24 April 2007
Science and the Perception of Risk
The Office of Science and Innovation
Department of Trade and Industry, London, 16 March 2007
Resilience in the Face of Terrorism
Warwick Business School Lecture
The University of Warwick, Warwick, 9 March 2007
What Science and Technology can Contribute to the War on Terror
King’s College London, Maxwell Society Conference
Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, 3 March 2007
Towards Strategic Risk Management
Department of Work and Pensions
Holiday Inn, Doncaster, 27 February 2007
Misunderstanding the Meaning of Contemporary Terrorism
Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation Seminar
London School of Economics, London, 20 February 2007
Resilience in the Face of Terrorism
School of Psychology Visiting Seminar Series
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, 6 February 2007
National Resilience in Crises
Asia-Pacific Programme for Senior National Security Officers
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 19 January 2007
2006
Understanding the Meaning of Contemporary Terrorism
London in a Time of Terror: the Politics of Response
Birkbeck College, University of London, London, 8 December 2006
Looking to the Future
Terrorism and Extremism Conference
The British Library, London, 7 December 2006
Radicalisation
Plymouth International Studies Centre Seminar
The University of Plymouth, UK, 17 November 2006
Are We Paralysed by Risk Aversion?
Battle of Ideas Conference
The Royal College of Art, London, 29 October 2006
Presumptions on Radicalisation
Understanding Islam in the 21st Century
Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, UK, 26 October 2006
Building and Maintaining Public Resilience
Social and Psychological Effects of Radiological Terrorism
NATO Advanced Research Workshop, Bratislava, Slovakia, 24 October 2006
Conspiracy Theories and the Politics of Fear
Port Talk
Goodenough College, London, 19 October 2006
Risk Management and the Politics of Fear
SKYDD International Security Conference
Stockholm International Conference Centre, Sweden, 20 September 2006
Towards Strategic Risk Management
The Institute of Risk Management Risk Forum
Keele University, 19 September 2006
Celebrating Development
British Dam Society Conference
Durham Castle, 7 September 2006
New Security Research
British Association Festival of Science
University of East Anglia, 4 September 2006
Risk Management
International Mine Action Training Centre
Nairobi, Kenya, 9 August 2006
Risk Society and Resilience
Soliswiss Board Conference
Kartause Ittingen, Switzerland, 15 June 2006
Limitations of Risk Management Approaches to Fighting Terrorism
ACPO/Home Office Joint Research Conference: Organised Crime
Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK, 8 June 2006
Public Panic and Morale: Lessons From the Blitz and Other Disasters
Fear – An Interdisciplinary Conference
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, 19 May 2006
Expert Panel Meeting on Alcohol Consumption in Europe
The Weinberg Group
Brussels, Belgium, 9 May 2006
Paralyzing Development Through Public Engagement and Risk Communication: The Case of Hydro-Electric Dams
Environmental Hazards and Risk Communication Conference
The Royal Society, London, 20 April 2006
Terrorism Research Update
Exclusive Analysis Briefing
Lombard Street, London, 31 March 2006
Pathways to Radicalisation – The Wider Social and Cultural Context
Asylum and Security Conference
The Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, 27 March 2006
Understanding Scientific Risk in Context
Social and Ethical Issues Concerning Protocells: Key Questions and Answers
Palazzo Franchetti, Venice, Italy, 16 March 2006
Terrorism in Europe and the World
Young Fabians Seminar
Italian Embassy, London, 9 March 2006
Limitations of Public Involvement in Infrastructure Development
Dams and Sustainable Development Conference
Institution of Civil Engineers, London, 21 February 2006
Maintaining “Business as Usual” – A New Mind-set
Aviation Resilience in the 21st Century – Prevention, Response and Recovery
Royal Aeronautical Society, London, 9 February 2006
The Limitations of Contemporary Counter-Terrorism
The Risk and Security Management Forum
Union Jack Club, London, 2 February 2006
Was 9/11 a Conspiracy?
Oxford Union Forum
University of Oxford, 23 January 2006
Terrorism in Perspective
Emerging Markets, Trade and Political Risk 2006
Whitehall, London, 19 January 2006
Limitations of Risk Management in Dealing with Disaster
Department of Defence Management and Security Analysis – Research Seminar
Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, UK, 12 January 2006
2005
Business Continuity – Beyond Risk Management
Survive 16th Annual Conference
Victoria Park Plaza Hotel, London, 17 November 2005
Responses to Asymmetric Attacks
Transnational Terrorism Project
Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, London, 14 November 2005
The Challenge Within
Tackling Organised Crime in Partnership
Victoria Park Plaza Hotel, London, 1 November 2005
What Next for … Anti-Terrorism?
Battle of Ideas Conference
The Royal College of Art, London, 29 October 2005
Headline Debate
The Royal Institution of Great Britain
Piccadilly, London, 27 October 2005
Defence and Development: A Special Role for the UK and France?
Corporate Responsibility in International Development
École Polytechnique, Paris, 22 October 2005
Perception of Threats and Real Resilience
Sveriges Säkerhetsting
Eskilstuna, Sweden, 11 October 2005
Risk in Perspective: Toxic Policies
CTPA Annual Business Forum
The Grove, Chandler’s Cross, UK, 10 October 2005
International Terrorism: Implications and Directions
Terrorism, Tourism and Crisis Management
Visit Scotland, Edinburgh, 7 October 2005
Ethics versus Experimentation: Scientific Advance in a Culture of Precaution
Social and Ethical Issues in Protocell Research: Assessing Risk and Responsibilities in an Uncertain World
Venice International University, Italy, 2 October 2005
Addressing the Wider Community
Understanding Islam in the 21st Century
Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, UK, 29 September 2005
Terrorism and Community Relations
Institute of Ideas – Health Forum
St. Thomas’ Hospital, London, 14 September 2005
Animal-Rights Terrorism and the Demise of Political Debate
Huntingdon Life Sciences
Cambridgeshire, UK, 1 September 2005
Contribution of the Science and Technology Community in Responding to Terrorist Threats
ESRC Technology, Governance and Security Workshop
Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, 19 July 2005
Social Resilience
Public Sector Security Conference
Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, 18 July 2005
Exaggerating Risks and Missing the Real Threat
Emergency Planning Society Annual Conference 2005
Harrogate, UK, 29 June 2005
Suicide Bombers vs Sexual Abusers: A Battle of Depravity or Western Fixations?
The Barbarisation of Warfare
University of Wolverhampton, UK, 28 June 2005
Fearing Terror
The Hive
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 18 May 2005
Understanding Hazard and Risk to Build Confidence and Trust
NCV/NVZ Annual General Meeting
Utrecht, Netherlands, 11 May 2005
The Concept of Risk
Health, Foreign Policy and Security
Nuffield Trust, London, 6 May 2005
Animal-Rights Terrorism and the Demise of Political Debate
NETCU Stakeholders Conference
Cambridgeshire, UK, 26 April 2005
Animal-Rights Terrorism and the Demise of Political Debate
IAT Congress
Glasgow, UK, 17 March 2005
How Policy Makers Approach the Public’s Resilience
Resilience
NATO Advanced Research Workshop, University of Kent, 26 February
Opening Remarks
Homeland Security
SMi, London, UK, 23 February 2005
Terrorism and the Politics of Fear
Perse School
Cambridge, UK, 11 February 2005
International Terrorism
Surrey Emergency Services Major Incidents Committee
Kempton Park Racecourse, Surrey, UK, 9 February 2005
The Limitations of Risk Management in Dealing with Disaster
Social Contexts and Responses to Risk Conference
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, 29 January 2005
The Domestic Management of Terrorist Attacks
Anti-Terrorism, Media and Publics
Regents College, London, UK, 14 January 2005
2004
Resilient or Vulnerable? The Consequences for UK Security of Assumptions about Human Behaviour in a Disaster
British International Studies Association Conference
University of Warwick, UK, 20 December 2004
Chemical Reactions
Royal Institution of Great Britain
Piccadilly, London, 23 November 2004
Is Real Resilience Attainable?
Wide Area Crises – Resilience and Recovery in the 21st Century
SMi, London, UK, 15 November 2004
Facing the Possibility of Bioterrorism
VIIth International CBRN Defence Symposium
Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, 12 November 2004
Animal-Rights Terrorism and the Demise of Political Debate
Annual General Meeting
Coalition for Medical Progress, Wellcome Trust, 6 October 2004
Nanotechnology and Risk Assessment
Labour Party Conference Fringe Meeting
King’s Hotel, Brighton, 28 September 2004
Risk Assessment and UK Policy
Science and Society in the Face of the New Security Threats
NATO Advanced Research Workshop, University of Cambridge, 27 September 2004
What can the Science and Technology Community Contribute?
Science and Technology Policies for the Anti-Terrorism Era
NATO Advanced Research Workshop, University of Manchester, 13 September 2004
The Domestic Context of the War Against Terror
International Intelligence Directors Course
Defence Intelligence and Security Centre, Chicksands, Bedfordshire, 5 July 2004
Fear and Self-Loathing in the West
Ideologies of Anti-Americanism: Cross-cultural Perspectives
Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford, 12 June 2004
Prioritising Chemicals for Attention: Risk versus Hazard
REACH: A Science Based Approach
Scientific Alliance, London, 3 June 2004
Transport/Commuter Security – Two Months on from Madrid
Homeland Security and Resilience
Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, London, 19 May 2004
Terror in an Age of Insecurity
The Age of Insecurity
The Institute for Cultural Research, London, 15 May 2004
Government and Media Influences
Perception Gap: Public attitudes to security and the impact on corporate decision-making
Demos, London, 11 May 2004
The Costs of Precautionary Chemicals Regulation
Science and Politics – Special Symposium
Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Prague, 19 April 2004
How Accountable should Scientists be to the Public?
Oxford Literary Festival
Town Hall, Oxford, 27 March 2004
The Precautionary Principle: Is it Killing Innovation?
An Apology for Capitalism?
Economist Conference, Whitehall, London, 20 February 2004
Who’s Afraid of the Modern World?
The Way We Live Now
Fabian Society Conference, Imperial College, London, 7 February 2004
2003
General Trends
Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age
King’s College London, 22 November 2003
Plenary Session
Countering Terrorism: The Experience of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, London, 22 October 2003
The Cultural Background to Risk Aversion and its Consequences for Resilience
Global Security and Resilience Symposium
Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, 9 October 2003
Chemical and Biological Weapons
Global Public Affairs Conference
Dorchester Hotel, London, 3 October 2003
9/11 – Two Years On
Liberal Democrat Party Conference Fringe Meeting
Hilton Metropole Hotel, Brighton, 21 September 2003
Emergent Concepts of Risk
Risk in its Social Context
University of Plymouth, 9 September 2003
Political Stability: Impacts on Global Business
Institute for Practitioners in Credit Insurance and Surety
University of East London, 18 August 2003
European Chemicals Policy
World Congress on Risk
Brussels, Belgium, 24 June 2003
The Challenge of Terrorism
World Congress on Risk
Brussels, Belgium, 23 June 2003
Peer Review and Public Experts
Ideas, Intellectuals and the Public
Goodenough College, London, 22 June 2003
Chemical and Biological Weapons
Festival of Science
Cheltenham, England, 8 June 2003
Closing Remarks
Communicating the War on Terror
Royal Institution of Great Britain, Piccadilly, London, 6 June 2003
Public Dialogue in Science
Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology
Portcullis House, Westminster, London, 13 May 2003
Risk and Chemicals
Stockholm Network Conference
Geneva, Switzerland, 7 May 2003
Cultural and Psychological Aspects of the War on Terror
Psychological Aspects of Terrorism and Martyrdom
University of Ulster, Derry, 30 April 2003
Bio-Terrorism
Genes and Society Conference
Battersea Arts Centre, London, 26 April 2003
Genetically Modified Crops: Time to Say Yes?
Genes and Society Conference
Battersea Arts Centre, London, 25 April 2003
The Challenge of Terrorism
SMi Homeland Security Conference
The Hatton, London, 20 February 2003
2002
Can We Trust the Experts?
International Book Festival
Edinburgh, 18 August 2002
The Loss of Trust
Science, Medicine and Expertise in Contemporary Society
Oxford Union, 15 June 2002
Getting Regulation Right: The Uses and Limits of the Precautionary Principle
21st Century Trust
Merton College, Oxford, 7 April 2002
The Demoralization of Science
Demoralization: Morality, Authority and Power
University of Cardiff, 5 April 2002
The New Morality of Risk Awareness – A Case Study
Medical Research Council – Institute for Environment and Health
Leicester, 21 March 2002
Public Health Communication and ‘New Terrorism’
NATO Parliamentary Assembly Sub-Committee on the Proliferation of Military Technology
King’s College London, 4 March 2002
2001
The True Cost of Precautionary Chemicals Regulation
Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution
London, 19 July 2001
First published by -, 21 January 2007
A battle of ideas in which understanding lies among the casualties
As Paul Wilkinson's book, Terror v Democracy illustrates, what analysts do best today is to describe what, when and where events happen. What they are weakest at is explaining why.
printable
version
This book is full of contradictions. That should be no surprise. Almost 100 years ago, in a short essay on terrorism, Leon Trotsky noted how the “bought-and-paid-for moralists” of the establishment would “make solemn declarations about the ‘absolute value’ of human life” before sending millions to war to defend the “nation’s honour or the monarch’s prestige”. The contradictions here are just as glaring.
“The new US strategic doctrine of pre-emptive attack used by the Bush administration is in fact extremely dangerous”, says Paul Wilkinson. The word “extremely” is italicised in the original in the manner beloved by conspiracy theorists. Forty pages later, he suggests “the best form of prevention is to intercept and pre-empt”.
Likewise, Wilkinson proposes to champion Thomas Jefferson’s principle of free speech “that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself”. This freedom lasts a page before he indicates that “the more responsible mass media organisations” favour “voluntary self-restraint”.
The real weakness, though, is one shared by the authors of the Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7th July 2005 . That is, that what analysts do best today is to describe what, when and where events happen. What they are weakest at is explaining why.
Hence this book lists organisations and chronicles events and legislative responses. But without understanding why such incidents occur, there is little hope of precluding them from happening again. Wilkinson talks of a “battle of ideas” but fails to flesh it out.
The language is loose, unbefitting of a book with academic pretensions, with talk of “fanatics”, “carnage”, “godfathers of terrorism” and “Al Qaeda’s congenital tendency to engage in mass killing”. Weak or absent references suggest this to be more of a rant than an insightful analysis.
On several occasions Wilkinson suggests that terrorists seek to create “a climate of fear”. He seems unaware of the fact that this pre-dated 9/11 quite significantly. In that regard, Trotsky also had it right when he indicted any terrorist act as inadmissible “because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness” as well as breeding disillusionment and apathy. Today we might be able to say precisely the same things about governments that continually seek to bypass the people in the name of security.
Terrorism v Democracy: The Liberal State Response, by Paul Wilkinson is published by Routledge.
First published by Times Higher Education Supplement, 19 January 2007
The government is for turning
As U-turn follows U-turn, New Labour is looking more and more like a party devoid of direction.
printable
version
Another day, another U-turn. Less than a week into the New Year, a UK government minister has been told to ‘get back in your box and stay there’ by his own boss after criticising the airline industry. But this kind of thing is nothing new for a government that doesn’t know whether it is coming or going.
The minister, Ian Pearson, responsible for climate change, had very publicly rebuked a number of airlines for not taking seriously enough what he considers to be their responsibilities in relation to climate change. In an interview published in the Guardian, Pearson accused Michael O’Leary, chief executive of the budget airline Ryanair, of being ‘the irresponsible face of capitalism’, for describing a proposed EU carbon trading scheme as ‘just another tax’.
He also criticised American airlines for not wanting to have anything to do with the scheme and added that even British Airways were ‘only just playing ball’. But the following day Mr Pearson was severely reprimanded by his boss, David Miliband, for speaking out of turn. According to a senior adviser quoted in The Times (London) that day, ‘this is not how you make government policy’, and she indicated that in future Mr Miliband would lead the discussions on the carbon trading scheme.
It wasn’t the only U-turn that day. Elsewhere in The Times, it was reported that Tony Blair had questioned plans by his ministers to ban the use of ‘human-animal’ cloned embryos.
The proposed ban on fusing human DNA with animal eggs, which could provide experimental material for research into diseases like motor neurone disease and Alzheimer’s, had been criticised by leading scientists in The Times the previous day. The Department of Health had only just set out their proposals to introduce restrictions in a White Paper published in December, and officials had privately advised scientists that their applications to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to conduct such research were unlikely to be successful.
But, the scientists, including Professor Ian Wilmut - who led the team that created Dolly the cloned sheep - argued that Caroline Flint, the public health minister, and Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, had been ill-advised. Their decision appeared to be based on a small number of unrepresentative responses from interested parties answering a call for public consultation. This went on to generate adverse newspaper headlines referring to ‘frankenbunnies’ and ‘moo-tants’. Now it appears as if Tony Blair is prepared to overrule his ministers by indicating that the law should be amended.
What both these instances reveal is not hard-nosed commercial pressures winning out over vacuous rhetoric about environmental awareness and scientific ethics, even if David Miliband and Tony Blair did baulk at the economic implications of what some of their more zealous ministers were proposing. After all, slapping down the airline industry and British science is quite a lot for one day.
Rather, the fact that such senior-level decisions were reversed within 24 hours is more significant. It reveals a government whose left hand doesn’t know, or does not agree with, what its right hand is doing - a government increasingly organised around endless streams of fleeting and reversible policies rather than a small number of firm and enduring principles.
New Labour was forged in the politics of pragmatism when Tony Blair announced his government would be the people’s servant upon being elected in 1997. But his claim sought to conceal the real and growing disconnection between the party and its traditional base. Far from being popular, politicians now needed to be populist. And policy based on unchallenged prejudice and emotion does not provide a stable base to build from.
More bereft of a coherent ideology than any political party before it, New Labour also came to be dependent on a growing army of privately appointed experts and cronies. Policy led by consultants and focus groups, and an obsession with new initiatives and measurable targets, hampered its ability to define an agenda. What one group of experts or consumers might come up with on a Monday was readily undone by what another group (or even the same group) thought on a Tuesday.
Nor are these inherently contradictory tendencies restricted to government circles either. For example, last week, Derbyshire Constabulary refused to release photographs of two escaped, convicted murderers on the grounds of having to protect their human rights. Greater Manchester police issued them instead, after the Lord Chancellor had intervened, on the grounds of protecting public safety.
Over the coming months we can expect many more policy U-turns and confusions such as these, as the plethora of incoherent policy initiatives produced over the last decade, and still emanating from various quarters, are increasingly doomed to clash. What we are witnessing is a government that has no strategy or guiding vision (hence Gordon Brown’s growing obsession with the need to find one), and policymakers and institutions that have no sense of purpose or direction around which to frame their ideas and decisions.
First published by spiked, 8 January 2007
In Conversation with Robyn Williams
Are London bombers more likely to be hardened, trained members of terrorist squads or misguided young men on eccentric missions?
printable
version
in conversation: interview on ABC Radio National, Australia
Robyn Williams: Tonight In Conversation is about young men as suicide bombers. Are they focused and trained militants, or mixed up kids trying to make a meaning out of nothingness? My guest is Professor Bill Durodie, who made something of a splash at the recent BA Festival, that’s British Association Festival of Science in Norwich in England. Now, he accepts that there are indeed hardened militants among the disaffected, but plenty of lost kids as well, not really connected to any set like Al Qaeda.
Bill Durodie: I think it’s fairly clear that there’s a spectrum of people in relation to terrorism. Some of them have indeed been to camps in Afghanistan and been trained, others are typically people in the Gaza Strip who have a personal grievance because of the tragic loss of a loved one and therefore they see it as some kind of revenge. But increasingly, particularly in the United Kingdom, we’ve seen essentially loners and small groups where it’s very hard to detect any organisational affiliation prior to their trying to, or actually, detonating some kind of device.
And in that regard, when we look into the background of these people what we find is on the whole, very well brought up, well educated, fee-paying public schools, universities like the London School of Economics and therefore no obvious signs of what some people presume to be the risk factors that shape a terrorist. They weren’t educated in a madrasa, there’s no evidence of great piety, of being well versed in the Koran, and many of them keep their grievances largely to themselves before they then commit suicide. Therefore it begs the question as to what it is that really shapes and drives these people? And the way I see it is that in some respects they are fantasists searching for some kind of identity amongst what’s going on out there in the world.
Robyn Williams: So something happens to them, they’ve got a kind of misalliance, some personal grievance, a sense of failure, a certain sense of something missing and then they become the sort of people who think nothing really of ending their lives and doing so on a spectacular basis. That seems to be an extraordinary transition though.
Bill Durodie: That’s true and obviously fortunately it’s not the majority of people that are like that. I think we need to be clear by the way that this sense of alienation and lacking in identity and searching for meaning affects most of us in contemporary society. Since the end of the Cold War there is no great political divide in the world between a socialist left and a free market right. And also, we’ve seen social networks fragmenting from families, communities, neighbourhoods. People don’t participate in general elections, we’re all a bit disconnected from the world that we live in, we no longer participate in the formal process of decision-making in society and our informal networks have all been severely eroded. And the consequence of that is in some ways we are a generation of people searching for meaning and identity.
Now within that generation of course not all of them will become radical nihilists and some will go into all sorts of bizarre hobbies to try and affirm who they are and what they do. Others will discover illness and stress within their lives and have fantasy illnesses that they shape their lives around. And a small minority, no doubt they have some connection of some kind, possibly to Islamic extremism or they see it as a ready model for them to identify with despite the fact that their parents weren’t particularly devout Muslims at all. They may end up in that kind of avenue but it is a tiny, tiny minority and how to identify those – really my suggestion is that you can’t – we just are going to have to learn to accept that we now live in a world – and we will continue to live in a world so long as we are unable to define what it’s for and where it’s heading – whereby a tiny minority of individuals will lash out in a form of extreme rage against a world that they feel totally disconnected from.
Robyn Williams: I’m reminded somewhat of a section in The Tipping Point, you know Gladwell’s book where he describes teenage violence being completely unknown on a particular Pacific Island. Then it happened twice and there was a huge outbreak – in other words it became almost a fashion and it seems from what you’re saying that because this sort of terrorism is so commonplace, people can opt for it because, well, it’s there, it’s really almost its own kind of recruiting drive. Is that fair?
Bill Durodie: I think that is fair. There’s a huge amount of copycat events occurring that we can see. You have to ask yourself where did the – for instance, bombers in London, in the summer of 2005 – get the idea of bombing the Underground from? Well actually if you look at the intervening years between 9/11 and then you’ll find a number of BBC drama documentaries about terrorist attacks on the London Underground. You could argue that the BBC has been radicalising individuals and fermenting terrorism, or at least glorifying it to some extent, if you were the Home Secretary and wanted to ban them.
Fortunately I think it is worth reminding people that this is a very, very rare occurrence. You know we are still more likely to suffer an unfortunate accident on the way to the airport in our cars than we are ever to encounter some kind of terrorist eventuality. And even those car accidents are few and far between. So the problem really is when we start reorganising our lives around these extreme, rare, and very unfortunate events. And I see another problem, by the way, that it’s not so much what is it that makes radical alienated youth, but the real crises is what’s got wrong with the adults in society and the elite? You know it’s their absence of any sense of purpose and vision for society, any direction that they’re providing society with that lends itself to people, you know young people, trying to look for that somewhere else.
Robyn Williams: Idealism really.
Bill Durodie: Well we all need some ideals and I think to some extent to live our lives by. In some ways we live a very empty life nowadays and I’m not saying that from a religious perspective necessarily, I think there’s a crises of secularism that needs to be explored and investigated. And it is possible for instance to shape a life around a positive sense of humanity and human achievements and where we’ve got to today, and wanting to go further. And the divide I see emerging in the world today is between people who are positive and ambitious in that sense, and others who are very nihilistic, very pessimistic, who suggest that humanity has destroyed the planet, is destroying itself, and to be honest is a plague that ought to be destroyed. And believe me there are senior academics that I could name who write that kind of stuff.
Robyn Williams: Go on, name them.
Bill Durodie: Well they would be easy for your listeners to find.
Robyn Williams: Indeed. Going back to what you’re saying about risk, I was fascinated the other day to hear something on the BBC concerning the fear of paedophiles; occasionally of course, it’s a real, real thing that there is a nasty man in a coat and there is a poor vulnerable child. However for every one of those – apparently now that everyone drives their kids to school, there are 300 fatal accidents – so for each one child that you’re saving from the paedophile, 300 are dying in car crashes.
Bill Durodie: I think that’s catastrophic and I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. In this country there is legislation about to go through Parliament in the autumn basically asking that any adult that works in any capacity with children will need to be vetted for their criminal records. And we’re not just talking teachers here, we’re not just talking music tutors, or athletics coaches, we’re talking cleaners in hospitals, canteen staff in schools, young adults who are helping teachers look after young children. To the point where you ask the question, well, how long is it going to be before a mother taking a few children to a football match on a Saturday has to be vetted because she’s taking children that aren’t her own?
I think it’s a very insidious culture and it’s not simply the cost to society that worries me in terms of economic cost. There are going to be continuous and pointless records being checked but it’s more the social cost – we are teaching our children that we do not trust one another as adults and I cannot think of a more perverse and corrosive message to be sending to society.
Robyn Williams: Going back to the terrorists and Heathrow, an airport I will avoid at all costs but sometimes I can’t, given the fact that there are now gigantic inspections of security and that the lipstick syndrome and the gel syndrome and all the rest of it. How do you assess the worth of that kind of elevation of security check?
Bill Durodie: It is the equivalent of putting a totem pole up in your village green hoping that it will ward away evil spirits. The reality is it’s largely pointless, people in the security world know that it’s largely pointless, they are doing it to be seen to be doing something because they have got a false impression of how the public would behave were something to go wrong. The presumption from officials is that if something goes wrong the public will never forgive them. However what we saw in London after the attacks last summer is that most members of the general public were determined to get to work the next day and the British government did not collapse.
So what we have now is a series of measures that hamper the airline industry, where we are effectively doing the terrorist job for them, which are entirely pointless. We know that determined individuals will be able to get through no matter how many checks are introduced. Indeed many of the checks have been introduced on the passenger side but there’s not half that level of security airside in terms of staff that service planes, or people that put catering onto planes. So there is always a weak link in the chain. We are going to have to get used to this and accept that as long as we live in a society that doesn’t know where it’s going, as I said earlier, there will be a few nihilists who will lash out against it. It’s sad, it’s annoying, we need to deal very hard with those people when we find them but at the same time we must not allow ourselves to reorganise society around them.
Robyn Williams: But it’s very much a legalistic society, someone always has to be to blame, you see this with doctors. I’m not talking about the grotesque medical maniac who is hurting people, I’m talking about genuine mistakes. There is always a legal redress – is that not yet another example where it’s always got to be someone’s fault and you need to avoid the case rather than look at the overall general good and say to people well, you’re going to have to put up with things in a modern society.
Bill Durodie: Well you used a phrase there that’s very important. You talked about the general good and the problem is that we now live in a society that no longer perceives itself as a society. Rather it’s just a mass of individuals looking after their own interests and obsessing about personal choice. They have been encouraged in this by various governments, not just you know left-leaning, but the right as well over a number of years. And what we have is a society that is essentially fragmented so it takes, of course it maintains the appearance of being a society, but at its root it’s just individuals looking after their own. And as soon as you’re looking after your own you get particularly obsessed with things to do with your private health, you get particularly obsessed with things to do with security because it’s No.1 that you’re looking after.
Actually in the past as a society we had a sense that some things were worth certain sacrifices and it’s that absence of meaning that means that people are reluctant to put up and tolerate any kind of suffering today. Victor Frankel the holocaust survivor who wrote a book Man’s Search for Meaning famously said it’s not suffering that kills people, it’s suffering without meaning. If you give people a reason for why they have to put up with things, why things might be difficult, then they will be more willing to accept the cost if they align themselves with a particular project. For instance like flying to the moon a generation or so ago. But today, if you’re unable to define a direction for society, if as a politician you’re hiding behind the security measures that you say are imposed upon you because of 9/11 rather than trying to define your agenda and what your vision for humanity is then you are helping to create that society. And in some regards you’re as much a terrorist as those who perpetrate the nihilist acts.
Robyn Williams: Now I’m sure you are consulted by various corporations and indeed government – how do they react when you say things like this?
Bill Durodie: Quite favourably although my suspicion is they then go to work the next day and nothing much changes. I’ve noticed over a range of issues recently that government officials are very keen to deny any responsibility for the measures they’ve been introducing steadily over the last decade. We recently had the case here of the director of the Health and Safety Commission saying that we had all become risk obsessed and that we should stop being so without any recognition of the role of the health and safety executive in shaping that. A few years ago Tessa Jowell the culture secretary said that it was time that we celebrated art for art’s sake, rather than making it instrumentalist and utilitarian in terms of realising corporate profits or social inclusion projects or other targets.
And again really it’s the department of culture, media and sports that were responsible for doing that. So we are now effectively in a society that’s operating like a ghost ship, where the people that are meant to be manning the tiller are all saying ‘Oh it wasn’t me guv, don’t blame me’ and they’re absent you know on duty. I find that quite disconcerting at one level but on the other hand it also offers an opportunity for those of us who can see through all of this and who are brave enough to put our heads above the parapet and say it’s time we started defining a new political project, for a new period in time. It’s time that we went away from all the limitations of left and right that existed in the past and tried to put humanism central and social progress central and try and begin to articulate a project around that. And if I may, I’m part of a small group of people in London who’ve begun exactly that kind of venture, we’ve called ourselves the Manifesto Club and you can find our website at www.manifestoclub.com
Robyn Williams: Given that you suggest that with some sort of hope of progress – I think Peter Medawar the Nobel Prize-winning scientist from Britain who actually shared the prize with the Australian MacFarlane Burnett – hope of progress would transform people’s views about what they should do, especially young people who would stop bombing perhaps and start doing something rather more constructive. But what would the Manifesto organisation stand for?
Bill Durodie: Well we’re very honest at this stage, our key at the moment is to identify some of the problems as we see them. We’re doing quite a large piece of work, which will be ready shortly, precisely on the issue of vetting people for working with children. And we’re trying to connect with other interested parties worldwide who can contribute something to this project. It’s a very open group at this stage and we’re wanting people to join and make some major contribution. I think one of the major things that disappoints me I suppose as a scientist over the last ten, twenty years is the extent to which people of a left wing tradition have disowned science and have suggested that rationality and enlightenment thinking is what has brought devastation and problems to humanity.
And I think that unless we recognise the extent to which the left (which once understood science to really offer opportunities to shake up power and prejudice and the control of elites) have become disillusioned and have affiliated themselves to environmentalists who actually, if you look into the roots of that movement, really come from the opposite end of the spectrum. I find that quite disappointing and I think together with a kind of fragmentation of society that’s happened over the last ten to twenty years these are the drivers of the contemporary culture. It’s time we started explaining that to people and getting them on board as part of a project to change things.
Robyn Williams: Changing things might involve an environmental solution and indeed building a different way of doing things.
Bill Durodie: I’m not against environmental solutions as long as they make sense, I think unfortunately because we live in a slightly cynical culture where people have grown accustomed to not trusting scientists, not trusting politicians and definitely not trusting corporates, there is a presumption that everything that these people do destroys the planet. Whereas in fact you know life is a bit more nuanced than that and it’s time we had some nuance argument.
Robyn Williams: And you may also have heard that nuanced argument on Lateline which has featured Bill Durodie more than once. He’s a senior lecturer at Cranfield University in England and that website again he mentioned just now is manifestoclub.com.
First published by ABC Radio National, Australia, 28 September 2006
We are the enemies within
It is not a clash of civilisations but our own cultural self-loathing and pessimistic outlook that motivates young terrorists, many of them born in the West.
printable
version
It is not a clash of civilisations but our own cultural self-loathing and pessimistic outlook that motivates young terrorists, many of them born in the West.
In a recent speech on security to the Foreign Policy Centre in London, Tony Blair argued in reference to the War on Terror that “this is not a clash between civilisations. It is a clash about civilisation. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence; between optimism and hope on the one hand and pessimism and fear on the other.”
Notably, the ideas and protagonists that Blair had in mind in this “clash about civilisation” are all foreign in their origins or, at least, externally oriented and focused. He continued: “The roots of global terrorism and extremism are indeed deep. They reach right down through decades of alienation, victimhood and political oppression in the Arab and Muslim world.”
In a similar vein, the recently released British government document Countering International Terrorism: The United Kingdom’s Strategy identifies the need for a “battle of ideas, challenging the ideological motivations that extremists believe justify the use of violence”. This key strand of the strategy is described in terms indicating it as affecting or targeting solely Muslims and so-called Muslim communities.
So although most politicians and officials have slowly reconciled themselves to the fact that many of the perpetrators of contemporary terror are Western-born and educated, the glib assumption remains that what drives them is a foreign ideology or agenda that only Muslims can understand or address.
But is the problem really a clash about civilisation or rather that we face a more profound cultural crisis? To recognise the problem as such would discomfit Western leaders and societies. It would require understanding the extent to which many of the ideas that inspire the nihilist terrorism we witness today are largely home-grown and inculcated.
How can I say this? Surely we know that Mohammed Siddique Khan and the three others who took their own lives, alongside those of 52 innocent bystanders, in London on July 7, 2005, as well as the perpetrators of similar attacks in Madrid, Bali, New York and elsewhere, were driven by a rejection of Western interference in the Muslim world and a distorted religious faith? They may, in many instances, have been products of the West, but their guiding influences, Blair and other commentators imply, were reactionary ideas and ideologies from the East.
In fact, there is very little evidence for this. The Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7th July 2005 makes it clear that the individuals concerned were “unexceptional” and that their purported links to al-Qaeda lack “firm evidence”. Likewise, a parallel Report into the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005, issued by the Intelligence and Security Committee, indicates that the claimed responsibility for the attacks from Ayman al-Zawaheri, al-Qaeda’s deputy leader, was “not supported by any firm evidence”.
There is also no evidence that any of those concerned was particularly pious, well versed in the Koran or clear in their appreciation of Middle Eastern politics, let alone vociferous about their views, only that they lashed out at the society they were from but felt they could not influence. In that regard, these nihilist criminals appear to reflect the sentiments of many other disgruntled individuals and groups across Western society today.
Indeed, their ideas and influences appear to have far less to do with imams and mullahs and far more in common with the views of numerous Western commentators. One need not look far to find all manner of anti-American sentiment, or people who reject the benefits of science, modernity and progress. Such views are all around us.
Increasingly, Western academics and thinkers have come to portray the impact and influence of human actions on the world in a negative vein. Sir Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society, called one of his latest books Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-First Century?, while John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, felt comfortable describing human beings as little more than a plague upon the planet in his book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals.
It appears we hardly need foreign enemies. And such ideas are not limited to a few academics. Surely, when Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, a few bright minds in the security world and beyond should have noticed the depth of disillusionment in society and its supposedly adverse consequences? Little wonder that Osama bin Laden appears keen to cite Western commentators so frequently.
Western society today is replete with individuals and institutions that appear determined to criticise and undermine its achievements, reposing these as a risk or a threat. This dominant cultural self-loathing and pessimistic outlook forms the backdrop for, and inevitably shapes, contemporary terrorism. Yet the authorities appear determined to identify causes emanating elsewhere, while liberals seek to excuse terrorism on the grounds of the supposed adversities the individuals involved have faced.
Anyone reading the intriguing Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror by Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, might be forgiven for believing that the real enemy he railed against is to be found among the risk-averse government bureaucracies of the West. Along with many other experts and analysts across the political spectrum - such as Peter Preston, former editor of The Guardian - Scheuer presented an almost romantic idealisation of bin Laden. This romanticisation stems from a rejection of the culturally corrupt mores and values such commentators believe are emerging in their own societies.
“The clash of civilisations” thesis, taken from the title of political scientist Samuel Huntington’s book of the same name, assumed that future conflicts would increasingly pit East against West in a fundamental clash of values. This idea benefited from a renewed degree of interest in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But few have critically inquired into the true ideological origins of those who perpetrate acts of terrorism in the name of Islam.
Rather, a lazy empirical approach has been employed to identify the so-called risk factors that may lead individuals to become “radicalised”. Variously these include attending a madrassa or listening to the inflammatory rhetoric of a radical mullah.
Alternatively - for those of a more liberal disposition - an impoverished background, poor educational performance or impaired socioeconomic opportunities are held to be among the drivers. Most agree that a deep sense of perceived injustice in the Middle East is also key.
But this approach assumes a conclusion and then goes in search of the evidence to corroborate it. It is profoundly unscientific. Above all, it ignores the dominant social context such individuals find themselves in - that is, advanced Western societies shaped by a profound sense of malaise.
The trial in London of those accused of plotting terrorist atrocities through the acquisition of a large quantity of ammonium nitrate fertiliser is quite apposite in this regard. The list of their intended targets included “binge drinkers”, “football hooligans” and “slags in nightclubs”. Such ideas appear to reflect those of contemporary policymakers and their exaggerated fears rather than verses from the Koran.
In truth, we shall never know exactly what motivated the London bombers because they are no longer around to give us their views. But even if they were, there is no reason why we should take them, or their videos released since the attacks, at face value. What we do know is that individuals such as Omar Saeed Sheikh, who kidnapped and killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002, are from well-to-do backgrounds and well educated.
The question should then be to identify what motivates a minority from a variety of backgrounds, including some who are privileged, to act as they do. The answer surely lies closer to home than we assume.
The key is not what it is that attracts them to fringe Islamist organisations, but rather what it is about our societies and culture that they fail to provide energetic, educated, young individuals with an appropriate system of rules, a sense of purpose and collective direction to lead their lives by and realise their ambitions, that they look for this elsewhere, including in various arcane belief systems.
Increasingly, it appears that contemporary terrorism is sustained by two elements - the radical nihilists who are prepared to lose their lives and to take those of others around them in their misguided determination to leave their mark on a world they reject, and the nihilist intellectuals who help shape a public discourse of apocalyptic failure and rejection.
If we are to defeat these pathetic and desperate acts, it is high time we appreciated their deeper cultural roots, which lie not in the sands and slums of the Middle East but squarely in the salons and suburbs of the societies they emanate from - in the West.
Blair and others engaged in the War on Terror are keen to state their determination to defend “our values” and “our way of life”. But it is not at all clear what they mean by this. Are our values the dystopian, misanthropic visions of Western intellectuals and politicians? Is our way of life one whereby the very democratic ideals we claim to preserve and promote are circumscribed in the name of security?
In trying to protect our societies from the presumed threat posed by a global terrorist conspiracy bent on acquiring and deploying weapons of mass destruction, it seems that increasingly it is we, lacking in any clear direction, who are at war with ourselves and our values.
The supposed clash of civilisations is one that will need to be resolved within civilisation first and foremost. Sadly, the predominance of negative views within our societies - best captured by the all-party consensus on impending environmental catastrophes, a consensus ironically presumed by some to offer hope of some unifying agenda for the future - is one that encourages the very nihilistic tendencies we then decry.
First published by Times Higher Education Supplement, 22 September 2006
What can the science and technology community contribute?
The role of science and technology in combating the global war on terror.
printable
version
First published by in Science and Technology Policies for the Anti-Terrorism Era, edited by A. James, 14 September 2006
What can the science and technology community contribute?
in Science and Technology Policies for the Anti-Terrorism Era, James, A. ed.
IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2006
This article explores the role attributed to science and technology in combating the global war on terror in an age when social bonds have been eroded and our sense of the need for social solutions diminished accordingly. One consequence of this is the exaggeration of risks presented by science and by terrorists to the point of ignoring the more mundane and probable threats that confront us.This article explores the role attributed to science and technology in combating the global war on terror in an age when social bonds have been eroded and our sense of the need for social solutions diminished accordingly. One consequence of this is the exaggeration of risks presented by science and by terrorists to the point of ignoring the more mundane and probable threats that confront us.
printable
version
Repeating the anti-terror soap opera
How did the police get a terror raid so wrong (again)?
printable
version
On Friday 2 June at 4am, more than 250 police and other officials – including some from the UK’s health protection agency – took part in a raid on a house on Lansdown Road in east London, arresting two individuals, as part a continuing campaign against terrorism.
The morning TV news carried little else, and the 24-hour rolling news channels continued with a soap opera-like coverage throughout the day. Terrorism effectively competed with Big Brother as the nation’s most watched reality TV show.
Earnest journalists reported from various locations – Lansdown Road, New Scotland Yard, Paddington Green police station (where one of the men was detained), and the Royal London Hospital (where the other man – who had suffered a gunshot wound to the shoulder during the raid – had been taken).
Numerous interviews were conducted with supposed eyewitnesses who, in the main, had witnessed nothing, and an army of experts speculated wildly on various matters, including the clothing worn by some officers during the raid.
Claims soon emerged that some kind of chemical device was involved. Prime minister Tony Blair had reportedly been informed in advance of the operation and a five-mile air exclusion zone had been imposed around the property from midnight that day – although no residents were evacuated from the area.
Over the weekend, suggestions emerged that the individual shot had been injured by the other arrested individual, while views were aired on the supposed dangerous chemical. For a while it appeared that the UK could be paralysed, not by terrorism itself, but by an anti-terror raid.
On 2 June, Peter Clarke, the head of counter-terrorism operations for the Metropolitan Police, had announced in a statement that a long-standing surveillance operation had been accelerated, due to security sources obtaining specific intelligence.
Now, several days later, it looks as if no bomb-making equipment or chemicals have been found at the property. The Independent Police Complaints Authority is investigating another police shooting. The situation is still unclear, but it appears that the operation was based on flawed intelligence. How could this be?
One clue lies in the size of the operation and the breadth of the media coverage. These reveal the presumptions about contemporary terrorism that shape our societal responses. In the past, such anti-terrorist raids would have been conducted discreetly, but today the police court and receive full publicity.
Intelligence, in the security sense, is a product of both information and the interpretation of that information. Irrespective of what information has been received, it is its presumed meaning that determines the course of action.
Of course, often the information received is itself erroneous. There have been a number of high-profile instances since 9/11 – including the discovery of arms in a locker at a Paris airport – whereby individuals with a grudge against others have set them up and shopped them to the police.
What’s more, the fact that there is a police raid means little in an age when the definition of ‘acts preparatory to terrorism’ ranges from actual bomb making to looking at dodgy websites on the internet.
But fundamentally, it is the interpretation applied by the police and the security services to the information they receive that is the problem. If the authorities presume to be living in an age dominated by a global network of terrorist cells bent on wreaking havoc with chemical agents, this will shape their response.
The evidence for this framework so far seems to be lacking. There have never been weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq or the UK. Even the so-called ricin factory in north London turned out to be a misnomer: there never was any ricin.
Rather, what we have seen has been a small number of incidents, where a handful of independently operating individuals have taken it upon themselves to lash out against a society they dislike. They are neither connected by a common ideology, or particularly clear about their aims.
Over the past few years a precautionary approach has come to dominate police and other security operations. This holds, at its heart, the notion that officials have to act in advance of conclusive evidence, before it is too late.
It is this precautionary and fearful approach that today determines the presumptions and actions of the police, and other actors in society such as the media.
Recent anti-terror raids have all been over-the-top. When the second shoe-bomber, Sajid Badat, was arrested in Gloucester, police sent in 26 armed units and sealed off the city centre.
In the past, the dominant view was that we should not give terrorists the oxygen of publicity. Today, any nihilistic loner with a grudge is likely to receive blanket coverage for a week. We can be sure that there will be more such incidents to come.
First published by spiked, 7 June 2006
Risk and the Social Construction of ‘Gulf War Syndrome’
It may be that the search for a scientific or medical solution to Gulf War Syndrome was misguided. If there is such an entity, it appears to have much in common with other 'illnesses of modernity', whose roots are more socially and culturally driven than what doctors would conventionally consider to be diseases.
printable
version
First published by Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 26 March 2006
The ‘war on terror’ as displacement activity
The author of Imperial Hubris recognises the rot in Western society, but seems to think it can be resolved by taking out some Johnny Foreigners.
printable
version
Imperial Hubris: Why The West Is Losing The War On Terror, Anonymous, Potomac Books, 2005.
Since the publication of the hardback edition of this book in 2004, Anonymous has been revealed to be Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit in the late 1990s. So he has a lot of experience when it comes to terrorism and counterterrorism.
Scheuer is at his most compelling when lamenting the impossibility of exporting and imposing Western democracy and capitalism on those who, for whatever reason, reject such values. The consequence, in his words, is that the Karzai regime in Afghanistan is unsustainable - ‘a self-made illusion on life-support’. He notes the need to understand a problem’s history and context, and complains that ‘the way we see and interpret people and events outside North America is heavily clouded by arrogance and self-centredness amounting to what I called “imperial hubris” in Through Our Enemies’ Eyes’ (his previous book).
Scheuer’s overall thesis is fairly straightforward: the West does not face a terrorist problem but rather is confronted by a worldwide Islamic insurgency that requires political will and military means to be resolved. Above all, he says, the West is not hated for what it believes in, but rather for what it does - largely to the Arab world. So despite being a tough-minded Catholic conservative, Scheuer sounds remarkably like a whole spectrum of political opinion, from the radical left through to establishment-minded think-tanks (such as Chatham House in the UK), when he suggests the West has a self-serving interest in oil and should stop interfering in the Middle East.
How could this be? A clue lies in Scheuer’s book itself. You can’t help but notice that throughout the book he actually identifies a different enemy to the Islamist insurgency that he says must be destroyed. From the preface through to the final chapter, Scheuer bemoans the ‘moral cowardice’ of senior leaders, political elites, the media and even generals, as well as some in the intelligence community, who have become ‘risk averse’, ‘hold expertise and experience in low esteem, perhaps even contempt’, and who would rather have a quiet life than confront the pressing difficulties facing American society.
Nor, would it appear, do the problems confronting the US today simply consist of the ‘anti-Western sentiments of Muslims’. Scheuer also has other targets: political correctness, multiculturalism, creeping legalism and a culture of precaution in Washington and beyond. Indeed, his suggestion that, ‘In a society bereft of talented, manly, pious, and dignified leaders, the Mujahideen are both legitimate and romantic heroes’, could be taken as a description of certain Western societies as well as Muslim ones.
The work is littered with a liturgy of Western failings. ‘Style over credibility every time’, he moans, presumably emanating from some of ‘Washington’s desk-bound chest beaters’. By the end, he subscribes to Niall Ferguson’s therapeutically informed description of the US as a ‘colossus with an attention deficiency disorder’.
Some of these criticisms are pointed and well-made, but they surely point to a prior battle to be engaged in - at home - before his preferred option of a military engagement with insurgents abroad? It might also suggest that if so many Muslims hate the West - as he suggests they do - then maybe they got their ideas from far closer to home than most commentators care to imagine.
If Scheuer had spent a bit more time reading Clausewitz rather than Sun Tzu - the preferred strategist of the neo-cons - and the American Civil War generals he liberally cites throughout, he might have got to the bottom of his conundrum. For Clausewitz understood that the ‘friction’ of war necessitates winning a few battles at home prior to going overseas to teach ‘Johnny Foreigner’ a lesson or two.
In February 2003 the US State Department, in its National Strategy for Countering Terrorism, noted the need to engage in a ‘war of ideas’ - although what it meant by this remains unclear. Since then, the ideas element has been rather thin on the ground, beyond the bland attempts to superficially rebrand the US (attempts lambasted by Scheuer). Western leaders are conscious of the dilemma but have continuously skirted the issue when talking of the need to defend what they label as ‘our values’ or ‘our way of life’.
What values and way of life are they referring to? If it is the long list of morally corrupt and culturally degenerate mores and habits Scheuer decries, then that is hardly going to cut it in the eyes of Muslims or anybody else. It is only in contrast to these home-grown failings that bin Laden and Al Qaeda - in what is very much an image war - make themselves look impressive or important, even if they claim a list of other, more substantive, grievances, from US occupation of the Arabian peninsula to Western support for Muslim tyrants.
Scheuer effectively concedes that it is the West’s own decaying system of values and moral confusion that is the real problem when he says that bin Laden and his coreligionists benefit from ‘a shared mechanism for perceiving and reacting to world events’. It is the loss of any broader sense of purpose at home that drives Scheuer to exalt bin Laden when he notes that at least ‘he speaks in specifics and matches words with deeds’.
Scheuer identifies how Muslims ‘appear to genuinely love their God, faith and fellow Muslims in a passionate, intimate way that is foreign to me and, I suspect, to many in America and the West’, and argues that what Western commentators label ‘suicide’ (as in suicide bombings) is actually better understood as the sacrifice of those who still perceive ‘a cause that is greater than themselves’. All of this is a far cry from the culture of leaks and celebration of defeat he bemoans among Westerners in the closing stages of his book - a society where ‘the threat level wanders between “don’t worry” and “prepare to die”’.
The notion that ‘the enemy is at home’ might seem a step too far for some, but as Scheuer himself concludes: ‘The United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.’ So surely he and others would better spend their time coming up with an appropriate response rather than calling for more warfare ‘over there’.
First published by spiked, 9 March 2006
Public Panic and Morale
(with Edgar Jones, Robin Woolven and Simon Wessely)
Second World War civilian responses reexamined in the light of the current anti-terrorist campaign.
printable
version
First published by Journal of Risk Research, 23 January 2006
Cultural Precursors and Psychological Consequences of Contemporary Western Responses to Acts of Terr
in The Psychology of Resolving Global Conflicts, Fitzduff, M. and Stout C.E. eds.
printable
version
Cultural Precursors, Psychological Consequences of Contemporary Western Responses to Acts of Terror
(with Edgar Jones, Robin Woolven, Simon Wessely)
printable
version
First published by in Psychological Responses to the New Terrorism: A NATO-Russia Dialogue, Wessely, S. and Krasnov V.N. eds., 12 January 2006
Contending cultures of counterterrorism
No European power opposed the principle of intervening in Iraq, they simply offered different tactics.
printable
version
First published by International Affairs, 1 January 2006
Terrorism: a threat to humanity
The end of principled political debate makes nihilistic terror a product of our times.
printable
version
First published by Mission Catalyst, 31 December 2005
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror
This book serves as a useful critique of any who may assume Al Qaeda to be a bunch of disorganised hicks, living in caves.
printable
version
First published by Journal of Strategic Studies, 12 October 2005
Foreword
in Risk in Perspective: In Defence of Common Sense
printable
version
Inclusion versus experimentation
For the advocates of public dialogue, process is far more important than content. Quantity is prioritised over quality.
printable
version
First published by Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8 September 2005
Terror in the first person
Review of Talking to Terrorists by Robin Soans
printable
version
“Not one inch should we give to these people.” The words of the Prime Minister at his monthly press conference rang through my mind as I set off to Chelsea to watch Robin Soans’s production Talking to Terrorists .
The armed police unit outside Sloane Square Tube station, adjacent to the Royal Court, acted as a reminder of the reality outside.
Out of Joint, the theatre company directed by Max Stafford-Clark, gave “these people” rather more than an inch - two hours and 20 minutes, in fact - in the latest in a genre known as verbatim theatre. Still, that must be less of a gift to the terrorists than jettisoning 200 years of hard-fought civil liberties, which some appear to suggest as the best way to counter such threats.
No doubt, well-paid lawyers and barristers will be able to deliberate as to whether such a production constitutes “incitement” to terrorism. I suspect the new three-part BBC Two documentary The New al-Qaeda might be somewhat more effective in that sense presuming, as it does, sufficient instinctive indignation among viewers to avoid a robust argument with those interviewed.
Talking to Terrorists seeks to throw light on characters by faithfully repeating the content of recorded interviews. This is both its strength and its weakness.
Certainly, the confusion of people’s public actions with their private asides makes them sound more real. The audience may sympathise with the hardships endured by some of the characters and wonder, along with the play’s British army colonel, whether they too, in similar circumstances, might have ended up as a terrorist.
But the play also depoliticises conflict. As it is only possible to talk to individuals, not to actions or agendas, the presentation is more focused on personal emotions than social realities and motivation.
In Northern Ireland, the Women’s Coalition may well have been a great way for the Secretary of State to separate “Shinners” from Loyalists at dinner parties, but its inception was primarily designed to undermine the majoritarian politics that was perceived as having reached an impasse.
Maybe democratic debate is one of the values Tony Blair has in his mind when he talks about defending “our values” and “our way of life”?
Notably though, most of the perpetrators, relatives and victims - so wonderfully characterised, juxtaposed and presented here - belong to the age when terror was largely used as a means for achieving a greater political end.
Today we are confronted by a form of terror that is an end in itself. No one claims responsibility or declares their agenda, leaving all the pundits to project their own pet prejudice as to the meaning behind such attacks.
Symbol has triumphed over substance or, as the play suggests occurs at Cabinet meetings, “speak” drowns out content.
This new form of terror may be much harder to perceive and interview for, being uncomfortably close to home. The nearest we get in the play is when a psychologist suggests setting up a campaign against four-wheel drives in Chelsea, noting how the security service interrogators would provide the group with its name and vocabulary.
“The key to the ideology of violence is to see your enemy as sub-human,” he reminds us. Judging by the ripple of support in the audience for blowing up all of the four-by-fours in SW3, we may be in for a rough ride.
First published by Times Higher Education Supplement, 5 August 2005
Terrorism and community resilience
The role of social bonds and political purpose in dealing with adversity.
printable
version
First published by Chatham House briefing paper, 14 July 2005
Terrorism and Community Resilience - A UK Perspective
printable
version
First published by Chatham House Briefing Paper, 12 July 2005
Suicide Bombers v Sexual Abusers: A Battle of Depravity or Western Fixations?
conference paper, University of Wolverhampton
printable
version
The Domestic Management of Terrorist Attacks
Final Project Report, Economic and Social Research Council
printable
version
Al-Qaeda: a conspiracy of dunces?
The real story of the 'ricin plot' is that Britain's would-be terrorists are a bunch of losers.
printable
version
Kamel Bourgass, a 31-year old Algerian, has been found guilty of ‘conspiracy to commit a public nuisance by using poisons and explosives’. We now also know that in June 2004 he had already been found guilty of the murder of detective constable Stephen Oake during a bungled police raid on a house in Manchester. The media clamour surrounding this case, however, missed the real story to emerge from the trial.
As well as the murder of Stephen Oake, Bourgass and four others were charged with ‘conspiracy to murder’ using the obscure poison ricin, held to have been manufactured at a flat in north London, but they were not convicted of that charge. A further trial involving four further alleged conspirators was to have followed soon after.
The now infamous ‘ricin factory’ was raided on 5 January 2003, two months prior to the onset of war in Iraq. The blanket media coverage of this raid coupled with the assurance of various politicians that this displayed the willingness of ‘international terrorists’ to develop and deploy so-called weapons of mass destruction, undoubtedly helped soften public opinion to the ensuing conflict.
But the trial has finally forced the authorities to admit that there never was any trace of ricin found in the first place. That is the one, truly newsworthy story to emerge from this saga. Yet following the contemporary fashion for not letting the evidence stand in the way of a good story, this welcome news has been ignored in favour of collective speculation as to what Bourgass ‘might’ have been up to.
Irrespective of the fact that ricin is considered to be a fairly unreliable covert assassination weapon, still less a weapon of mass destruction, most reporting of the case has focused on the various ‘recipes, ingredients and equipment’ which could have enabled Bourgass to manufacture ricin, cyanide and other poisons.
Presumably, the fact that such information is readily available online will allow the police to arrest pretty much whomever they please in the future. At the trial, prosecuting QC Nigel Sweeney listed the equipment that had been found as including ‘scales, thermometers, rubber gloves, a coffee grinder, batteries and bulbs’. It would appear that anyone with a moderately well-equipped kitchen might be in trouble then, as well as those who diligently follow government advice on preparing for possible terrorist attacks.
Of course, none of this is to say that Bourgass is a complete innocent; his repeated stabbing of an unarmed police officer suggests otherwise. But there are already laws for dealing with murder and, having admitted his guilt, he had been duly tried and sentenced accordingly. It is also perfectly possible that Bourgass did want to make some kind of poison, although the quantities of ingredients found - the castor oil beans that have to be ground down to make ricin - were insufficient.
But then the real story ought to be about the sheer naivety and incompetence of all the so-called al-Qaeda operatives sentenced to date. In the UK there have been only three: Richard Reid, the dim-witted shoe bomber who had trouble with matches; Sajid Badat, the Gloucester loner who bottled out of emulating Reid; and now Bourgass, a man who purportedly hoped to cause mayhem by painting car handles with a poison that has to be injected to be effective.
If that is the best of what the supposed massed ranks of al-Qaeda have to offer after three years, then, irrespective of the forthcoming trial of a similar loser who bought more fertiliser than he could handle, we should have little to fear. But the media, politicians and the police have sought to portray the situation differently.
Peter Clarke, the recently appointed Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner charged with countering terrorism, spoke of the ‘fear and disruption this plot could have caused across the country’, blissfully ignoring the fact that the only reason any of us ever heard of ricin was because the authorities pushed it into the public domain, despite there not having been any.
Notably, all of the supposed co-conspirators in this case have been cleared of the charges, so there was no evidence of an organised al-Qaeda ‘cell’ either. The jurors should be commended for reaching this verdict in the context of the constant bombardment about sinister individuals and organisations to which we have all been subjected since 9/11.
But most insidiously of all, much of the coverage of these events is dominated by evidence gathered from a supposed fellow-plotter, Mohamed Meguerba. The story about the car handles, the allegations of al-Qaeda connections and specialist training, even the existence of a supposed Nivea cream pot that contained ricin but that has never subsequently been discovered - all of these claims and others were ruled as inadmissible evidence by the judge, having been derived from interrogations by the Algerian security services.
Yet regardless of this, the BBC and others choose to repeat those statements, presumably because without them there would be no story left. In effect this legitimises the replacement of evidence with fantasy and hearsay, which can only serve to bring contemporary British justice and media reporting still further into disrepute.
There was, it seems, no al-Qaeda cell, no plot, and no ricin - but there was still a bloody good story anyway, from those who have truly terrorised the public.
First published by spiked, 14 April 2005
The limitations of risk management in dealing with disaster and building social resilience
This article explores the significance of social resilience in the light of the events of the 11th of September 2001. More broadly, it examines the way in which evolving cultural contexts alter our perceptions of risk and disaster. It argues that the contemporary dominance of technically focused risk management led responses is limiting and may serve to undermine the ordinary human bonds that actually make us truly resilient. A political debate over societal values is required if we are to reengage the public in order to achieve this and hence deal appropriately with disasters and terrorism.
printable
version
First published by Politik, 12 March 2005
REACH is not about safety
On September 24, the EU council of ministers permanently banned a family of organic chemicals, called phthalates, from use in toys and childcare items. This ‘political agreement’ brought to an end five years of debate about their toxicity. During that time, the European Commission maintained a series of temporary, emergency bans, despite existing and new evidence that consistently and increasingly opposed the official view.
printable
version
First published by Science and Public Affairs, 9 March 2005
The Concept of Risk
printable
version
First published by Nuffield Trust Paper, Health, Security and Foreign Policy Programme, 9 February 2005
Toxic policies
On September 24, the EU council of ministers permanently banned a family of organic chemicals, called phthalates, from use in toys and childcare items. This ‘political agreement’ brought to an end five years of debate about their toxicity. During that time, the European Commission maintained a series of temporary, emergency bans, despite existing and new evidence that consistently and increasingly opposed the official view.
printable
version
First published by The Parliament Magazine, 29 November 2004
A question of fear, not chemistry
'Many of the concerns about chemicals can best be described as conclusions in search of data.'
printable
version
On 24 September 2004, the Council of the European Union permanently banned a family of organic chemicals, known as phthalates, from use in toys and childcare items. This ‘political agreement’ finally brought to an end five years of debate about the toxicity of these compounds. During that time, the European Commission maintained a rolling series of temporary emergency bans, despite the scientific research evidence that consistently and increasingly opposed this official view.
Banning phthalates, a family of organic compounds used to soften PVC, appears unexceptional in its own terms. After concerns had been raised as to their possible toxicological impact upon infants, it perhaps seems reasonable to pursue a course of caution and further research. Phthalates’ removal from the marketplace is unlikely to generate much immediate economic pain, even for those companies that produced them.
But concerns about phthalates reflected a growing cautionary climate and helped pave the way for a new European chemicals regulation strategy - REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals). Now, thousands of chemicals that have been in regular use for over 20 years have to face a battery of toxicological tests, despite our having billions of hours of exposure data as to the consequences of their use.
Again, it may seem sensible to make such testing mandatory. It could surprise some people to find out that chemicals in use prior to 1981 are unlikely to have been subjected to toxicity and carcinogenicity tests. But the tests are unlikely to resolve matters.
The tests have been described as both unfeasible and unnecessary by the UK Medical Research Council Institute for Environment and Health. This is because - as with phthalates before them - the tests are to be performed on a precautionary basis. There is no evidence of any harm. Rather, it is our contemporary culture that demands constant reassurance at any cost that may be the most harmful. REACH will require vast resources, not least in terms of animal testing, but it will be unable to address all possible concerns, and it will drive consumer fears rather than assuaging them for a period in excess of 50 years.
It is important to understand these developments as shaped more by political context than scientific evidence. In the early 1990s, the European Commission and its scientific services went through major physical and cultural reorganisations in the aftermath of the BSE (‘mad cow disease’) debacle. A new cautionary outlook was adopted which effectively advocated pre-emptive strikes in situations of uncertainty. This ‘precautionary principle’ required the use of worst-case scenarios in scientific decision-making.
These developments both reflected and amplified broader trends in society. A proclivity to speculate about what might be, now dominates over examination of what actually is. Caution requires extrapolating from uncorroborated or anecdotal evidence - just in case. This has allowed rumour and myth to abound and increasingly to shape our lives. Hence the growing calls to regulate, not just chemicals, but all manner of other products and activities, both new and old, from conkers to vaccines.
But the real driver behind our growing insecurities has more to do with the political disconnection that now dominates contemporary life. As ordinary people no longer form part of active networks as they did in the past, so their tolerance and trust in all forms of authority, whether political, corporate or scientific, has waned. Subjective impressions of reality go unmoderated and grow into all-consuming worldviews not open to reasoned interrogation.
This process has been facilitated by the political, corporate and scientific elites who, lacking any vision or direction of their own, have willingly repackaged themselves as societal risk-managers. Sensing their growing isolation from those they depend upon for authority, leaders now offer to protect us from our fears. An alienated and fearful public is the flipside of an isolated and purposeless elite.
Accordingly, the specifics of any particular issue are only a small part of what shapes the debate. Campaigners’ complaints about minute traces of persistent chemicals found inside their bodies are driven more by their sense of alienation from the decision-making process than by any real grasp of chemistry. They extrapolate from experiments upon rodents, which not only have different metabolisms, but which are also subjected to huge doses of chemicals for protracted periods of time, precisely to see the worst that might happen.
Many of the concerns, such as those regarding so-called ‘endocrine disrupting chemicals’, can best be described as conclusions in search of data. Despite the Royal Society report that notes that such chemicals are just as likely to be beneficial, and despite the evidence that there are millions of times as many of such substances in our foods as in any chemical we are likely to be exposed to, the decision to assume the worst now drives policy.
It is the authorities themselves that are in the vanguard of driving the agenda. Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) may act as catalysts, but it is the European Commission, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and even many chemical producing companies themselves who, desperate not to lose face in relation to what they assume to be public opinion, are prepared to push through the new cautionary policies.
Far from stabilising matters and reassuring the public such actions will drive public concerns and also shape a far more unstable regulatory environment. Rather than challenging the public with the evidence, the new elite, lacking any purpose of its own, is happy to appear to provide protection by pandering to social fears.
Our obsession with preventing the unthinkable lends itself to distracting us from more likely sources of risk, thereby diverting social resources from more plausible sources of threat at the same time as alarming people needlessly. But the drive to be seen to be taking precautions now determines all. It has allowed groups to pose as champions of consumer welfare, of animals, the environment or future generations, despite their being unelected and unable to represent the dumb, the inanimate or the unborn.
By raising problems at a time when these are in decline, and by positing widespread tests that are neither desirable nor achievable, the authorities make matters worse rather than better. And by adopting politically expedient, yet ultimately intellectually cowardly policies, they display their ultimate contempt for those that they claim to be fighting for.
First published by spiked, 16 November 2004
Facing the possibility of bioterrorism
Bioterrorism provides a powerful metaphor for élite fears of social corrosion from within. Accordingly, a broader historical and cultural perspective is required to understand why individuals and societies feel so vulnerable to what remain largely speculative scenarios.
printable
version
First published by Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 6 November 2004
The Power of Nightmares
Transcript of Episode 3: 'The Shadow in the Cave'
printable
version
First published by BBC, 3 November 2004
Civilian morale during the Second World War: responses to air-raids re-examined
with Edgar Jones, Robin Woolven and Simon Wessely
Civilians proved more resilient than planners had predicted, largely because they had underestimated their adaptability and resourcefulness.
printable
version
First published by Social History of Medicine, 12 October 2004
Animal rights terrorism and the demise of political debate
Those confronting animal-rights activists lack the resolve to win the debate.
printable
version
First published by World Defence Systems, 12 October 2004
Hunters in the House
There's little point securing institutions from the outside, if they have failed to win the loyalty of those on the inside.
printable
version
The invasion of the chamber of the House of Commons by a handful of pro-hunt campaigners last week led to the usual debate about security at public buildings.
Much of the discussion focused on the anachronism of allowing ‘men in tights’, rather than the Metropolitan Police, to dictate security arrangements at parliament. The fact that in recent years the police have failed to stop Greenpeace activists from scaling Big Ben and a self-styled comedy terrorist from getting into Prince William’s birthday party at Windsor Castle seems to have been forgotten.
But there is something more interesting going on here than a typical security blunder. Whether or not the protesters who got in through the relatively obscure Speaker’s entrance were, as suspected, directly aided by somebody inside - an MP, a researcher or a contractor - they clearly benefited from insider knowledge about the layout of parliament.
There is little point securing institutions from the outside, with CCTV, concrete blocks or armed guards, if those institutions have failed to win the loyalty of those on the inside. Many of the individuals employed in the House in the past will have disagreed with decisions taken in the chamber; but they would also have had a sense that their own private political persuasions were not sufficient to trump the significance of a public institution.
Of course some would have had to sign a piece of paper declaring that they were not politically motivated (although for obvious reasons the same could not apply to MPs and their researchers). But there would have been a clear divide between private morality and public action, which no longer seems to apply today.
This became evident earlier this year when former Privy Council member Clare Short - who threatened to resign, then stayed, and was finally dismissed for her views on the legality of invading Iraq - chose to go public and break the Official Secrets Act in relation to the UK’s role in spying on UN officials. This suggested that, for some in public office, personal moral conscience can take precedence over issues of public security.
Short, like pro-hunt activists, could have made her views known in public and tried to win support for them. That is the political process. Her willingness to bypass such a process reflected her own intellectual incompetence, and her contempt for the public. She was not alone. Throughout 2002 and early 2003, many ‘secrets’ relating to the forthcoming invasion of Iraq were leaked from within the Pentagon. It was well known that senior military staff were not happy with the proposals coming from within the White House. But again, rather than trying to win the argument behind closed doors, they went to the media.
The images from inside Abu Ghraib prison were also leaked by elements within the US military, rather than having emerged as the result of investigative journalism or Iraqis protesting about their treatment by coalition forces. Across the developed world, key social institutions seem unable to hold the line on what they are for. They fail to win the hearts and minds even of those they employ. It is this internal uncertainty that can give rise to breaches of security.
Real security derives from the quiet confidence of knowing who you are, what you stand for and where you are heading. And that is a political question, about how to cohere a consensus around social aims and values.
A journalist remarked to me during a recent radio interview that it was hardly difficult to infiltrate the House of Commons considering how many of its functions have now been outsourced. Catering, building, even security and IT are regularly performed by contractors. It’s a wonder, he said, that they haven’t outsourced the MPs themselves.
Funny as it was, this example also reveals something fundamental about what is happening today. Nobody wants to take responsibility for anything - because they don’t really believe in it. And this process starts at the very highest level of society. For example, there are more mercenaries and private security contractors in Iraq than there are British troops.
If the establishment wants some real security then the least it could do is take responsibility for its actions, and try to win the support of those individuals it employs.
First published by spiked, 24 September 2004
Cultural influences on resilience and security
In addressing the issue of terrorism, it is as important to understand what our responses teach us about ourselves — both as individuals and as a society — as it is to deal with the terrorists or tackle what we perceive to be the root causes of terrorism.
printable
version
First published by Homeland and Security Monitor, 13 September 2004
Home Affairs Committee inquiry into terrorism and community relations
This submission seeks to inform policy-makers and emergency-planners of the significant lessons to be learnt from the growing body of literature examining human behaviour in a disaster. These point to the paramount need for professionals to incorporate community responses to particular crises within their actions, rather than seeking to supplant them as ill-informed or less productive.
printable
version
Cellular Phones, Public Fears, and A Culture of Precaution
Rather than taking people’s perceptions at face value, Burgess seeks to explain how these perceptions came to be constructed in the first place, thereby, challenging these and critiquing precaution.
printable
version
First published by Risk Analysis, 9 August 2004
Don’t send in the tanks
Using the Army to deter animal activists will not win over public opinion.
printable
version
The Prime Minister has sanctioned deployment of the Army to protect the Pounds 18 million biomedical research facility being built in Oxford. This comes after the decision by the main contractor, Walter Lilly & Co Ltd, following concrete suppliers RMC before it, to pull out of the project to replace and update the university’s animal-testing facilities.
Animal-rights groups have opposed the development, staging protests outside the construction site in South Parks Road, and have targeted researchers and suppliers. They have also used smear tactics, inflicted damage on executive cars at Walter Lilly’s parent company, Montpellier, and used firebombs.
Earlier this year, Cambridge University was forced to shelve plans for a neuroscience research centre after a similar campaign and amid spiralling costs.
Now, the Home Office, with support from the Department of Trade and Industry, is to prepare a paper on how the Government can combat such extremism.
This autumn, City firms whose members control pension funds worth £650 billion will take matters into their own hands by announcing a £25 million bounty for any information that leads to the arrest of extremist ringleaders.
But are animal-rights activists “terrorists” as many, including ministers, scientists - even journalists - have suggested?
Certainly, since September 11, 2001 such groups have perpetrated more attacks in mainland Britain than al-Qaeda. And the numbers are rising rapidly. In the first four months of the year, there were 54 attacks on people’s homes and 117 arrests. The US activist Jerry Vlasak is on record as saying that the murder of scientists would be an “effective tactic”.
Such extremists are not in the same league as those who, some hold, may seek to develop and use weapons of mass destruction. Nor are their attacks as gratuitous as the Madrid bombings. On the whole, like political terrorism in the past, they target particular individuals rather than the public at large.
But such differences miss an important commonality shared with the new terrorism of today. This is that, like al-Qaeda or its more numerous sympathisers, extremist animal-rights activism reflects the profound anti-humanism within contemporary society.
Their misanthropic, anti-modern, anti-Western outlook is almost entirely Western in origin. Dealing with such views could therefore offer the authorities some hope in their wider efforts to combat the war against terror. The problem is that, as with this broader conflict, there has been a kneejerk response aimed at securing society from the outside rather than winning the argument from the inside.
In many ways, terrorism is best seen as the failure to win a political argument. By short-circuiting or bypassing this process, those who engage in acts of terror reveal their true contempt for ordinary people. But in this regard, the various authorities - scientific, political and corporate - have reacted rather like the purported terrorists.
The reluctance of large multinationals to comment on the situation is telling. By failing to promote a debate as to how we benefit from, and why we should be in favour of, animal experimentation, they - together with a Government supposedly committed to dialogue - miss an opportunity to truly engage with the public.
Without this debate, the authorities lack real resilience in the face of action taken by a handful of activists and cave in too easily.
Already, much has been made of the fact that the new research facility will not increase the number of animal experiments conducted, as if this were the problem. Others suggest that more legislation along the lines of antisocial behaviour laws is the answer.
In fact, restricting the freedoms of the few, rather than winning the argument with the many, leads only to a degradation of democracy, equality and freedom to the detriment of all.
First published by Times Higher Education Supplement, 30 July 2004
They warn too much
Why the UK government's booklet on ‘preparing for emergencies' backfired.
printable
version
The New Labour government is currently distributing a booklet entitled ‘Preparing for Emergencies: What You Need to Know’ to every household in the UK (1).
The 22-page publication is ‘constituted from 75 per cent post-consumer waste’, so it can literally be described as reconstituted rubbish. Judging by its contents, it is fair to assume that many booklets will be recycled again quite quickly.
Having viewed an early draft, which itself was fairly inane, the remarkable feature of the finished product is that the powers-that-be managed to dumb it down still further. This speaks volumes about how the public is viewed by those who promote access, engagement and dialogue.
The real purpose of this exercise is to placate the government’s critics who, since 9/11, have demanded that more should be done to provide the public with information as to how to act in an emergency. This vocal minority has pointed to the literature provided early on to Australian citizens, as well as the far more detailed official websites available in the USA.
The UK Home Office view was always to emphasise that providing information in the absence of evidence of specific threats would be alarmist. A handful of Conservative doom-mongers and quasi-retired former army officers working as local authority emergency planning officials have managed to turn things around.
Predictably, the leaflet has satisfied nobody. The ‘something must be done’ constituency point to its obvious deficiencies and vacuity, while the vast majority who were carrying on with their lives as normal - which is presumably what the government would most want - will by and large continue to do so, only now armed with evidence of official waste and nervousness.
The need to be seen to be doing something has dominated most official actions since 9/11. A mythology of looming threats has created an insatiable appetite for security, which then has to be assuaged through totemic gestures. In fact, no amount of information or action will ever reassure those who are currently demanding more, short of being permanently zipped up into their own rubber universe.
In this regards, the government only has itself to blame. In spite of prime minister Tony Blair’s November 2002 Banqueting House speech, in which he spoke of the need to ‘avoid doing [the terrorists’] job for them’, there has been a constant tendency to talk up the situation. The head of the security services described it as a matter of ‘when, not if’ the terrorists would strike, while the chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police announced that an attack was ‘inevitable’.
With language like this, it is hardly surprising that the government is expected to do something to protect the citizenry, or at least arm them with the necessary knowledge to cope. But these official warnings, the constant crying of wolf in relation to allegedly imminent acts of terror, only increase the general culture of cynicism towards authority. It was inevitable that the focus groups that were asked whether they felt the government should be doing more to provide people with such information would report back accordingly.
Equally, it was inevitable that the publication would be received with dismay or disdain. What we are witnessing is not an accurate gauge of public perception, but rather the elite’s perception of public perception, reflected and amplified back at it through the prism of mistrust and isolation. The net outcome is the creation of a constant sense of being under siege. One more strike for the terrorists, then?
(1) Preparing for emergencies website
First published by spiked, 30 July 2004
Panic in the streets
What makes us all so anxious?
printable
version
First published by New Humanist, 12 May 2004
Facing the possibility of bioterrorism
Bioterrorism provides a powerful metaphor for élite fears of social corrosion from within. Accordingly, a broader historical and cultural perspective is required to understand why individuals and societies feel so vulnerable to what remain largely speculative scenarios.
printable
version
First published by Current Opinions in Biotechnology, 12 May 2004
The Social Basis for Fears about Science
Conference Paper, Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry
printable
version
Political tunnel vision is today’s real terror
In retreating from the world and politics, we all become more vulnerable - as the people and politicians of Spain have learnt.
printable
version
The defeat of the People’s Party in the Spanish general election was not a consequence of terrorism, but was rather an expression of the failure of principled debate and public engagement in contemporary political life. This failure affects all parties, in all countries around the world. It looks set to have a far more destabilising impact on international affairs than terror ever could. Yet, despite this, the trend expressed by the outcome, for a retreat from the public and the political to the private and the personal, continues unabated. Instead of trying to shape the world, an exaggerated sense of insecurity encourages people and politicians everywhere to hide away from it.
Many political commentators have long been pointing to the growing absence of substance in politics nowadays. This has been matched by a steady decline in electoral participation rates. Accordingly, politicians concerned about their legitimacy have sought numerous means to enhance turnout and have repackaged themselves as societal risk managers. But these more limited aspirations - to promote voting by anyone, for anyone, and to micro-manage the economy, focusing particularly on education and health - have not inspired a new generation of voters. Nowhere was this pattern more evident than in Spain in the run-up to the recent elections, when all were rudely awakened by the blasts in Madrid.
It was this longer-term political failure by Jose Mar!a Aznar, the prime minister, to project and fight for a bold and engaging vision for Spanish society that left him exposed to people’s more immediate preoccupations with their personal safety in the aftermath of the bombings. Promoting some positive principles and values would have militated against this emotional response to an extraordinary incident. But, like politicians of all hues in most countries, all sense of public mission had gradually been replaced by pandering to private concerns. The instability that ensued in Spain should act as a wake-up call to leaders everywhere.
No doubt the Spanish electorate was angry to discover that the perpetrators of these atrocities might have been al-Qaida rather than the Basque separatist group Eta, as they had initially been assured. But at the time of the vote the available evidence for this was far from conclusive. In different times, tapes, arrests and claims of responsibility would have been treated with due scepticism. But in the contemporary climate, characterised by mistrust and cynicism for all forms of authority, there is a general proclivity to assume the worst and presume a cover-up. This mood has been facilitated by governments that, directly or indirectly, play on people’s fears to justify their own agendas. It allows urban myths and rumours to hold a devastating sway over world affairs.
It is true that the Spanish people had largely opposed their government’s support for the war in Iraq a year earlier, but the issue had hardly featured in the general election. Assuming that the attacks were retribution for this military role - a belief raised only in retrospect by those laying claim to the attacks - conveniently ignored previous incidents such as those in Indonesia and Morocco, whose armies had played no such role. What’s more, the form that opposition to the war took - concern as to the unforeseen consequences for Spain of participating in it - is itself quite revealing as to the self-oriented politics of our time.
In the past, anti-imperialist groups would have opposed the principle of intervention, irrespective of whether it was sanctioned by the United Nations or any number of legal experts. More significantly, they would have highlighted the consequences of war for the people of Iraq rather than focusing so narrowly on themselves. This shows the extent to which the opposition, too, was not averse to playing the risk game at home and points to why the government was able to trump their fears with that of leaving Saddam alone. Thus it was that, in the absence of principled political argument by both sides and despite huge demonstrations, when the war started the protests largely disappeared.
It is an interesting phenomenon in the world today that events that appear public and transformative in form are actually private and limited in character. Rather than expressing any broad sense of cohesion and direction, protests are now often an expression of isolation and insecurity. This “age of insecurity” or “culture of fear”, as some have coined it, long predated the events of September 11 2001. It is manifest nowadays in almost all social and political discussions, which increasingly take the form of how best to protect society from certain assumed external risks. This approach breeds cynicism in authority and is met by quiet resignation or childish anger (think of the “BLIAR” slogan on protest signs) rather than determined action or constructive and mature criticism.
Ironically, this absence of principled debate is reflected back at us in the form that terrorism takes in the modern age. In the past, groups fought national liberation struggles, and targeted their attacks on the authorities with a view to winning over a wider constituency. Today, the acts of terrorists, unrestrained by any sense of moral purpose, are increasingly nihilistic in character. Terrorism has become a petulant lashing-out against modernity that draws encouragement from the broader self-hatred evident in the West. In this regard, giving it a name, such as al-Qaida, rather misses the point. Its perpetrators are as likely to be found at home as anywhere else. They include Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, and the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan.
In this context, people and politicians have understandably become fixated on the presumed enemy beyond. But this fails to recognise the extent to which political and cultural corrosion at home is the driving force, both encouraging an exaggerated sense of insecurity and encouraging potential terrorists, as well as loners, hoaxers and other cranks. The sight of western societies prioritising the supposed threat to civilisation posed by al-Qaida is an immensely dispiriting one. Not only does this continue to avoid the necessary political debate as to what exactly we are for, but it also leads to an encroachment of all manner of technical barriers supposedly designed to make us feel more secure.
Sadly, the focus on surveillance, protection, information and warnings really will have unintended consequences. These encourage more mistrust, suspicion and concern, accentuated by senior officials suggesting that it is simply a matter of time before terrorists strike. This tends to push people farther apart from one another at the very time when they need to be drawn together in a sense of common purpose. It is also the case that advertising campaigns exhorting us to be more vigilant are likely to prove about as effective as erecting a totem pole against evil spirits on a village green.
Realising that real resilience is an attitude rather than a technology, Tony Blair recently indicated his resolve to defend “our way of life” in a speech to his Sedgefield constituency. But he failed to spell out what that means. Accordingly, such assertions, like those of others who have waxed lyrical about defending freedom and democracy of late, come across as shallow platitudes. A Martian visiting the UK recently might be forgiven for thinking that “our way of life” consists of advising people what to eat and how much to drink.
This phenomenon of focusing on lifestyle issues is itself a consequence of the paucity of political debate today. Political leaders across the world have seen how incredibly divisive the war on terror has turned out to be.
It appears less problematic to launch an even more intrusive war on behaviour. Instead of expanding their horizons as the times demand, and reminding people that there is more to life than life itself, they feel more comfortable digging in. So on the very day the government announced its deployment of rail marshals to wade through rush-hour carriages identifying suspect bags and packages, the same authorities, who clearly assume drunkenness to be as “inevitable” as terrorism, revealed plans to train an army of alcohol marshals to patrol our pubs and clubs drumming out aberrant behaviour.
An exaggerated sense of insecurity, a proclivity to prioritise the personal over the political and a cynical mistrust of all forms of authority, including other people, is driving world politics. Civilisation can never be bombed out of existence by terrorists. It can, however, be seriously corrupted and corroded from within. The reluctance of political leaders everywhere to define what they are for and project a sense of mission for society may save them from the embarrassment of losing some political arguments, but it could also ensure that they go down with a sinking ship.
By limiting their remit to security, they leave society incredibly unarmed as they fail thereby to win and cohere a resilient society.
Focusing down rather than up has encouraged the advent of a war on behaviour at home to match the war on terror overseas. Soon, marshals will be telling us where to place our bags and when it is time to go home. None of this will make things any better. Unless we assume some political responsibility to reject the narrow politics of fear that have brought us to this juncture, we face an unpredictable and insecure future.
First published by Times Higher Education Supplement, 26 March 2004
Political tunnel vision is today’s real terror
In retreating from the world and politics, we all become more vulnerable - as the people and politicians of Spain have learnt.
printable
version
In retreating from the world and politics, we all become more vulnerable - as the people and politicians of Spain have learnt.
The defeat of the People’s Party in the Spanish general election was not a consequence of terrorism, but was rather an expression of the failure of principled debate and public engagement in contemporary political life. This failure affects all parties, in all countries around the world. It looks set to have a far more destabilising impact on international affairs than terror ever could. Yet, despite this, the trend expressed by the outcome, for a retreat from the public and the political to the private and the personal, continues unabated. Instead of trying to shape the world, an exaggerated sense of insecurity encourages people and politicians everywhere to hide away from it.
Many political commentators have long been pointing to the growing absence of substance in politics nowadays. This has been matched by a steady decline in electoral participation rates. Accordingly, politicians concerned about their legitimacy have sought numerous means to enhance turnout and have repackaged themselves as societal risk managers. But these more limited aspirations - to promote voting by anyone, for anyone, and to micro-manage the economy, focusing particularly on education and health - have not inspired a new generation of voters. Nowhere was this pattern more evident than in Spain in the run-up to the recent elections, when all were rudely awakened by the blasts in Madrid.
It was this longer-term political failure by Jose Mar!a Aznar, the prime minister, to project and fight for a bold and engaging vision for Spanish society that left him exposed to people’s more immediate preoccupations with their personal safety in the aftermath of the bombings. Promoting some positive principles and values would have militated against this emotional response to an extraordinary incident. But, like politicians of all hues in most countries, all sense of public mission had gradually been replaced by pandering to private concerns. The instability that ensued in Spain should act as a wake-up call to leaders everywhere.
No doubt the Spanish electorate was angry to discover that the perpetrators of these atrocities might have been al-Qaida rather than the Basque separatist group Eta, as they had initially been assured. But at the time of the vote the available evidence for this was far from conclusive. In different times, tapes, arrests and claims of responsibility would have been treated with due scepticism. But in the contemporary climate, characterised by mistrust and cynicism for all forms of authority, there is a general proclivity to assume the worst and presume a cover-up. This mood has been facilitated by governments that, directly or indirectly, play on people’s fears to justify their own agendas. It allows urban myths and rumours to hold a devastating sway over world affairs.
It is true that the Spanish people had largely opposed their government’s support for the war in Iraq a year earlier, but the issue had hardly featured in the general election. Assuming that the attacks were retribution for this military role - a belief raised only in retrospect by those laying claim to the attacks - conveniently ignored previous incidents such as those in Indonesia and Morocco, whose armies had played no such role. What’s more, the form that opposition to the war took - concern as to the unforeseen consequences for Spain of participating in it - is itself quite revealing as to the self-oriented politics of our time.
In the past, anti-imperialist groups would have opposed the principle of intervention, irrespective of whether it was sanctioned by the United Nations or any number of legal experts. More significantly, they would have highlighted the consequences of war for the people of Iraq rather than focusing so narrowly on themselves. This shows the extent to which the opposition, too, was not averse to playing the risk game at home and points to why the government was able to trump their fears with that of leaving Saddam alone. Thus it was that, in the absence of principled political argument by both sides and despite huge demonstrations, when the war started the protests largely disappeared.
It is an interesting phenomenon in the world today that events that appear public and transformative in form are actually private and limited in character. Rather than expressing any broad sense of cohesion and direction, protests are now often an expression of isolation and insecurity. This “age of insecurity” or “culture of fear”, as some have coined it, long predated the events of September 11 2001. It is manifest nowadays in almost all social and political discussions, which increasingly take the form of how best to protect society from certain assumed external risks. This approach breeds cynicism in authority and is met by quiet resignation or childish anger (think of the “BLIAR” slogan on protest signs) rather than determined action or constructive and mature criticism.
Ironically, this absence of principled debate is reflected back at us in the form that terrorism takes in the modern age. In the past, groups fought national liberation struggles, and targeted their attacks on the authorities with a view to winning over a wider constituency. Today, the acts of terrorists, unrestrained by any sense of moral purpose, are increasingly nihilistic in character. Terrorism has become a petulant lashing-out against modernity that draws encouragement from the broader self-hatred evident in the West. In this regard, giving it a name, such as al-Qaida, rather misses the point. Its perpetrators are as likely to be found at home as anywhere else. They include Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, and the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan.
In this context, people and politicians have understandably become fixated on the presumed enemy beyond. But this fails to recognise the extent to which political and cultural corrosion at home is the driving force, both encouraging an exaggerated sense of insecurity and encouraging potential terrorists, as well as loners, hoaxers and other cranks. The sight of western societies prioritising the supposed threat to civilisation posed by al-Qaida is an immensely dispiriting one. Not only does this continue to avoid the necessary political debate as to what exactly we are for, but it also leads to an encroachment of all manner of technical barriers supposedly designed to make us feel more secure.
Sadly, the focus on surveillance, protection, information and warnings really will have unintended consequences. These encourage more mistrust, suspicion and concern, accentuated by senior officials suggesting that it is simply a matter of time before terrorists strike. This tends to push people farther apart from one another at the very time when they need to be drawn together in a sense of common purpose. It is also the case that advertising campaigns exhorting us to be more vigilant are likely to prove about as effective as erecting a totem pole against evil spirits on a village green.
Realising that real resilience is an attitude rather than a technology, Tony Blair recently indicated his resolve to defend “our way of life” in a speech to his Sedgefield constituency. But he failed to spell out what that means. Accordingly, such assertions, like those of others who have waxed lyrical about defending freedom and democracy of late, come across as shallow platitudes. A Martian visiting the UK recently might be forgiven for thinking that “our way of life” consists of advising people what to eat and how much to drink.
This phenomenon of focusing on lifestyle issues is itself a consequence of the paucity of political debate today. Political leaders across the world have seen how incredibly divisive the war on terror has turned out to be.
It appears less problematic to launch an even more intrusive war on behaviour. Instead of expanding their horizons as the times demand, and reminding people that there is more to life than life itself, they feel more comfortable digging in. So on the very day the government announced its deployment of rail marshals to wade through rush-hour carriages identifying suspect bags and packages, the same authorities, who clearly assume drunkenness to be as “inevitable” as terrorism, revealed plans to train an army of alcohol marshals to patrol our pubs and clubs drumming out aberrant behaviour.
An exaggerated sense of insecurity, a proclivity to prioritise the personal over the political and a cynical mistrust of all forms of authority, including other people, is driving world politics. Civilisation can never be bombed out of existence by terrorists. It can, however, be seriously corrupted and corroded from within. The reluctance of political leaders everywhere to define what they are for and project a sense of mission for society may save them from the embarrassment of losing some political arguments, but it could also ensure that they go down with a sinking ship.
By limiting their remit to security, they leave society incredibly unarmed as they fail thereby to win and cohere a resilient society.
Focusing down rather than up has encouraged the advent of a war on behaviour at home to match the war on terror overseas. Soon, marshals will be telling us where to place our bags and when it is time to go home. None of this will make things any better. Unless we assume some political responsibility to reject the narrow politics of fear that have brought us to this juncture, we face an unpredictable and insecure future.
First published by THES, 24 March 2004
Sociological Aspects Of Risk And Resilience In Response To Acts Of Terrorism
Our response to terrorist incidents as a society teaches us far more about ourselves than it does about the terrorists.
printable
version
First published by World Defence Systems, 12 March 2004
The Precautionary Principle: Is it Killing Innovation?
The precautionary principle is, above all else, an invitation to those without evidence, expertise or authority, to shape and influence political debates. It achieves that by introducing supposedly ethical or environmental elements into the process of scientific, corporate and governmental decision-making.
printable
version
First published by in An Apology for Capitalism?, Kumaria, S. ed, Profile Books, 9 March 2004
The Timid Corporation – Why Business is Terrified of Taking Risk
Hunt examines why business has become re-presented and increasingly accepts an image of itself as reckless, abusive, and destructive. Despite lack of evidence as to widespread misdemeanors, every corporate scandal today, from Enron to Worldcom, becomes reinterpreted as a morality tale that points back to an already assumed need to constrain the corporation.
printable
version
First published by Risk Analysis, 9 February 2004
Britain’s bunker mentality
What kind of message does the UK's fortification of its overseas missions send to the world - and to terrorists?
printable
version
In the aftermath of the bomb attacks on the British consulate and a British bank in Istanbul in November 2003, the Foreign Office has launched an exercise to examine the security of its 230 overseas missions.
The study may take ‘some months’, and will recommend numerous relocations and fortifications, costing hundreds of millions of pounds. This will dwarf the budget provided for more limited improvements such as gates, concrete blocks and bulletproof glass, initiated after the attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
Officials perceive British interests overseas to be high on the international terrorist hitlist, due to prime minister Tony Blair’s support for President Bush in the war on terror. Two British consulates, in Tangiers and Casablanca, have already relocated and the embassy in Yemen is also expected to move. The remaining missions will be examined for, among other things, their ability to withstand an attack by a lorry packed with explosives. America also recently moved some of its embassies out of towns into heavily fortified compounds.
No doubt, in the restricted imaginations of the Foreign Office officials who will write the report, all of these measures make perfect sense. ‘Why risk further attacks…? Why risk the life of a single British citizen overseas…?’ But there can be few clearer examples of something that makes sense to an auditor or a risk manager making absolutely no sense in policy terms.
Some diplomats have already pointed to one problem - losing contact with the local population. Presumably, one of the purposes of being a diplomat is to be diplomatic and this requires a certain rapport with those among whom you locate yourself. In security terms - considering that most outposts still serve an intelligence-gathering function, even at the mundane level of just knowing what is going on - this failure to integrate could actually create greater risks further afield. British diplomats would, in effect, barricade themselves in and communicate to the outside world through the intercom. Why not stay at home and use the internet instead?
But there is a bigger problem, which in some ways it is already too late to rectify: namely that hiding behind closed doors is hardly an outward expression of an inner resolve, derived from any sense of purpose. The government, through its recently launched Civil Contingencies Bill, hopes to build and strengthen UK resilience. But by responding in this way to what were, despite tragic consequences, fairly limited attacks by a group with little connection to the great bogey al-Qaeda, British officials send out a confused message to the world. If this is all it takes to provoke a sea-change in policy and inflict significant financial damage, then the government really is doing the terrorists’ job for them.
Allowing such a ‘bunker mentality’ to develop will prove debilitating. Logically, diplomatic residences ought also to be assessed, fortified and, if necessary, relocated. All travel arrangements will need re-evaluation. In fact, there is no limit to feeling vulnerable, and in the long run normality will never be resumed. In the meantime, noting the onset of such significant changes from small-scale strikes, all manner of terrorists, hoaxers, loners, cranks and other disaffected persons with a grudge against the British state will be further encouraged to have a go.
There have always been dangers in establishing a base overseas, but in the past such narrow concerns were readily outweighed by a broader sense of purpose and opportunity. Today, viewing such moves primarily through the auditor’s prism of risk, it indeed makes more sense to call the whole thing off, pull up the gang planks and come home. After all, what’s the point in having a mission without a mission?
First published by spiked, 22 January 2004
Review: The Globalization of Terrorism
The year 2001 was a huge one for terrorism. This little book missed it. Published six months before the momentous events of September one might feel inclined to forgive the author, series editor and publishers for failing to anticipate the broadly unimaginable. But the book’s bigger failing is to have missed the 1990s.
printable
version
First published by The Global Review of Ethnopolitics, 20 January 2004
Communicating the War on Terror: conference summary
(with Brendan O'Neill)
What should governments tell the public about terror threats? How should governments and other official bodies strike a balance between warning us and worrying us? And what is the role of the media in the war on terror -- how should we define the responsibilities of increasingly influential reporters in a time of conflict?
printable
version
Social bonds can withstand most bombs
Terrorism aimed at a divided society will never be countered by technical efforts alone - real resilience can come only from common purpose.
printable
version
The first line of defence against terrorism is civilians. Their support prior to and their subsequent reactions to any incident are crucial. In this sense, our response to terrorist incidents as a society teaches us far more about ourselves than it does about terrorists. While terrorists may hope that emergencies and disasters lead to a breakdown in social cohesion, such incidents are also one of the best indicators of the strength of bonds across a community. At such times, societies that are together pull together. Those that are apart more readily fall apart.
We know that social bonds have been severely eroded over the past decade or so. At the formal level, people in advanced western societies are increasingly unlikely to participate in the political process. Even when people do vote, it is often on a negative basis. Nor are we as likely to be active, or even passive, members of political parties or trade unions in the same way that our forebears were.
At the informal level, the changes are even more striking. Many have commented on the growing pressures faced by communities, neighbourhoods and families. In Bowling Alone , the US academic Robert Putnam also pointed to the demise of informal clubs and associations. Meeting with friends occurs less frequently than previously, too. This loss of social capital has occurred and been experienced within a generation. It has dramatic consequences.
For example, not so long ago it was still possible to send children to school on their own, assuming that other adults would act in loco parentis .
None of us ever signed a contract saying that we would look after other people’s children. It was simply an unstated and self-evident social good.
Now, we can no longer assume it to hold true, and it is frightening how fast once core social bonds have been displaced.
Being less connected leaves people less corrected. It allows their subjective impression of reality to go unmediated or unmoderated through membership of a wider group or association. Thus, personal obsessions can grow into all-consuming worldviews that are rarely open to reasoned interrogation or debate. In part, it is this that explains our recent proclivity to emphasise or exaggerate all the so-called risks that are held to confront us. From BSE to mobile phones to the MMR vaccine, all new developments are viewed through the prism of a heightened consciousness of risk.
Yet, as the recent episode relating to the Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome virus) shows, it is our own responses that, on occasion, can prove the most debilitating. Our fears are not restricted to the realms of science and technology either. Age-old activities and processes have been reinterpreted to fit our new sense of isolation and fear. School bullying, sunbathing and even sex have joined an ever-growing panoply of concerns.
We may be more aware, but we are also easier to scare. Being isolated leaves us more self-centred, as well as risk averse. In turn, these reduce the likelihood of our acting for some greater common good and make us less resilient, individually and as a society.
A focus of research and activity since September 11 2001 has been on security and intelligence. In addition, there has been a significant examination of the role, remit and readiness of so-called first-responders, or the emergency services. Sociological, cultural and psychological analyses have been restricted to examining societies in the Middle East, or the “mind of the terrorist”. In this context, it is hardly surprising that it appears that the more we do, the more vulnerable many people seem to feel. This is because none of the solutions being proffered addresses our own social disengagement and isolation. They are also almost entirely technical and negative in character.
Technical fixes, if not easier, are more comfortable for the authorities than addressing problems of cultural coherence. A glance at the literature or the talks delivered to any related conference reveals a bewildering array of suggestions, including more surveillance, better intelligence, new detection equipment, protective clothing, emergency vaccines, concrete blocks, computer models to predict behaviour and outcomes and new structures of governance to enhance communication and ensure accountability.
In fact, deep down we all know that real resilience is about attitude. It is a cultural outlook based on a sense of confidence and purpose that says, “I won’t let them get me down.” We can have all the technology in the world at our disposal and the most transparent lines of accountability, but if our mindset is not right we’re in trouble. Being electronically connected cannot compensate for being socially disconnected. The latter leaves us less clear and less wilful as a society. It is this asymmetry that terrorists exploit.
What’s worse, there is a clear danger that technical fixes can become part of the problem. This is because, at heart, they serve to undermine the very liberties our societies once held up as unique and worth fighting for or defending. They also serve to make us more suspicious and mistrustful of one another, thereby pushing us further apart. Real resilience requires people to be brought together with a sense of common purpose. Despite believing firmly that we remain at greater threat from nature than from bioterrorism, for instance, many in the health sector are now having to tailor their requests for future funding from the government to fit the new agenda.
It is also easier to be against something than to be for something. It appears simpler to cohere society around some dystopian fear than around a progressive vision. For example, it was easier to agree on getting rid of Saddam Hussein than to know what to replace him with. Similarly, governments have found it easier to introduce new laws against animal-rights protestors or anti-abortionists than to win an argument as to why society should support animal experimentation or abortion.
In a similar vein, some have remarked that we need to understand why it is that a small number of Asian youths appear to be attracted to fringe Islamist organisations. In fact, it is the reverse we need to address. Why is it that a small number of Asian youth, and some non-Asians besides, are not attracted to our own society? Surely it is we who hold the balance of power and attraction here? It is a huge indictment of our own societies that we are unable to provide young people with rules, structures, a sense of purpose and meaning, as well as ways of realising their ambitions, so that they end up looking for this elsewhere - in whatever twisted and abbreviated form that may take. It is not the magnetism of al-Qaida we need to worry about, but the vacuum at the heart of our own society. No doubt, it is just such a sentiment that led a friend of UK journalist Allison Pearson to remark recently that watching the reality TV programme Big Brother 4 made him feel like joining al-Qaida.
At every level in our society, from politics through to culture and science, our leaders appear increasingly unwilling to lead and lacking in any sense of mission or purpose other than, at best, to protect us from risks. Ironically, these risks only become worse the more we divert social resources to focus solely on them, as we fail, thereby, to debate where we are heading and to expand our horizons.
In February 2003, the US State Department launched its national strategy for countering terrorism. The document indicates from the outset that the best form of defence is offence, before describing what it called a 4-D strategy for combating terror. The 4-D’s stand for “defeat”, “deny”, “diminish” and “defend”. What is remarkable about these is the limited outlook they project. It would appear that US policy in the war on terror is restricted to reacting to the assumed actions of others. This is hardly the projection of a bold vision for the future that might win hearts and minds at home, let alone among potential terrorists.
Real resilience requires rather clearer aims and purposes than we are witnessing. If we were to define resilience very roughly as somehow restoring the status quo prior to a severe shock on society, or at least restoring the general direction in which we were heading, then the first task that needs to be fulfilled is achieving some sort of agreement across society as to where we are and where exactly we are heading.
Changing our culture is certainly a daunting task. It requires people in positions of authority to agree on a common direction and convert others to it. Bizarrely, few of the authorities concerned consider it to be their responsibility to lead in this matter. Neither do they believe such cultural change to be a realistic possibility. Yet, in the eventuality of a major civil emergency, they hope that the public will pay attention to the warnings they provide and alter their behaviour accordingly. By then, it will be too late.
First published by Times Higher Education Supplement, 19 December 2003
Limitations of Public Dialogue in Science and the Rise of New ‘Experts’
printable
version
First published by Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 14 December 2003
An arresting sight
Why does it take 26 armed police units to detain one terrorist suspect?
printable
version
Whatever the reasons for arresting student Sajid Badat in a dawn raid on his parents’ Gloucester home on 27 November 2003, the manner in which it was carried out suggests that the authorities are losing all sense of proportion.
Twenty-six armed police units of the Gloucestershire Constabulary were deployed to arrest Badat and to seal off three roads in the city centre; 119 residential homes were evacuated during the searches, which apparently uncovered a ‘small amount’ of explosives.
If, as has been claimed, Badat had been under close surveillance by Special Branch officers for about a year, why were so many resources required? The manner of the arrest suggests that the authorities knew little about the kind of person they might encounter, what he may or may not have had inside the house, and above all their own capabilities in safely arresting him.
Police press officer Kate Nelmes explained that ‘our primary concern was for public safety’. Martin Baker, deputy chief constable of Gloucestershire Police, also said that ‘public safety is our first consideration’. Such a risk-averse outlook is now endemic among those charged with maintaining law and order, as exposed earlier this year in the Metropolitan Police’s two-week siege at a house in Hackney (see London’s safe siege, by Jennie Bristow). Of course, police ought to be concerned about public safety, but what happens when that is prioritised to such an extent that it stands in the way of arresting someone? Whether such an approach makes the public any safer is a moot point.
Home secretary David Blunkett waded in with some ill-measured comments over the arrest of Badat. These can no longer be repeated, in case they prejudice any possible future trial. But without regard to issues of culpability, the fact that Blunkett suggested that one individual could be a threat to the life and liberty of the country raises some awkward questions. What kind of individual can threaten 60million people? Or more importantly, what kind of country can feel so threatened by the actions of one person?
What’s more, the kind of language used by Blunkett would in the future allow him to declare a national emergency and assume special powers according to the government’s draft Civil Contingencies Bill - which, coincidentally, was being reported on that very same day by a joint committee of the House of Lords and House of Commons.
Together with the associated detention of a 33-year-old man in Birmingham, and of a 39-year-old man in Manchester as part of a separate investigation (both of whom were later released without charge), Badat’s arrest brought to 481 the number of people arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 since 11 September 2001. The number has since passed 500; only 73 of whom, or 1 in 7, have had any kind of charge brought against them, let alone a successful prosecution.
The trend is now to make numerous arrests, before releasing the suspects without charge. Notably, the famous ‘ricin factory’ story that dominated the news headlines in autumn 2002 did not lead to any successful convictions, as scientists from Porton Down were subsequently unable to confirm the existence of ricin on the premises (1). Across Europe there has been a similar pattern - where young men, mostly of Arab, Asian or North African origin, are held and then released.
In France, an individual was arrested for having a cache of arms; it later transpired that the cache had been planted by his enemies with a view to provoking just such an arrest. As the intelligence net is cast wider and wider, rumour, bravado and general chatter, as well as knowing someone who knows someone in al-Qaeda, are seen as sufficient justification for close monitoring and possibly arrest.
Unsurprisingly, the arrests have generated much press interest. Deputy chief constable Martin Baker remarked: ‘There’s an awful lot of wild speculation in the papers this morning, very little, if any of which, has come from the police. As far as I’m aware there have been no statements from the police, either the Metropolitan Police or the Gloucestershire Constabulary, that would substantiate any of the speculation in the papers this morning so it’s important that we keep a very level head about this.’
But what did he expect, considering the manner in which the arrests took place? This looks like little more than blame-shifting for the ensuing furore - a trick that Baker may have learned from Blunkett, who claimed that his comments had merely been an interpretation of what the police’s actions meant, considering they had made use of terrorism legislation.
As for maintaining a balance between staying alert and becoming alarmed - two Gloucester residents interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the morning after the raid reported being shocked at the revelation that their neighbour might be involved with al-Qaeda, and claimed to feel very, very scared. Job well done, then?
(1) See ‘New government setback as ricin plot claims collapse’, David Leppard, Sunday Times, 5 October 2003, p2
First published by spiked, 4 December 2003
From the rules of engagement to passionless marriages
Review of Conflict: From Analysis to Intervention, edited by Sandra Cheldelin, Daniel Druckman and Larissa Fast
printable
version
Reading this compilation aimed at practitioners and theorists in the field of conflict resolution is like being on the receiving end of one of their interventions. First, a number of mutually incompatible viewpoints are posited. Then, the inherent contradictions within these are studiously ignored and one is asked to focus on process rather than content. By the end, you become so bored and confused that you are desperate to get out, unsure as to what you really believed in the first place. Problem solved!
Conflict is a book for our post-political times. What it lacks in depth and conviction it makes up for in scope. Unfortunately, as the serious research gets covered in the same cursory manner as the trite, any wisdom is lost. Presumably, its authors and editors, all acolytes of the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University in the US, agreed to disagree. But believing in everything reduces the impact of their insights. These are brought to bear upon tensions ranging from playground spats and passionless marriages to civil wars and international bloodbaths.
The unstated thread throughout is the therapeutic presumption that conflict is inherently a bad thing rather than a necessary element of social problems. In this post-Clausewitzian universe, war is the continuation of psychology by other means. Conflict becomes pathologised, and trying to win an argument is the act of a bully. Thus emotions become the legitimate target for intervention. A simplistic “cycle of violence” is asserted to hold - note, no room for negotiation here. This assumes that those who have been abused and traumatised go on to abuse and traumatise others. As ideas go, it is on a par with the profundity of “monkey see, monkey do”.
We are introduced to the roles of the mediator, arbitrator, facilitator and peace negotiator. While appearing to focus on individuals and their feelings, these professionals’ real role is apparently to avoid contentious debate. This treats people as children and serves to temper and frustrate their real passions and ambitions. The logic is complete as we are told that “mediators must learn to understand their own emotions”.
Thus it appears essential to empathise with, or at least know of, the fall of Kosovo to the Ottoman Turks in 1389, to address concerns expressed six centuries later. What this approach misses entirely is the extent to which, by emphasising political, economic and social disintegration “over there”, western politicians sought to shape and form a badly missing sense of moral identity at home.
On the plus side, there are a few pearls hidden in the book’s pages. But you spend so long finding them that any sensible person begins to wonder why they should bother. By the end, the reader is left in little doubt that if 20 conflict resolution experts were placed together in a room, they would be at loggerheads in minutes. Still, as my five-year-old pointed out, the book does have a pretty cover.
First published by Times Higher Education Supplement, 28 November 2003
Phone alarm
A new book examines how the culture of precaution shaped public fears over mobile phones.
printable
version
Cellular Phones, Public Fears and a Culture of Precaution, Adam Burgess, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Risk analysis falls broadly into two opposed camps: those who appeal to scientific evidence to critique what they consider to be exaggerated public fears, and those who focus on sociological data to highlight people’s perceptions, in an attempt to justify a more precautionary outlook. While most recognise that risk contains both a material and a perceptual element, there is rarely a meeting of ways between these methods.
This is where Adam Burgess’ contribution to the debate is to be welcomed. His Cellular Phones, Public Fears and a Culture of Precaution focuses on the panics over cellular phones. Rather than falsely comparing the statistical risk of one activity with another, as many in the scientific camp do, Burgess, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Bath, has produced an explicitly sociological analysis. Instead of taking people’s perceptions of the risks posed by cellular phones at face value, he seeks to explain how these perceptions came about in the first place, as a means of critiquing today’s precautionary climate.
In discussions of risks, focusing on people’s perceptions has become the mainstay of governments, activists, the media and even risk consultants. They suggest that our perceptions of risks are just as important, if not more so, than the actuality of the risks we face, as perceptions often determine behaviour. So it is argued that irrespective of scientific ‘fact’, the effects of fear are real in social consequence, leaving governments with little choice but to regulate accordingly.
This conciliatory approach benefits from appearing to make ordinary people’s views part of the decision-making process. In an age when few participate actively in political life, treating their fears seriously is seen as inclusive and democratic. But, as others have suggested elsewhere, assuming or adapting to popular perceptions is as contemptuous of the public as dismissing them. It may also be more damaging.
In his study of cellular phones, Burgess explores the advent and use of the ‘precautionary principle’ in the European context, comparing it with the notion of ‘prudent avoidance’ in the USA. He argues that these approaches have led to the institutionalisation of marginal concerns, creating a lose-lose situation. Not taking precautions is taken to show a lack of concern, while funding new research suggests either an attempt to influence the outcome, or the existence of a real problem. So irrespective of outcome, any action taken serves to drive public fears rather than assuaging them.
Burgess also shows that once one authority, region or country has adopted a particular standard, others feel under pressure to follow suit. Indeed, the vogue for the devolution of power to regional authorities has accelerated this trend, as new bodies are at pains to prove their purpose and adopt a campaigning agenda to distinguish their role from that of central government. All of this leads to a ratchet-like effect superimposing worst-case regulations on to worst-case assumptions. Consider the role of the European Commission, which has established safety as one of its raisons d’êtres.
The book’s greatest strength lies in its international comparisons. Burgess exposes the extent to which social perceptions of cellular phones were constructed according to varying national priorities and agendas. For example, the sheer size of the USA, combined with the availability of cheap conventional calls and the pre-existing confusion of media and lobby groups, made it much harder for activists against cellular phones to establish a coherence there. This was despite long-standing debates over the impact of electromagnetic radiation. What’s more, efforts to establish a campaign against cellular phones became moderated by the specific responses to the Columbine High School shootings of April 1999 and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. These events showed a nervous public the extent to which technology could possibly serve a vital social function, thereby undermining moves against it.
In Europe, concerns focused on the siting of transmission towers, or base-stations. Campaigns only really emerged when the masts, reflecting the shift from analogue to digital technology, needed to be located in closer proximity to the users. As more masts were required in hilly or mountainous regions, such as Scotland and Italy, than flat ones, such as the Netherlands, so the campaigns took on different intensities there. Also, telecommunications towers had a different meaning in Northern Ireland, where they evoked memories of a ‘surveillance state’ and the campaign against them was used by the authorities to unite different communities. In the Irish Republic, complaints largely emanated from non-Irish émigrés searching for a rural idyll, and went against the dynamic image of a ‘Celtic Tiger’ that the Irish government sought to project. For rather obvious reasons, in Finland, home of Nokia, such campaigns never really got off the ground.
The role of the media is most rigorously examined in the UK case. Here, far from being a tabloid frenzy, concerns were first raised, and continued to be developed, by the high-brow broadsheet The Sunday Times. Headlines such as ‘Mobile phones cook your brain’ (14 April 1996) and ‘Are we being told the truth about mobile phones?’ (20 December 1998), reflected one particular journalist’s personal obsession. Indeed, the case is well made that once the issue hit the tabloids, it also shifted from one newspaper to another as particular journalists changed jobs. In an interview with Cathy Moran of the Express, Burgess ascertains how her interest in the subject stemmed from her seeing it as a personal opportunity to do something ‘more worthwhile’ than covering celebrity-driven trivia.
It is the interaction between this small number of ‘moral entrepreneurs’, in lobby groups and the media, and governments with differing attitudes to the future that determined the shape concerns took in each country. In turn, this altered the nature of concerns raised by the relatively few members of the general public who got interested in the issue. These originally focused on the aesthetics of transmission masts, the impact they might have on property prices and the lack of consultation as to their deployment and positioning. It was institutional influences that transformed these rather isolated ‘not-in-my-backyard’ concerns into far more effective campaigns about the purported health effects of the phones and their base-stations.
As ownership of mobile phones became more widespread and more likely to occur among younger age groups, so the debate shifted from attacking ‘yuppie status-symbols’ to focusing on the towers and their possible effects upon children. The science, as is often the case, was counterintuitive: the closer you are to a base-station, the less energy your phone requires to receive the signal; so the best place to site masts would be as near to children as possible. But a nervous elite ignored the evidence in favour of hearsay and emotion. So in 1999, Britain’s then education minister David Blunkett called for an ‘urgent investigation’ into the placing of masts on schools, while the National Union of Teachers called upon the Health and Safety Executive for advice and the Metropolitan Police advised their officers to restrict usage of the technology.
The consequence, unique to the British response, was the establishment of the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones in 1999, under the chairmanship of the former chief medical officer Sir William Stewart. This initiative, launched at the behest of then minister for public health Tessa Jowell, to ‘keep ahead of public anxiety’, is seen by Burgess as the paradigm inquiry of our precautionary times. It sought to avoid dealing with the scientists of the National Radiological Protection Board, including instead members with little specific expertise in the field. It concluded that there was no scientific evidence of any harm; but it also sought to give credence to public concerns by advocating further research and urging parents to limit their children’s use of cellular phones.
Unsurprisingly, this attempt to have it both ways, satisfying both scientists and concerned parents, satisfied neither. It generated headlines such as ‘So are mobiles a risk or what?’ in the Daily Mirror. Through this process of demonstrating their sensitivity to what they presumed to be public concerns, or what Burgess calls ‘symbolic politics’, the authorities not only failed to clarify the matter; they made it worse, with the number of campaigns growing in the wake of the Stewart report. Such campaigns felt encouraged by the official endorsement and apparent recognition of their concerns. In fact, as Burgess indicates, parents might well have responded differently in surveys if the scale of the risk and money expended upon it had been put in the context of other options for protecting their children’s health.
In the case of mobile phones, no plausible scientific mechanism has been posited to explain any purported ills. Indeed, much of the research produced has been to explain various associations after they had been noticed, rather than to understand their possible cause. This approach could equally well be applied to other products that produce localised heating effects, such as lap-tops and electric blankets. But apart from generating new fears, as Burgess points out, noting an effect is not the same as assuming harm. And as Frank Furedi suggests in his new book Therapy Culture, ‘if society wants to treat electromagnetic fields as a cause of illness, they will be deemed a cause of illness’. Also, there is a danger that dealing with problems in this way reduces diagnosis to mere description, making the possibility of resolution impossible.
Risk consultants and sociologists suggest that our perception of risk is shaped by such factors as whether the risk is taken voluntarily, the extent to which it is understood, the fear it instils, our level of trust in authority, and the impact the risk may have, particularly on children. Burgess’ analysis suggests rather different factors, including: the degree of political engagement in public life, the confusion of roles and responsibilities between differing authorities, the growing sense of isolation among the political, scientific and commercial elite and their attempts to combat a crisis of legitimacy by promoting public fears.
Situating the rising obsession with the impact of science upon our lives into this context of a demise in broader social and political engagement, Burgess points to the ultimate irony: ‘attempts to reform science have extended the role of science in policy much further.’ In the end, it was the sheer utility of the technology that outweighed the fears that had been constructed and, as people continued to use their mobiles, so gradually the media lost interest. However, Burgess’ book remains a salutary lesson in the social construction of fears, which will undoubtedly be used to inform similar episodes in the years ahead.
First published by spiked, 27 November 2003
Limitations of Public Dialogue in Science and the Rise of New ‘Experts’
We should move away from our growing obsession with the impact of science upon society and begin to examine a bit more critically the impact of society upon science - especially in a society that has lost its sense of ambition.
printable
version
First published by Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 9 November 2003
The fear and self-loathing in Las Vegas
Now even the Americans are anti-American.
printable
version
As shocking to Americans as the events of September 11 2001 was the worldwide wave of anti-American sentiment that followed. By December 2002, an independent opinion research group based in Washington DC had confirmed this phenomenon. The Pew Research Centre’s Global Attitudes survey interviewed 38,000 people across 44 countries. But what exactly does anti-American mean? And is it a useful category for analysis?
Among the British media, it was leftwing commentators who blamed America for what had happened. US intransigence over issues such as global warming and the International Human Rights Tribunal, combined with arrogance in all things cultural, was held to reflect a rapacious, consumerist, imperialist power that had encouraged, so the critics argued, terrorist atrocities.
Less than two days had passed since 9/11 when Seumas Milne first used the term anti-American in his Guardian article “They can’t see why they are hated”. Others soon followed, leading to expressions of outrage from rightwing commentators. The argument has run ever since. Clearly, as Times columnist Mick Hume suggested to a recent University of Oxford Rothermere American Institute conference, “American Culture in Europe”, the debate has been marked by some considerable dishonesty on both sides.
Supporters of US foreign policy seek to dismiss any dissent as being based on anti-American sentiment, while the critics of US intervention around the globe are usually the same people who campaigned for just such action in Bosnia.
Such inherent contradictions are not new. Postwar Britain was infused with an old-fashioned, conservative dislike of American culture. Yet those who disliked what they saw as shallow and vulgar were often the first to slaver over the US’ power and technological might. Today, contempt for soulless American consumerism is more likely to come from the liberal left, but, given the choice between an anti-US placard and their all-elusive green card, it is clear which many would choose. As writer Ziauddin Sardar has pointed out, many Muslims express loathing for America while still aspiring to work for the likes of Microsoft or Citibank.
But a focus on the petites jalousies Europeans have for their transatlantic rivals, or the simultaneous love and hate that others express towards the world’s sole superpower, misses what is new. The greatest problem is the extent to which many Americans concur. US society could be characterised by its loss of self-confidence well before those terrible events. Nowadays, many prejudices about the US seem to come from Americans themselves. In some ways being anti-American has become as American as apple pie.
You don’t need to be in Europe, still less to go to the Middle East, to find a rejection of American values such as ambition, success and experimentation. Americans have been uncomfortable with themselves for some time. In this regard, September 11 acted as a catalyst rather than a trigger. Anti-globalisation protestors in Seattle, many of them American, had long been arguing for the dismantling of the World Trade Organisation before al-Qaida took the wind out of their sails. Indeed, we would do well to recognise quite how western the anti-westernism of the hijackers was.
This had little to do with America itself, but rather expressed a broader dissatisfaction with the world that targeted America as the highest symbol of capitalism. It was informed rather more by Nietzsche than Mohammed.
For many in America, as well as elsewhere, power has become represented as egotism, success as arrogance, freedom as illusory and the desire to defend oneself as the act of a bully. With such confusion at large, it is hard to envisage how the downtrodden of the world will ever liberate themselves. By attacking everything American from McDonald’s to Microsoft, the critics display a rejection of who they are that reaches its apogee in the self-loathing of Oscar-winning Michael Moore’s aptly titled book Stupid White Men.
Neither is such self-hatred and denial a preserve of the liberal left. On the same day as Milne’s piece appeared in The Guardian, Reverend Jerry Falwell, pastor of the 22,000-member Thomas Road Baptist Church of Lynchburg, Virginia, told US TV viewers that it had been the activities of abortionists, feminists, gays and lesbians that led God to give Americans “what we deserve”. By comparison, the Bush administration can only talk the talk about American values, for to walk the walk would demand identifying content behind the hollow references to freedom, equality and democracy included in the all-new US National Security Strategy.
America has lost its sense of mission in the world, other than to protect us all from a handful of terrorists. This lack of a wider purpose, born out of the failure of the political projects of both left and right, has allowed self-doubt and confusion to grow. Ironically, by advocating restraint on all fronts, the supposedly leftwing critics reveal themselves to be even more conservative in outlook than George W. Bush. Their rejection of scientific endeavour, economic growth and political debate, combined with the right’s reluctance to fight for these, unites them with the nihilism of the hijackers. It is this lack of direction that has emboldened the likes of French president Jacques Chirac and United Nations secretary-general Koffi Annan to snipe from the sidelines.
At the beginning of November 2001, Chelsea Clinton made her views heard at an anti-war rally in Oxford, where she was studying. Writing later for the US magazine Talk, she explained: “Every day I encounter some sort of anti-American feeling.” But that so many in the one undisputed superpower on earth feel so isolated, threatened and unloved speaks volumes as to where the problem lies. Their introspection was possibly best captured by another series on anti-American sentiment held earlier this year in Oxford.
This student-led initiative was organised by Seth Green, a Marshall scholar at New College and founder of Americans for Informed Democracy.
Attendance at one of his gatherings was a bit like a cultural version of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Students, mostly American, were encouraged to discuss their feelings as a group, as well as ideas such as: “Why do they hate us?”, before reporting back to the main body. Transcripts of the discussions posted on the group’s website invariably concluded: “We believe that the forum promoted international understanding and cooperation” and the like.
Could this more therapeutic “touchy-feely” ethos or confessional-style of discussion that has infested America over the past ten or so years serve to put things straight? I doubt it. While the sentiment behind such initiatives may be admirable, without addressing the fundamental issue of America’s loss of nerve for its old values and reluctance to debate new ones, the meetings could only ever be about holding hands and trying to feel good. As one member of the audience at the recent Oxford conference said: “The events of 9/11 have allowed the US to understand itself as a victim on the world stage.”
Whether any good will derive from such self-pity remains to be determined.
As the University of Central Lancashire’s Alan Rice reminded the audience, we forget at our peril that America represents much that is best in the world, as well as a little of what is worst. Its values can be used to liberate as much as to oppress. The key question, therefore, should not be whether we are for, or against, the US, but “what exactly are we for?”
First published by Times Higher Education Supplement, 17 October 2003
Lay Values?
printable
version
First published by Tech Central Station, 24 September 2003
Is real resilience attainable?
The concept of resilience — the ability to withstand or recover from adverse conditions — has come of age in the wake of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Politicians, emergency planners and others talk of the need to “build”, “engender”, “improve” or “enhance” resilience in society. What is being proposed and to what extent is real resilience attainable in today's conditions?
printable
version
First published by Homeland Security & Resilience Monitor, 5 September 2003
Response to Riskworld 2020
Riskworld 2020 uncritically repeats many of the assumptions, aphorisms, platitudes and prejudices that currently inform the risk discourse. The single key question here should have been: ‘Do people’s perceptions of risk, match the reality of the dangers they face?’ Yet it has not clearly been asked.
printable
version
First published by Journal of Risk Research, 9 July 2003
Letter to the Editor Regarding Chemical White Paper Special Issue
Sadly, some scientists also have all too readily absorbed the modern dictate for “inclusivity” and “dialogue” in the vain hope of somehow relegitimizing their activities.
printable
version
First published by Risk Analysis, 26 June 2003
Houses of Precaution
Will the concrete blocks installed to protect Parliament from terror make the UK feel secure, or scared?
printable
version
Whitehall and the Metropolitan Police have tightened security at the Houses of Parliament, by installing concrete blocks to ‘protect the building from a possible terrorist attack’. But according to officials, this latest measure ‘is not in response to a specific threat’ (1).
This highlights some of the tensions for the authorities in trying to keep the public alert but not alarmed. The powers-that-be consistently flag up the nation’s ‘vulnerabilities’ and the need for public vigilance, yet, as prime minister Tony Blair reminded us in a speech in November 2002, actions ‘on the basis of a general warning’ could lead us to ‘doing [the terrorists’] job for them’.
Irrespective of the prime minister’s, or anybody else’s, occasionally measured assessments of the terror threat, there are always individuals and institutions who consider it their responsibility to err on the side of caution. A spokesman for the Met Police says the concrete bollards around parliament have been installed ‘on a precautionary basis, in light of events around the world and the fact that security in the capital remains at a high level’ (2).
This precautionary approach is not something that can be shaped by policy or diktat. Rather, it reflects a wider public mood that has become increasingly pessimistic and risk-averse over the past decade. Reversing this cultural tide will take more than ‘specific intelligence’ or good intentions.
Many of the technically oriented solutions to the alleged terror threat, like the concrete blocks or greater surveillance, could make things worse in the long term. Because while resilience is, to a certain extent, a function of technology, it is above all a function of attitude. Our already fractured and disaggregated society appears to be suffering from a lack of common purpose and social vision. Technical restraints imposed for security reasons will surely only heighten people’s sense that we live in an out-of-control world.
It is hard to see how the rising cordon of security - at Westminster, Heathrow or wherever - will ever be reversed. Under what circumstances would a government risk stepping down its coloured warning system from amber to green? To do so would be to risk opprobrium in the event of an actual terrorist attack.
Accordingly, amber is the new green and the whole enterprise gets cranked up a gear - except that people’s state of alertness will gradually wane and the real battle that needs to be won, the campaign against mistrust and cynicism at home, remains to be engaged.
(1) Security tightens at parliament, BBC News, 23 May 2003
(2) Security tightens at parliament, BBC News, 23 May 2003
First published by spiked, 23 May 2003
How Long Can an Emergency Last For?
printable
version
First published by TechCentral Station, 23 May 2003
Communicating the War on Terror
An open public debate is key to striking the right note in the war on terror.
printable
version
The recent car bombs in Riyadh should remind us that whatever precautions are taken, determined terrorists will always manage to get through our defences. A balance must be struck between restricting terrorist movements and maintaining a free society. But are we getting this balance right?
This is the question delegates will be asking at Communicating the War on Terror, an upcoming conference in London.
Riyadh also illustrates the gulf between the hype and the reality of terror. For the past 20 months, many in the media and elsewhere have focused on the threat of so-called weapons of mass destruction (WMD). These encompass chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) devices and vary in importance and impact according to what you read.
However, despite these fanciful and, some might say, speculative or anticipatory scenarios, the actuality of terrorism remains rather more mundane. Since 11 September, terrorist attacks have largely consisted of surface-to-air missiles (SAM) and car bombs. Indeed, some commentators have noted that detonating such devices in the Saudi capital is a bit like blowing up your own living room to get rid of an unwanted guest.
As the US State Department’s own ‘Patterns of Global Terrorism’ statistical report for 2002 reveals, out of the almost 200 terrorist attacks that occured in 2002, fewer than 10 were perpetrated in north America or western Europe. This is not to suggest that we can all relax - only that we should maintain a sense of perspective.
Al-Qaeda is not equivalent to the Red Army, against whom the Western powers maintained a stand-off for almost half a century under the threat of mutually assured destruction (MAD). The Soviet Union was known to have a vast nuclear arsenal and a significant chemical and biological weapons capability.
Nonetheless, we seem to have turned al-Qaeda into a very potent threat in our minds. Is it possible that our fears about Osama bin Laden and his acolytes tell us rather more about ourselves and our attitudes to unexpected risks, than about the enemies we now face?
In February 2003, the USA published its National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. This covers some well-rehearsed ground among intelligence and security circles, suggesting that the best form of defence is offence. Yet many of the terms used in this ‘4D strategy’ (defeat, deny, diminish, defend) appear remarkably defensive in outlook.
Despite allusions to a ‘war of ideas’, the document seems somewhat bereft on this front. There is a tendency merely to assume that which needs to be spelt out. Freedom and democracy get a look in, but their content remains unexplored. There is little by way of a positive promotion of what Western society stands for, what we expect those who are ‘with us’ to fight for, and where it is we think we are heading.
Surely, it is not too much to ask our leaders to spell this out more fully? After all, if we believed in and felt inspired by a common sense of mission, then not only would our societies be more resilient in the face of adversity, but there may be others, in less fortunate parts of the world, who would wish to buy into those aspirations too.
There are calls for new protective equipment and better detection instruments, but defeating terrorism cannot be limited to better gadgetry. The desire for better intelligence or new structures of governance are also rather narrow and technical aims. If we are not careful, the vast sums of money being poured into the blue-light services and other emergency response operations may all go to feeding a new bureaucracy, rather than truly protecting ourselves.
It is vital therefore, that the public get involved in these debates about how we organise our priorities. Many argue that there is little time for such niceties. We face a real enemy now, that has to be dealt with. According to this view, there will be plenty of time later for more philosophical discussion as to the future of society or engaging the masses in such a discourse. I could not disagree more.
‘Communicating the War on Terror’ is designed to engage the public first-hand in dealing with these issues. What should governments tell the public about terror threats? What is the role of the media in the war on terror?
These debates cannot be left until ‘after the war’. What we do today is informed by where we believe we are heading, and it will affect where we are tomorrow and the kind of debate we will have then. Responding to security threats by monitoring our neighbours, or installing more security cameras, may make us feel safer for a short while, but eventually this approach will serve only to further fragment the human bonds that bind us together as a society.
I have heard it said that we need to understand why it is that a small number of Asian youth are attracted by fringe Islamist groups. This strikes me at best as an inversion of the real issue, at worst as a form of self-denial. In truth, we need to understand why Asian youth, and many others besides, are no longer attracted to our vision of the future. What is it about our societies, at the beginning of this new century, that leaves them bereft of the ability to inspire allegiance, and provide purpose, meaning and structure to people’s lives?
And the problem of disillusionment with Western society impacts well beyond the ‘usual suspects’ in Bradford or Brick Lane. I would suggest that even if we managed to rid ourselves of every last member of al-Qaeda tomorrow, the problems we face would not go away. Our exaggerated sense of fear would still be with us and, more significantly, by consistently elevating our perceived vulnerabilities since 9/11, we have effectively educated a new generation of terrorists, cranks, hoaxers and disaffected loners as to how to undermine our societies and our sense of wellbeing using such rudimentary tools as box-cutters and bags of sugar.
‘Communicating the War on Terror’ aims to address the culture of mistrust and cynicism in Western societies. Why is it, for instance, that if a bucket of white powder or some other agent were to be discovered in Baghdad tomorrow, many of our domestic population would believe, regardless of the evidence, that the Americans had planted it?
Perhaps some of the greatest battles we will face in the war on terror are battles on the home front, or battles in our minds. Refusing to recognise this and continuing to prosecute a traditional campaign against enemies ‘out there’ may well be a failure to recognise what truly changed at the end of the Cold War. This could lead to a far longer and more destructive campaign than anyone yet anticipates.
I hope the debate continues long after the event. There has never been a more pressing time to examine our beliefs, our fears and our sense of purpose.
First published by spiked, 22 May 2003