1st Edition

CTS and Right-Wing Terrorism and Counterterrorism Volume I, The Politics of Labelling Political Violence

Edited By Alice Martini, Raquel da Silva Copyright 2024

    This volume is a timely contribution to the current debates and potential efforts to study and counter the phenomena of extreme right violence in a period when the rise of right-wing extremism is being witnessed across the globe. Against this backdrop, the violent radicalisation and extremism of individuals and groups belonging to the extreme right threaten to undermine and destabilize societies and democratic orders, leaving a research gap that has only started to be filled in recent years, but that is still quite wide when it comes to counter-terrorism approaches to extreme right violence. Learning from the past, and trying to avoid similar mistakes, this volume creates a much-needed space for open, honest, and ethical debate around countering extreme right violence, answering social and political calls to debate how to counter this kind of violence. This volume brings together a group of interdisciplinary scholars to contribute to national and international, academic and policy debates about countering extreme right violence from a critical perspective. 

    Volume I focuses particularly on exploring how extreme right violence has been approached, narrated and made sense of in different spatial and temporal contexts, examining how political actors such as media and politicians portray the threat of and actual violence perpetrated by the extreme right, deconstructing current counter-terrorism approaches, and formulating a critical approach to researching extreme right violence. It will be of great interest to all students of terrorism studies, security studies, international relations, and political science in general.

    The chapters in this book were originally published in Critical Studies on Terrorism.

    Introduction—CTS and Right-wing terrorism and counterterrorism: Volume I, The politics of labelling political violence

    Alice Martini and Raquel da Silva

    1. Critical terrorism studies and the far-right: beyond problems and solutions?

    Lee Jarvis

    2. Meaning and context in analysing extremism: the banalisation of the far-right in Spanish public controversies

    Laura Fernández de Mosteyrín and Alice Martini

    3. Let’s not put a label on it: right-wing terrorism in the news

    Vanja Zdjelar and Garth Davies

    4. "Is this terrorism?" The Italian media and the Macerata shooting

    Monica Colombo and Fabio Quassoli

    5. Press coverage of lone-actor terrorism in the UK and Denmark: shaping the reactions of the public, affected communities and copycat attackers

    David Parker, Julia M. Pearce, Lasse Lindekilde and M. Brooke Rogers

    6. "Terrorism", "democracy" and the Spanish 1978 "constitution": transitional concepts, post-transitional metaphors

    Carlos Yebra López

    7. Erasing historical violence from the study of violent extremism: memorialization of white supremacy at Stone Mountain, United States

    Priya Dixit and Kathryn Miller

    8. Feral fascists and deep green guerrillas: infrastructural attack and accelerationist terror

    Michael Loadenthal

    9. Countering far-right threat through Britishness: the Prevent duty in further education

    Natalie James

    10. Better researchers, better people? The dangers of empathetic research on the extreme right

    Harmonie Toros

    Biography

    Alice Martini is Lecturer in International Relations at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Her research focuses on counter-terrorism and prevention of extremism, specifically at a global level and as implemented by the United Nations. More in general, her research examines and deconstructs global discourses on security, (counter)terrorism and (counter)extremism, looking into the resulting practices of power and international hegemonies. She is the author of The UN and Counterterrorism. Global Hegemonies, Power and Identities (2021) and co-editor of, among others, Encountering Extremism (2020).

    Raquel da Silva is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra and Integrated Researcher at CEI-Iscte. She is the author of Narratives of Political Violence: Life Stories of Former Militants (2019). Her research has been funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, the British Academy, and the European Union, among others.