No abstract

Many scholars and practitioners claim that labelling groups or individuals as "terrorists" does not simply describe them but also shapes public attitudes, due to the label's important normative and political charge. Yet is there such a "terrorist label effect"? In view of surprisingly scant evidence, the present paper evaluates whether or not the terrorist label -as well as the "Islamist" one -really impacts both the audience's perception of the security environment and its security policy preferences, and if yes, how and why. To do so, the article implements a randomized-controlled vignette experiment where participants (n=481) first read one out of three press articles, each depicting a street shooting in the exact same way but labelling the author of the violence with a different category ("terrorist"/"shooter"/"Islamist"). Participants were then asked to report on both their perceptions and their policy preferences. This design reveals very strong effects of both the "terrorist" and "Islamist" categories on each dimension. These effects are analysed through the lenses of social and cognitive psychology, in a way that interrogates the use of the terrorist category in society, the conflation of Islamism with terrorism, and the press and policymakers' lexical choices when reporting on political violence.

Lone‐actor terrorists are very often presented as emotionally and/or cognitively impaired—yet is it really the case? The present article provides the first rigorous assessment of the hypotheses according to which a high level of negative emotions, especially anger, and a lack of cognitive flexibility and complexity play a role in lone‐actor terrorists’ violent actions. Using a sample of lone‐actor terrorists’ writings, we use the LIWC (a fully automated language use analysis software) to compare terrorists’ cognition and emotion with those of other control groups, most notably nonviolent radical activists. Results strongly support the first hypothesis but clearly refute the second one, suggesting that lone‐actor terrorists are in fact characterized by a specific combination of high‐anger and high‐cognitive complexity. These method and results lay the groundwork for a more systematic and nuanced analysis of the psychology of terrorists, which is currently in a deadlock.

In the past two decades, calls for International Relations (IR) to ‘turn’ have multiplied. Having reflected on Philosophy's own linguistic turn in the 1980s and 1990s, IR appears today in the midst of taking – almost simultaneously – a range of different turns, from the aesthetic to the affective, from the historical to the practice, from the new material to the queer. This paper seeks to make sense of this puzzling development. Building on Bourdieu's sociology of science, we argue that although the turns ostensibly bring about (or resuscitate) ambitious philosophical, ontological, and epistemological questions to challenge what is deemed to constitute the ‘mainstream’ of IR, their impact is more likely to be felt at the ‘margins’ of the discipline. From this perspective, claiming a turn constitutes a position-enhancing move for scholars seeking to accumulate social capital, understood as scientific authority, and become ‘established heretics’ within the intellectual subfield of critical IR. We therefore expect the proliferation of turns to reshape more substantively what it means to do critical IR, rather than turning the whole discipline on its head.

No abstract

is an economist working as a research officer at the Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford, UK. Her research interests are wide ranging and often interdisciplinary. Broadly she is interested in the macroeconomics of developing countries and political economy issues, but has a specific interest in the economics of violence. In 2004 Paul Collier and Anke published 'Greed and Grievance in Civil War' in Oxford Economic Papers. Recent publications include work on elections in the Journal of Peace Research and the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics. Anke has also contributed to the

Has immigration been securitised at the EU level? The question has been hotly discussed, but no consensus has been reached. This article claims that two shortcomings -one methodological, one theoretical -in the empirical conduct of securitisation theory (ST) have provoked this lack of consensus. Taking this situation as an opportunity, a quantitative method is introduced that addresses these two shortcomings, thereby helping to reach a stronger claim on the securitisation of immigration at the EU level. By measuring the intensity of the security framing in EU legislation on immigration, the method helps avoid simplistic binary statements of (non-)securitisation and encourages the scholar to acknowledge the complex, multifaceted reality of vast political fields. The results contribute to accrediting the thesis according to which immigration has been securitised at the EU level, but nuances it by demonstrating a significant variation between the various subfields of the policy (e.g. asylum, legal immigration).In an 'age of migration ' (Castles and Miller, 2009), migration and immigration policies are increasingly central and should be thoroughly scrutinised from various angles. Immigration policies provoke highly polemical discussions, mainly because of visible 'hard security' elements such as detention camps or fortified walls. In this regard, throughout the 2000s and until now, a question has been raised recurrently by scholars working at the cross of European Studies and Security Studies: Has immigration been securitised at the EU levelthat is, has the immigration phenomenon successfully been framed as a threat and transformed by EU authorities into a security issue calling for policies of exception? This question, which makes sense within the theoretical framework of Securitisation Theory (ST), is of prime importance given the potential ethical problems that a securitised migration policy may create. Drawing on several schools of thought (e.g. speech act theory, framing analysis), ST studies the dynamics through which political actors transform, more or less consciously, a social issue into a security issue; and the consequences of such processes are also analysed.ST scholars present an impressive record of articles devoted to the sole question of the securitisation of immigration at the EU level. In spite of this profusion, however, we believe that ST scholars have not yet clearly established if immigration has indeed been securitised at the EU level. Contradictory but equally vigorous claims have indeed been made on the presence/absence of securitisation in the field of EU immigration policies in the last decades.

No abstract