“Crime takes the pulse of a culture: it tells us the truth about ourselves”. Terrorism is the darkened ground where we grow our own monsters. Historically commentators on terrorism have likened it to mythical beasts – the hydra of carnage, the monster from the depths, the serpent of jihadism, the vengeful fire bearing figure who… Read More So, you Write About Terrorism?
Japanese cinema has a dark, often subversive narrative of violence. In the years since local terrorist group, Aum Shin Rikyo carried out a series of devastating attacks on an unsuspecting urban population, there appears to be an upward trend in violence in Japanese cinema. At a talk at the Japan foundation in London in 2018,… Read More Aum Shin Rikyo: Terrorism in Japanese Cinema
Attacks in New York and Washington on 9 11 by a network of operatives from Al Qaeda changed America’s perspective on the terrorist threat. The Pentagon, the nerve center of American military operations around the world, and the twin towers, symbols of America’s global economic power lay in ruins. Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind behind… Read More Stories of the Minotaur: Terrorism as Narrative
The Irish Republican Army has always had a complex relationship with the English prison system. For an IRA activist, there were always only two options – death or incarceration – and so the stories of the prison experience have long been woven into IRA narratives of protest against British rule. For the British government, its… Read More IRA Paramilitaries in Prison: Philosophers in a Cage
In July 2001, the Tamil Tigers celebrated the 18th anniversary of Sri Lanka’s civil war by bombing the country’s only international airport at Kataunayaka. In September 2001 Al-Qaeda operatives brought violence to American shores with devastating attacks in New York and Washington. In Iraq in 2009, a suicide bomber killed Shia pilgrims on a bridge… Read More Mindset of Suicide Bombers
Terrorism is text, whether it is the printed pamphlets of Sendero Luminoso or the PLO in the 1970s, messages delivered by hooded IRA spokesmen at hastily arranged news conferences in Belfast, or Al-Qaeda leaders issuing proclamations, videos of Osama Bin Laden discussing attacks or pro-violence websites extolling supporters to participate in violence. People do not… Read More Propaganda of the Deed: Terrorism as Communication
hollow places 