Antifeminism is one of the ideological pillars of the far right that demands careful consideration in the context of efforts to counter and prevent the far right. Antifeminism is a political stance that opposes efforts to end inequality and domination and can appear across different ideologies, including far-right and liberal politics. Antifeminism is described as an "ideological hinge" and hence represents a double bind for counter-efforts. This paper considers the case of Germany, where the Alternative for Germany frequently attacks gender-equality policies and the Christian Democratic Union contests gender-inclusive language and has banned rainbow flags in parliament. German civil society organisations (CSOs) play a central role in countering the far right and lead over half of all efforts related to democracy-building and extremism prevention. But how do they counter far-right antifeminism and navigate the double bind of antifeminist gender politics? Through analysis of more than 20 interviews with CSOs, we find that civil society takes a multi-level approach: CSOs counter antifeminism at the individual level through disengagement, exit and counselling programmes; at the community level through social work, education and community counselling; and at the political level by countering antifeminist narratives in public debates and holding political actors accountable. The paper argues that countering far-right antifeminism is not an isolated endeavour, rather it is closely related to gender norms and politics in mainstream society at all levels. We conclude that countering antifeminism requires a comprehensive approach that addresses mainstream society rather than relegating antifeminism exclusively to the political fringes.
This study investigates the localisation of P/CVE policy in Sweden and explores the sociocultural mechanisms shaping this process. By moving beyond formal political explanations, it examines how nonelected public administrators across different governance levels understood and responded to the emerging expectations of P/CVE. Drawing on new institutional theory and 19 semi-structured interviews, this study shows that the localisation of P/CVE was not driven by legal mandates or local security needs but by normative and mimetic pressures. The national coordinator's office played a central role by aggressively promoting municipal action plans and coordinators as legitimate responses. Owing to the uncertainty regarding how to act, most municipalities felt compelled to conform, often out of the fear of reputational damage. Many responded by rapidly adopting action plans, often through uncritical imitation, resulting in superficial and poorly contextualised policies. These findings contribute to the P/CVE literature by offering a detailed analysis of how the institutional context and embedded sociocultural forces shape local P/CVE policymaking.
The persistent decontextualisation of terrorism and reluctance to engage with historical and structural conditions remains a key challenge for terrorism studies. In this paper, we apply a case study method and discourse analysis to help understand the historical, political, social and economic context of Salaf & imacr;-jih & amacr;dist militancy and discourse in Tunisia. We focus on Ben Gardane - a milieu for recruitment for Islamic State - and examine the group's assault on the town in March 2016. By analysing all of the articles the group released after commencing the assault, we reveal discursive strategies that foreground structural precursors to terrorism, including a history of colonialism, corruption, oppression, disparity and economic marginalisation. We also identify intertextuality that situates the battle within a continuum of Muslim conquest and confrontation of aggressive foreign invasions posing a perceived existential threat to Islam. Our findings underscore improved governance as a peaceful and effective alternative to lethal military force in counter-terrorism strategies, particularly through the creation of meaningful, legitimate, and satisfying employment opportunities.
This article examines what academic open letters about the Israel-Gaza war do communicatively: what purposes they serve as a genre, why they generate discord, and how their effects diverge from their aims of informing publics or influencing policy. It analyses 23 open letters published between October 2023 and early 2024, selected as representative of the conflict's initial phase. The article combines rhetoric - addressing genre expectations, emotionalisation, and appeals to authority - with speech act theory, which conceptualises open letters as performative acts that perform a particular stance while aiming to inform address and the public. The analysis identifies four recurrent strategies: (1) employing analytical terms to mobilise urgency and moral affect; (2) strong performatives that enact condemnation and solidarity; (3) appeals to scholarly authority structured by an exception-by-urgency logic; and (4) confessional speech acts through which letters perform self- and group-formation. The article argues that this confessional-performative structure produces two problems: many letters lack defined addressees, weakening their appeal function, and genocide/complicity framings often shift attention from actions to presumed intentions, reinforcing the friend-enemy polarisation characteristic of war discourse. As a result, the genre's reliance on moralised urgency and identity performance can undercut analytic deliberation and strain academic debate.
This article examines the dynamics of collaboration between the state and civil society organizations (CSOs) in preventing and addressing violence-based extremism in Indonesia. The central question is whether such collaborations reflect an empowering, aligned partnership or reinforce state dominance over CSOs. Drawing on interviews with key actors and analysed documents, this study reveals that the collaboration is inclusive yet selective, participatory but tightly controlled, with strict oversight mechanisms. While CSOs participate in policy formulation, implementation, and evaluation, their operational capacity is constrained by the logic of state security. This article argues that beneath the rhetoric of collaboration, there is a practice of strategic exclusion, co-optation, surveillance, and control, which renders the partnership more of an instrument of state control rather than an equal and transformative endeavour. Amid these constraints, CSOs cultivate "adaptive resistance", a negotiation-based advocacy strategy that enables them to retain substantive influence while using collaborative spaces to advance normative change.
How is the figure of the enemy produced, sustained and transformed in the context of settler colonialism? This article addresses this question through the Israeli soldiers' war songs - songs written and performed by soldiers themselves. Drawing on a corpus of songs composed across three periods - South Lebanon (1982-2000) and the First Intifada (1987-1993), the Second Intifada and the Second Lebanon War (2000-2006), and the war in Gaza and South Lebanon (2023-2025) - the article examines how military culture constructs different forms of enmity. It shows that while representations of Hezbollah as an external adversary remain relatively stable, representations of Palestinians undergo systematic transformation, reflecting Gaza's position as a settler-colonial frontier. Building on frontier theory and models of colonisation and separation, the article identifies three stages of control - colonisation, separation, and extermination - each associated with distinct modes of enemy-making and violence. Methodologically, it shifts attention from victims to perpetrators, conceptualising violence as culturally and affectively produced through soldiers' performative practices.
This article examines how Operation Metro Surge generated domestic state terror in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during Donald Trump's second presidency. Drawing on qualitative thematic analysis of contemporaneous news reporting, NGO, civil and legal documentation produced between December 2025 and March 2026, the study analyses how immigration enforcement practices operated beyond their formal administrative remit. The findings show that terror was produced through a patterned configuration of practices. These practices worked together to generate uncertainty, constrain behaviour, and discipline publics far beyond those directly targeted for immigration enforcement. Conceptually, the article treats terrorism as a method, applying action-based criteria that focus on systematic violence or threat oriented towards producing fear and coercing behaviour among broader audiences. It argues that Operation Metro Surge meets these criteria while remaining embedded within formally lawful administrative action. The study contributes to scholarship on democratic backsliding, authoritarian governance, and immigration enforcement by specifying a street-level mechanism through which democratic erosion enables fear-based governance from within the administrative state. In doing so, it challenges actor-centred exclusions in terrorism studies and demonstrates how Trump's second presidency in the United States provides a concrete example of domestic state terror emerging under conditions of democratic decline without formal regime breakdown.
This article interrogates the dominant framing of Palestinian resistance through the questions "why do Palestinians resist?" and "how should they resist?", arguing that both emerge from colonial epistemologies that condition the legitimacy of anticolonial struggle. Drawing on Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS), settler-colonial studies, and decolonial theory, the article reframes the debate by asking instead: why will Palestinians never stop resisting? It argues that Palestinian resistance cannot be understood as a temporary reaction to isolated events, nor reduced to questions of strategy, legality, or violence. Rather, resistance constitutes an enduring, historically grounded response to ongoing settler-colonial domination, dispossession, and the continuing structure of the Nakba. Using a genealogical approach rooted in Palestinian intellectual traditions, historical accounts, and lived experience, the article traces how Palestinian resistance has been historically reframed, disciplined, and depoliticised within colonial and counterinsurgent discourses. It examines how both armed and unarmed forms of resistance have been narrated, disciplined, and delegitimised through the terrorism - resistance binary, while Israeli state violence is normalised through dominant security paradigms. In doing so, the article contributes to CTS scholarship by exposing how discourses of terrorism shape what counts as legitimate violence, resistance, and political agency and by reclaiming Palestinian resistance as a historically situated political and ethical practice. The article further argues that resistance for Palestinians is not merely political but existential: a praxis of survival, dignity, and refusal against structures of erasure. By centring Palestinian voices and experiences, it moves beyond securitised and legalistic frameworks to examine resistance as lived reality - manifested in everyday acts, cultural production, political mobilisation, and armed struggle alike. Ultimately, the article calls for a reconceptualisation of solidarity and liberation, positioning the struggle against Israeli settler colonialism not as an exclusively Palestinian task, but as part of a wider struggle over freedom, legitimacy, and the right of colonised peoples to resist.
This article examines the puzzle of why, despite extensive documentation of Israel's practices of state terrorism, it remains for the most part unacknowledged and unspoken - "unknown" in epistemological terms - in academic, political and media discourse. I explore this puzzle through a number of key concepts related to power-knowledge and dominant regimes of truth, such as "subjugated knowledge", "unknown knowns", "public secret" and the "epistemology of ignorance". The analysis begins with a conceptualisation of state terrorism, before providing an overview of what is well documented about the nature, forms, causes and primary examples of Israeli state terrorism. I argue that the use of state terrorism by Israel is intimately tied to the internal logic of its settler colonial project which necessitates violent coercive power in its drive for "the elimination of the Native". The article then examines how the knowledge or "known" of Israeli state terrorism is subjugated and "unknown" in the academic and political fields of discourse, and with what primary consequences. Lastly, I argue that maintaining the "public secret" of Israeli state terrorism serves a range of material, political and academic interests, but that there is nevertheless room for discursive resistance and de-subjugation.
In the aftermath of Hamas' October 7 attacks on Israel, the politicisation of the terminology employed to analyse and discuss various forms of political violence has become evident. The concept of "terrorism" became pivotal in justifying the military reaction to the attack, both within Israel and internationally. I propose looking at a sub-section of discourse to find the necessary space for nuance and discernment. Early on, the Israeli government evoked the comparison that 'Hamas is ISIS,' eliciting numerous responses. I examine public discourses around this statement and how opinion pieces and media commentary articulate their stances on Hamas in reference to the statement. More broadly, I explore how definitional struggles over violence, political positioning and definitional power are carried out. These articles take on a breadth of stances toward the comparison but ultimately do so by appealing to an image of ISIS as inherently irrational, ideological and apolitical. In doing so, they reproduce simplistic assumptions similar to what they reject about the Hamas-discourses. Rather than extending their critique towards other actors and broader notions of reproducing and applying the category of terrorists, ISIS serves as a placeholder. It becomes a boundary object for arguing who is a terrorist and who is a legitimate actor.
Gaza marks the most destructive deployment of terrorism discourse. Having long constituted eliminatory violence-against Palestinian rights, if not lives-this discourse has, since 7 October, enabled genocide in the occupied Strip. Drawing on Foucault's analysis of discourse, Agamben's concepts of homo sacer and the state of exception, and Arendt's anatomy of total domination, this article demonstrates how terrorism discourse has rendered Gaza a zone of anomie-wherein Palestinians, including children, are reduced to the singular subjectivity of the "terrorist", their bare lives thus exterminated with total impunity.Tracing the emergence of modern terrorism discourse to the 1970s, the article shows that "terrorism"-once a footnote to colonial wars-has been elevated into a meta-narrative and central doctrine legitimising imperial conquest and domination in a purportedly postcolonial world. Inaugurated by its key architects as a rallying cry for perpetual war against both Palestine and international law, this discourse has been conceived as a moral alibi for sovereign violence. It is thus, by design, imbued with the logic of biopolitical camps. Analysing statements and commentary from Israeli and Western officials and media between 2023 and 2025, the article elucidates how terrorism framing-with its supremacist, orientalist, and spurious characteristics-has functioned as a de facto licence for, and a mechanism of complicity in, genocidal violence against a colonised population.Contributing to the restoration of Palestine's long-ignored centrality in the genealogy and operation of terrorism discourse, the article advances emancipatory critique of the terrorism dispositif as an edifice of colonial modernity.
"Radicalisation" has become one of the central organising principles of both contemporary research on terrorism and counterterrorism policy. While existing reconstructions of its emergence largely focused on the role of political institutions - particularly the European Union - such accounts provide only a partial explanation, leaving the internal dynamics of terrorism studies largely unexamined. Drawing on Google Scholar data, this article aims at supplementing the existing literature by providing a bibliometric analysis of terrorism studies publications (2000-2020) to reconstruct the emergence of "radicalisation" within the field. The findings on when "radicalisation" first emerged, the composition of the field-specific debate, and the publications that played a crucial role in the emergence of this notion, offer several insights for future research to investigate the simultaneously political and scientific conditions that facilitated the rise of "radicalisation."
Based on ethnographic research conducted between 2010 and 2024 among first- and second-generation Palestinians in Germany, this article examines how anti-Palestinian racism is reproduced through discursive, institutional, and security regimes. It shows how dominant narratives surrounding Israel and Palestine, embedded in German memory politics and state practices, render Palestinian experiences of violence unintelligible or illegitimate, while recoding them through the idioms of terrorism and antisemitism. The article conceptualises anti-Palestinian racism as operating in part through symbolic violence, a process in which Palestinian suffering is systematically misrecognised, delegitimised, and recoded as threat. By analysing media discourse, political interventions, and everyday interactions, the article traces how these regimes shape the conditions of Palestinian life in Germany. It demonstrates how Palestinians are positioned outside the bounds of moral and political legitimacy, producing forms of non-grievability, self-erasure, and internalised stigma. Drawing on narrative-biographical interviews and long-term ethnographic engagement, the article further examines how these dynamics are negotiated across generations. The article argues that anti-Palestinian racism in Germany must be situated within broader histories of European racialisation, coloniality, and post-Holocaust formations of national identity within German memory politics, in which anti-Palestinian racism is constitutive.
