This article contrasts political discourse on the threat posed by terrorism today from the US and UK. Three arguments are made. First, there is significant overlap in the characterisation of today's threat as more fragmented, more ideologically plural, less predictable, and potentially more dangerous than that which dominated the immediate post-9/11 period. Second, counterintuitively, this consistent framing of terrorism's recent transformation is situated within two very different constructions of terrorism's wider temporalities. In the UK, a model of historical discontinuity dominates in which today's terrorism is seen as radically different from the violences of the twentieth century and of the post-9/11 period. In the US, in contrast, a model of historical cyclicity sees contemporary terrorism positioned as a return to much older violences including those associated with the Ku Klux Klan. Third, these differences highlight the considerable political significance of constructed temporalities around terrorism, with their capacity to (de-)emphasise ostensibly pertinent similarities and differences, and to legitimise or foreclose policy responses to this threat.

Nominative laws—laws named after particular victims of violence or injustice such as Martyn's Law, Sarah's Law and Awaab's Law—have become increasingly prominent in the UK. In this article, we offer the first sustained attempt to explore this phenomenon and its social, political and legal significance. Two contributions are made. First, we demonstrate the breadth of nominative laws via an original typology organised around their four primary ambitions: rights, obligations, protections and punishments. Second, we situate these laws within relevant social and political dynamics, including the rise of populism, expectations of performative justice, and social memory. In doing this, the article argues that nominative laws are important for what they create and close down. On the one hand, they offer new opportunities for marking injustices and accelerating political action. On the other, they risk foreclosing space for political debate and contestation.

Security professionals have become an increasingly important part of analyses of security and security politics. This article focuses on a specific aspect of such roles and identities; namely the extent to which security professionals view public opinion as an important factor in their work. Drawing on primary data, in the form of interviews with public and private security professionals, this article argues that instead of public opinion being a distant concern for such “securocrats”, that public opinions and views can be, and sometimes are, important for the work of security professionals. Analysis of the interviews finds security professionals attesting to the significance of public opinion for their work and delineating specific instances where public views have shifted and changed their work. However, in this connection, publicity is a key factor. Where the work of security professionals is prominent and visible, the incentives to pay heed to public views is greater. For public security professionals, claims to legitimacy feature prominently; whereas for private security professionals, it is the protection of brand identity which drives such concerns. The article argues that where such publicity is absent, we should be more pessimistic about the extent of the influence and significance of public voices.

Contemporary reckoning with the catastrophic outcomes of the post-9/11 era opens important questions for the future of counterterrorism policy. It also raises significant issues for thinking through the future priorities and purposes of security scholarship. In this article we make two core claims. First, recent years have seen considerable mainstreaming of ostensibly critical ideas on (counter)terrorism within political debate, media commentary, and - crucially - security policy. Second, such ideas - including around the futility of 'war' on terror; the ineffectiveness of torture; the unstable framing of threats such as radicalisation; and the inefficiency of excessive counterterrorism expenditure - were widely dismissed as lacking in policy relevance, even being utopian, when articulated by critically oriented scholars. This development, we argue, raises important ontological questions around the ending of security paradigms such as the war on terror. It also prompts vital political, epistemological, and normative questions around the status of overtly critical scholarship when its ideas and recommendations achieve wider currency

This article presents an original analysis of the U.K. government's discursive response to COVID-19 across the first six months of the pandemic. Two arguments are made. First, representations of the state/people relationship were vital to the state's storying and selling of its response to this crisis. And, second, despite populist-style inflections, the state/people relationship was typically constructed around a 'government knows best' claim associated with the 'British Political Tradition' (BPT). In making these arguments the article offers three contributions: (i) empirical, via an original thematic analysis of over 120 speeches, statements and documents from the U.K. government; (ii) analytical, via a new taxonomy of ways in which 'the public' is imagined and represented in political discourse; and (iii) theoretical, via conceptualisation of the flexible and adaptive discourse of the BPT.

This book examines the ways in which the views of the public inhabit the counter-terrorism policy space, with a focus on the UK case. Drawing insights from Critical Terrorism Studies, Critical Security Studies and studies of public opinion, the book develops an argument that the relationship between public opinion is complex, iterative and mutually instantiating. Rather than public opinion and counter-terrorism policy existing in a simple, uni-directional causal relationship, the book argues that whilst counter-terrorism policy actors are informed by public opinion, in important ways they also construct that very opinion. This argument is made through an empirical analysis of UK counter-terrorism policy. Drawing on primary research interviews with key counter-terrorism policy actors, and security professionals, as well as original analysis of parliamentary debates, the book demonstrates that rather than UK counter- terrorism politics being closed and elite-driven, there exists a complex, dialectical relationship between public opinion and both the making and the implementing of counter-terrorism policy. This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies, counter-terrorism, security studies, British politics and communication studies.

This paper seeks to explore the politics of counterterrorism in the UK. It argues that for a number of reasons, counterterrorism policy has been separated off from other policy areas and seen as securitised, exceptional or just different. The paper argues that such a separation from "normal" politics is problematic, both conceptually and empirically. It argues that much can be gained by considering counterterrorism policy through the lenses, concepts and debates which feature in other areas of British politics. The paper then examines two such lenses/debates - depoliticisation and neo-liberalism. An argument is developed that counterterrorism policy is not, in the main, depoliticised, but rather overt, politicised and visible. This prominence, it is argued, is due to the ways in which neo-liberalism has reduced many of the traditional roles of the state. Drawing on the work of Wacquant and Hall, the paper argues that in the absence of such traditional roles, counterterrorism offers the state an opportunity to perform its own "stateness", to visibly display its sovereign power in a context of ever more (self-imposed) diminished powers.

This chapter disaggregates the mistakes, errors and miscalculations around counter-terrorism policy. We note the difficulties in assessing when ‘something goes wrong’ in counter-terrorism which centre around the issue of uncertainty. We reflect on how to calculate the impacts of counter-terrorism in objective and subjective terms, before considering specific aspects of counter-terrorism in examples from British counter-terrorism policing and measures. We distinguish three types of ‘mistakes’: ‘genuine’ errors, misapplication of policy and unintended consequences. We consider the effects of such mistakes, in the form of ‘suspect communities’ and the ways in which high-profile mistakes come to shape perceptions of counter-terrorism practices. Given the inherent uncertainty and the seeming decision to prioritise precautionary logics, ‘mistakes’ in counter-terrorism are inevitable.