By Dr. Andrew Glazzard, Director of National Security and Resilience Studies at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. Counter-terrorist practitioners and policy makers appear to be very interested in narrative. They often describe the worldview of violent Islamist groups and movements as the ‘jihadi narrative’, while their efforts to confront terrorist […]
By Yousif Kalian & Omar Alhashani. In a video with over 3,000,000 views on Youtube, Abu Tahseen, a stocky senior of about 60 years old wearing a hand-knitted camouflage beanie, slowly walks up to his station. The hills and rivers of Iraq surround him. “I am relaxed”, he says. Nothing seems to reassure him more than […]
We look at terrorist acts in ways that most people would never consider reasonable when it comes to other tragedies in life. For instance, we accept a certain level of fatality in car accidents, or drug overdoses, or in gang disputes, or even, at least in the US, in everyday gun incidents. Of course, we […]