Paper presenters
- Charlotte Heath-Kelly: “Building resilience to terrorism: Architecture and memorialisation on post-terrorist sites as retrospective security
- Kari Steen-Johnsen: “Does trust prevent fear in the aftermath of terrorist attacks?
- Øyvind Bugge Solheim: “Anti-immigration reactions to terrorism”
- Marius Linge: Everyday resistance - the counter-narratives of jihadism
Abstracts
Building Resilience to Terrorism
Charlotte Heath-Kelly, University of Warwick
How do societies become resilient against the threat of terrorism? Security policies anticipate a multitude of threats, some of which cannot be prevented, to recover from future disasters. Policy and research anticipate and try to prevent the next disaster, rather than the means to recover from a previous atrocity.
This project adopts a different temporality of security. It explores whether projects to rebuild, redesign and memorialise sites of terrorist attack mediate threats in a retrospective, rather than anticipatory, manner. Does reconstruction enable societal resilience by contained and processing feelings of insecurity? And how can rebuilding be optimized to avoid protest and public dissatisfaction?
This presentation draws from empirical research in Norway to show the complex intersection of place-identity, memorialisation and local protest. In Norway, the social unity felt after the July 22nd attacks was eventually replaced by the return of politics – and contestation derailed the national memorials planned for Sørbraten and Oslo. The July 22nd visitor centre and the memorialisation on Utøya have both been crucial to the rehabilitation of the sites, but the furore over Memory Wound points to continued political polarisation in Norway.
Terror and trust
Kari Steen-Johnsen, Institutt for Samfunnsforskning
This paper investigates the prophylactic role of generalized trust on fear generated by terrorist threat based on a combined comparative, longitudinal and experimental approach.
Previous studies have indicated such a prophylactic role of trust, notably in the case of the 22nd of July attacks in Norway (cf. Wollebæk et al., 2012, 2013). Survey data collected in Norway, France and Spain before and after three major attacks (Utøya, Nice, Barcelona) are analyzed. These data have a panel structure, which allows the study of within-individual variation over time, and to investigate the differences characterizing the relationship between levels of generalized trust and levels of anxiety within these three countries.
The longitudinal approach is supplemented by an experimental approach where individuals were randomly assigned either to a constructed news story that report on the danger of an imminent terrorist attack in the given country, or to a control story. The longitudinal analyses shows that higher levels of generalized trust before the attacks are associated with lower levels of anxiety after the attacks in all three countries.
The experiment showed that individuals who were exposed to news stories displayed, in average, a higher level of anxiety than the control group. Still higher levels of generalized trust before exposition to terrorist threat were associated with lower levels of anxiety provoked by the treatment. This relationship is statistically significant for Norway and France but not for Spain. Results from both analyses thus support the assumption that trust may serve as a prophylactic against fear of terrorism.
Attitudinal consequences of three terrorist situations
Øyvind Bugge Solheim, Institutt for Samfunnsforskning
A central finding in the research on consequences of terrorism has been a negative reaction towards out-groups, and especially towards immigrants. This has been found both in countries experiencing terrorism and in countries far away. However, while there is an implicit assumption that terrorism affects immigration attitudes through increased perceptions of threat, this has so far not been studied. Similarly, few studies have looked into how the effects depend on characteristics of the attacks.
This paper studies the attitudinal consequences of three “terrorist situations” in Norway; the July 22 2011 attacks, the “terror scare” during the summer of 2014 and the Nice attacks in 2016. These events occurred during the fielding of different rounds of the same survey.
The paper has a dual contribution. On the one hand, it studies how the effects of terrorism may differ with characteristics of the terrorist threat. While Norwegians became more positive towards immigrants after the July 22 attacks (Jakobsson and Blom 2014), extant research leads to the expectation of more negative reactions in the two other cases. However, these two events differ in political relevance, with one being a direct threat to Norwegian society and the other happening in France. On the other hand, it tests how different types of immigration attitudes are affected.
Does terrorism primarily affect perceptions of physical threat or are there a more general effect? Preliminary results indicate that July 22 created lower perceptions of physical threat, but no change in the perceptions of economic and cultural threat.
Everyday resistance –the counter narratives of jihadism
Marius Linge, OsloMet - Oslo Metropolitan University
In the public discourse, young Muslims are often associated with fundamentalism, sectarianism and radicalization. In the debate about Islam, conservative and liberal activists are the most vocal interlocutors. In this project, we provide the «silent majority» of ordinary practising Muslims with a voice. The data material draws on qualitative interviews with 90 young adults with various ethnic and theological backgrounds. The study sheds light on how everyday Islam resists extremism. Everyday resistance is a continuing struggle for the meaning of notions such as jihad, martyrdom, sharia and judgement day. Public programs are not necessarily the most important tools in preventing extremism. Our project exposes counter narratives from below, shaped by young Muslims in school, in the streets and among friends. These stories show how Muslims themselves explain, delegitimize, and ridicule extremism and extremist groups. These actors and narratives are in the frontline of counter-radicalization.