- Leena Malkki, University of Helsinki: Coming to terms with the t-word: How to deal with 'terrorism' in academic research
- Mats Fridlund, University of Gothenburg: Vectors of violence: Conceptualizations of terror, terrorism, and violence-affirming extremism in Swedish parliamentary discourse, 1971–2018
- Kathlyn Elliott, Boston Children's Hospital/Harvard Medical School: The conceptualization of violent extremism in the US and the Nordic Region
Abstracts
Coming in terms with the t-word: How to deal with “terrorism” in academic research
Leena Malkki, University of Helsinki
Terrorism has proven to be a difficult term for academic research to come in terms with. Seemingly endless debates about how to define terrorism have left many researchers frustrated and reluctant to engage in conceptual discussions. The bad news is that as tiring as conceptual debates may be, they are also necessary. Terrorism is too influential and widely used a term in public debate for academic research to not engage with it. Moreover, we already have a significant body of academic research on “terrorism”.
The good news is, however, that there is no need to find an academic consensus definition of terrorism. As terrorism is a contested concept, the prospects of reaching a widely accepted and systematically applied definition are weak in any context that the term is being used. This may be problematic for international cooperation and law, but entirely manageable for academic research. This paper outlines an alternative path towards bringing more analytical and conceptual clarity into how academic research engages with the term.
Vectors of violence: Conceptualizations of terror, terrorism, and violence-affirming extremism in Swedish parliamentary discourse, 1971–2018
Mats Fridlund, Magnus P. Ängsal, Daniel Brodén, Leif-Jöran Olsson & Patrik Öhberg, University of Gothenburg
This paper examines conceptual changes in the Swedish parliamentary discourse on political violence 1971–2018. Prior to 1971, political violence was rarely verbalized as terrorism, more frequently as ‘terror’. The highly contested term ‘terrorism’, in turn, was more often used for signifying acts committed by states in the sense of state terrorism. Around 1970, a terminological shift occurred as ‘terrorism’ increasingly became deployed with reference to political violence committed by clandestine groups. The aim is to analyse two conceptual shifts in the Swedish terrorism discourse: first, the shift from ‘terror’ to ‘terrorism’; second, the shift 2014–2015, when the innovative expression våldsbejakande extremism (‘violence-affirming extremism’) was introduced in the context of radical Jihadism. Deploying language technology techniques, including word vectors that give the contextual closeness of words allows us to capture changes in usage. The main question is to what extent and by whom the aforementioned terms have been used to denote different, similar or related activities or stances. By comparing similar contexts we can predict words with similar meanings, but also find what words are used in such contexts earlier, or later on. Combining this with aggregated text metadata concerning gender and party affiliation enables a powerful drill-down into sociolinguistic variables.
The conceptualization of violent extremism in the US and the Nordic eegion
Kathlyn Elliott, Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School
This qualitative study compares how education's role in the prevention of violent extremism is conceptualized in policy documents in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the US. Using Bacchi’s WPR analysis, this research seeks to understand how different nations conceptualize the problem of violent extremism and potential solutions. In particular, this research seeks to the Nordic states with well-developed welfare systems conceptualize violent extremism to the neoliberal capitalist American conceptualization. This research will also seek to demonstrate the variation within the Nordic countries themselves. The purpose of this research is to understand how different understandings of the role of the state in different political systems and structures leads to different conceptualizations of the problem of violent extremism and potentially divergent policy solutions. In a world where policy borrowing is rife, it is essential to understand how different nation-states understand “wicked” social problem to encourage appropriate contextualization of borrowed policies. This study seeks to fill a gap in that research by comparing policy conceptualizations of violent extremism from the Nordic region with those from the US.