Teaching Assistant: Mr Gordon Clubb
Society, Agency and the Decline of Waves of Terrorism
The focus of the thesis will be on the decline of terrorism and the role of social agents in this decline. The overarching aim of the study is to identify and explain structural and agential changes that result in broader campaigns of terrorism coming to an end over time and place. Therefore, in addition to the role of state coercion, it sets out to highlight such factors as the role of norms in society and the declining power of mobilising narratives. Rather than focusing on a single group, the study expands it to ‘broader campaigns of terrorism’, or ‘waves of terrorism’ (Rapoport, 2004).
As such, this thesis aims to unpack these so-called waves and analyse its composite parts by drawing from such social theory as Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach to structure-agency. It will identify the emergent properties of waves and their constraining and enabling effect upon primary and corporate agents. The re-conceptualisation of waves of terrorism theory will provide a framework which enables the linkage between the ‘international’ and the ‘local’, and yet, through analytical dualism, ensuring characteristics of the individual groups (and individual terrorists) are not obfuscated. Therefore the study looks at different strata that constitute a wave and considers how agents feed up to change waves. In addition to such social collectivities the study looks at actors (or ‘individuals’) and the relationship between their attitudes and behaviour towards composite parts of terrorist waves.
Publications
- Clubb, G. ‘Re-evaluating the Disengagement Process: the Case of Fatah’, Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2009)
Research Interests
- (Counter-) Terrorism, Political Violence, Militant Groups, the Middle East, Palestine
Research Affiliations
- Terrorism Research Initiative Research Assistant - Postgraduate Network on Terrorism Research