The fact that Bin Laden thought of South Africa as an open territory and one in which his operatives could work relatively freely to strike at US targets should come as no surprise to those who have b]]>http://www.icsr.info/blog/The-Egyptian-Uprisings-collective-effervescence-and-its-shortcomings2012-05-14Ryan EvansPerformative Revolution in Egypt by Jeffrey Alexander provides a sociological analysis of competing symbols and narratives in a chronicle of the uprising in Egypt through the lens of media reports and activist-generated accounts. Ryan Evans reviews the essay and finds that despite the author’s explicit focus on the ‘performance’ of the revolution itself, it brings the dissonance between this performance and its deliverables to the fore.

Read the review at the London School of Economics Review of Books.

However the situation is far more nuanced than we may believe. In the first instance, as Graham Fuller has abundantly made clear – the Islamists themselves are deeply divided – between ultra]]>http://www.icsr.info/blog/Newsblog-9-13-April2012-04-13ICSRThis is a round-up of the weeks major terrorism news stories by ICSR Research Intern, Henry Millard

Six held in Antrim after Real IRA vow to continue their campaign of terror

A Real IRA rally at the Creggan cemetery in Derry commemorating the 1916 Easter Rising has seen 6 men arrested by the Police Service of Northern Ireland and taken to the Serious Crimes Suite of Antrim police station after the event was monitored by a PSNI helicopter.

Before the rally a small group of paramilitaries and several hundred supporters marched through the cemetery. During the wreath-laying ceremony a man in a balaclava wearing battle fatigues read a statement, on behalf of the Real IRA , which vowed that the dissident republicans would persist in acts of terrorism; "The IRA will continue to attack Crown Force personnel, their installations, as ]]>http://www.icsr.info/blog/The-Black-Liberation-Army-and-Homegrown-Terrorism-in-1970s-America2012-04-12William RosenauThe appearance of the hip-hop artist Common at the White House last May reopened some old wounds from the 1970s. In his music, Common has praised Assata Shakur (formerly Joanne Chesimard), convicted for the 1973 murder of a New York State trooper, who was shot in the back of the head with his own service revolver. After escaping from prison in 1979, Shakur fled to Cuba, where she remains a guest of the Castro government. Police organisations in New Jersey denounced the Obama administration’s invitation, which the White House declined to withdraw.

Shakur was a major terrorist figure in 1970s America—a decade of “indigenous American berserk” in the words of the novelist Philip Roth. During this period, the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society, bombed the Pentagon, New York police headquarters, corporate offices, and other symbolic targets. The violent escapades of Weather’s well-educated middle- a]]>http://www.icsr.info/blog/The-Mayhem-in-Mali2012-04-11Hussein SolomonWhen Captain Amadou Sanogo staged his coup on 22^nd March
against Malian President Toure, one of the reasons he gave for his actions was
that Toure did not supply the Malian armed forces with sufficient heavy and new
weapons to take on the Tuareg rebellion in the north. Tuareg rebels, however,
made use of the chaos of the coup in Bamako to stake their claim to a large
swathes of territory in northern Mali which they called Azawad which in
addition to including the historic city of Timbuktu also includes the important
towns of Gao and Kidal.

The initial assault on government towns by Tuareg rebels were led by the
Azawad National Liberation Movement or MNLA and led by Mohammed Ag Najim, a
former officer in Gaddafi’s army. Indeed, the bulk of Najim’s fighters were
Malian Tuaregs who fought in Gaddafi’s forces. As Gaddafi’s star faded, these
fighters crossed into Mali with large amounts of sop]]>http://www.icsr.info/blog/Counter-Terrorism-and-the-War-of-Ideas-Is-the-West-Losing-It2012-04-05Hussein SolomonBeyond the body count following a fresh terrorist atrocity on the streets of Baghdad or Bali or a US predator drone attacking another target in Waziristan, the struggle against global terrorism is truly a contest between competing ideologies. After all before a suicide bomber detonates his or her vest they must be ideologically indoctrinated to believe that they are doing the “right” thing – both in terms of the act and the target. Moreover, such an act exists within a social milieu in which such acts are not only condoned but also lauded.

Most of the twentieth century witnessed an ideological struggle between freedom and democracy. Democracy won that struggle whilst Nazism, Fascism and Communism have been largely confined to the dustbin of history. However the ideological struggle between freedom and authoritarianism is far from over. The spawn of this twentieth century authoritarianism, Islamism, is alive and well in the twenty-first century. Thus we]]>http://www.icsr.info/blog/The-Shariah-Question-in-Northern-Nigeria-and-the-Failure-of-Political-Islam2012-03-28Hussein SolomonFor some years Islamists in Northern Nigeria had been lobbying for the implementation of shar’iah law. By the end of the 1990s a propitious set of circumstances brought their demand to reality. Military rule came to an end in Nigeria, but with the advent of civilian rule and the concomitant ending of 15 years of martial law there was fear amongst Nigerian citizens that criminality would rise. Shar’iah law, in this context, held the promise of curbing crime. Given the domination of the Nigerian armed forces by northerners, the ending of military rule also witnessed the diminution of political power of northern political elites within the Federal Republic of Nigeria. As such, these now feared that their traditional political fiefdoms in the north were threatened by southerners. Northern political elites then elected to support shari’ah law in their respective states to serve as a bulwark against southern influence.

Consequently, as a result of Islamist lobbying]]>http://www.icsr.info/blog/Mission-Cant-Complete2012-03-20Ryan EvansMichael O'Hanlon and Bruce Riedel insisted in an op-ed last week that the United States must stay in Afghanistan "until the job is done." While they are wise to warn against making rash decisions based on the particularly tragic events of the last few weeks, they never convincingly explain when the job should end and how we can expect to accomplish it in the next few years if we - to borrow a phrase from the last war - stay the course. The mission and objectives O'Hanlon and Riedel envision are of the never-ending variety: creating a viable, stable nation where none has previously existed. They also ignore their former, wiser caution on the future of the war.

Read the rest at Foreign Policy’s AFPAK Channel

The one that has most piqued my interest are the alleged British documents that are supposed to have been written by Rashid Rauf. From the understanding I have, the papers are essentially a post-operation report on the July 7, July 21, and Overt bomb plots (Overt was the codename for the 2006 attempt by Abdulla Ali and a bunch of his mates to bring down about eight planes as they made there way to America) and German intelligence seems pretty convinced t]]>