Raquel Da Silva
Biographic Data
| ID | 127239 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Raquel Da Silva |
| GIVEN NAMES | Raquel |
| FAMILY NAME | Da Silva |
| SIGNATURE | DA SILVA R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5239-5919 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Governing through pressure
This article examines how counter-terrorism has become a permanent governmental rationality across European countries through a comparative analysis of France and Portugal. Drawing on securitisation theory, governmentality studies and postcolonial critique, we develop the framework of postcolonial governmentality, which reveals how colonial techniques persist within contemporary security governance. France operates through civilisational securiti…
Between Support and Critique
Care and counterterrorism
The global expansion of counterterrorism practices following 9/11 has fundamentally reshaped security governance worldwide, with policies increasingly permeating domestic spaces through surveillance programmes and targeted interventions. Care ethics has emerged as a significant framework for understanding social relations and policy formation, emphasising relationality, responsibility, and the fostering of human flourishing over control and punis…
How to measure political polarization in text-as-data? A scoping review of computational social science approaches
The rise of political polarization within western societies has been portrayed by events such as the United States Capitol riot or the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union. In this context, we argue that computational social science (CSS) methods offer a scalable and language-independent fashion to measure political polarization, enabling the processing of big data. In this vein, this article offers the first scoping review of the applic…
The Antiracist Civil Society in Portugal
Memorializing (violent) resistance to authoritarianism
Mass polarisation
Ideological polarisation research has gained prominence due to its growing presence in established democracies and its associated negative consequences. This study aimed to explore the identification with polarised parliamentary discourses in a Portuguese sample and its relationship with psychological factors. Results revealed the absence of mass ideological polarisation and a greater leftist identification. Participants who identified more with …
Contemporary Reflections on Critical Terrorism Studies
"Bringing together established and emerging voices in Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS), this book offers fresh and dynamic reflections on CTS and envisages possible lines of future research and ways forward. The volume is structured in three sections. The first opens a space for intellectual engagement with other disciplines such as Sociology, Peace Studies, Critical Pedagogy, and Indigenous Studies. The second looks at topics that have not recei…
Statebuilding beyond the West
Strategic narratives are employed by political actors as tools to pursue their goals, constructing a shared meaning of the past, present, and future in order to shape behaviour. Building on discourse analysis of the magazine Dabiq and from in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted between 2018 and 2019 with IS civilian employees and civilians living in IS-controlled territory, we analyse how IS organised its strategic narrative of governance…
Stretching the Peace
The purpose of this exploratory study was to underline the importance of a humanistic approach to peace studies against a scenario characterized by the failings and weaknesses of the liberal peacebuilding agenda. To do so, we employ a transrational peace research framework to investigate whether Kundalini yoga can be used as a peacebuilding tool by analyzing its role in the lives of young people living in an Alexandra township, in South Africa. W…
ShamimaBegum
This study explores the constructions of gender in social media narratives regarding Shamima Begum, a British born woman who travelled to Syria to join Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Using the Twitter hashtag #ShamimaBegum – developed in response to Begum’s expressed interest in returning to the United Kingdom to give birth to her third child – we employ critical discourse analysis to examine social media users’ responses to Begum’s case…
Extreme-Right Violence in the Portuguese Transition to Democracy
The Exército de Libertação de Portugal [ ELP ; Portugal’s Liberation Army] was one of the most infamous clandestine organizations active during the Portuguese transition to democracy, bringing together far-right militants from the deposed authoritarian regime. This organization has been considered the most dangerous terrorist group fighting for the restoration of Estado Novo ’s regime. This article aims to challenge this statement, recurrently de…
From street soldiers to political soldiers”
Historical evidence points to the fact that extreme right-wing (ERW) violence has not always been prosecuted under terrorism legislation, but under various other criminal statutes. In Portugal, since the regulation of terrorism in the general Criminal Code in 1982, which was then replaced by counterterrorism (CT) legislation in 2003, there have been five terrorism convictions. However, none was related to ERW violence, despite the existence of nu…
Narrative, Political Violence and Social Change
Narrative, Political Violence and Social Change is a call for engaging actively and critically with the ontological, epistemological, and methodological implications of narrative in the study of political violence and terrorism. Building on a basic framework of three modes of narrative – as lens, as data, and as tool – the chapters in this book demonstrate how the study of political violence and terrorism benefits from narrative inquiry as an int…
And the emergence of Critical Terrorism Studies
The attacks of 11 September 2001 have profoundly impacted the field of terrorism studies. In this article we aim to trace, in particular, the impact of this date on the establishment of critical terrorism studies (CTS) as a school of thought. Such an endeavour aims to create an ‘umbrella-term’ to gather scholars from diverse backgrounds, in an attempt to provide a counter-narrative to the dominant, mainstream understanding of terrorism and counte…
It’s about keeping children safe, not spying’
From its inception in 2015, the Prevent Duty has required educators, and other members of the social sector, to exercise ‘due regard’ in preventing pupils from being drawn into terrorism, irrespective of the age of the child. This article explores how primary educators have understood and implemented this preventative security policy in their schools. Analysis is based on a survey of 345 primary school educators and 37 semi-structured interviews …
The Post-Dictatorship Memory Politics in Portugal Which Erased Political Violence from the Collective Memory
Former clandestine militants' voices and stories have been recurrently silenced in the Portuguese "battle over memory", because their activities were linked to events, such as the Revolution of 25 April 1974, which have themselves been politically and socially depreciated in mainstream political narratives. Only recently did the traditional political narratives start to be questioned and debated by Portuguese scholars. Such political narratives t…
Narratives of Political Violence
An exploration of how political violence is constructed, this book presents the life stories of individuals once committed to political transformation through violent means in Portugal. Challenging simplistic conceptualisations about the actors of violence, this book examines issues of temporality, gender and interpersonal dynamics in the study of political violence. It is the first comprehensive case study of political violence in Portugal, base…
Memory Politics, Statebuilding and Social Movement Identity
How states, organizations and individuals deal with the legacy and memories of troubled pasts has been the focus of various scholarly studies in recent decades. Some authors even believe that there
Narrative, Political Violence, and Social Change
This special issue is concerned with the development of the study of narratives of political violence and terrorism. While the concept of narrative has become increasingly popular among scholars in the field over the past two decades, this has not been accompanied by an active and critical engagement with its full ontological, epistemological, and methodological implications. This issue proposes to view the extant work through a basic framework o…
Disengagement from Political Violence and Deradicalization
This article applies a dialogical analysis to the change processes involved in moving from engagement with to disengagement from an armed militant group, as well as from radicalization to deradicalization. The findings underline the interplay between different push and pull factors at individual, organizational, and societal levels that played a role in the already mentioned processes in three periods of time—engagement with, life within, and dis…
Narrative resources and political violence
This study analyses the experiences, both violent and non-violent, of two former clandestine militants who were part of distinct politically violent organisations in the past in Portugal. It explores the narrative resources at the origin of personal political awareness and their influence on political activism, taking into (particular) account the impact of the early family narrative environment and of the moment in history in which individuals w…
Children in Angola
Talk about terror in our back gardens”
The phenomenon of foreign fighters has become a central issue to the ongoing conflict in Syria. This article explores how members of the public answer the question ‘Why do British citizens join the conflict in Syria’ on social media sites and in response to online news articles. Building upon research on everyday narratives of security and terrorism, we analyse 807 comments, and in doing so, we argue that online comments are important in producin…
Talk about terror in our back gardens”
The phenomenon of foreign fighters has become a central issue to the ongoing conflict in Syria. This article explores how members of the public answer the question ‘Why do British citizens join the conflict in Syria’ on social media sites and in response to online news articles. Building upon research on everyday narratives of security and terrorism, we analyse 807 comments, and in doing so, we argue that online comments are important in producin…
ShamimaBegum
This study explores the constructions of gender in social media narratives regarding Shamima Begum, a British born woman who travelled to Syria to join Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Using the Twitter hashtag #ShamimaBegum – developed in response to Begum’s expressed interest in returning to the United Kingdom to give birth to her third child – we employ critical discourse analysis to examine social media users’ responses to Begum’s case…
Narrative, Political Violence, and Social Change
This special issue is concerned with the development of the study of narratives of political violence and terrorism. While the concept of narrative has become increasingly popular among scholars in the field over the past two decades, this has not been accompanied by an active and critical engagement with its full ontological, epistemological, and methodological implications. This issue proposes to view the extant work through a basic framework o…
It’s about keeping children safe, not spying’
From its inception in 2015, the Prevent Duty has required educators, and other members of the social sector, to exercise ‘due regard’ in preventing pupils from being drawn into terrorism, irrespective of the age of the child. This article explores how primary educators have understood and implemented this preventative security policy in their schools. Analysis is based on a survey of 345 primary school educators and 37 semi-structured interviews …
The Post-Dictatorship Memory Politics in Portugal Which Erased Political Violence from the Collective Memory
Former clandestine militants' voices and stories have been recurrently silenced in the Portuguese "battle over memory", because their activities were linked to events, such as the Revolution of 25 April 1974, which have themselves been politically and socially depreciated in mainstream political narratives. Only recently did the traditional political narratives start to be questioned and debated by Portuguese scholars. Such political narratives t…
Disengagement from Political Violence and Deradicalization
This article applies a dialogical analysis to the change processes involved in moving from engagement with to disengagement from an armed militant group, as well as from radicalization to deradicalization. The findings underline the interplay between different push and pull factors at individual, organizational, and societal levels that played a role in the already mentioned processes in three periods of time—engagement with, life within, and dis…
Narrative resources and political violence
This study analyses the experiences, both violent and non-violent, of two former clandestine militants who were part of distinct politically violent organisations in the past in Portugal. It explores the narrative resources at the origin of personal political awareness and their influence on political activism, taking into (particular) account the impact of the early family narrative environment and of the moment in history in which individuals w…
Talk about terror in our back gardens”
The phenomenon of foreign fighters has become a central issue to the ongoing conflict in Syria. This article explores how members of the public answer the question ‘Why do British citizens join the conflict in Syria’ on social media sites and in response to online news articles. Building upon research on everyday narratives of security and terrorism, we analyse 807 comments, and in doing so, we argue that online comments are important in producin…
Narrative resources and political violence
This study analyses the experiences, both violent and non-violent, of two former clandestine militants who were part of distinct politically violent organisations in the past in Portugal. It explores the narrative resources at the origin of personal political awareness and their influence on political activism, taking into (particular) account the impact of the early family narrative environment and of the moment in history in which individuals w…
Children in Angola
Narratives of Political Violence
An exploration of how political violence is constructed, this book presents the life stories of individuals once committed to political transformation through violent means in Portugal. Challenging simplistic conceptualisations about the actors of violence, this book examines issues of temporality, gender and interpersonal dynamics in the study of political violence. It is the first comprehensive case study of political violence in Portugal, base…
Memory Politics, Statebuilding and Social Movement Identity
How states, organizations and individuals deal with the legacy and memories of troubled pasts has been the focus of various scholarly studies in recent decades. Some authors even believe that there
Narrative, Political Violence, and Social Change
This special issue is concerned with the development of the study of narratives of political violence and terrorism. While the concept of narrative has become increasingly popular among scholars in the field over the past two decades, this has not been accompanied by an active and critical engagement with its full ontological, epistemological, and methodological implications. This issue proposes to view the extant work through a basic framework o…
Disengagement from Political Violence and Deradicalization
This article applies a dialogical analysis to the change processes involved in moving from engagement with to disengagement from an armed militant group, as well as from radicalization to deradicalization. The findings underline the interplay between different push and pull factors at individual, organizational, and societal levels that played a role in the already mentioned processes in three periods of time—engagement with, life within, and dis…
The Post-Dictatorship Memory Politics in Portugal Which Erased Political Violence from the Collective Memory
Former clandestine militants' voices and stories have been recurrently silenced in the Portuguese "battle over memory", because their activities were linked to events, such as the Revolution of 25 April 1974, which have themselves been politically and socially depreciated in mainstream political narratives. Only recently did the traditional political narratives start to be questioned and debated by Portuguese scholars. Such political narratives t…
Narrative, Political Violence and Social Change
Narrative, Political Violence and Social Change is a call for engaging actively and critically with the ontological, epistemological, and methodological implications of narrative in the study of political violence and terrorism. Building on a basic framework of three modes of narrative – as lens, as data, and as tool – the chapters in this book demonstrate how the study of political violence and terrorism benefits from narrative inquiry as an int…
And the emergence of Critical Terrorism Studies
The attacks of 11 September 2001 have profoundly impacted the field of terrorism studies. In this article we aim to trace, in particular, the impact of this date on the establishment of critical terrorism studies (CTS) as a school of thought. Such an endeavour aims to create an ‘umbrella-term’ to gather scholars from diverse backgrounds, in an attempt to provide a counter-narrative to the dominant, mainstream understanding of terrorism and counte…
It’s about keeping children safe, not spying’
From its inception in 2015, the Prevent Duty has required educators, and other members of the social sector, to exercise ‘due regard’ in preventing pupils from being drawn into terrorism, irrespective of the age of the child. This article explores how primary educators have understood and implemented this preventative security policy in their schools. Analysis is based on a survey of 345 primary school educators and 37 semi-structured interviews …
Extreme-Right Violence in the Portuguese Transition to Democracy
The Exército de Libertação de Portugal [ ELP ; Portugal’s Liberation Army] was one of the most infamous clandestine organizations active during the Portuguese transition to democracy, bringing together far-right militants from the deposed authoritarian regime. This organization has been considered the most dangerous terrorist group fighting for the restoration of Estado Novo ’s regime. This article aims to challenge this statement, recurrently de…
From street soldiers to political soldiers”
Historical evidence points to the fact that extreme right-wing (ERW) violence has not always been prosecuted under terrorism legislation, but under various other criminal statutes. In Portugal, since the regulation of terrorism in the general Criminal Code in 1982, which was then replaced by counterterrorism (CT) legislation in 2003, there have been five terrorism convictions. However, none was related to ERW violence, despite the existence of nu…
Contemporary Reflections on Critical Terrorism Studies
"Bringing together established and emerging voices in Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS), this book offers fresh and dynamic reflections on CTS and envisages possible lines of future research and ways forward. The volume is structured in three sections. The first opens a space for intellectual engagement with other disciplines such as Sociology, Peace Studies, Critical Pedagogy, and Indigenous Studies. The second looks at topics that have not recei…
Statebuilding beyond the West
Strategic narratives are employed by political actors as tools to pursue their goals, constructing a shared meaning of the past, present, and future in order to shape behaviour. Building on discourse analysis of the magazine Dabiq and from in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted between 2018 and 2019 with IS civilian employees and civilians living in IS-controlled territory, we analyse how IS organised its strategic narrative of governance…
Stretching the Peace
The purpose of this exploratory study was to underline the importance of a humanistic approach to peace studies against a scenario characterized by the failings and weaknesses of the liberal peacebuilding agenda. To do so, we employ a transrational peace research framework to investigate whether Kundalini yoga can be used as a peacebuilding tool by analyzing its role in the lives of young people living in an Alexandra township, in South Africa. W…
ShamimaBegum
This study explores the constructions of gender in social media narratives regarding Shamima Begum, a British born woman who travelled to Syria to join Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Using the Twitter hashtag #ShamimaBegum – developed in response to Begum’s expressed interest in returning to the United Kingdom to give birth to her third child – we employ critical discourse analysis to examine social media users’ responses to Begum’s case…
Mass polarisation
Ideological polarisation research has gained prominence due to its growing presence in established democracies and its associated negative consequences. This study aimed to explore the identification with polarised parliamentary discourses in a Portuguese sample and its relationship with psychological factors. Results revealed the absence of mass ideological polarisation and a greater leftist identification. Participants who identified more with …
How to measure political polarization in text-as-data? A scoping review of computational social science approaches
The rise of political polarization within western societies has been portrayed by events such as the United States Capitol riot or the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union. In this context, we argue that computational social science (CSS) methods offer a scalable and language-independent fashion to measure political polarization, enabling the processing of big data. In this vein, this article offers the first scoping review of the applic…
The Antiracist Civil Society in Portugal
Memorializing (violent) resistance to authoritarianism
Governing through pressure
This article examines how counter-terrorism has become a permanent governmental rationality across European countries through a comparative analysis of France and Portugal. Drawing on securitisation theory, governmentality studies and postcolonial critique, we develop the framework of postcolonial governmentality, which reveals how colonial techniques persist within contemporary security governance. France operates through civilisational securiti…
Between Support and Critique
Care and counterterrorism
The global expansion of counterterrorism practices following 9/11 has fundamentally reshaped security governance worldwide, with policies increasingly permeating domestic spaces through surveillance programmes and targeted interventions. Care ethics has emerged as a significant framework for understanding social relations and policy formation, emphasising relationality, responsibility, and the fostering of human flourishing over control and punis…
Political science (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Politics (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Terrorism (11 works) · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence (10 works) · Narrative (9 works) · Criminology (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works)