Joel Busher
Biographic Data
| ID | 302877 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joel Busher |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joel |
| FAMILY NAME | Busher |
| SIGNATURE | BUSHER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Coventry University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9004-3447 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 73 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Public Perceptions of Violent Extremism and the Prevention of Violent Extremism in Mauritania and Burkina Faso: What They Tell Us About the Nature of the Problem and Opportunities for Intervention
During the last decade the Sahel has been the region most affected by violent extremism. While research has examined the dynamics and drivers of that violence, little attention has been given to public perceptions either of the violence itself or of responses to the violence and how this can advance understanding of ‘the problem’ and possible response strategies. This article responds to this gap, focusing on the cases of Mauritania and Burkina F…
The Relational Dynamics of Violence Escalation and Inhibition During Far-Right Protest Waves
This article examines how interactions between far-right protestors, counter-protestors and other actors, including the police, lead towards and away from violence that exceeds normal levels relative to the groups under analysis. Based on four cases (Dover, United Kingdom 2015–2016; Sunderland, United Kingdom 2016–2018; Charlottesville, United States 2016–2017; Chemnitz, Germany 2018), and integrating interactionist approaches with relational and…
In the Discomfort Zone: Emotional Labour and Reflexivity in Field Research on Extremism
As the literature on understanding and addressing extremism and terrorism has expanded, there has also emerged a significant methodological literature. As well as providing valuable insight about research design, this literature increasingly addresses practical issues, such as how to gain access to difficult-to-reach populations, how to build trust, and strategies for effective interviewing. There remain however a number of relatively neglected a…
The Cambridge Handbook of Race and Surveillance
Featuring chapters authored by leading scholars in the fields of criminology, critical race studies, history, and more, The Cambridge Handbook of Race and Surveillance cuts across history and geography to provide a detailed examination of how race and surveillance intersect throughout space and time. The volume reviews surveillance technology from the days of colonial conquest to the digital era, focusing on countries such as the United States, C…
The Routledge Handbook on Radicalisation and Countering Radicalisation
Counter-radicalisation policies in the United Kingdom are routinely framed as operating in a 'pre-criminal' space — positioned as safeguarding interventions that divert vulnerable individuals away from the criminal justice system. This chapter critically examines the tension between that framing and the simultaneous expansion of pre-emptive terrorism offences under UK law. Drawing on the UK's Prevent strategy and Duty as a central case study, it …
How the “Internal Brakes” on Violent Escalation Work and Fail: Toward a Conceptual Framework for Understanding Intra-Group Processes of Restraint in Militant Groups
This article advances the emergent literature on restraint within militant groups in three ways. First, it offers a framework for situating the “internal brakes on violent escalation”—understood as the practices through which group members shape the outer limits of their action repertoires—in relation to the interplay between conflict dynamics, intra-group processes and individual-level decision making. Second, it develops a basic analytical stra…
Researching the Far Right: Theory, Method and Practice
The Prevent Duty in Education: Impact, Enactment and Implications
This open access book explores the enactment, impact and implications of the Prevent Duty. In July 2015 the UK became the first country to place a specific legal requirement on those working in education to contribute to efforts to ‘prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’
The enactment of the counter-terrorism “Prevent duty” in British schools and colleges: Beyond reluctant accommodation or straightforward policy acceptance
When Britain imposed the “Prevent duty”, a legal duty on education, health and social welfare organisations to report concerns about individuals identified as at-risk of radicalisation, critics argued it would accentuate the stigmatisation of Muslim communities, “chill” free speech, and exacerbate societal securitisation. Based on 70 interviews with educational professionals and a national online survey (n = 225), this article examines their perc…
Chicken suits and other aspects of situated credibility contests: Explaining Local Trajectories of Anti-Minority Activism
Why do some towns become focal points for anti-minority activism at particular moments in time, when other towns with similar socio-economic conditions do not? While policy practitioners charged with responding to such activity frequently ask this question, it has received less academic attention. Consequently, an adequate response falls between different strands of the academic literature on anti-minority politics.\nWe explore this question thro…
The internal brakes on violent escalation: A typology
Most groups do less violence than they are capable of. Yet while there is now an extensive literature on the escalation of or radicalisation towards violence, particularly by ‘extremist’ groups or actors, and while processes of de-escalation or de-radicalisation have also received significant attention, processes of non- or limited escalation have largely gone below the analytical radar. This article contributes to current efforts to address this…
Introduction: The Emotional Dynamics of Backlash Politics beyond Anger, Hate, Fear, Pride, and Loss
The activists from March for England, a group that had worked closely, although not always seen eye to eye, with the English Defence League, for some years the UK’s most prominent anti-Muslim protest movement, gathered outside Brighton station. It was an excellent day for a St. George’s day parade: warm spring sunshine, just a light breeze. The activists, many wearing, wrapped in or carrying England flags, greeted one another, and shared a joke a…
Why Even Misleading Identity Claims Matter: The Evolution of the English Defence League
When activists in radical, far or extreme right groups claim identities that set them apart from such analytical categories, they are usually given short shrift by commentators and academics, a function of the presumed strategic nature of such claims and the evidential inaccuracies that scrutiny of such claims often reveals. Such responses help ensure critical readings of these groups. However, they also risk overlooking the fact that even where …
Micro-Moral Worlds of Contentious Politics: A Reconceptualization of Radical Groups and Their Intersections With One Another and the Mainstream
The emergence or resurgence of radical political groups invariably provokes a struggle between activists, academics, commentators, and policymakers over the set of terms that best correspond to the group in question. While such debates are an integral part of political practice, scrutinizing the claims made in these debates reveals significant limitations in standard strategies of description—most notably their inability to satisfactorily render …
Hopes and Fears: Community Cohesion and the 'White Working Class' in One of the 'Failed Spaces' of Multiculturalism
Since 2001, community cohesion has been an English policy concern, with accompanying media discourse portraying a supposed failure by Muslims to integrate. Latterly, academia has foregrounded White majority attitudes towards ethnic diversity, particularly those of the 'White working class'. While questioning this categorisation, we present data on attitudes towards diversity from low income, mainly White areas within Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, a t…
The Making of Anti-Muslim Protest: Grassroots activism in the English Defence League
Activism in any social movement group is, as Deborah Gould observes, a project of collective ‘world-making’. It is about changing the world out there by influencing policy and public opinion, but is also about the way it transforms the lives of participants – activists generate new identities, cultures, social ties, rich and varied emotional experiences and interpretations of the world around them. Movements are more likely to be able to attract …
"Interpreting "Cumulative Extremism: Six Proposals for Enhancing Conceptual Clarity
The concept of “cumulative extremism”—described in 2006 by Roger Eatwell as “the way in which one form of extremism can feed off and magnify other forms [of extremism],” has recently gained considerable traction in academic, policy, and practitioner discourses about extremism. Yet in spite of the growing usage of the term, particularly in analyses of the dynamic between extreme Islamist and extreme Right-Wing or anti-Muslim protest groups, there …
The missing spirals of violence: Four waves of movement–countermovement contest in post-war Britain
Since the Second World War, Great Britain has witnessed a recurring escalation and de-escalation of confrontations between extreme right-wing or anti-minority protest groups on the one hand and, on the other, militant anti-fascist or anti-racist groups, and latterly also a number of extreme Islamist groups. In this article, we trace the outline of four waves of these movement–countermovement contests in order to engage critically with ideas of wh…
From Ethnic Nationalisms to Clashing Civilizations: Reconfigurations of (Un)Civil Religion in an Era of Globalization
One of the main questions currently facing scholars of civil religion is how civil religions, and in particular national civil religions, are being reconfigured in response to the contemporary repositioning of the nation state within the supra-national political, economic, legal and cultural orders entailed by globalization. This article first surveys some of the main arguments to emerge from the civil religion literature in this regard. It then …
When promoting pills is easier than pushing the ABC: A case study from Kavango, Namibia
One of the challenges faced by AIDS service organisations seeking to engage with traditional leaders and community elders in Kavango, north-east Namibia, has been the popular view that the messages of the fight against HIV/AIDS contradict local cultural values. However, there are indications that this has been changing. Staff and volunteers working with AIDS service organisations reported that growing numbers of traditional leaders were becoming …
Being an identity prop: Some ethical implications
During recent fieldwork in Namibia I noticed that the people I worked with often took care to arrange our public encounters so that onlookers did not interpret our relationship in ways that might be inconvenient. I was cast as a friend, colleague, employer, customer, acquaintance. My presence created opportunities for the extension of people's "repertoire of identities" (Cinnirella 1998) in both desirable and undesirable directions, and their cho…
The enactment of the counter-terrorism “Prevent duty” in British schools and colleges: Beyond reluctant accommodation or straightforward policy acceptance
When Britain imposed the “Prevent duty”, a legal duty on education, health and social welfare organisations to report concerns about individuals identified as at-risk of radicalisation, critics argued it would accentuate the stigmatisation of Muslim communities, “chill” free speech, and exacerbate societal securitisation. Based on 70 interviews with educational professionals and a national online survey (n = 225), this article examines their perc…
The Making of Anti-Muslim Protest: Grassroots activism in the English Defence League
Activism in any social movement group is, as Deborah Gould observes, a project of collective ‘world-making’. It is about changing the world out there by influencing policy and public opinion, but is also about the way it transforms the lives of participants – activists generate new identities, cultures, social ties, rich and varied emotional experiences and interpretations of the world around them. Movements are more likely to be able to attract …
Hopes and Fears: Community Cohesion and the 'White Working Class' in One of the 'Failed Spaces' of Multiculturalism
Since 2001, community cohesion has been an English policy concern, with accompanying media discourse portraying a supposed failure by Muslims to integrate. Latterly, academia has foregrounded White majority attitudes towards ethnic diversity, particularly those of the 'White working class'. While questioning this categorisation, we present data on attitudes towards diversity from low income, mainly White areas within Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, a t…
Why Even Misleading Identity Claims Matter: The Evolution of the English Defence League
When activists in radical, far or extreme right groups claim identities that set them apart from such analytical categories, they are usually given short shrift by commentators and academics, a function of the presumed strategic nature of such claims and the evidential inaccuracies that scrutiny of such claims often reveals. Such responses help ensure critical readings of these groups. However, they also risk overlooking the fact that even where …
The internal brakes on violent escalation: A typology
Most groups do less violence than they are capable of. Yet while there is now an extensive literature on the escalation of or radicalisation towards violence, particularly by ‘extremist’ groups or actors, and while processes of de-escalation or de-radicalisation have also received significant attention, processes of non- or limited escalation have largely gone below the analytical radar. This article contributes to current efforts to address this…
How the “Internal Brakes” on Violent Escalation Work and Fail: Toward a Conceptual Framework for Understanding Intra-Group Processes of Restraint in Militant Groups
This article advances the emergent literature on restraint within militant groups in three ways. First, it offers a framework for situating the “internal brakes on violent escalation”—understood as the practices through which group members shape the outer limits of their action repertoires—in relation to the interplay between conflict dynamics, intra-group processes and individual-level decision making. Second, it develops a basic analytical stra…
Introduction: The Emotional Dynamics of Backlash Politics beyond Anger, Hate, Fear, Pride, and Loss
The activists from March for England, a group that had worked closely, although not always seen eye to eye, with the English Defence League, for some years the UK’s most prominent anti-Muslim protest movement, gathered outside Brighton station. It was an excellent day for a St. George’s day parade: warm spring sunshine, just a light breeze. The activists, many wearing, wrapped in or carrying England flags, greeted one another, and shared a joke a…
"Interpreting "Cumulative Extremism: Six Proposals for Enhancing Conceptual Clarity
The concept of “cumulative extremism”—described in 2006 by Roger Eatwell as “the way in which one form of extremism can feed off and magnify other forms [of extremism],” has recently gained considerable traction in academic, policy, and practitioner discourses about extremism. Yet in spite of the growing usage of the term, particularly in analyses of the dynamic between extreme Islamist and extreme Right-Wing or anti-Muslim protest groups, there …
The missing spirals of violence: Four waves of movement–countermovement contest in post-war Britain
Since the Second World War, Great Britain has witnessed a recurring escalation and de-escalation of confrontations between extreme right-wing or anti-minority protest groups on the one hand and, on the other, militant anti-fascist or anti-racist groups, and latterly also a number of extreme Islamist groups. In this article, we trace the outline of four waves of these movement–countermovement contests in order to engage critically with ideas of wh…
In the Discomfort Zone: Emotional Labour and Reflexivity in Field Research on Extremism
As the literature on understanding and addressing extremism and terrorism has expanded, there has also emerged a significant methodological literature. As well as providing valuable insight about research design, this literature increasingly addresses practical issues, such as how to gain access to difficult-to-reach populations, how to build trust, and strategies for effective interviewing. There remain however a number of relatively neglected a…
Chicken suits and other aspects of situated credibility contests: Explaining Local Trajectories of Anti-Minority Activism
Why do some towns become focal points for anti-minority activism at particular moments in time, when other towns with similar socio-economic conditions do not? While policy practitioners charged with responding to such activity frequently ask this question, it has received less academic attention. Consequently, an adequate response falls between different strands of the academic literature on anti-minority politics.\nWe explore this question thro…
Micro-Moral Worlds of Contentious Politics: A Reconceptualization of Radical Groups and Their Intersections With One Another and the Mainstream
The emergence or resurgence of radical political groups invariably provokes a struggle between activists, academics, commentators, and policymakers over the set of terms that best correspond to the group in question. While such debates are an integral part of political practice, scrutinizing the claims made in these debates reveals significant limitations in standard strategies of description—most notably their inability to satisfactorily render …
Being an identity prop: Some ethical implications
During recent fieldwork in Namibia I noticed that the people I worked with often took care to arrange our public encounters so that onlookers did not interpret our relationship in ways that might be inconvenient. I was cast as a friend, colleague, employer, customer, acquaintance. My presence created opportunities for the extension of people's "repertoire of identities" (Cinnirella 1998) in both desirable and undesirable directions, and their cho…
When promoting pills is easier than pushing the ABC: A case study from Kavango, Namibia
One of the challenges faced by AIDS service organisations seeking to engage with traditional leaders and community elders in Kavango, north-east Namibia, has been the popular view that the messages of the fight against HIV/AIDS contradict local cultural values. However, there are indications that this has been changing. Staff and volunteers working with AIDS service organisations reported that growing numbers of traditional leaders were becoming …
From Ethnic Nationalisms to Clashing Civilizations: Reconfigurations of (Un)Civil Religion in an Era of Globalization
One of the main questions currently facing scholars of civil religion is how civil religions, and in particular national civil religions, are being reconfigured in response to the contemporary repositioning of the nation state within the supra-national political, economic, legal and cultural orders entailed by globalization. This article first surveys some of the main arguments to emerge from the civil religion literature in this regard. It then …
The missing spirals of violence: Four waves of movement–countermovement contest in post-war Britain
Since the Second World War, Great Britain has witnessed a recurring escalation and de-escalation of confrontations between extreme right-wing or anti-minority protest groups on the one hand and, on the other, militant anti-fascist or anti-racist groups, and latterly also a number of extreme Islamist groups. In this article, we trace the outline of four waves of these movement–countermovement contests in order to engage critically with ideas of wh…
The Making of Anti-Muslim Protest: Grassroots activism in the English Defence League
Activism in any social movement group is, as Deborah Gould observes, a project of collective ‘world-making’. It is about changing the world out there by influencing policy and public opinion, but is also about the way it transforms the lives of participants – activists generate new identities, cultures, social ties, rich and varied emotional experiences and interpretations of the world around them. Movements are more likely to be able to attract …
"Interpreting "Cumulative Extremism: Six Proposals for Enhancing Conceptual Clarity
The concept of “cumulative extremism”—described in 2006 by Roger Eatwell as “the way in which one form of extremism can feed off and magnify other forms [of extremism],” has recently gained considerable traction in academic, policy, and practitioner discourses about extremism. Yet in spite of the growing usage of the term, particularly in analyses of the dynamic between extreme Islamist and extreme Right-Wing or anti-Muslim protest groups, there …
The internal brakes on violent escalation: A typology
Most groups do less violence than they are capable of. Yet while there is now an extensive literature on the escalation of or radicalisation towards violence, particularly by ‘extremist’ groups or actors, and while processes of de-escalation or de-radicalisation have also received significant attention, processes of non- or limited escalation have largely gone below the analytical radar. This article contributes to current efforts to address this…
Introduction: The Emotional Dynamics of Backlash Politics beyond Anger, Hate, Fear, Pride, and Loss
The activists from March for England, a group that had worked closely, although not always seen eye to eye, with the English Defence League, for some years the UK’s most prominent anti-Muslim protest movement, gathered outside Brighton station. It was an excellent day for a St. George’s day parade: warm spring sunshine, just a light breeze. The activists, many wearing, wrapped in or carrying England flags, greeted one another, and shared a joke a…
Why Even Misleading Identity Claims Matter: The Evolution of the English Defence League
When activists in radical, far or extreme right groups claim identities that set them apart from such analytical categories, they are usually given short shrift by commentators and academics, a function of the presumed strategic nature of such claims and the evidential inaccuracies that scrutiny of such claims often reveals. Such responses help ensure critical readings of these groups. However, they also risk overlooking the fact that even where …
Micro-Moral Worlds of Contentious Politics: A Reconceptualization of Radical Groups and Their Intersections With One Another and the Mainstream
The emergence or resurgence of radical political groups invariably provokes a struggle between activists, academics, commentators, and policymakers over the set of terms that best correspond to the group in question. While such debates are an integral part of political practice, scrutinizing the claims made in these debates reveals significant limitations in standard strategies of description—most notably their inability to satisfactorily render …
Hopes and Fears: Community Cohesion and the 'White Working Class' in One of the 'Failed Spaces' of Multiculturalism
Since 2001, community cohesion has been an English policy concern, with accompanying media discourse portraying a supposed failure by Muslims to integrate. Latterly, academia has foregrounded White majority attitudes towards ethnic diversity, particularly those of the 'White working class'. While questioning this categorisation, we present data on attitudes towards diversity from low income, mainly White areas within Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, a t…
The enactment of the counter-terrorism “Prevent duty” in British schools and colleges: Beyond reluctant accommodation or straightforward policy acceptance
When Britain imposed the “Prevent duty”, a legal duty on education, health and social welfare organisations to report concerns about individuals identified as at-risk of radicalisation, critics argued it would accentuate the stigmatisation of Muslim communities, “chill” free speech, and exacerbate societal securitisation. Based on 70 interviews with educational professionals and a national online survey (n = 225), this article examines their perc…
Chicken suits and other aspects of situated credibility contests: Explaining Local Trajectories of Anti-Minority Activism
Why do some towns become focal points for anti-minority activism at particular moments in time, when other towns with similar socio-economic conditions do not? While policy practitioners charged with responding to such activity frequently ask this question, it has received less academic attention. Consequently, an adequate response falls between different strands of the academic literature on anti-minority politics.\nWe explore this question thro…
Researching the Far Right: Theory, Method and Practice
The Prevent Duty in Education: Impact, Enactment and Implications
This open access book explores the enactment, impact and implications of the Prevent Duty. In July 2015 the UK became the first country to place a specific legal requirement on those working in education to contribute to efforts to ‘prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’
How the “Internal Brakes” on Violent Escalation Work and Fail: Toward a Conceptual Framework for Understanding Intra-Group Processes of Restraint in Militant Groups
This article advances the emergent literature on restraint within militant groups in three ways. First, it offers a framework for situating the “internal brakes on violent escalation”—understood as the practices through which group members shape the outer limits of their action repertoires—in relation to the interplay between conflict dynamics, intra-group processes and individual-level decision making. Second, it develops a basic analytical stra…
The Cambridge Handbook of Race and Surveillance
Featuring chapters authored by leading scholars in the fields of criminology, critical race studies, history, and more, The Cambridge Handbook of Race and Surveillance cuts across history and geography to provide a detailed examination of how race and surveillance intersect throughout space and time. The volume reviews surveillance technology from the days of colonial conquest to the digital era, focusing on countries such as the United States, C…
The Routledge Handbook on Radicalisation and Countering Radicalisation
Counter-radicalisation policies in the United Kingdom are routinely framed as operating in a 'pre-criminal' space — positioned as safeguarding interventions that divert vulnerable individuals away from the criminal justice system. This chapter critically examines the tension between that framing and the simultaneous expansion of pre-emptive terrorism offences under UK law. Drawing on the UK's Prevent strategy and Duty as a central case study, it …
In the Discomfort Zone: Emotional Labour and Reflexivity in Field Research on Extremism
As the literature on understanding and addressing extremism and terrorism has expanded, there has also emerged a significant methodological literature. As well as providing valuable insight about research design, this literature increasingly addresses practical issues, such as how to gain access to difficult-to-reach populations, how to build trust, and strategies for effective interviewing. There remain however a number of relatively neglected a…
The Relational Dynamics of Violence Escalation and Inhibition During Far-Right Protest Waves
This article examines how interactions between far-right protestors, counter-protestors and other actors, including the police, lead towards and away from violence that exceeds normal levels relative to the groups under analysis. Based on four cases (Dover, United Kingdom 2015–2016; Sunderland, United Kingdom 2016–2018; Charlottesville, United States 2016–2017; Chemnitz, Germany 2018), and integrating interactionist approaches with relational and…
Public Perceptions of Violent Extremism and the Prevention of Violent Extremism in Mauritania and Burkina Faso: What They Tell Us About the Nature of the Problem and Opportunities for Intervention
During the last decade the Sahel has been the region most affected by violent extremism. While research has examined the dynamics and drivers of that violence, little attention has been given to public perceptions either of the violence itself or of responses to the violence and how this can advance understanding of ‘the problem’ and possible response strategies. This article responds to this gap, focusing on the cases of Mauritania and Burkina F…
Political science (19 works) · Law (15 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Politics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence (9 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (6 works) · Criminology (5 works)