Lee Jarvis
Biographic Data
| ID | 85562 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lee Jarvis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lee |
| FAMILY NAME | Jarvis |
| SIGNATURE | JARVIS L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of East Anglia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4149-7135 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 75 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 385 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
From having to doing vernacular security
This article explores vernacular discussion within below-the-line (BTL) media commentary on the politics of extremism. Through an analysis of the work done by four rhetorical devices – quotation, humour, ad hominem claims and idiom – it develops two arguments. First, BTL commentary offers a heterogeneous yet underexplored site of vernacular security discourse. Second, such discourse is important as an exercise in political argumentation as much a…
The New ‘New terrorism’?
This article contrasts political discourse on the threat posed by terrorism today from the US and UK. Three arguments are made. First, there is significant overlap in the characterisation of today’s threat as more fragmented, more ideologically plural, less predictable, and potentially more dangerous than that which dominated the immediate post-9/11 period. Second, counterintuitively, this consistent framing of terrorism’s recent transformation i…
Beware! Here (might) be terrorists
This article offers an original discursive analysis of the construction of terrorism within travel advice published by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). It argues that this advice positions terrorism as a very specific – omnipresent, Islamist, and non-state – security threat from which British nationals will never be safe. Three contributions are made. First, empirically, the article offers a descriptively …
Strategies of Critique in Vernacular Security Discourse
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in “vernacular security” research, with its emphasis on non-elite discourse on security. Such discourse is often positioned as a “bottom-up” alternative to more traditional forms of security knowledge, with potential to pluralize, and potentially disrupt, hegemonic ways of thinking and doing security. By engaging with non-elite articulations, therefore, vernacular security scholarship is attributed a…
Stop in the Law of the Name! Nominative Lawmaking, Populism and Justice
Nominative laws—laws named after particular victims of violence or injustice such as Martyn's Law, Sarah's Law and Awaab's Law—have become increasingly prominent in the UK. In this article, we offer the first sustained attempt to explore this phenomenon and its social, political and legal significance. Two contributions are made. First, we demonstrate the breadth of nominative laws via an original typology organised around their four primary ambi…
Twenty years of vernacular security research
This issue marks the 20th anniversary of Nils Bubandt’s influential article on the concept of vernacular security. Bringing together cutting-edge scholarship showcasing how the concept has travelled across this period, it explores key conceptual, methodological and political questions raised by work in this field. This introduction sets the scene for this by: (1) situating vernacular security scholarship within wider literature on ‘the vernacular…
Children’s literature and/as political critique
The forcible removal of unwanted individuals from the body politic – as, say, illicit migrants or terrorists – is a prominent feature of contemporary world politics. This prominence, and its typical storying from the vantage point of the national or communal ‘self’ needing protection, risks rendering exclusionary politics and their considerable harms unremarkable, even unremarked. In this article, we argue that children’s literature offers a powe…
Critical security research and the war on terror
Contemporary reckoning with the catastrophic outcomes of the post-9/11 era opens important questions for the future of counterterrorism policy. It also raises significant issues for thinking through the future priorities and purposes of security scholarship. In this article we make two core claims. First, recent years have seen considerable mainstreaming of ostensibly critical ideas on (counter)terrorism within political debate, media commentary,…
What the War on Terror leaves behind
This article serves as the introduction to a Special Issue of the European Journal of International Security titled ‘What the War on Terror Leaves Behind’. In it, we seek to contextualise and summarise the diverse contributions of this collection, which is animated by four overarching questions: (i) More than 20 years after the attacks of 11 September 2001, is the War on Terror now, finally, over? (ii) What, if any, legacies remain from the post-…
Covid-19 and the Limits of Critical Security Theory
Recent years have witnessed a growing and important series of efforts to make sense of the post-2019 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic through diverse lenses within the field of critical security studies (css). In this article, we set out to reverse this analytical gaze, asking not “what can css tell us about COVID-19?” but rather, “what can COVID-19 tell us about css?” In order to do this, we pair two important moments in the UK pandemic response …
Three waves of critical terrorism studies
The past twenty years have witnessed critical terrorism studies (CTS) become an increasingly influential body of work. In this article, I offer the first sustained effort to chart CTS’ development and transformation by positing three successive waves in its evolution. CTS’ first wave, I argue, was characterised by agenda-setting efforts to map the prospects of a distinctively critical approach to terrorism research. Second wave literature elabora…
Plotters
Children’s games and global politics
Recent years have witnessed growing attention to popular culture’s role in the reproduction, negotiation, and contestation of global political life. This article extends this work by focusing on games targeted at young children as a neglected, yet rich site in which global politics is constituted. Drawing specifically on the Heroes of History card game in the Top Trumps franchise, I offer three original contributions. First, I demonstrate how chi…
Oh help! Oh no! The international politics of The Gruffalo
The article explores the complicity of children’s picturebooks in the construction and critique of world politics. Focusing on The Gruffalo , it argues that this spectacularly successful book: (1) stories the international as a pessimistic, anarchical world populated by self-interested, survival-seekers; (2) disrupts this reading and its assumptions through evocation of the social production of threat; and, (3) provides a more fundamental decolon…
National Submissions to the UN Counter-Terrorism Committee as Constructions of National Identity
This article examines the construction of national identity in the context of the post-9/11 counter-terrorism sanctions regime established by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1373. The study focuses on the written reports of three member states – Cameroon, Kenya, and Nigeria – arguing that these documents not only serve as inventories of national capacity but also as performances of national identity within a specific historical moment.…
Critical terrorism studies and numbers
Recent years have witnessed a growing multi-disciplinary engagement with the importance of quantification across social, political, and economic life. In this article, I seek to build on this work by offering the first sustained exposition of the significance of numbers for critical scholarship on (counter-)terrorism. Three arguments are made. First, there is evidence of greater appetite for engaging with numbers in critical terrorism studies sch…
Everyday security and the newspaper obituary
This article explores the obituary as an important, yet neglected, site of everyday security discourse. Through an original analysis of 86 published obituaries of 11 prominent ‘terrorists’, we offer three arguments. First, obituaries play an important constitutive role in shaping public understanding of terrorism and terrorists. Second, in so doing, terrorist obituaries frequently draw upon and reproduce established constructions of terrorism. Es…
(En)Gendering the Dead Terrorist
This article contributes to contemporary scholarship on gender, violence, and global politics by exploring how the figure of the terrorist is produced within mainstream media obituaries. It offers three arguments. First, the genre overwhelmingly positions the terrorist as a masculine figure. This positioning takes place, we demonstrate, in a variety of ways including through constructions of the character, family life, and “career” of those desig…
Covid-19 and ‘the public
This article presents an original analysis of the UK government’s discursive response to COVID-19 across the first six months of the pandemic. Two arguments are made. First, representations of the state/people relationship were vital to the state’s storying and selling of its response to this crisis. And, second, despite populist-style inflections, the state/people relationship was typically constructed around a ‘government knows best’ claim asso…
That still goes on, doesn't it, in their religion?’ British values, Islam and vernacular discourse
This article explores ‘everyday’ or ‘vernacular’ conceptions of Muslims, Islam and their relationship to ‘British values’. Drawing on original data from focus groups in the East of England, it argues that the relationship is typically constructed around a series of binary pairings. Where Islam is held to be traditional, conservative, pious and outmoded, British values are seen as progressive, liberal, secular and modern. This opposition matters f…
Counting Security in the Vernacular
Recent years have witnessed a 'vernacular turn' in critical security scholarship centered on everyday constructions of (in)security. In this article, I advance this turn by arguing for greater attention to the role of numbers in non-elite discourse on (in)security. Doing so deepens understanding of the mechanisms and registers through which (in)securities are constructed in the vernacular while conceptually strengthening work on vernacular securi…
Critical terrorism studies and the far-right
Recent years have witnessed increasing academic, media, and political attention to the threat of far-right terrorism. In this article, I argue that scholarship on this threat has suffered from two limitations, each with antecedents in terrorism research more broadly. First, is an essentialist approach to this phenomenon as an extra-discursive object of knowledge to be defined, explained, catalogued, risk assessed, and (ultimately) resolved. Secon…
Cracking the box or stretching its walls? Exploiting institutional plasticity in Iranian creative advertising
Through a nine-month ethnography in an advertising agency in Iran, a deeply conservative society, we explore the microprocesses through which actors search for and exploit areas of institutional plasticity toward incremental change. Given the infeasibility of more significant change in a highly institutionalized arrangement, actors in these settings are likely to seek out institutions characterized by the highest degree of plasticity. Yet, extant…
Time, memory, and critical terrorism studies
The centrality of temporality to the meaning and significance of the events of 11 September 2001 became evident very quickly after the attacks. Early analysis from David Campbell (2001) and Jacques
Constructing the coronavirus crisis
The Spaces and Faces of Critical Terrorism Studies
This article explores the burgeoning academic interest in establishing a critical terrorism studies research programme. It begins by reviewing the debates over definition, causation and response that still dominate mainstream discussions of terrorism. The analytical and normative limitations of these debates, it argues, open considerable space for the emergence of a critically oriented body of literature. A second section then explores two distin…
Disconnected Citizenship? The Impacts of Anti-Terrorism Policy on Citizenship in the UK
This article draws on primary focus group data from the UK to offer three contributions to recent debate on the impact of anti-terrorism measures on citizenship. First, it presents a qualitatively rich account of citizens' own perspectives on this relationship. Second, it explores the significance of ethnic identity in relation to public attitudes. Finally, it traces the implications of anti-terrorism initiatives upon multiple dimensions of citiz…
What would you do? Everyday conceptions and constructions of counter-terrorism
This article explores findings from focus group research in which UK publics were asked, If you were in government, what would you do about terrorism? After situating our research within contemporary ‘bottom-up’ work on counter-terrorism, we discuss the diversity of answers we received to this question, which included improving education, addressing social fracture, and the need for more punitive counter-terrorism powers. These exercises in publi…
Toward a Vernacular Security Studies
This article seeks to situate, evaluate, and advance the recent “turn” toward the “vernacular” within security studies. It argues that vernacular security studies has significant advantages over alternative “bottom up” approaches. First, its conceptual emptiness allows for genuinely inductive research into public experiences, understandings, anxieties, and fears. Second, it offers engagement with a potentially far richer tapestry of everyday (in)…
Vernacular Securities and Their Study
This article draws on primary focus group research to explore the differing ways in which UK publics conceptualise and discuss security. The article begins by situating our research within two relevant contemporary scholarly literatures: The first concerns efforts to centre the 'ordinary' human as security's referent; the second, constructivist explorations of security's discursive (re)production. A second section then introduces six distinct und…
Introduction to the Special Issue
The Internet is a transformative technology that terrorists are exploiting for the spread of propaganda and radicalizing new recruits. While Al Qaeda has a longer history, Islamic State is conducting a modern and sophisticated media campaign centered around online social networking. This article introduces and contextualizes the contributions to this Special Issue by examining some of the ways in which terrorists make use of the Internet as part …
Stakeholder security
This article explores the ways in which Western states have adapted their counter-terrorism strategies to meet the demands of a post-9/11 era. Focusing on the USA and UK as illustrative case studies, this article charts the emergence of a new, complex topography of security measures aimed at confronting the threat of unconventional violence from above and below. Of particular interest is the construction of a raft of initiatives heavily reliant o…
I am somewhat puzzled’
A recent wave of scholarship has drawn attention to the need for further engagement with the role of 'the audience' in securitization 'games'. This article contributes to this discussion both theoretically and empirically by exploring the types of question an audience may ask of a securitizing actor before a securitizing act meets with success or failure. To do this, it offers a discursive analysis of all 27 UK parliamentary debates on the extens…
Constructing the coronavirus crisis
War, time, and military videogames
This article contributes to a small, but growing, scholarship on military videogames. Focusing, specifically, on diverse manifestations of temporality within these games, it demonstrates that this genre is both more diverse, and has greater critical potential, than is often recognised. The article begins with a brief overview of contemporary scholarship on temporality, war and global politics. A second section then identifies three different ways…
Times of terror
This paper contributes to the growing academic literature of Critical Terrorism Studies. It does so by tracing the ways in which the George W. Bush administration narrated the unfolding War on Terror around specific and distinct conceptions of temporality. Claims to temporal discontinuity, linearity, and timelessness, it is argued, were all central to the writing of this conflict, and helped to inscribe significance, coherence, and normative inte…
Night fell on a different world”
This article explores the endurance of the pervasive framing of “9/11” as a moment of temporal rupture within the United States. It argues that this has persisted despite the existence of plausible competitor narratives for two reasons: first, because it resonated with public experiences of the events predating this construction’s discursive sedimentation and; second, because of its vigorous defence by successive US administrations. In making the…
Critical terrorism studies and the far-right
Recent years have witnessed increasing academic, media, and political attention to the threat of far-right terrorism. In this article, I argue that scholarship on this threat has suffered from two limitations, each with antecedents in terrorism research more broadly. First, is an essentialist approach to this phenomenon as an extra-discursive object of knowledge to be defined, explained, catalogued, risk assessed, and (ultimately) resolved. Secon…
Affecting Terrorism
The contemporary fascination with terrorism in Anglo-American popular culture, political discourse, news reportage, and beyond is boundless and well documented. In this article, we explore contemporary productions of terrorism as the outcome of three drives to knowledge: laugher, lamentation, and detestation. Drawing on a range of social and cultural practices—including jokes, street art, film, memorial projects, elite rhetoric, and abuse scandal…
We [for]got him’
This article explores how the death of Osama bin Laden was narrated by the Obama administration between the night of his killing and the 2012 State of the Union address. Three aspects of this unfolding story, in particular, are explored: i) descriptions of the operation itself; ii) constructions of bin Laden’s life and character; iii) accounts of the significance and likely consequences of his killing. The article argues that the narration of the…
Covid-19 and ‘the public
This article presents an original analysis of the UK government’s discursive response to COVID-19 across the first six months of the pandemic. Two arguments are made. First, representations of the state/people relationship were vital to the state’s storying and selling of its response to this crisis. And, second, despite populist-style inflections, the state/people relationship was typically constructed around a ‘government knows best’ claim asso…
Researching 'British [Muslim] Values
This article reflects on methodological decisions, strategies, and challenges from a recent interdisciplinary project on the relationship between 'British values' and Islam. The project employed digital storytelling to access 'everyday' conceptions and constructions of this contentious relationship. The research was undertaken by participant researchers recruited from Muslim communities in the UK's East Anglia region, working with academics from …
Terrorism, counter-terrorism, and critique
This article explores the parameters, value and limitations of different critical strategies for those dissatisfied with the contemporary politics of terror. It argues, first, that the prominent (counter-)terrorism paradigm – in which terrorism is approached as a ubiquitous and very specific security challenge meriting appropriately exceptional responses – is far more critiqued than we might anticipate. And, second, that such critiques – which ca…
The Proscription or Listing of Terrorist Organisations
This article serves as an introduction to this Special Issue on the banning or proscription of terrorist organisations around the world. It begins by arguing for greater attention to proscription powers because of their contemporary ubiquity, considerable historical lineage, implications for political life, and ambiguous effectiveness. Following an overview of the Issue's questions and ambitions, the article discusses five themes: key moments of …
Preaching to the Converted
This article explores UK Parliamentary debate around the proscription - or banning - of terrorist organisations. It argues that these debates are usefully conceptualised as a form of political ritual organised around a core script, established participant roles, a shared respect for the performance of democracy and a predictable outcome. Taking these ritualistic aspects seriously extends research on proscription by highlighting the importance of …
Enemies of the state
The Cyberterrorism Threat
This article reports on a recent research project exploring academic perspectives on the threat posed by cyberterrorism. The project employed a survey method, which returned 118 responses from researchers working across 24 different countries. The article begins with a brief review of existing literature on this topic, distinguishing between those concerned by an imminent threat of cyberterrorism, and other, more skeptical, views. Following a dis…
Cyberterrorism Today? Findings From a Follow-on Survey of Researchers
This article reports on a survey of researchers designed to capture current perspectives on core questions around cyberterrorism. The survey—conducted in 2017 as a follow-on to an initial, 2012, exercise—focused on questions of definition, threat and response. By documenting our findings in each of these areas—and highlighting developments in the years between our surveys—we identify three particularly important trends. First, an increasing conve…
Introduction
When the editors of Critical Studies on Terrorism wrote their introduction to the inaugural issue in April 2008, they noted that “terrorism” was a “growth industry” which generated a huge amount of social and political activity, and affected an extensive list of areas of social and cultural life (Breen Smyth et al, 2008: 1). They also noted that there was a yawning gap between the actual material threat posed by terrorists, and the level of inves…
Unpacking cyberterrorism discourse
This article explores original empirical findings from a research project investigating representations of cyberterrorism in the international news media. Drawing on a sample of 535 items published by 31 outlets between 2008 and 2013, it focuses on four questions. First, how individuated a presence is cyberterrorism given within news media coverage? Second, how significant a threat is cyberterrorism deemed to pose? Third, how is the identity of ‘…
Times of terror
This paper contributes to the growing academic literature of Critical Terrorism Studies. It does so by tracing the ways in which the George W. Bush administration narrated the unfolding War on Terror around specific and distinct conceptions of temporality. Claims to temporal discontinuity, linearity, and timelessness, it is argued, were all central to the writing of this conflict, and helped to inscribe significance, coherence, and normative inte…
Times of Terror
Since 11 September 2001, the War on Terror has dominated global political life. The book takes a critical look at different ways in which the George W. Bush administration created and justified this f
The Spaces and Faces of Critical Terrorism Studies
This article explores the burgeoning academic interest in establishing a critical terrorism studies research programme. It begins by reviewing the debates over definition, causation and response that still dominate mainstream discussions of terrorism. The analytical and normative limitations of these debates, it argues, open considerable space for the emergence of a critically oriented body of literature. A second section then explores two distin…
Remember, remember, 11 September
The events of 11 September 2001 continue to attract the interest of political elites and publics across the world. This article takes as its focus an unusual and contemporary collection of efforts to commemorate those attacks and their victims, exploring the emergence of a series of Internet memorials dedicated to the preservation of their memory. By positioning these memorials both historically and politically via an investigation of their form …
Stakeholder security
This article explores the ways in which Western states have adapted their counter-terrorism strategies to meet the demands of a post-9/11 era. Focusing on the USA and UK as illustrative case studies, this article charts the emergence of a new, complex topography of security measures aimed at confronting the threat of unconventional violence from above and below. Of particular interest is the construction of a raft of initiatives heavily reliant o…
Terrorism
"Terrorism has a long history but the devastating attacks of 9/11 transformed what had been seen as a relatively minor security issue into one of major global significance. This incisive new text provides an accessible and balanced assessment of political terror and its study and in the process rethinks many assumptions"
The Cyberterrorism Threat
This article reports on a recent research project exploring academic perspectives on the threat posed by cyberterrorism. The project employed a survey method, which returned 118 responses from researchers working across 24 different countries. The article begins with a brief review of existing literature on this topic, distinguishing between those concerned by an imminent threat of cyberterrorism, and other, more skeptical, views. Following a dis…
Disconnected Citizenship? The Impacts of Anti-Terrorism Policy on Citizenship in the UK
This article draws on primary focus group data from the UK to offer three contributions to recent debate on the impact of anti-terrorism measures on citizenship. First, it presents a qualitatively rich account of citizens' own perspectives on this relationship. Second, it explores the significance of ethnic identity in relation to public attitudes. Finally, it traces the implications of anti-terrorism initiatives upon multiple dimensions of citiz…
Disconnection and resistance
The corroding impacts of anti-terrorism measures on citizenship have been much discussed in recent years. Drawing on qualitative research from the UK, this article argues that citizens do indeed frequently feel that aspects of citizenship – such as rights, duties, identity claims and the ability to participate in the public sphere – have been significantly dampened by developments in this policy area. At the same time, however, participants in ou…
Vernacular Securities and Their Study
This article draws on primary focus group research to explore the differing ways in which UK publics conceptualise and discuss security. The article begins by situating our research within two relevant contemporary scholarly literatures: The first concerns efforts to centre the 'ordinary' human as security's referent; the second, constructivist explorations of security's discursive (re)production. A second section then introduces six distinct und…
Counter-Radicalisation
This book offers a wide-ranging and critical examination of recent counter-radicalisation policies, using case studies from several countries. Counter-radicalisation policies, such as the UK ‘Prevent’ strategy, have been highly controversial and increasingly criticised since their introduction. In this edited volume, voices from disciplines including sociology, political science, criminology and International Relations are brought together to add…
Cyberterrorism
Terrorism, discourse and analysis thereof
This is a reply to:Clement, Maeva. 2014. “Al-Muhajiroun in the United Kingdom: the role of international non-recognition in heightened radicalization dynamics.” Global Discourse. 4 (4): 428–443. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.918306
State terrorism research and critical terrorism studies
This article explores the value of scholarship on state terrorism for the critical study of terrorist violences. The article begins by identifying four primary contributions of this scholarship: first, a rethinking of the status and significance of terrorism; second, an unsettling of broader assumptions within International Relations (IR) and terrorism research; third, an ability to locate state violences within pertinent, but potentially camoufl…
Night fell on a different world”
This article explores the endurance of the pervasive framing of “9/11” as a moment of temporal rupture within the United States. It argues that this has persisted despite the existence of plausible competitor narratives for two reasons: first, because it resonated with public experiences of the events predating this construction’s discursive sedimentation and; second, because of its vigorous defence by successive US administrations. In making the…
Enemies of the state
We [for]got him’
This article explores how the death of Osama bin Laden was narrated by the Obama administration between the night of his killing and the 2012 State of the Union address. Three aspects of this unfolding story, in particular, are explored: i) descriptions of the operation itself; ii) constructions of bin Laden’s life and character; iii) accounts of the significance and likely consequences of his killing. The article argues that the narration of the…
Critical Perspectives on Counter-Terrorism
This volume examines the rationale, effectiveness and consequences of counter terrorism practices from a range of perspectives and cases.The book critically interrogates contemporary counter-terrorism powers from military campaigns and repression through to the prosecution of terrorist suspects, counter-terrorism policing, counter-radicalisation programmes, and the proscription of terrorist organisations. Drawing on a range of timely and importan…
Terrorism Online
This book investigates the intersection of terrorism, digital technologies and cyberspace. The evolving field of cyber-terrorism research is dominated by single-perspective, technological, political, or sociological texts. In contrast, Terrorism Online uses a multi-disciplinary framework to provide a broader introduction to debates and developments that have largely been conducted in isolation. Drawing together key academics from a range of disci…
Anti-terrorism, citizenship and security
This book explores how different publics make sense of and evaluate anti-terrorism powers within the UK, and the implications of this for citizenship and security. Drawing on primary empirical research, the book argues that whilst white individuals are not unconcerned about the effects of anti-terrorism, ethnic minority citizens (including, but not only those identifying as Muslim) believe that anti-terrorism powers have impacted negatively on th…
Terrorism and counterterrorism after 7/7
Charles Clarke was born in London on 21 September 1950 and read for a degree in mathematics and economics at Kings College Cambridge. From 1974 to 1977, he was Treasurer, then President, of the Nat
Confessions of a Terrorist
Anti-Terrorism, Citizenship and Security
Since 9/11, the UK's anti-terrorism framework has undergone dramatic changes. Drawing on primary empirical research, this study examines the impact of these on security and citizenship, as perceived by citizens themselves. Engaging with different communities across the UK, it argues that although white individuals are not unconcerned about the effects of anti-terrorism powers, ethnic minority citizens believe that anti-terrorism measures have had…
Terrorism Online
What Is Cyberterrorism? Findings From a Survey of Researchers
This article reports on a recent survey designed to capture understandings of cyberterrorism across the global research community. Specifically, it explores competing views, and the importance thereof, amongst 118 respondents on three definitional issues: (a) the need for a specific definition of cyberterrorism for either policymakers or researchers; (b) the core characteristics or constituent parts of this concept; and (c) the value of applying …
Political science (65 works) · Law (59 works) · Sociology (54 works) · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence (49 works) · Terrorism (47 works) · Law (44 works) · Politics (40 works) · Global Security and Public Health (30 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Criminology (16 works)