ABSTRACT
How do ordinary citizens understand radicalisation? Our concern is not simply with whether or not citizens are scared of terrorism or trust government counterterrorism policies. More important is the way citizens think about issues like radicalisation – issues where there is little concrete reliable data in the public domain, issues that may involve thinking about a complex set of further problems (immigration, religion, multiculturalism, policing), and issues where should a problem be established, then any response would involve trade-offs of political values like liberty, equality and security. Climate change is another such issue: the science is (said to be) contested, any solution would involve domains of energy, economy, and science and technology, and such responses would entail difficult normative trade-offs based on what values we prioritise over others. By asking not just what citizens think but how they think about radicalisation, we open up the processes of deliberation and negotiation – with themselves, and with others – through which citizens engage with complex political problems. Indeed, explaining these processes has been identified as one of the key challenges for political analysis today (Stoker 2010: 60). If one aim of this book is to understand why different groups in different cultural contexts connect with discourses of radicalisation, then such an approach is absolutely essential. Finding out how citizens think about issues like radicalisation is much more difficult than finding out simply what they think. Opinion polls and surveys offer regular updates on ‘the public mood’. These snapshots offer timely guides to general sentiments, but can easily obscure as much as they reveal. For instance, public opinion polls in the UK in recent years have offered many seemingly contradictory views held. In August 2006, a Yougov/Spectator poll1 indicated that 53 per cent of British citizens wanted the Blair government be ‘tougher and more aggressive’ in its foreign policy approach to ‘the terrorist threat’. A month later, a Yougov/Sky News poll2 showed that 77 per cent of the same population thought ‘Tony Blair’s policies towards the Middle East have made Britain more of a target for terrorists’. Would a tougher foreign policy have made Britain less of a target? Similarly, in the August poll, a majority supported 90-day detention of those only suspected, not charged, with terrorist offences, tougher controls at airports, and increased police profiling. These were the very policies that were making British Muslims feel insecure and alienated from Britain (Gillespie and
O’Loughlin, forthcoming). Did the public offer support for further alienating the very community from which ‘the threat’ is considered to emanate? The approach taken in this chapter begins to open up how such apparently contradictory positions can be held. Connectivity, certainty (or lack of ), and contradiction are the three characteristics of citizen understandings of security in Britain, according to recent analysis by Gillespie and O’Loughlin (2009). Connectivity: different discursive ‘realities’ from personal experience, religious beliefs, media consumption and the statements of political leaders can inter-lock and mutually reinforce one another to produce an understanding more determined than if supported only by one; Certainty: uncertainty is a problem for citizens as well as policymakers, trying to piece together information about risks and threats; such uncertainty including learning how to ‘modulate’ and deal with the very fact of uncertainty itself; and Contradiction: in this context it is perhaps unsurprising that some individuals come to hold ambivalent and often contradictory perceptions of threats and the role of state and media in representing and responding to threats. Jarvis and Lister followed with a briefer study3 of whether people in the UK feel more secure as a result of counter-terrorism policy. Based on a series of focus groups in London, Oxford and Swansea, they found participants held a range of views on what security means, from simple human survival to contentment, hospitality, equality and freedom. This range was also reflected in variation in how people thought about security. Those who equated security with survival presumed others held the same narrow view as them; it was just common sense. Others held more complex and multi-layered ways of understanding security, especially those individuals who could hold several understandings of security together at once. They were more inclined to think how others might reflect on different forms of security too. In addition, a person’s conception of security shaped their evaluation of recent counter-terrorism policy. Hence, there is policy value as well as scholarly interest in addressing not just what but how people think about security. Gillespie and O’Loughlin’s analysis used collaborative audience ethnography as a research method to find out how ordinary people understand security (Gillespie 2006, 2007). The Legitimising project developed and extended this method, conducted audience ethnography in four countries, the UK, France, Denmark and Australia. A total of 67 interviews were conducted. Eight ethnographers were recruited to conduct, transcribe and pre-analyse the interviews. Five of them conducted interviews in the UK. The population of research participants was broad, with news audiences of different generation, gender and faith (see Appendix I). Participants initially recruited were part of the social networks of the ethnographers, with further participants recruited through snowballing. In addition to the interviews, two focus groups were conducted: one focused on a specific episode of BBC’s Newsnight on the Gaza crisis, another on citizens’ anxieties around media technologies. The analysis of the interviews was first organised through their coding into Nvivo8. Categories for coding were designed
in relation to this strand of the Legitimising project and to other strands, to achieve integrated analysis across the project of key themes such as legitimacy, violence and visuality. Concrete examples were mobilised in the interviews in order to elicit reactions as to whether or not they can meaningfully be described as instances of radicalisation. In this approach, what is constituted as not being related to radicalisation is as important as what is construed as being related to it. Close ethnomethodological analysis of the transcripts was then undertaken (for a full explanation of our methodological approach to the audience analysis, see Appendix II). A key objective of the Legitimising the Discourses of Radicalisation project was to identify, map and evaluate mainstream news public understandings and interpretations of political violence and the term ‘radicalisation’ and its associated terms, contexts and discourses. Hence, our interviews were designed to create a space in which radicalisation is made sense of. How, if at all, do audience members who constitute mainstream news publics understand the term radicalisation? If they felt comfortable using the term, did they use it to refer to the same processes or individuals that official or media discourses refer to? In a context of disconnection between the understandings of political leaders and citizens in the UK (Couldry et al. 2007; Gillespie 2006; Moss and O’Loughlin 2008) we sought to explore whether the introduction of the new radicalisation concept would create a further distance between official and public understandings of security, and to investigate the role media played in this relationship. If government was using a discourse to describe security concerns that made little sense to citizens, achieving legitimacy for policy would be difficult. In this article we analyse data from interviews in France and the UK. The central idea underpinning the audience research is that the meaning of radicalisation, like the meaning of any other word, is ordinary. Minimally, this means that there is no need for a specialised language, academic or else, for radicalisation to mean anything; it is an expression belonging to the ordinary language and hence that makes sense within this ordinary language. It does not have a meaning outside its practical uses, for instance, when ‘talking about the news’, or ‘talking to the academics’. The interviews were not organised so as to decide what ‘radicalisation’ ultimately means but to elicit the ‘way’ people talk about radicalisation and media. Such an approach is informed by ethnomethodology but is not properly speaking ethnomethodological. For instance, we do not analyse the grammar of ordinary language in this article. Additionally, our treatment of interview talk as ordinary language differs from recent discourse and interpretive work in security analysis (Altheide 2007; Campbell 2007; Debrix 2008; Giroux 2006; Hansen 2006; Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2007; Jarvis 2009; Mirzoeff 2005) by demonstrating the understandings held by individuals not by identifying the terms or concepts they use but by analysing the way they talk about these issues. The analysis that follows concentrates on the relationship between radicalisation and the media from the point of view of the interviewees.
