Professor Fiona de Londras has been awarded a Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust grant, for the project ‘UK Counter-Terrorism Review’.
Since September 2001 the UK Parliament has passed reactionary, repressive legislation, which the government has claimed will counter terrorism and radicalisation, but which has unknown potential effects. Misguided counter-terrorism can cause disenfranchisement, which has been identified as a root cause of terrorism. It is vital, therefore, that counter-terrorism laws and policies are accompanied by systems of review to assess whether or not they ‘work’, and what societal impacts they have, and to allow people to challenge their application in concrete situations, in order to avoid unintentionally exacerbating problems of terrorism-related insecurity. In other words, it is important to engage in counter-terrorism review.
This project, awarded over £80,000 by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, will identify existing knowledge gaps in UK counter-terrorism review, explore the implications and impacts for rights of how counter-terrorism currently works, and propose reforms based on the finding of this cross-disciplinary research. The project will produce both academic outputs and a stakeholder-oriented report that will outline, justify and contextualise the major policy reform proposals emanating from the research, to be disseminated to a variety of stakeholders.
Professor de Londras will be working closely with co-investigator Dr Jessie Blackbourn (University of Oxford) and a postdoctoral researcher to be appointed for this 18-month project, which will start in September 2017.