Abstract
ABSTRACTThere is some evidence that, in the UK, current counter terrorism initiatives reproduce and amplify both real and imagined differences between Muslim and anti-Muslim groups, leading in turn to social and community polarisation and isolation. It is far from clear whether these changing perceptions always lead to increased ethnic and religious violence or increased radicalisation. However, more worrying is the potential for the development of ‘soft harms’ among those ‘suspect communities’; for example, reduced social integration, withdrawal from British cultural life, hate crime, forced marriage and domestic violence. There has to date been little interrogation of the scale of ‘soft harm’ among Muslim communities. Within this paper, the author offers a qualitative review of how the Muslim ‘other’ has become an ascribed category reproduced through an endemic ‘Muslim common sense’. Following that the author suggests that Twitter analytics may be harnessed to analyse the attitudes, current condition and reactions of suspect other communities through the tweeting of everyday events. The aim in doing so is to develop a series of proposals to counter the ideological underpinnings of difference and contribute to current debates on counter terrorism policy in the UK.
Highlights
On (De)Constructing Difference: A Qualitative Review of the ‘Othering’ of UK Muslim communities, Extremism, Soft Harms, and Twitter Analytics
This paper proposes that the process of othering leads to what the author calls a stigmatising ‘Muslim common sense’ through which our everyday knowledge about I/we and other is played out and performed on many levels, including political; cultural; ee economic; media – Twitter
Where Twitter mining has previously been useful in terrorism response informatics this paper suggests a more fundamental use: to monitor the ongoing health of a community through aspects of Twitter informatics such as geographic profile, user demography and ly the broadcasting of everyday occurrences
Summary
Taking an anthropological stance this paper suggests new ways of overlaying ie neighbourhood knowledge (e.g. crime statistics) with Twitter analytics in order to develop accurate representations of suspect communities and individuals. First the author w examines some of the ways in which identity and community are constructed through everyday common sense understandings of ‘Muslim’ and ‘Muslim community’. On this analysis the author looks at new ways of overlaying neighbourhood knowledge with Twitter analytics in order to develop accurate representations of suspect communities and individuals. This paper proposes that the process of othering leads to what the author calls a stigmatising ‘Muslim common sense’ through which our everyday knowledge about I/we and other is played out and performed on many levels, including political (as in UK counter terrorism policy); cultural (as in social and community polarisation and Islamaphobia); ee economic (as in poverty, welfare and employment); media – Twitter (as in reproduction of popular discourses of Muslim). Where Morgan used moral panic theory (Cohen 2002) to explain how ‘Muslims equal terrorists’, this paper instead offers a qualitative review of the ways in which ‘othering’ leads to a stigmatising ‘Muslim common sense’ that in turn structures understanding of and response to extremism
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