London Bombings Research Articles

The role of “zero-responders” during 7/7: implications for the emergency services

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore the psychological processes involved in spontaneous co-operation by survivors of mass emergencies, and the possible implications this may have for emergency responders.Design/methodology/approach– A qualitative interview study was conducted with 12 survivors and witnesses of the 7 July 2005 London bombings. Data were subjected to thematic analysis.Findings– Spontaneous co-operation amongst survivors often emerged, and this was a function of a common identity that grew out of a sense of shared fate amongst those affected. Some social influence that encouraged co-operation also occurred, and this was dependent upon whether there was a sense of shared identity between source and target of influence.Research limitations/implications– Evidence was only collected from a sub-set of one incident (7/7), thus limiting possible generalisability of the findings. Further research into comparable situations would provide a better understanding of the processes underlying mutual co-operation and support amongst emergency survivors.Practical implications– Uninjured bystanders in emergencies can act as “zero-responders”, and so may become a useful resource which can be utilised by the emergency services in mass emergencies.Originality/value– This is the first paper to explore in detail the social influence processes underlying spontaneous co-operation amongst survivors of emergencies, and will be of use to emergency responders.

Young British Muslims

Most popular and academic interest in the subject of British Muslim communities
 in recent years can be located within the context public debates around
 the visible presence of western Muslims and fears of radicalization and religious
 extremism. The 7/7 London bombings of 2005, which increased the attention
 of journalists, researchers, and government policymakers on Muslim
 young people, has resulted in numerous books, reports, and journal articles
 purporting to explain why some young British Muslims seem attracted to terrorism.
 The title under review joins a handful of similar publications that provide
 more nunanced observations in this field, notably, Philip Lewis’ Young,
 British, and Muslim(2007), Anshuman Mondal’s Young British Muslim Voices
 (2008), and Sughra Ahmed’s Seen and Not Heard: Voices of Young British
 Muslims (2009), all of which explore the lives, experiences, and views of
 young Muslims in Britain.
 This important subject area warrants deep research and rigorous analysis.
 Nahid Afrose Kabir’s extensive ethnographic fieldwork draws upon 216 interviews
 with young people aged between fifteen and thirty from five of
 Britain’s main cities with substantial Muslim communities. Structured around
 the themes of identity, religion, and culture, it also includes responses to questions
 of citizenship and loyalty, media bias, recent controversies around the
 niqab (face veil), and reactions to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s comments
 on implementing aspects of the Shari‘ah in the country. Overall, it makes a
 contribution to the nascent field of Muslim youth studies by offering windows
 into the hopes and aspirations of young British Muslims as well as presenting ...

Does counterterrorism spending reduce the incidence and lethality of terrorism? A quantitative analysis of 34 countries

Following the 11 September 2001 attacks, the US government increased its counterterrorism (CT) funding and created several Federal Agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security; Transportation Security Administration; and National Counterterrorism Center. Similarly, the 7 July 2005, London bombings also compelled the British government to increase its CT funding. These examples illustrate a phenomenon that when states experience terrorism, they dramatically increase public safety spending in order to reduce or eliminate the incidents of and casualties resulting from acts of terror. Using statistical data collected from 34 countries covering nine years, this article examines recent CT spending increases. Critically, the authors explore whether recent public safety expenditures can measurably reduce the number of domestic and international terrorist attacks. The implications of their findings should be salient for policy-makers’ assessments of their countries’ current CT strategies and policies concerning their respective Intelligence and Security Communities.

Improving the resilience of metro vehicle and passengers for an effective emergency response to terrorist attacks

In the framework of the European FP7 project SecureMetro, the authors have studied the occurrences of terrorist attacks against rail-based vehicles, in particular Underground trains, with the goal to reduce the number of attacks by making transport systems a less attractive target. Many counter-measures have already been implemented in a multi-layered manner to increase the resilience to terrorism, such as depot security, detection of explosives or passenger screening. The SecureMetro project adds another layer aimed at mitigating the effects of an attack to the vehicles, should the other layers fail to avoid it. The case of interest, a metro train blocked in a tunnel due to a bombing, has been chosen as representative of the attacks perpetrated in the recent years, and of the most difficult case to cope with. Based on the experience of the 7/7 London bombings and other emergency situations, as well as the currently admitted behaviour models, this paper identifies critical systems and proposes improvements to the design of metro coaches, in order to improve the management of the emergency situation, assist the evacuation and rescue to passengers.

POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER AND THE BRAIN

Chris Brewin is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist at the Traumatic Stress Clinic and Professor in the Research Department of Clinical, Educational & Health Psychology, University College London. He is a...

STRESS AND WAR: THE LIMITS OF NEUROPSYCHIATRY

Professor Neil Greenberg is an academic psychiatrist based at King's College London UK and is a consultant occupational and forensic psychiatrist. Neil served in the United Kingdom Armed Forces for...

Citizen Journalism as Data for Disaster Research

The “story” of a disaster is no longer simply told by the traditional media. Along with developments in communication technology, we are witnessing the desire of active citizens, via acts of citizen journalism, to be involved in telling the story of a “disaster”. Accordingly, from the perspective of disaster researchers seeking to understand how others perceive response to disaster, material created by citizen journalists provides a unique insight into the activities of members of the public following a disaster. The article begins by providing illustrations of acts of citizen journalism following acts of terrorism include the 2007 Glasgow airport attacks and the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The article then goes on to provide researchers with a methodological tool known as qualitative media analysis for the study of citizen journalism data. It will provide evidence of this methodology in action by presenting a case study of the 7th July 2005 London bombings.

Myths, Monarchs and Prime Ministers: “Blitz Spirit” Discourses of Royalty and Tony Blair in British Newspaper Responses to the July 7th Bombings

The ‘Blitz spirit’ is a popular story of Britain during the Second World War, uniting together with defiance and resilience to overcome the threat of invasion from Nazi Germany. However, this paper reviews the story of the Blitz spirit as a myth. A Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) then examines some instances when this myth was retold in British newspapers after the July 7th bombings in London. In this article I analyse the role of the Queen and Royal family as symbols of national unity and defiance. Subsequently, I argue that such constructions of Britishness became more complex than a monolithic national narration; Blitz spirit discourses often criticised Tony Blair and rejected him as a figure of British identity in comparison to the Queen or Winston Churchill. Therefore, this paper argues that whilst the Blitz spirit was a problematic feature of post-July 7th discourses, it did not serve one ideological purpose. Rather, through a nuanced approach to Roland Barthes’ model of myth, I argue that an ideological battleground occurred when a myth from 1940 was reused to define events in 2005.

Roadworks: British Bangladeshi mothers, temporality and intimate citizenship in East London

Narratives of street life from British Bangladeshi Muslim mothers, collected in the aftermath of the suicide bombings in London in 2005, are the focus of this article. The author examines how temporal schemas that combine the unpredictable time of racist events with a rendering of a foreseeable linear temporality of racism and of intergenerational identifications in the future provide the women with a means of living with ontological insecurity and threat. Although this reproduction of linear time can appear to exclude the singularity of unknown futures, with regard to the demands of multicultural living, understanding of time can be more open and undecided. The author locates an ethicality to the mothers’ deliberations in how to live in situations marked by racism and multiculturalism in both their negotiation of temporal registers and in the sharing and interrogation of perspectives and strategies with others. Particular attention is given to the ambivalent use of temporality as an instrument of narrative agency. The discussion also considers how the methodological apparatus of the focus group is engaged with matters of intimate citizenship, conveying and participating in the production of the research problem.

The impact of dramatic events on public debate concerning accommodation of Islam in Europe

Using the data of the EURISLAM project, this article investigates the impact of dramatic events on the public debate with regard to Islam in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland and the UK. It assesses the extent to which dramatic events such as 9/11, the bombings in Madrid and London and the murder of Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam impacted on the debate on multiculturalism, notably the accommodation of Western-European institutions to Islam. In this contribution, we analyse the overall evolution of public debate in the written press on Muslims, and more particularly Muslim rights, for the period 1999–2009. Our aim is to empirically analyse the transitions that the public debate on Islam in Europe has undergone in the wake of the most dramatic terrorist acts perpetrated by Muslim extremists during the last decade. We hypothesize that dramatic violent events involving Muslim extremists had an impact on the number of claims about Muslims and Islam in general, but not on the debate about religious rights for Muslims in Europe. Descriptive analysis and time series plus intervention analysis were undertaken to test these hypotheses.1

A Continuum of Nation-State Resiliency to Watershed Terrorist Events

This article is a qualitative analysis of nation-state population “resiliency” to several spectacular and/or highly symbolic terrorist assaults that were watershed events. It draws heavily from qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) frameworks to isolate and identify the presence of what Goertz calls the “secondary dimensions” of a “primary concept” such as resiliency to terrorist assaults. In turn, the presence of those secondary dimensions and their strength presuppose and derive from “tertiary indicators” that are the basic metrics and concrete manifestations of those secondary dimensions. The nation-states under consideration include the London bombings of 2005, the United States for 9/11, the Madrid bombings of 2004, the first suicide bombings within pre-1967 boundaries of Israel, and the Russian Federation in the case of the 2002 terrorist assault against the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow. The results serve as the basis for the development of a “resiliency continuum” of nation-states where placement of those countries on the continuum reflect “nonresilient,” “semiresilient,” and “resilient” conditions, themselves defined by the number of secondary dimensions found in each case study. In the process, the analysis illuminates possible interconnections between “context specific” factors, such as a country’s historical experience with terrorism and population characteristics (e.g., education levels, degree of heterogeneity) to the resiliency or nonresiliency condition, and describes possible links between exogenous “systems factors” such as war and power ranking to the resiliency condition.

The myth of the “Blitz spirit” in British newspaper responses to the July 7th bombings

The “Blitz spirit” is a popular story about the British public during the Second World War, uniting together with defiance and resilience to overcome the threat of invasion from Nazi Germany. Previous work has revised this wartime story as a propagandistic construction of national identity and popular memory. Therefore, this paper reviews the Blitz spirit as a myth. A critical discourse analysis (CDA) then examines how this myth was retold in British newspapers after the July 7th bombings in London. I examine how this myth was constructed and the ideological role it played after the attacks. Similar to previous revisions of the Blitz myth from 1940, I argue that social and political complexities after July 7th were often suppressed by messages that sought to evoke a sense of “Britishness” defined by a previous generation. Whilst the July 7th bombings were not a case of traditional warfare or attacks carried out by a foreign force, I argue that wartime analogies often supported military responses in the war on terror and evoked a foreign threat.

Funny Looks: British Pakistanis' experiences after 7 July 2005

This article examines the experiences of British Pakistanis living in West Yorkshire after the 7 July bombings in London in 2005. Based on qualitative interviews conducted in the Beeston and Hyde Park areas of Leeds and the nearby town of Dewsbury in 2006, the article considers a number of important themes that have emerged since the bombings, including: locality and segregation, views about the London bombers, experiences of racism and Islamophobia, citizenship and identity.

Malign or Maligned? – Arthur Winnington-Ingram, Bishop of London, in the First World War

AbstractArthur Winnington-Ingram, Bishop of London, features prominently in all the scholarly narratives of the activities of the Church of England during the First World War. Particular emphasis has been placed on his description of the conflict as a “Holy War”, on his assertion that those who died in the cause of Britain and her allies should be seen as martyrs, and on his very successful efforts to persuade men to enlist as combatants. Furthermore, many books claim that the Bishop in a 1915 sermon called on his hearers to “Kill Germans”.This paper closely examines contemporary narratives of that sermon and the way in which an anti-clerical writer of the 1930s edited the original text, thus seriously distorting Winnington-Ingram’s message. An analysis of the Bishop’s declaration which was made in 1960, but significantly modified in 1971, is identified as being highly influential in shaping contemporary perceptions of him.The context of a short article in which the Bishop described the conflict as a “Holy War” is examined and an attempt is made to show that such pronouncements were the logical development of the then widely-held perception of Britain as a nation especially chosen by God to take to the world both the benefits of its Empire and the light of the Gospel. It is shown that the most balanced assessments of his activities have come from non-British historians and theologians who have been able to offer a more detached and less anachronistic analysis than, in particular, some ordained Anglican writers.The way in which the scholarly critique of Winnington-Ingram has in recent years been taken up by more popular authors in a process of distillation and embellishment is described. Finally, his repudiation of popular calls for reprisals against German civilians, in the context of the serious loss of life incurred through the German bombing of London, is offered as a corrective to the highly prejudicial way in which the war-time activities of Arthur Winnington-Ingram have been presented in both the scholarly literature and popular narratives.

Homegrown Terrorism: The Known Unknown

Homegrown terrorism has attracted significant attention following the 2004 Madrid and the 2005 London bombings. Homegrown terrorism is usually thought to be a new phenomenon, with few observed events, and inherently distinct from transnational terrorism or the old domestic terrorism in Europe. However, little research has so far examined the alleged distinctiveness of homegrown terrorism empirically. I argue that homegrown terrorism shares many similarities with domestic and international terrorism, suggesting that we can learn more about homegrown terrorism from studying these similarities rather than insisting on its inherent distinctiveness. I formulate these claims as testable hypotheses, which I examine using the ITERATE data on international and the TWEED on domestic terrorism, and compare these with information on homegrown terrorism. My findings suggest that homegrown terrorism follows the same logic of other types of domestic terrorisms, hence lessons can be learned through observations on domestic typologies. Homegrown terrorism is a separate strain of domestic terrorism due to ideological character of political Islam, yet, differing from international terrorism in targeting patterns. The implications of the study are that counterterrorism efforts for homegrown terrorism should resemble those of domestic terrorism rather than international terrorism.

The Effect of Local Area Crime on Mental Health

This paper analyses the effect of local crime rates on the mental well-being of residents. Our identification strategy addresses the problem of sorting, and endogenous moving behaviour. We find that crime causes considerable mental distress of residents, and that these effects are mainly driven by property crime. However, individuals react also to violent crime, in particular in areas individuals may be exposed to when following their daily routines, such as travel to work. Local crime creates more distress for females, and is mainly related to depression and anxiety. The impact on mental well-being is large: We find that the increase in mental distress following a one standard deviation increase in local crime is about 2-4 times as large as that caused by a one standard deviation decrease in local employment, and about one seventh of the effect experienced by in the direct aftermath of the London Bombings of Jul 7th, 2005.

Who speaks for Muslims? The role of the press in the creation and reporting of Muslim public opinion polls in the aftermath of London bombings in July 2005

Muslim public opinion polls are mostly taken at face value as the direct and unbiased voice of British Muslims, but, as this article argues, most of the public opinion polls are commissioned by the media and suffer from similar framing effects to those seen in the general media coverage of Muslims. At a time of national crisis, following the London terrorist attacks in 2005, it has become especially clear that the media have been following their pre-existing narrative on Muslims rather than responding to public interest. We analyse all public opinion polls conducted in the 18 months following the 7 July attacks and all their broadsheet newspaper coverage to show that the media-framing effects influence both the creation of Muslim opinion polls and their reporting.

Securitized Citizens: Islamophobia, Racism and the 7/7 London Bombings

The London bombings of 7 July 2005 were a major event shaping the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain. In this paper we introduce the idea of ‘securitized citizens’ to analyse the changing relationship between British Muslims and wider British society in response to this and similar events. Through an analysis of qualitative interviews with Muslims and non-Muslims of a variety of ethnic backgrounds in the areas where the London bombers lived in West Yorkshire we examine the popular perceptions of non-Muslims and Muslims' experiences. We show how processes of securitization and racialization have interacted with Islamophobic discourses and identifications, as well as the experiences of Muslims in West Yorkshire after the attacks.

Media Framing of Terrorism: Implications for Public Opinion, Civil Liberties, and Counterterrorism Policies

This study presents experimental findings on the impact of media framing of the 2005 London bombings. A total of 371 American participants were exposed to one of two frames to test their effect on public attitudes towards civil liberties and Muslims, and support for counterterrorism policies. Results show that the “domestic homegrown” frame produces greater increases in fear than the “international” frame. This leads to greater support for restricting civil liberties of Muslims and, under certain circumstances, general feelings of negativity toward Muslims. The study also finds support for the hydraulic effect of framing in that the domestic homegrown frame suppresses party identification in attitude formation.

Between policy and reality: multiculturalism, the second generation, and the third space in Britain

Despite the significant level of cultural diversity that exists in contemporary Europe as a consequence of immigration and diaspora, state policies on multiculturalism in several countries have not kept pace with the complex and dynamic processes created by these pluralising social forces and realities. This has given rise to exclusionary contexts that have led to feelings of alienation by immigrant communities. In Britain, the violent street confrontations in Bradford in 2001 and the London bombings of 2005 both epitomised, as well as were outcomes of, the British nation state’s failure to foster dialogue and a sense of inclusion among these communities. Foregrounding the extent of the grievances and frustrations prevalent in British society, these social disturbances have also contributed to renewed debates on issues of national identity, belonging, and multiculturalism. More importantly, these clashes, involving mostly the second-generation British Asian Muslim community, have brought to the fore the dissonance between assumptions of belonging underlying “state multiculturalism”, which moves to fix and stabilise identities, and those that inform the complex processes of identification and constructions of the “third space” of belonging by racialised minority communities. Focusing on Britain, this paper’s central hypothesis is that official multiculturalism has failed to take into account the fluid and heterogeneous frames in and through which second-generation British Asians ground their cultural and political identities and demands. As many of the nation states in Europe are today, like Britain, multiethnic in composition with expanding Asian communities, how successfully or not Britain modifies its integration policies with respect to the presence of minorities of immigrant origin has enormous implications not only for Europe but also for Asia and Asia–Europe relations.