Paris Attacks Research Articles

Psychological follow-up and its perception in civilians involved in the January 2015 terrorist attack in Paris, France

Abstract Background A terrorist attack occurred in Paris in January 2015 against the staffs of the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher grocery. This study examined the psychological follow-up and the non-satisfaction of the people civilians involved in the terrorist attacks. Methods The IMPACTS survey, an open cohort study of civilians involved in the terrorist attacks was conducted 6-10 (wave 1) and 18-22 months (wave 2) after the attacks. Psychologists interviewed in face-to-face 190 civilians in wave 1 and 123 of them participate to the wave 2. A questionnaire was used to collect data on socio-demographic characteristics, exposure level, social support, psychological support and perception, impact on work and social functioning, and mental health disorders. Results In wave 1 (N = 190), 24% of participants had initiated a regular follow-up with a psychologist or a psychiatrist. Reasons of non-follow-up were: they had refused because they did not feel the need or they did not want to talk about it (60%), it was not suggested to them (30%), or they have already had a follow-up before (12%). In wave 2 (N = 123), 25% had a regular follow-up with a psychologist/psychiatrist since the events, 22.0% had had a follow-up but not anymore in wave 2, 15% did not have a follow-up in wave 1 but they had in wave 2 and 38.2% never had. Psychological aid from professionals for resilience has not been appropriate for 32% of the participants at 6 months and for 39% at 18 months. In both waves, non-satisfaction of follow-up was more frequent among witnesses than with those who were directly exposed. Conclusions Six months after the January 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, among the participants without psychological follow-up, it was not offered to nearly a third of participants. In order to enhance resilience, psychological aid should also be provided to those who have not been directly exposed. Main message Psychological follow-up should be provided to all civilians in short and long-term.

From mandatory to voluntary. Impact of V4 on the EU relocation scheme

ABSTRACT In response to the ‘migration crisis’ of 2015–17, the European Commission proposed a scheme of relocating refugees across European Union states. It was accepted by a majority of countries, but met with an intransigent opposition from Central Europe, particularly the Visegrad Group (Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia), which caused a political crisis in the EU. This paper analyses the positions of the V4 regarding refugee relocation and their influence on the EU's policy, based on a historical analysis of EU and national documents and statements of key politicians. We conclude that, although problems with the implementation of the relocation scheme and terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels were significant, the opposition of the V4 was one of the most important factors which led to the abandonment of relocation as an instrument in dealing with refugees. Our conclusions were confirmed in interviews with officials involved in negotiations on the relocation scheme and media representatives in Brussels and other European capitals.

La bandera de Francia en Facebook: un debate en torno a la identidad, la ideología y la globalización

In recent years, social media have incorporated into their communications the use of filters for published images, specifically, the profile photos. Within Facebook, these image filters have been presented frequently to express support or rejection to some social or political causes. This paper analyzes the case of the French flag filter in Facebook, used the days after the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015. Beyond the filter itself, the work analyzes the different reactions that arose inside the network motivated by the use of these images. To carry out this exercise, an image hermeneutic analysis is applied to these images. This method is based on the proposals of Erwin Panofsky in iconography and iconology and aims to review the ideological and identity questions underlying down the use of these filters in the images of networks.

Time and the Problems of Television: Three Images

In this paper I look at three images and use them to discuss television and the conditions for the representation of time in the twenty-first century. The first image is from the UK’s Channel 4 news report following the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris. The paper begins by offering a theoretical critique of this televisual image and explores the grounding offered for the representation of fear and the contingent. From here, I explore two images from the experimental beginnings of television, which can be seen to provide the historical and technical conditions for the first image. The paper is media philosophical in method, critically analysing the way television can represent time and events by looking to its technical operation and its history as a technology rooted in solutions to time-based problems.

Terrorist attacks in Paris: managing mass casualties in a remote trauma center.

On 13 November 2015, Paris was the target of multiple terrorist attacks responsible for a massive influx of casualties in emergency departments (EDs). Because of the activation of a local crisis plan and the arrival of extra staff, our capacities increased markedly. Our aim was to analyze whether our center, in this challenging context, efficiently managed this massive influx of patients. We carried out a monocentric retrospective study. All patients received in the first 24 h were included (isolated psychological trauma with no physical injury excluded). Our main endpoint was to assess patient diversion through early secondary transfers ( ≤ 24 h) because of an overrun of our capacities. A total of 53 victims were sent to our center in a 4 h timeframe; 12 patients were excluded (no physical injury). We analyzed 41 victims. Their median injury severity score was 4 (1;9). Three (7%) patients were transferred after ED management to a nearby hospital within the first 24 h for minor orthopedic surgery. There was a significant increase in medical/surgical staff (eight ED physicians instead of two; six intensivists vs. two; three orthopedic surgeons vs. one). Among the victims, 71% had firearms wounds and 30% had open fractures. Twenty surgeries were performed in the first 24 h. There were no in-hospital deaths. Faced with an unusual event and thanks to the increase in staff, our operating capacities increased. Our center took charge of almost all victims. Patient diversion concerned only three patients transferred to a nearby hospital for minor orthopedic surgery.

Attitudes Towards Outgroups Before and After Terror Attacks

ABSTRACT In light of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, the aim of the current set of studies was to examine if attitudes towards terrorists and—by extension—uninvolved outgroups (i.e., Muslims, refugees, and immigrants) changed before vs. after these attacks. In a Belgian student sample (Study 1a), we investigated the impact of the Paris attacks on various facets of outgroup attitudes: feelings towards terrorists, Muslims, and refugees, immigrant trust, immigrant threat, and immigrant prejudice. The impact of the Brussels attacks was studied in a Belgian convenience sample (Study 1b), specifically focusing on feelings towards refugees, refugee trust, refugee threat, and avoidance of contact with refugees. Results from frequentist and Bayesian analyses in both samples revealed no significant short- and long-term longitudinal changes in outgroup attitudes after both the Paris (Study 1a) and Brussels (Study 1b) attacks. We discuss these findings and connect them to the alleged refugee crisis; another recent event that polarized European societies.

The Ideological Construction of The 2015 Paris Attacks in The Jakarta Post

The terrorist attacks makes the global phenomenon in the world as the radical action by terrorist group. Therefore, this study wants to find out the ideological constuction of the 2015 Paris attacks in the Jakarta Post. The writer analyzed the data by using Critical Discourse Analysis which is proposed by van Dijk. This theory known as socio-cognitive approach which analyzes the object of the study into three levels: text, socio-cognitive, and societal analysis. The expected of the study, the writer applies the qualitative method to observe the study. The finding of this study revealed that The Jakarta Post emphasizes the bomber in Paris is claimed by Islamic group or ISIS. The writer found that ISIS in Paris attacks is depicted as violent group. Therefore, the people around the world cares about this case. From the findings, it was true that the power or dominant group can influence the text to spread the ideology to the society.

Crisis Acting in The Destroyed Room

The internet immerses us in waves of traumatic information, leaving us desperately crawling through media wreckage to make sense of the world. We are left alienated from a reality that never settles into a cohesive narrative. Media wreckage in my argumentation denotes the fragmentation of reality occasioned by the digital acting as the dominant epistemological source of the real in the twenty-first century. The atomisation of reality into the porous realm of the digital has spawned conspiratorial internet sub-cultures dedicated to immersing us all in a state of perpetual crisis. Conspiracy theories like crisis acting are thriving in this milieu. This theory was popularised by the host of InfoWars Alex Jones who argued high school shootings are events staged by the government. This article appropriates the term 'crisis acting' from the alt-right political lexicon to analyse how the experience of living in media wreckage is performed on the intermedial stage of The Destroyed Room (Vanishing Point 2016). The performance is a semi-improvised conversation between three actors who debate the morality of watching videos depicting Islamic State executions, the Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris, the refugee crisis and scenes of natural disasters. Terror, social media and climate breakdown constitute the three pieces of media wreckage that are staged The Destroyed Room. It is argued that constructing narratives of reality with media wreckage turns us all into crisis actors who cannot imagine ways of performing in the world as political agents outside of digital spaces.

Reshaping the urban hierarchy: patterns of information diffusion on social media

ABSTRACTThe spatial diffusion of information is a process governed by the flow of interpersonal communication. The emergence of the Internet and especially social media platforms has reshaped this process and previous research has studied how online social networks contribute to the diffusion of information. Understanding such processes can help devise methods to maximize or control the reach of information or even identify upcoming events and social movements. Yet activities in cyberspace are still confined to physical locations and this geographic connection tends to be overlooked. In this research, we focus on geographic regions instead of individuals and study how the underlying hierarchical structure of regions relates to their response to the information. We examined the top 30 populated cities and metropolitan areas in the U.S. and retrieved Twitter data related to two selected topics from these regions, the 2015 Nepal Earthquake and the #JesuisCharlie hashtag in response to the Paris attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices. We analyzed the similarity among regions of their response using multiple statistical methods and three urban classifications. Our results indicate that the diffusion of information is impacted by the hierarchy of urban regions and that the Twitter responses act more similar when the populated regions are positioned at the same level in the urban hierarchy.

Anger Mediates the Effects of Fear on Support for the Far Right—A Rejoinder

We are grateful to John Jost for carefully engaging with our work and presenting a different interpretation of our findings on the effects of fear and anger stemming from the November 13, 2015, Paris attacks on the propensity to vote for the far right. Jost advances a model that holds that anger mediates the effect of fear on support for the far right. In this rejoinder, we respond to the issues he raises regarding our model specification, consider his alternative suggestion, and offer some conclusions about how to resolve this debate empirically. We hope this exchange advances the literature on the impact of various societal threats on voting for the far right.

Preterm birth and selection in utero among males following the November 2015 Paris attacks

On 13 November 2015, coordinated terrorist attacks swept through Paris. This large stressor, like earlier terrorist attacks in the USA, may have perturbed the health of pregnant women. We test whether the attacks preceded an increase in the risk of preterm parturition among live-born males as well as excess male loss in utero. We focused on males on the basis of previous findings of elevated male frailty following population stressors. We examined live births in the Paris region (n = 1049057) over 70 months, from January 2011 to October 2016. Interrupted time-series methods identified and removed serial correlation in the monthly risk of preterm birth; these methods employed non-linear least-squares estimation. We also repeated analyses using month of conception, and performed sensitivity tests among females as well as among male births outside Paris. Males exhibited an elevated incidence of preterm birth in November 2015 and January 2016 [risk difference for November 2015 = 0.006, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.0002-0.012; risk difference for January 2016 = 0.010, 95% CI: 0.004-0.016], which equates to an 11% increase in the count of preterm births. Females, as well as males born outside Paris, showed no change in preterm delivery. The sex ratio also fell below expected values in December 2015, January 2016 and February 2016. Among males, more preterm births, but fewer live births, occurred after the November 2015 Paris attacks. Future examinations of perinatal health responses to unexpected stressors may benefit from sex-specific analyses.

Presse écrite et événement terroriste : routines narratives et émergence de la société civile (1995-2016)

The irruption of terrorism within the States of law undermines the social bond and democracy. In these days of the crisis created by violence, the media produce stories that allow the integration the event into the history of the society affected by the violence. The semiotic and discursive analysis of the newspapers published during the 1995-1996 (Paris) and 2015-2016 (Paris and Nice) attacks makes it possible to understand the evolution of media narratives and the emergence of civil society.

ISIS Cohort Transnational Travels and EU Security Gaps: Reconstructing the 2015 Paris Attack Preplanning and Outsource Strategy

ABSTRACT We explore the underappreciated role of organizational tactics in terrorist violence in an understudied single case: ISIS’s execution of the November 13, 2015 Paris attacks. It is one of the first systemic reconstructions of the journeys made by two ISIS strike cohorts in the coordinated attacks, as teams traveled from the Levant to Europe. In contrast to other high-profile attacks, terrorism scholars have not undertaken a detailed reconstruction of this event, even while open source information is now available. By examining the transnational travels of foreign terrorist fighters, we identify ISIS’s distinctive terrorist outsourcing strategy in which operatives used their experiences to adapt to changing security conditions, while EU governments revealed limited responses. Both elements in this tightly-knit dynamic—terrorist outsourcing savvy using FTFs and EU security policy failures—were necessary to achieve this high-profile attack. The essay contributes to descriptive empirical and theoretical knowledge of terrorist tactical innovation and adaptive operational learning, as these capacities are enhanced by on-the-ground organized networks to increase organizational (versus lone-wolf) campaign success. By using a single case interdisciplinary and exploratory framework, terrorism studies can delve deeper into superficially understood phenomena to isolate concepts with future cross-case value, such as cohorts and tactical adaptation.

Configuring terrorism in the age of ISIS: The New York Times’ coverage of the 2015 Beirut and Paris attacks

This study inquires whether cultural proximity may explain how media handle terrorism in a global village era where cultural proximity may have given way to cosmopolitanism in news-making. Findings indicate that although loss of life is not culture-bound, cultural proximity persists, as comes through in the sheer contrast in the amount of coverage devoted to Paris versus Beirut. This distinction ought to be qualified, for even with Paris, the self-interest of the nation-state was prioritized, meaning that national security and welfare come first, followed by those of culturally proximate locales. Sensational violence was emphasized for both Lebanese and French victims.

The Iron Gate

SummaryEvents such as the 1979 hostage crisis, 9/11, and the 2015 Paris attacks have led to a backlash against people from the Middle East, including Iranian migrants. This, in turn, has influenced how Iranians identify themselves and how they are identified by others, as well as their interactions with people in the communities in which they live and travel. In this personal narrative, I aim to offer readers an insight into an experience that many will never experience first hand. I offer my personal story of immigration and discrimination so that others may better know what it is like to be an Iranian, a Muslim, and a woman in the West. Mine is only one example of thousands of untold stories. We need to hear more firsthand narratives of the challenges faced by migrants.

Behavioral responses to terrorist attacks: empirical evidence from professional football

ABSTRACTDespite a rich literature on the psychological responses to terrorist attacks, surprisingly little is known about the subsequent changes in citizen behavior. In this research note, we exploit a unique sequence of two rare events, the Paris attacks of 13 November 2015 and the cancelation of the international friendly between Germany and the Netherlands over terrorist threats only four days later, to compare the number of German football spectator no-shows, i.e., the number of ticket holders that have decided not to attend a particular football game, before and after these attacks. Although we observe a significant increase in the number of no-shows during the first two weeks after the incidents, this effect was not permanent.

Paris and Nice terrorist attacks: Exploring Twitter and web archives

The attacks suffered by France in January and November 2015, and then in the course of 2016, especially the Nice attack, provoked intense online activity both during the events and in the months that followed. The digital traces left by this reactivity and reactions to events gave rise, from the very first days and even hours after the attacks, to a ‘real-time’ institutional archiving by the National Library of France ( Bibliothèque nationale de France, BnF) and the National Audio-visual Institute ( Institut national de l’audiovisuel, Ina). The results amount to millions of archived tweets and URLs. This article seeks to highlight some of the most significant issues raised by these relatively unprecedented corpora, from collection to exploitation, from online stream of data to its mediation and re-composition. Indeed, web archiving practices in times of emergency and crises are significant, almost emblematic, loci to explore the human and technical agencies, and the complex temporalities, of ‘born-digital’ heritage. The cases examined here emphasize the way these ‘emergency collections’ challenge the perimeters and the very nature of web archives as part of our digital and societal heritage, and the guiding visions of its governance and mission. Finally, the present analysis underlines the need for a careful contextualization of the design process – both of original web pages or tweets and of their archived images – and of the tools deployed to collect, retrieve and analyse them.

Same Old (Macro-) Securitization? A Comparison of Political Reactions to Major Terrorist Attacks in the United States and France

Abstract After the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris, the French government reacted swiftly by declaring a state of emergency. This state of emergency remained in place for over two years before it was ended in November 2017, only after being replaced by the new anti-terror legislation. The attacks as well as the government’s reactions evoked parallels to 9/11 and its aftermath. This is a puzzling observation when taking into consideration that the Bush administration’s reactions have been criticized harshly and that the US ‘War on Terror’ (WoT) was initially considered a serious failure in France. We can assume that this adaption of the discourse and practices stems from a successful establishment of the WoT macro-securitization. By using Securitization Theory, we outline the development of this macro-securitization by comparing its current manifestation in France against the backdrop of its origins in the US after 9/11. We analysed securitizing moves in the discourses, as well as domestic and international emergency measure policies. We find extensive similarities with view of both; yet there are differing degrees of securitizing terrorism and the institutionalisation of the WoT in the two states. This suggests that the WoT narrative is still dominant internationally to frame the risk of terrorism as an existential threat, thus enabling repressive actions and the obstruction of a meaningful debate about the underlying problems causing terrorism in the first place.

The Difference Culture Makes

Abstract Although terrorist attacks in Europe have increasingly been carried out on cultural targets such as media institutions, concert halls and leisure venues, most research on media and terrorism draws conclusions based on traditional hard news stories rather than on journalism specialising in cultural issues. This study explores the distinctiveness of Swedish cultural journalism by comparing it to news journalism, using the 2015 terror attacks in Paris as a case study. Our content analysis reveals that whereas news journalism is mainly descriptive, focusing on the short-term consequences of terrorism, security frames and political elites and eyewitnesses as sources, cultural journalism is more interpretive, giving a voice first and foremost to “cultural elites”. The “cultural filter” put on this event means a focus on the longer term implications of terrorism and instead of engaging in the hunt for the perpetrators, there is greater emphasis on the societal dilemmas that terrorism accentuates, especially the democratic values that are at stake. However, our results also show that the ongoing “journalistification” of cultural journalism, as defined by a stronger prevalence of descriptive style, blurs the lines between news and cultural journalism.

Blurring European and Islamic values or brightening the good – bad Muslim dichotomy? A critical analysis of French Muslim victims of Jihadi terror online on twitter and in Le Monde newspaper

ABSTRACT Victimhood remains under analysed in the Critical Terrorism Studies literature, including the abilities of Muslim victims of terror attacks to blurring social boundaries and possibly de-securitise Muslims in Europe. This is of specific importance in France, which has not only suffered the most terror incidents in Europe in the past five years but also is a country where Muslims have been securitised for decades. This paper uses a mixed methods approach to analyse twitter data for the #jesuisahmed hashtag used to commemorate the Muslim police officer killed in the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and the le monde online memorials created in the wake of the Paris and Nice terror attacks. This analysis demonstrates French Muslim victimhood attacks blur Muslim social boundaries, influences the way that terror events are constructed and also present opportunities for the de-securitisation of Muslims in France. Muslim victimhood does this through three key themes – Muslims being situated as defenders of European values on twitter, Muslim biographies demonstrating “banality” in the le monde online memories and visual nuances of group identity through victim photos included in the le monde memorial. However, these narratives also can re-enforce a problematic good/bad Muslim dichotomy.