Leonie B. Jackson – författare

This book provides the first sustained critical engagement with the legacy of the 9/11 attacks twenty years on. Featuring a wide range of established and emerging voices in critical terrorism studies, the book explores the deeply political character of remembering and forgetting, and the racialised, gendered and other contexts within which this takes place. A lively and provocative conversation between feminist, postcolonial, post-structural, literary and critical perspectives, 9/11 Twenty Years On asks what ‘the day that changed the world’ means for critical terrorism studies today, and how we might choose to mark those events in the future.

It will be essential reading for upper-level students, researchers and academics in the fields of International Relations, Security Studies and Political Science in general, as well as anyone interested in critical approaches to terrorism, political violence, and memory. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies on Terrorism.

This book provides the first sustained critical engagement with the legacy of the 9/11 attacks twenty years on. Featuring a wide range of established and emerging voices in critical terrorism studies, the book explores the deeply political character of remembering and forgetting, and the racialised, gendered and other contexts within which this takes place. A lively and provocative conversation between feminist, postcolonial, post-structural, literary and critical perspectives, 9/11 Twenty Years On asks what ‘the day that changed the world’ means for critical terrorism studies today, and how we might choose to mark those events in the future.

It will be essential reading for upper-level students, researchers and academics in the fields of International Relations, Security Studies and Political Science in general, as well as anyone interested in critical approaches to terrorism, political violence, and memory. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies on Terrorism.

In June 2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared an Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and called for Muslims around the world to migrate there. Over the next five years, around 150 women left the UK to heed this invitation, and the so- called ‘jihadi brides’ were rarely out of the news. This book traces the media fascination with those who joined the ‘caliphate’, including Sally Jones, Aqsa Mahmood and Shamima Begum.

Through an analysis of the media that presented the ‘brides’ for public consumption, Leonie B. Jackson reveals the gendered dualistic construction of IS women as either monstrous or vulnerable. Just as the monstrous woman was sensationalised as irredeemably evil, the vulnerable girl was represented as groomed and naïve. Both subjects were constructed in such a way that women’s involvement in jihadism was detached from men’s, scrutinised more closely, and explained through gender stereotypes that both erased the agency of female extremists and neglected their stated motivations.

As Jackson demonstrates, these media representations also contributed to the development of new norms for dealing with the ‘brides’, including targeted killing and the revocation of citizenship. While the vulnerable girl was potentially redeemable, the monstrous woman was increasingly considered expendable.

This book is concerned with the ideology of Islamophobia as a cultural racism, and argues that in order to understand its prevalence we must focus not only on what Islamophobia is, but also why diversely situated individuals and groups choose to employ its narratives and tropes. Since 2001, Muslims in Britain have been constructed as the nation’s significant ‘other’ – an internal and external enemy that threatened both social cohesion and national security.

Through a consideration of a number of pertinent contemporary issues, including no-mosque campaigns, the rise of anti-Islamist social movements and the problematisation of Muslim culture, this book offers a new understanding of Islamophobia as a form of Eurocentric spatial dominance, in which those identified as Western receive a better social, economic and political ‘racial contract’, and seek to defend these privileges against real and imagined Muslim demands.