Ryan O'Connor – författare

This book examines how de-radicalisation programmes have been portrayed in the media and details the role of public relations (PR) strategies employed by such programmes and Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) to create positive coverage of their work.

CVE and de-radicalisation programmes have seen a significant rise in recent years and are now cornerstones of many countries’ counterterrorism strategies. Despite the increased importance of these tools to counter violent radicalisation leading to terrorism, they remain controversial and sometimes receive fierce public criticism and opposition. This work looks at how CVE and de-radicalisation programs are able to influence a country’s discourse on de-radicalisation, and how far governmental programs differ from non-governmental initiatives in terms of their PR strategies. The book also provides a theoretical basis of how the discourse on CVE is constructed in the media. As major case studies, this book examines the United Kingdom, Germany and Nigeria. For these countries, the authors have gathered and assessed roughly 3,000 newspaper articles on de-radicalisation programmes over a decade to provide an empirical base.

This book will be of much interest to students of countering violent extremism, de-radicalisation, and terrorism studies.

This book examines how de-radicalisation programmes have been portrayed in the media and details the role of public relations (PR) strategies employed by such programmes and Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) to create positive coverage of their work.

CVE and de-radicalisation programmes have seen a significant rise in recent years and are now cornerstones of many countries’ counterterrorism strategies. Despite the increased importance of these tools to counter violent radicalisation leading to terrorism, they remain controversial and sometimes receive fierce public criticism and opposition. This work looks at how CVE and de-radicalisation programs are able to influence a country’s discourse on de-radicalisation, and how far governmental programs differ from non-governmental initiatives in terms of their PR strategies. The book also provides a theoretical basis of how the discourse on CVE is constructed in the media. As major case studies, this book examines the United Kingdom, Germany and Nigeria. For these countries, the authors have gathered and assessed roughly 3,000 newspaper articles on de-radicalisation programmes over a decade to provide an empirical base.

This book will be of much interest to students of countering violent extremism, de-radicalisation, and terrorism studies.

A BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2022 FOR BBC, i-D MAGAZINE, AND FOYLES

‘After a couple of weeks, I found myself standing outside the voids in the middle of the night listening for human activity, for any sign of life at all. Voids are flats that have been vacated, that will never be lived in again. But there never were any signs of life. Only the wind whistling through vacant interiors.’

In a condemned tower block in Glasgow, residents slowly trickle away until a young man is left alone with only the angels and devils in his mind for company. Stumbling from one surreal situation to the next, he encounters others on the margins of society, finding friendship and camaraderie wherever it is offered, grappling with who he is and what shape his future might take.

The Voids is an unsparing story of modern-day Britain, told with brilliant flashes of humour and humanity.

This project seeks to demonstrate how multiple sites of discursive production (political elite, media, and popular culture) interact to construct truths about a conflict that condition political possibility. Through breaking down the interaction between multiple sites of production within moments of discursive stability and by tracing major themes across multiple sites of discursive production this work will illuminate the processes by which the ‘truth’ for a conflict is produced, sustained, and challenged. Specifically, this project will be contesting two historical moments of ‘naturalness’ wherein a dominant discourse established a representational stability within American foreign policy in order to display how multiple sites of production work to produce, sustain, and challenge the political realities of military interventions. In doing so, the processes which impact the production of policy and public acceptance/condemnation for military interventions will be demonstrated.