Diana Valencia Duarte[1]
University of Exeter

On the 24^th March, one of our own Exeter postgraduate researchers wrote this Twitter entry:

My research work is due largely to precarious waste workers in India. Many have lost livelihood. Those still working are vulnerable to #coronavirus exposure. Feels criminal to be academically “productive” right now. F*ck writing, I’m arranging financial support for my informants.

Unlike me, he dared to show how frustrating it is, how wrong it feels to be writing our thesis, using oral testimonies or inputs from real people, who in some distant part of the world could now be in a very tough and complex situation due to the current corona-crisis.

Our Uni has been amazingly supportive, our supervisors and directives, the doctoral college, our peers, in trying to keep the spirit and the optimism. They deserve a lot of recognition. And we are very much aware of how important our mental health is right now in order to fulfil our goals and follow our schedule. That said, I feel that is also important to add that for some of us it is no longer about us anymore and it just feels so unbearably wrong!

I keep on telling myself – as I did during my fieldwork while I collected those testimonies of violence, mistreatment, repression, suffering, displacement, hunger, injustice in three different peasant regions in my home-country, Colombia – that the best I can do for them is to be professional, to do my job and tell their history of food insecurity, to do it right to make a good case for their food sovereignty and basic rights. And that still keeps me going. However, it is not the same, it does not feel the same when I am fully aware of how vulnerable and endangered they are right now. Continue reading “Some reflections on international post-graduate research in the time of coronavirus” →

Alice Finden
SOAS, University of London

I have reluctantly forborne to point out that during the war when Egypt was a Protectorate the Home Office used to treat Egyptians as alien extremists.

– Sir Robert Allason Furness, Oriental Secretary in Egypt, 1922 [1]

12 February 2020 marks the five-year anniversary of the UK Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. The bill – one in a series of acts passed since the Terrorism Act 2000 –  was described as giving the UK ‘some of the toughest powers in the world to tackle the increasing threat from international terrorism.’ At the time it was condemned for providing the police with powers that were consequently exercised in an ‘overly-broad, discriminatory and ineffective manner.’

The Act introduced PREVENT, which places a statutory duty on public bodies to work with the police and local authorities to help prevent ‘vulnerable’ people from being drawn into terrorism. As reports and cases have shown, PREVENT works on a racialised and arbitrary logic which results in Muslim communities being suspected. In 2018 for example, a six-year-old child was referred to PREVENT for comments he had learned from the television programme ‘Horrible Histories’. The process caused great distress for the whole family. Wide powers such as these have been attributed in part to the definition of terrorism in the UK Terrorism Act 2000 being ‘one of the broadest in the world.’

The elasticity of the terms ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’ of course did not appear with 9/11 or 7/7. Rather, they have a long historical use by imperial states justifying violence against anti-colonial resistance. Cases of British martial law and blacklisting in Egypt in the years surrounding the First World War illustrate the historical racialised and wide-reaching constructions of ‘extremism’ and ‘terrorism’ underpinning contemporary British counter-terrorism legislation. Continue reading “From martial law to counter-terrorism law: lessons from British colonialism in Egypt” →