Islam, Politics and Security in the UK.

In 2002 the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) launched the comprehensive five-year New Security Challenges Programme. Directed by Professor Stuart Croft at the University of Warwick, it now funds almost 40 projects involving over 120 researchers. Its expansive and multidisciplinary approach seeks to reach beyond war into other important areas of global security. NSC projects explore eight broad themes: (1) the role of military force; (2) the role of international law, international organizations and security regimes; (3) economically driven security challenges; (4) technological aspects of security; (5) gendered dimensions of security; (6) security and civil society; (7) the media and psychological dimensions; and (8) human security. In a collaborative venture, a series of briefing papers written by project leaders within the NSC Programme is being published by Chatham House (and posted on its International Security Programme web pages) over a two-year period to summarize important research results and emerging discussion points. Previous briefing papers have focused on themes of Security, Terrorism and the UK, The Globalization of Security, Human Security, Peacekeeping and Interventionism and Post-Conflict Security-Building. This final briefing paper in the series focuses on Islam, Politics and Security in the UK. In the first contribution Jenny Pickerill, Frank Webster and Kevin Gillan explore Muslim anti-war activism as a form of positive political engagement and argue for a more complex understanding of Muslim political identities. In the second, Gurchathen Sanghera and Suruchi Thapar-Bjorkert discuss the changing nature of political radicalism in Bradford in the wake of the 'Rushdie Affair' in 1989 and the urban 'riots' of 1995 and 2001. They identify several social and political disjunctures which have emerged in this context and examine the impact of these on the mobility of young Pakistani Muslims. Finally, John Maule and colleagues innovatively draw on attributional analysis and an analysis of metaphors to examine whether (and if so how) UK Muslims and non-Muslims think about terrorist risk in different ways.