American terror:from Oklahoma City to 9/11 and after

Throughout American history, both terrorism and extremism have been constructed, evoked or ignored strategically by the state, media and public at different points, in order to disown and demonize political movements whenever their ideologies and objectives become problematic or inconvenient – because they overlap with, and thus compromise, the legitimacy of the dominant ideology and democratic credentials of the state, because they conflict with the dominant ideology or hegemonic order, because they offend the general (voting) public, or because they expose the fallacies of national unity and bi-polar opposition in the face of foreign enemies or international conflicts, such as the war on terror. This chapter looks at how domestic extreme right terrorism has been constructed, represented, evoked or ignored in the American political imagination in the post-civil rights era, with a particular focus on its changing status following the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11

Race, empire and the British-American "special relationship" in the Obama era

With the election of Barack Obama, much attention in Europe has focused on the possibility of the return of the good transatlantic relations that characterised the post-war period and was seriously damaged under Bush’s war on terror, unilateralism and imperialism. Much attention has also inevitably been focused on the fact that Obama is the first African-American president elected in a country that many view as historically and structurally racist. While Obama's election was seen to represent an end to both the damaging impact on transatlantic relations of the Bush era and to white supremacy in America, these two issues have rarely been connected. This chapter will look at the link between these by focusing on the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain, a relationship that has not only been the most enduring, if at times unequal and controversial, partnerships in the post-war era. Most notably between Churchill and FDR during the Second World War, Thatcher and Reagan during the Cold War and Blair and Bush during the War on Terror and invasion of Iraq. In spite of such cooperation, it is a relationship founded on colonialism and anti-colonialism, conflict and criticism – American criticism of British colonialism and, corresponding to it, British criticism of American racism. Far from representing pure anti-racism or anti-colonialism, British criticisms of American racism and American criticism of British colonialism have been deployed at crucial moments in which their relationship and relative geo-political power and influence was being contested or undergoing realignment, from the American Revolution through the cold war to the election of Obama. This chapter will examine the British response to the election of Obama in terms of the realignment of the special relationship and the place of both race and colonialism in the discussions about Obama’s election and relationship with Britain. More specifically, it will look at how this election has been celebrated in Britain as a victory over American racism, while his relationship to Britain has been criticised for his alleged anti-colonialism. I will argue that this response to Obama reflects historical and current tensions over the colonialism and imperialism of and racism in both countries, the realignment of the special relationship and concerns about the image, influence and power of each country globally following the Bush-Blair years, as well as changes in the domestic politics of each country following their elections

Quasidiagonality of nuclear C*-algebras

We prove that faithful traces on separable and nuclear C*- algebras in the UCT class are quasidiagonal. This has a number of consequences. Firstly, by results of many hands, the classification of unital, separable, simple and nuclear C*-algebras of finite nuclear dimension which satisfy the UCT is now complete. Secondly, our result links the finite to the general version of the Toms-Winter conjecture in the expected way and hence clarifies the relation between decomposition rank and nuclear dimension. Finally, we confirm the Rosenberg conjecture: discrete, amenable groups have quasidiagonal C*-algebras

Migration, Racism and the Hostile Environment:Making the Case for Social Sciences

Brexit, the European immigration and refugee situation and the Grenfell and Windrush scandals are just some of the recent major events which issues of migration have been at the heart of British social and political agenda. These highlight racism and the fundamental relations people who have settled in the UK have to British collective identity and belonging as well as to the British economy, polity and social relations. 9.4 million UK residents are foreign-born, 14% of the population, just over a third of whom are EU-born. Less than 10% of UK residents are not UK nationals. 20% of the population is of an ethnicity other than White British.Social scientists have observed and analysed such public issues and the public policies that both framed and resulted from them throughout the years. In doing so they have not only helped to document and analyse them but contributed towards their critique and problematisation as part of a public intellectual endeavour towards a more equal and just society. In doing so, much of social sciences research has been empirically informed, often methodologically innovative, theoretically productive and has contributed to our understanding of how processes of racialization and migration have been experienced in diverse ways by different groupings. In this report we aim to highlight some of these contributions and their importance to British society and institutions.At the end of this report, we list, as Further Readings, some of the main contributions members of AcSS and other social scientists have made throughout the years in the field of migration and refugees, racism, and belonging. Rather than attempting to sum up these contributions in the report itself, however, we have selected some of the main issues in this field of study, which present particular challenges to contemporary British society and institutions. We focus in this report on the specific contributions of social sciences to these issues.British social science has been playing for many years an important, often leading, innovative conceptual role in international social science debates. Although the issues we study are presented within their historical and locational contexts, we focus in this report on present day issues which have been crucial to our areas of study, such as the development of a ‘hostile environment’ and everyday bordering as a major governmental technology in the control and disciplining of diversity and discourses on migrants and racialized minorities. We also examine how the issues we have been studying have been affected by the rise of extreme right and neo-nativist politics in the UK and the role of Brexit in these, as well as the ways different groups and social movements have been resisting these processes of exclusion and racialisation.In this report, we do not present British social sciences as unified and non-conflictual; nor do we see social sciences in the UK as isolated from professional or political developments in other countries and regions. In addition, the report is multi-disciplinary; it covers research from the fields of psychosocial studies, sociology, social policy, economics and politics. It stretches from the local, to the regional and the national. And it is consistentlyintersectional, addressing gender, class, generation, race, ethnicity and religion.The report has been sponsored by the British Sociological Association; BSA Race and Ethnicity Study Group; BSA Migration and Diaspora Group; BSA Sociology of Rights Group; CMRB (Centre for research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging, UEL); IRIS (Institute for Research on Superdiversity, UoB; Migrants Organize; Migrants’ Rights Network; People’s Permanent Tribunal; ROTA (Race on the Agenda)To cite the report: Social Scientists Against the Hostile Environment (2020) Migration, Racism and the Hostile Environment: Making the Case for the Social Sciences, London: Academy of Social Sciences special interest group on Migration, Refugees and Settlement.Social Scientists Against The Hostile Environment (SSAHE):Prof. Molly Andrews; Prof. Madeleine Arnot; Prof. Floya Anthias; Dr. Stephen Ashe; Prof. Avtar Brah; Prof Giorgia Dona; Dr. Umut Erel; Dr. Ben Gidley; Rachel Humphris; Prof. Elenore Kofman; Dr. Aurelien Mondon; Prof. Karim Murji; Prof. Ann Phoenix; Prof. Nando Sigona; Prof. Corinne Squire; Dr. Nuria Targarona; Dr. Georgie Wemyss; Dr. Aaron Winter; Prof. Nira Yuval-Davis

Articulations of Islamophobia: From the Extreme to the Mainstream?

This article will examine the construction, functions and relationship between the diverse and changing articulations of Islamophobia. The aim of this article is to contribute to debates about the definition of Islamophobia, which have tended to be contextually specific (and sometimes universalized), fixed and/or polarized between racism and religious prejudice, between extreme and mainstream, state and non-state versions, or undifferentiated, and equip those interested in the issue with a more nuanced framework to: (a) clearly delineate articulations of Islamophobia as opposed to precise types and categories; (b) highlight the porosity in the discourse between the more extreme articulations widely condemned in the mainstream, and the more normalized and insidious ones, which the former tend to render more acceptable in comparison; (c) map where these intersect in response to events, historical and political conditions and new ideological forces and imperatives; and (d) compare articulations of Islamophobia in two contexts, France and the United States of America, in order to demonstrate both contextual differences and overlap and the application of our analysis and framewor

High-dimensional Z-stable AH algebras

It is shown that a C*-algebra of the form C(X,U), where U is a UHF algebra, is not an inductive limit of subhomogeneous C*-algebras of topological dimension less than that of X. This is in sharp contrast to dimension-reduction phenomenon in (i) simple inductive limits of such algebras, where classification implies low-dimensional approximations, and (ii) when dimension is measured using decomposition rank, as the author and Winter proved that dr(C(X,U)) $\leq$ 2.Comment: 14 pages. Improved the main result to handle subhomogeneous approximation

Covering Dimension of C*-Algebras and 2-Coloured Classification

Research partially supported by EPSRC (grant no. I019227/1-2), by NSF (grant no. DMS-1201385), by JSPS (the Grant-in-Aid for Research Activity Start-up 25887031), by NSERC (PDF, held by AT), by an Alexander von Humboldt foundation fellowship (held by SW) and by the DFG (SFB 878).Postprin