Brits in Spain: four broad Brexit narratives (though sometimes it's best to avoid the topic)

At least 300,000 Britons live in Spain. Joel Busher (Coventry University) has spoken to a number of those in Mallorca and the Costa Blanca about their views and feelings for a British Academy-funded project about their Brexit journeys. He identifies four main narratives, which range from optimism and confidence about life post-Brexit to dismay and anger. Many are careful about what they ..

Understanding the English Defence League: living on the front line of a ‘clash of civilisations’

Joel Busher reflects on what his 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork with the English Defence League tells us about what distinguishes them from the ‘ordinary English people’ that they claim to represent. His research highlights the importance of linking the attitudes and ideology of EDL activists with their lived experience, and questions what role society at large plays in shaping that experience

What do ‘middle class’ terrorists tell us about the link between poverty and terrorism?

Introduced in 2006, the Prevent workstream of the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy (CONTEST) has provided a focus for often heated debates about what drives people to support or take part in violent extremism and terrorism in the UK. Six months after the new Conservative – Liberal Democrat coalition government announced an extensive review of Prevent, David Cameron used his speech to the Munich Security Conference 2011 [1]to set out his position in relation to these debates. He distanced himself from what he referred to as the ‘hard right’ and the ‘soft left’.Publisher PD

Micro Moral Worlds of Contentious Politics: A Reconceptualization of Radical Groups and Their Intersections with One Another and the Mainstream

The emergence, or resurgence, of radical political groups invariably provokes a struggle between activists, academics, commentators and policymakers over the particular configuration of nouns and adjectives that best correspond to the group in question. While such debates are an integral part of political practice, scrutiny of the claims made within these debates reveals significant limitations in standard strategies of description – most notably their inability to satisfactorily render either the essential cultural messiness and dynamism of contentious politics or the intersections between the so-called extreme and mainstream. We propose an alternative, albeit not mutually exclusive, strategy of description. This entails decentering the group per se and focusing instead on mapping the micro moral worlds of contentious politics – the patchwork of intersubjective contexts of belief and behavior through which activism takes place. We illustrate this with two empirical cases: The English Defence League in Britain, and Republican Sinn Fein in Ireland

Understanding Concerns about Community Relations in Calderdale

•This study examined attitudes and dispositions towards greater ethnic and religious diversity, as well as community relations more generally, among residents of predominantly white British neighbourhoods. It also examined people’s attitudes and responses to anti-minority protest by groups like the English Defence League (EDL)and towards cohesion policy and practices. A mixed methods design was used combining a (non-representative) household survey (n=212) in three selected research sites (Illingworth, Sowerby Bridge and Todmorden) with eight key informant interviews (across key institutions) and nine focus group discussions (across age-ranges and localities) with local people