Category: Terrorism
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The West German police, the RAF manhunt and the killing of a British citizen: Reading the (slim) FCO file on the death of Iain Macleod
This is the draft of a paper that I presented at the online conference of the Australasian Association of European Historians last year. It is a reading of the rather slim FCO file on the death of Iain Macleod, a British citizen who was killed by the West German police during a raid on a…
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My review of Jeff Sparrow’s Fascists Among Us
This is a quick note to let you all know that the Sydney Review of Books has published my review of Jeff Sparrow’s new book Fascists Among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch Massacre. You can read the review here.
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A forgotten ‘suspect community’? Remembering the experiences of the Irish in Britain in the 1970s-80s
Two events this week have brought back the conflict in Northern Ireland to the attention of many, nearly twenty years after the Good Friday Agreement – the death of Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness and the terrorist attack at Westminster. Firstly McGuinness’ death demonstrated that while many had accepted the outcomes of the peace process and…
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New article in Terrorism & Political Violence: ‘Creating the National/Border Security Nexus’
Terrorism and Political Violence have just published my article, ‘Creating the National/Border Security Nexus: Counter-Terrorist Operations and Monitoring Middle Eastern and North African to the UK in the 1970s-1980s’. It is based on research funded by the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ David Phillips Travelling Fellowship. The abstract is below: This article looks at an…
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The border/national security nexus: Detecting Middle Eastern & North African ‘terrorists’ at the UK border in the 1970s-80s
In May 1980, two terrorist incidents involving Iran and Iranians led to a major overhaul of the UK’s border control system for counter-terrorism purposes, ordered by Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington. The below post is how the UK border control system was increasingly used to identify and monitor potential ‘terrorists’ from the Middle East and North…
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Removing the barriers to deportation from the UK: Lord Carrington and counter-terrorist efforts in the early 1980s
A story has appeared in The Guardian today that the UK Appeals Court has ruled that it is legal for foreign convicted criminals to be deported without their chance to appeal from the United Kingdom. The right to appeal before deportation was originally enshrined in the Immigrants Appeals Act 1969 and was long considered a…
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Full run of IMG’s ‘The Red Mole’ is now online
This is just a quick post to note that the blog Red Mole Rising has been resurrected and is now uploading many new interesting documents relating to the International Marxist Group, the USFI and Socialist Action. As part of this, the blog has uploaded the entire run of the IMG newspaper The Red Mole, alongside…
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Piecing together the death of Ian Macleod: The responses in West Germany and Britain
Early in the morning of June 25, 1972, the West German police raided a supposed ‘safehouse’ of the Red Army Fraction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, in Stuttgart. There had been supposed telephone communications between the flat in question and a group of Swiss anarchists who had allegedly been in contact with Andreas…
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Detecting Libyan terrorists at the UK border in the 1980s
One of my on-going projects is how the UK authorities pursued a counter-terrorist agenda through the border control system in the 1970s and 1980s, with a particular interest in how Middle Eastern and North African visitors to the UK were heavily scrutinised for being potential ‘terrorists’. In the latest round of government papers released by…
New Historical Express 