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The UK's Executive Counter-Terrorism Measures: A Critical Analysis of Strategy and Implementation
Wentworth, Matthew ; Fitzgerald, James (vedoucí práce) ; Ludvík, Zdeněk (oponent) ; Butler, Eamonn (oponent)
Since 2001, numerous national security threat developments have contributed to a significant increase in powers governing the use of coercive executive measures for use in a counter-terrorism context. The existing literature on the topic recognises the dynamic nature of the threat environment and the potential utility of executive measures but tends to focus on human rights and rule of law debates regarding the features of individual measures. This paper evaluates and critically analyses the changes in the UK's strategy behind, and implementation of, these executive measures with a specific focus on those employed to manage the terrorism-related risk of domestic individuals. Through assessment of domestic court and Strasbourg jurisprudence, strategy documents, oversight reports such as those from the Independent Reviewers of Terrorism Legislation, Parliamentary debate records, and official counter-terrorism figures, the paper analyses the ways in which the design and levels of use of the measures have been influenced by legal, political, and security-related factors. It argues that the along with the normalisation of these measures there has been accompanying policies to both restrict and extend them, resulting in a system which is strategically unclear and operationally insufficient. The research...
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Social Media Use of Far-Right Political Parties and Right-Wing Extremist Movements: A Comparative Mixed Methods Research on Twitter
Mos, Suzanne ; Fitzgerald, James (vedoucí práce) ; Střítecký, Vít (oponent) ; Carman, Christopher (oponent)
This research aims to explore and answer the question: how does the use of Twitter by far-right political parties differ from right-wing extremist movements in terms of their choice of topic and their use of language? Right-wing online extremism is becoming increasingly more relevant, particularly after the 2019 Christchurch attacks, in which the perpetrator seems to have been inspired by consuming significant amounts of online content. Following from Klein and Muis's research from 2018 regarding followers of right-wing extremist movements and far-right political parties, hypotheses were formulated. It was expected that right-wing extremist movements would tend to mostly discuss Islam and immigration topics, while far-right political parties would mostly focus on the national and European establishment. Moreover, it was expected that right-wing extremist movements would use more extreme language than the followers of political parties. One party and one movement from three different countries - the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Germany - have been selected. The selected groups are PVV, UKIP, AfD, IV, EDL and Pegida. A mixed methods approach to research was adopted in which the findings of the quantitative statistical analysis were complemented with and enriched by qualitative research methods,...
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"Refugees" or "Economic Migrants": An Obsolete Binary Categorisation for the Contemporary World
Baccovich, Giulia ; Prina, Federica (vedoucí práce) ; Fitzgerald, James (oponent) ; Ludvík, Jan (oponent)
Nowadays, more than ever, our world is developing at a fast pace, and its challenges and the priorities linked to these challenges are evolving as well. This dissertation examines the binary categorisation of 'refugees' and 'economic migrants' that is grounded on definitions and perceptions date back to the 20th century. Drawing on the case study analysis of the Nigeria situation, this dissertation aims at opening the floor to a new perspective over migration flows, highlighting the importance of developing policies and norms concerning individuals' security threats. By examining the Human Security Theory and Johan Galtung's concept of structural violence, this dissertation attempts to add a layer of analysis to the study of migration drivers. Moreover, it argues that the employment of systems of 'economic migrants' returns, emphasised by the contemporary context of securitisation of migration, is dangerous for those who are fleeing insecurity conditions not mentioned in the refugee definition.
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Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Analytics in Decision Making: The Migration and Asylum Systems
Bringas Colmenarejo, Alejandra ; Van Puyvelde, Damien (vedoucí práce) ; Fitzgerald, James (oponent) ; Špelda, Petr (oponent)
Big data and artificial intelligence inform decisions that affect people in their daily lives worldwide. Now, decision support systems are becoming increasingly frequent in sensitive contexts such as criminal justice or health insurance as they are considered objective, neutral and organic instruments whose decisions are purely based on facts. This is driven by the idea that human biases, emotions and discriminatory tendencies do not take part in their decision-making process. Yet, there is an overwhelming debate about the notions of fairness and effectiveness and the consequences that may arise from the implementation of these technologies in sensitive social and institutional contexts. Decision-making support tools are daily used in the judicial and migration areas to strengthen effectiveness and fairness while speeding up the often tedious and processes. However, technological automatisation and support systems are not always good allies of liberal values. The goal of accelerating judicial procedures and migration's and refugee's applications, increasing their efficiency, or better allocating limited resources could easily collide with the protection of individuals' rights; such as transparency, fair trial, dignity, or explanation. This paper will analyse the challenges and risk resulting from...
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Effectiveness of Countering Violent Extremism and De-radicalisation Strategy: A comparative analysis between the United States and the United Kingdom
Islam, Md Badrul ; Fitzgerald, James (vedoucí práce) ; Kaczmarski, Marcin (oponent) ; Bureš, Oldřich (oponent)
Different states have taken a significant number of countering violent extremism and de-radicalisation strategies all over the world. However, the effectiveness of these policies does not discuss so much. Sometimes governments claim success regarding their strategies. Nevertheless, these claims are questionable because of the lack of empirical evidence. The literature on CVE significantly highlights the importance of CVE campaigns with different programmes: de-radicalisation, disengagement, rehabilitation, and reintegration. However, the research on the evaluation of CVE and de- radicalisation programme around the world is limited. Therefore, this research has tried to contribute to this issue. This research has used the comparative case study method and selected the cases of the CVE and de-radicalisation strategies of the United States and the United Kingdom. This research finds that both US and UK CVE strategies predominantly focus on the Muslim, which stigmatised the Muslim community and reinforced Islamic stereotypes. Therefore, it creates 'Muslim' as a 'suspect community' that is alienating Muslims. For the US case, the right-wing extremism is increasing especially against Muslim and Jewish religious figures and institutions, but the government are giving less attention to this issue. The...
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A Mixed Picture Election: The Online Visual Framing of Migration in the 2019 European Parliament Election Campaigns
Bartley, Laura ; Paterson, Ian (vedoucí práce) ; Střítecký, Vít (oponent) ; Fitzgerald, James (oponent)
While there have been numerous studies focusing on the discourse used when discussing migration by both the media and political elites, the visual framing of migration as communicated by political parties has not garnered the same attention. As such the present study sets out to analyse the visual and written political communication relating to migration policy in the 2019 European Parliament election campaigns. The aim is to understand how the issue of migration was visually framed on social media by official parties during the 2019 European Parliament elections in the United Kingdom, and will thereby draw on securitisation and visual theory to examine whether migration was securitised during the campaign (and if so whether this securitisation differs to traditional understandings of this process). By developing and applying a visual securitisation framework to guide the qualitative visual analysis, the study focuses on how each political party visually represented their migration policy through official online social media accounts. The study also focuses on 'image-text entanglements' in online activity and how visual representations replicate or diverge from the framing of migration in the political party's manifesto (textual) framing. The results show that while certain pro-Brexit parties...
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Panic and the Perpetuum Mobile of Populist Right-Wing Propaganda: An Ontological Perspective of Political Security Communication
Pronk, Marijn Elle ; Fitzgerald, James (vedoucí práce) ; Anceschi, Luca (oponent) ; Aslan, Emil (oponent)
Panic and the Perpetuum Mobile of Populist Right-Wing Propaganda: An Ontological Perspective of Political Security Communication July 2020 Glasgow Student Number: 2409522P Dublin City Student Number: 18114598 Charles Student Number: 50023595 Presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of International Master in Security, Intelligence and Strategic Studies Word Count: 24.195 Supervisor: Dr. James Fitzgerald Date of Submission: 30th July 2020 Abstract The rise of polarizing narratives being spread online, and the successes of various Right-Wing Populist Movements and parties illustrate a seemingly causational tie to the change in the media landscape. Capturing the ontological zeitgeist, Populist Right-Wing movements use fears and hesitations of groups to trigger anxiety, consequently bottling the political energy generated for their own political gain by populist framing. By combining the Ontological Security Theory (OST), framing populism as a style of political communication, and the technology-political communication nexus as highlighted in the Political Communication Cycle, the aforementioned developments are tested to see how ontological insecurities based on identity rhetoric are weaponized against the backdrop of a new technological communicative reality. Using historical...
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Interstate Cooperation in Cyber Strategies of the United States and China Post-2010: A Comparative Study
Kolodii, Roman ; Kaczmarski, Marcin (vedoucí práce) ; Špelda, Petr (oponent) ; Fitzgerald, James (oponent)
INTERSTATE COOPERATION IN CYBER STRATEGIES OF THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA POST-2010: A COMPARATIVE STUDY July 2020 Glasgow Student Number: 2402268 Dublin City Student Number: 18114229 Charles Student Number: 67474092 ROMAN KOLODII Presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of International Master in Security, Intelligence and Strategic Studies Word Count: 21 990 words Supervisor: Dr Marcin Kaczmarski Date of Submission: July 30, 2020 2 ABSTRACT Academic, political and media discourses tend to focus on cyber warfare and cyberespionage as two key themes in cybersecurity. While recognizing their importance, this study explores the alternative, yet understudied topic of cyber-cooperation, drawing on the case of the two mightiest cyber powers-- the United States and China. More specifically, I ask: what is the role of interstate cooperation in cyber strategies of the US and China and how does it relate to their broader grand strategies in conventional domains of land, air and sea? Drawing on strategic theory, I compare American and Chinese approaches and argue that both countries use cyber-cooperation as a tool to enhance their cyber-capacity, conduct deterrence/reassurance in relations with foreign governments, and shape the rules of the game in cyberspace. However, the application of...
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GANs gone wild: Public perceptions of Deepfake technologies on YouTube
Poon, Jessica ; Špelda, Petr (vedoucí práce) ; Fitzgerald, James (oponent)
Deepfake technologies are a form of artificial intelligence (AI) which are based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), a development which has emerged out of deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) models. Using a data range which spans the years 2018 - 2021, this research explores public perceptions of deepfake technologies at scale by closely examining commentary found on the social video-sharing platform, YouTube. This open source, ground-level data documents civilian responses to a selection of user-produced, labelled deepfake content. This research fills a gap regarding public perception of this emerging technology at scale. It gauges an underrepresented set of responses in discourse to find that users demonstrate a spectrum of responses which veer between irony and concern, with greater volumes of commentary skewed towards the former. This study of user commentary also finds that YouTube as a wild space ultimately affords reflexive and critical thinking around the subject of deepfake technologies and could prove to be effective as a form of inoculation against disinformation.
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