Irish Network for Middle Eastern and North African Studies

To mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Irish Network for Middle Eastern and North African Studies (INMENAS), the International Master in Security, Intelligence and Strategic Studies (IMSISS), the DCU’s Institute for International Conflict Resolution and Reconstruction (IICRR, and the Jean Monnet Network on EU Counter-Terrorism (EUCTER) brought together distinguished scholars working on different aspects of security in the MENA, Ireland and the EU, for the roundtable “The legacy of 9/11: Community policing in Ireland and Turkey”. The goal of the roundtable was to reflect on the implications of the events of 9/11 for policing practices, looking into Ireland and Turkey’s approach to community policing and police reforms in the context of the Global War on Terror and following the increasing securitization of the international environment. During the panel, scholars’ contributions highlighted similarities and divergences in the way in which national police forces in these two countries ...

  An Afghan police officer receives treatment for wounds sustained in a suicide bombing. Source: Wiki commons. By Sean McCafferty Introduction The prevalence of suicide Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attacks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has drawn significant attention from academia. Although over the past 10 years the number of suicide bombings have proliferated, becoming a consistent feature of intra-state conflicts (AOAV, 2019), existing approaches to understanding political violence in the MENA region have not done enough to offer meaningful and non-Orientalist analysis. As a result, this piece argues that there is a pressing need to move in a new direction.   In the aftermath of 9/11 and the ensuing ‘War on Terror,’ academia became focused on the psychology of suicide bombers (Ward, 2018: 88), often concluding that this form of political violence is driven by cultural or religious factors indigenous to the MENA region. This overwhelming focus on individual...