10th Anniversary of STR's Annual Postgraduate Conference: Current Themes in the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence

Session

Gender, Counter-Terrorism, and Structural Violence

4A

29 May 2026, 16:00

4.08 (Williamson Building)

21. This-Order: L’Étourdit and Structural Violence

Nazanin Shahbazi (University of Manchester)

29/05/2026, 16:00

Paper

This work develops a Lacanian account of structural violence as the foundational operation through which political order is constituted. Rather than treating structural violence as an effect of inequality, symbolic domination or ideological mystification, it locates violence in the act of disavowal by which a political formation establishes itself as an order. Structural violence is defined as...

24. Gendering Prevent: Gendered Constructions in Prevent Policy and Policing

Kat Osborne (Royal Holloway, University of London)

29/05/2026, 16:15

Paper

Prevent is gendered to the core, with the absence of gender in policy incompatible with the reality of practice. Whilst gender has been minimally addressed in counterterrorism policing research, it has been largely limited to viewing Prevent as a feminised policy (Schmidt, 2022; Bahadur Lamb, 2014). Prevent practitioners are central to the implementation of counterterrorism yet required to use...

32. “It’s Not About Ideology”: Emerging Findings on Prevent Practice and Extreme Right-Wing Terrorism

Caitlin Jordan (Edge Hill University)

29/05/2026, 16:30

Paper

This paper presents emerging findings from ongoing PhD research examining the effectiveness of the Prevent Strategy in addressing Extreme Right-Wing Terrorism. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, it identifies how Prevent is interpreted in practice, with many practitioners’ prioritising vulnerability, safeguarding and early intervention over a narrow focus on ideology.

Participants...