Ideology, Politics and Terror

When she was first elected in 1979, Margaret Thatcher promised to do much to tackle problems relating to law and order and a sense that the country was becoming increasingly unsafe. However, her governments did little to make good on their 'get tough' rhetoric, despite crime rates sky-rocketing. This talk examines why crime continued to rise so dramatically during the 1980s and some of the reasons why it started to come down again in the mid-1990s. It poses and answers the question 'to what extent are crime rates responsive to politics?

500 years ago a monk wrote a list of ideas he thought the Church got wrong and posted it on the door of his parish church. Five years later that monk, Martin Luther, began publishing a radical bible translation. Peasants revolted, Luther paused. But his Bible, reworked until his death in 1545, went on to frame modern ideas about politics, morality and gender—in English as well as German. See Luther at work: Study his mistakes. Uncover his assumptions. Understand his contribution to ideas about women, marriage, immigration and the deserving poor. No knowledge of German or the Bible required!

Can "terrorism" be defined? Should it be? Debates on terrorism are often overshadowed by disagreements over who and what counts as “terrorist,” as exemplified by the cliché, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” What is less well-known is that even research on terrorism has been plagued by this “problem of definition.” This talk will show how debates over the definition of ‘terrorism’ shape public understandings of three key questions in political life: Who is the enemy? When is violence legitimate? And what is political?