Dissenting Citizenship? Young People and Political Participation in the Media-security Nexus

Dissenting Citizenship? Young Peopleand Political Participation in theMedia-security Nexus1

Ben O’Loughlin1,* and Marie Gillespie2

1Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK;2Open University, UK

*Correspondence: [email protected]

During the last decade, a media-security nexus has emerged that has exacerbated

pervasive feelings of the precariousness of citizenship among British Muslims.

Legally, citizenship became reversible while political and media discourses and

religious discrimination compounded by racism created deep unease about

belonging, identity and the very possibility of multicultural citizenship. With

diminishing prospects for effective participation in formal political processes,

except through the domineering framework of counter-terrorism, young British

Muslims sought alternative arenas and modes of political debate and engage-

ment. They expressed their dissent from the suffocating politics of security in

informal ways that were deemed efficacious in their own terms. While a sense

of loss of status and respect, and deep disappointment at how fellow Muslims

were being vilified, was present among older generations, young British Muslims

responded in politically creative ways that can be described as ‘dissenting citizen-

ship’. This article reflects on findings from an ESRC-funded collaborative ethnog-

raphy, Shifting Securities, conducted across 12 cities in Britain between 2004

and 2007 that investigated how a very diverse, multi-ethnic group of some 239

British people experienced citizenship and security in a time of relentless news of

terrorism, conflict and natural disaster catastrophes and ‘creeping securitisation’

in day-to-day life in Britain. Our research suggests that dissenting rather than dis-

affected citizenship is a growing trend particularly among multi-ethnic youth

who aspire to work critically within and revitalise mainstream politics to safeguard

their citizenship status via local and translocal personalised forms of political action

rather than engage in conventional forms of national party politics.

This paper was presented at a panel on young people and political participation organised by James

Sloam at the Political Studies Association Annual Conference in London on 20 April 2011. We would

like to thank him for his support with this initiative.

# The Author [2012]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society; all rights reserved.

For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

Parliamentary Affairs (2012) 65, 115–137 doi:10.1093/pa/gsr055

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1. The problem and our study

In Bowling Alone, published a year before the attacks of 11 September 2001,Robert Putnam argued that increased civic engagement ‘would be eased by apalpable national crisis, like war or depression or natural disaster, but forbetter or worse, America at the dawn of the new century faces no such galvanisingcrisis’ (Putnam, 2000, p. 402). This article asks whether the effects rippling outfrom that event were ‘for worse’ for young people and their experiences ofcitizenship in the UK.

The problem posed by Sloam in the introduction to this special issue is this:

While it is possible to argue that there is nothing special about thecurrent generation of young people – and that recent trends towardnon-participation in electoral politics can be explained by the ‘lifecycleeffect’ – if we are to understand political participation at all, we mustexplore how each new generation comes to develop its own conceptionsof democracy and comes to develop new repertoires of civic and politicalengagement. (Emphasis added)

What is special about the multi-ethnic generation living in cities marked by‘superdiversity’, who came of age in the aftermath of 9/11 and around the timeof the London Bombings, is the intensification of the media-security nexus.This refers to the mutually reinforcing set of relationships whereby media cover-age of events triggers public reactions that lead to the demonisation of minoritieswho are represented as connected to threats. After 9/11, and the 7/7 Londonbombings in 2005, public debate in Britain was characterised by progressive hos-tility towards Muslims, disenchantment at the diminishing prospects of multicul-tural citizenship and a sense of disenfranchisement—perceived and actual.Disenfranchisement can take many forms—legal, political, social and culturaland young British Muslims especially, compared with their peers—experienceddisenfranchisement in each of these intertwined domains.

We aim to explore how young British Muslims understood themselves to bepositioned as political subjects in the 2004–2007 period and how they respondedpolitically to these circumstances. The media-security nexus is not new, so we alsoaim to illuminate how it operates in a transformed media ecology in which multi-lingual citizens can access an unprecedented range of national and internationalmedia. We advance two main arguments. First, young people faced dominant dis-cursive frameworks that linked Muslims to terrorism. They faced conventionalnational party politics and government policies that, in their complicity withmainstream media, reproduced these ideologically loaded frames. For some,there appeared no possibility of escape, resulting in a sense of alienation.Others, however, invested hope in the improvement of normal politics through

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small, cumulative acts that modify ‘the mainstream’ and its discourses fromwithin. The intensified demonisation of specific minority groups through themedia-security nexus is nothing new, and minoritised groups know thisthrough experience. The exacerbation of discriminatory processes operated inBritain after the 1991–1992 Gulf War and following the attacks of 9/11 (Gillespie,1995; Gillespie, 2007a,b). Hence, we argue secondly that an important register inyoung people’s political repertoire is ‘dissenting citizenship’. This refers to ways inwhich individuals express frustration and disappointment with political processesand decisions and media coverage of associated events, but seek to remedy dis-criminatory practices over time rather than work towards revolutionary changein political or media systems (Maira, 2009). When their sense of identity and citi-zenship were challenged, individuals whomwe worked with showed restraint, andawareness that the cycles of intensified demonisation and discrimination inresponse to security events would abate with time. They sought and foundways to hold on to their sense of entitlement to British (if not multicultural) citi-zenship by undertaking small, strategic everyday acts, seeking to educate theirpeers or co-workers, outside engagement with formal political institutions. Inother words, dissenting citizenship may be rebellious, critical, angry and disap-pointed but the youth in our study believe in and invest in citizenship as anentitlement.

We draw on a study conducted across 12 cities in the UK.2 Multilingual eth-nographers immersed in their own local areas followed how individual and com-munity understandings of security were affected by living through a period ofterrorist attacks, international conflicts and natural disasters. These events weresometimes experienced directly (like 7/7) but reached people most commonlyvia news media and entertainment. The majority of interviewees were knownto the 13 interviewers working collaboratively on the project from previous quali-tative social research projects and/or other social relations. In other cases,researchers deployed a variety of methods to elicit spontaneous, self-revealingspeech and to observe everyday media practices. Across 30 months the ethnogra-phers conducted interviews, focus groups and participant observation techniqueswith 239 people around the UK and Ireland, with interviews conducted inEnglish but sometimes in two or three languages (see demographic table inAppendix). While approximately two-thirds of participants were categorised asMuslim, the study was events led rather than, say, a study of ‘Muslim disaffection’.Ethnicity, politics, legitimacy and citizenship were not treated as a priori concepts;rather, analysis identified how events, experiences and interactions led to themobilisation of these categories.

2For full details of the methodological approach, subjects of study, ethnographic analyses and findings

of this larger study see Gillespie (2007a,b).

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We use the term ‘media-security nexus’ to describe this context, whichinvolved ‘global uncertainties’ and local insecurities, for citizens and for policy-makers, and which was labelled for a time a ‘war on terror’. Young BritishMuslims3 in particular experienced great disappointment at the failure of hugepublic demonstrations to prevent the 2003 Iraq War and the introduction of arange of domestic and transnational counter-terrorist policies that had a dispro-portionate impact on the everyday lives of British Muslims. These policies werepassed by a democratically elected government; many of the participants of ourstudy spoke of a legitimacy ‘deficit’ (Gillespie, 2006). How, then, did youngBritish Muslims respond? Where did the diverse group of young people thatwe worked with seek and to what extent did they find effective (in their terms)arenas political debate and action? What repertoires of engagement did theyadopt, develop and deploy to respond to and to escape the crippling confinementof counter-terrorism and hyper-securitisation especially in the period followingthe London Bombings?

Finding answers to these questions requires qualitative research methods. Ourpaper responds to recent calls by leading political scientists to develop method-ologies to yield findings about how people understand politics and the experienceof ‘doing politics’ (Hay et al., 2008). For instance, after conducting a survey ofyoung people to find out whether they engage with politics online, Ward andde Vreese (2011, pp. 410–411) admit their survey ‘did not make available anin-depth portrait of what young people actually do online’. This paper presentsan analysis of a collaborative, multi-sited ethnography and consequently is ableto generate insights about people’s understanding and engagements with politicsover time. Ethnography is less a method than an ethos—an approach based onfieldwork in a local milieu where the social and cultural distance betweenresearcher and researched is minimised through participatory forms of researchand active presence among and engagement with interlocutors. It usually dependson participant observation—interacting with people in a naturalistic setting(e.g. co-watching TV in situ) and extensive documentation of conversationsand activities during which assumptions, perceptions and responses to experi-ences are revealed over time. Observation and engagement is often bolstered byinterviews, document analysis and surveys which together build up a ‘thick’description of the cultural phenomenon under study—in this case themedia-security nexus.

3The term ‘British Muslims’ is problematic and used here with caution. It masks the huge diversity

within this category, and some British Muslims who understood themselves as labelled as such, and

who even identified themselves as such during the research process, felt they were implicated in

media discourses as potential terrorists and thus faced unwarranted associations with terrorism,

implicit or explicit, on a daily basis.




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Political scientists have used ethnography to study political institutions such asparties, international organisations and NGOs as well as social movements, ter-rorist networks and mafias (for a review, see Halperin and Heath, 2011). Pro-longed ethnographic research in small US towns by Eliasoph (1998) and Maira(2009) has illuminated how diverse groups of citizens formulate their politicalviews, discuss politics in private and public spaces, and the conditions and con-straints that shape the likelihood of political action and the very notion of whatconstitutes political action (from talking politics to attending a demonstration toconsumer boycotts). Collaborative ethnography in multi-ethnic milieux con-ducted over time has the potential to address longstanding questionsconcerning participation, socialisation and alienation that remain central tothe study of politics.

Political science has struggled to grasp how young people engage politicallysince they may talk about political issues in vocabulary that is not reflected onsurveys or in conventional elite discourses. In the media-security nexus and thecontext of war on terror rhetoric, many of the Shifting Securities respondentsspoke of their own and others’ reluctance to talk about politics at work or withfriends in the immediate aftermath of critical events. Critical events are definedas those that unsettle everyday life and politics, forcing citizens to re-thinktheir political assumptions and taken for granted, tacit beliefs about the world,albeit often only on a temporary basis (Das, 1995). Such events were oftenhard to talk about. One focus group had to be interrupted because participantsfelt unwilling to speak about sensitive events after the 7/7 London bombingsin 2005.

Collaborative media ethnography with multilingual and especially BritishMuslim citizens demonstrated how news media consumption is intrinsic toliving and doing citizenship. News media consumption enables young peopleto acquire discursive competences in discussing news events and, as a conse-quence, develop an understanding of what politics is—graduating to adultstatus among family and friends (Gillespie, 1995). By the 2000s the widespreadavailability of satellite and internet media offered multi-lingual and diasporic audi-ences the opportunity to compare and contrast international news sources’ framingof events and thus relativise UK mainstream media. Collective discussion and ana-lysis of news and political events has always enabled citizens to identify the publicproblems of the day, to receive political information and analysis, and ideas andideals of ‘the good citizen’ are often presented to citizens by entertainment andnews media (Livingstone, 2005; van Zoonen, 2005). David Buckingham (2000,p. 59) argues that if news media address audiences in ways that assume the latterpossess media and political literacies, this positions individuals as‘citizens-in-the-making’ and can contribute to the skills and competencesyoung people need to be politically efficacious citizens. Young people wish to




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be engaged, hate being patronised, and some reporters do show how events ‘outthere’ are relevant to audience members’ lives. This invites conversation aroundnews, through which repertoires are formed. In a previous multi-ethnic audiencestudy on responses to the mediation of the attacks of 9/11 Gillespie identified theways in which ‘negotiations of the meanings of events, identities and relationshipsin the social world are enacted in the “talking spaces” created around televisionamong other sources of news in everyday life’. (Gillespie, 2006, p. 906). Hence,the Shifting Securities ethnographers asked participants about their mediaconsumption routines, and what media they turned to when critical events broke,such as the 7/7 bombings or 2004 Boxing Day Asian Tsunami. It is in thesespaces that understandings of politics and democracy and repertoires ofengagement form (cf. Gillespie, 1995 and Gillespie, 2011; Buckingham, 1996;Buckingham, 1999).

The political context of the period of study was shaped markedly by securityconcerns. Following the 11 September 2001 attacks in the USA and launch of adomestic and international war on terror, some suggested or questionedwhether this context was ‘the new normal’ (Abrams et al., 2004; Massumi,2005, p. 31) in which terrorist attacks would become a regular occurrence: the7 July 2005 bombings were followed by a second multiple bomb attack onLondon’s public transport a fortnight later, the 21/7 attacks in which the perpe-trators failed to detonate their bombs. Should Londoners expect bombs everyother Thursday (O’Loughlin et al., 2011)? A raft of counter-terrorism legislationwas introduced in the UK. This affected citizenship: Jarvis and Lister (2010,p. 180) conclude, ‘Governance, in this arena, has been diffused right throughoutthe social: to the homes, lives and work of “ordinary” individuals and communi-ties’. They add that citizens were not asked to contribute to debates about whatcounts as security or insecurity; the goals of ‘counter-terrorism’ were settop-down by the state, and citizens were simply asked to contribute to the deliv-ery of those pre-defined goals, a rather impoverished conception of citizenship. Inother words, security was taken out of the realm of legitimate political debate. Atthe same time, other insecurities concerned citizens. Economic struggles, familydislocations, fear of crime and other anxieties meant what one participant called ‘athousand pinpricks of insecurity’ and that relativised the significance of the threatof terrorism to any individual (Al Ghabban, 2007; Hoskins and O’Loughlin,2007, pp. ix–x).

A sense of ‘precarious citizenship’ was the result of this (Gillespie andO’Loughlin, 2009a,b). For older generations of minority ethnic or religiouspeople in the UK, citizenship became precarious objectively. Citizenship in theUK since the 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act is a privilege, nota right; it not only has to be ‘earned’ but protected and maintained. The 2006Terrorism Bill, the Home Office states, ‘enable[s] British citizenship to be




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removed where it is considered conducive to the public good, rather than, as pre-viously, where the individual has done something seriously prejudicial to the vitalinterests of the UK’ (Home Office, cited in Gillespie and O’Loughlin, 2009a,b; cfBlake, 2006). Citizenship has become contingent, and we might expect this to befelt by those under public or state scrutiny. Citizenship also became more precar-ious subjectively, in the everyday experience of having one’s loyalty or identityquestioned. These individuals had associated British citizenship and its attain-ment as a matter of hope and pride. New security legislation and harassmentby police and customs officials created a sense of disillusionment and disappoint-ment. This was communicated to younger generations. However, whereas olderparticipants spoke of the possibility of returning to a country of origin, thisoption was not thinkable to younger participants who had been born andraised in the UK. The disappointment expressed by their parents was anotherlayer of context within which young people assessed their political options.Benign resignation was not an option; young people sought a more active, dis-senting response. Having to take into account older generations’ views andreflect on oneself and one’s experiences within that broader identity group is aprerequisite to political consciousness (Buckingham, 2000, p. 205).

Precarious citizenship forced individuals to respond, and one response wefound was what Sunaina Marr Maira (2009) calls ‘dissenting citizenship’. It isuseful to bring our study into comparative focus with that of Maira’s (2009),as there are important resonances. She conducted ethnographic research priorto ours from 2001 to 2003 in a New England town she calls ‘Wellford’, and in par-ticular a high school there. She described the school as very multicultural: 40 percent of students were white and the rest a mix, with 20 per cent born overseas.Wellford had experienced two waves of immigrants from South Asia, the lattertaking working and lower middle class jobs; in particular, Muslim family net-works from Gujarat had been transported from a village to a Wellford apartmentblock. Her aim was to explore how young South Asian Muslim immigrantsexpressed ideas of national belonging and citizenship in the context of the waron terror. The puzzle she posed starkly was: How can you live somewherewhere people consider you an enemy? How would this affect South Asianyoung people’s sense of loyalty, security and belonging? And, we would add,can dissenting voices be treated as legitimate and valuable by political leadersor fellow citizens within democratic conversation?

Maira found the young people inWellford were in the position of ‘challenging thestate while seeking inclusion within it’ (2009, p. 201). For example, in 2001 and2002 they were critical of US policy-makers’ decision to go to war in Afghanistan.They felt Afghanistan’s culpability for the 11 September 2001 attacks had notbeen established, and disappointment that the USA was falling short of justice,accountability and international law. Nevertheless, this suggests they had




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expected the USA to meet these benchmarks—that the starting point was anassumption the USA could and should meet such standards. Regarding domesticor homeland security, the young South Asians in Maira’s study described a ‘gapbetween what the state can presumably guarantee, through citizenship or consti-tutional rights, and what a specific political project such as the War on Terroractually puts into effect’ (2009, p. 205). It is in the uncertain context of thisgap that young people had to decide how to act. We hope that an ethnographicapproach helps the reader identify how young people understood such a context,made decisions and used certain repertoires to engage.

‘Dissenting citizenship’ is Maira’s term for the effects of the ambivalent andcontradictory positioning experienced by young South Asians in the USA. It isconceptually and empirically similar to what Gillespie (1995) found amongyoung British Muslims in Southall, west London in response to Gulf War 1991.They responded strategically in ways that required regular switching between cul-tural codes, between home and school. Individuals had to strike a between dissentand accommodation. To an extent people want to live in peace, so dissent is attimes muted; at other times dissent is vocalised or acted on. Ethnographyallows participants to describe how they do this, what competences and difficul-ties are involved and what successes they have had. Dissenting citizenship is anattitude of frustration but hope. It often entails expectations of economic oppor-tunity, cultural belonging and legal status that are not being fully realised. Ouranalysis develops the concept of dissenting citizenship in a UK context by explor-ing how young British Muslims responded. Our study extends previous findingsthat citizens are committed to the idea of democracy but aware of culturally dis-tinctive approaches and meaning of the term and critical of its current practicesin the ‘west’. Individuals wish to engage politically but face uncertainty about theefficacy of their options (Norris, 1999), where efficacy is understood as ‘people’sbeliefs in their ability to understand and participate effectively in governance’(Coleman et al., 2008, p. 771). By taking into account the security context, weshed light on certain obstacles faced that have yet to be accounted for in thecivic and political engagement field.

In the analysis below we find that many young Muslim interviewees werefocused on finding alternative forms of representation and action. The pulltowards politics was there, since existing political representatives and representa-tions were deemed inadequate, but this lack presented certain choices: to work inand reinvigorate existing party politics or bureaucratic politics, or to workoutside; to work within and attempt to alter the agendas and news values of exist-ing media organisations or to set up Islamic media. Navigating this terrain wasdifficult, and dissent was often felt not to be registered or acted upon, but thepolitical imaginary of a national, democratic political system remained presentfor some.




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2. The perseverance of national thinking

Young British Muslims are in ongoing negotiation with a notional mainstream ormajority society. They are not alone in this, but after 9/11 and then 7/7 theirinclusion/exclusion became a public issue. Comparative ethnography helps illu-minate how young people become made as national citizens through media. Aspart of our collaborative ethnography Habiba Noor (2007) conducted a series ofexercises with school students in London and New York, helping them use movie-making software to create 60 second audio-visual news clips about the war onterror. Noor made hundreds of images available, which participants selectedfrom, put into a running order, and created a voiceover. Noor wanted to findout how minority audiences see themselves in relation to the majority in eachcountry. In New York, Noor met the students Kit (18 years old) and Kat (16years old) several times in late 2005. They were Muslim-identifying Americancitizens with parents of Indian origin, living in a suburb with few SouthAsians. Their news clip immediately addressed a presumed audience that was ig-norant of events in Iraq and of Islam, evidencing a sense of distance from an Ameri-can mainstream society. Kit and Kat did identify racism from anti-Arab statementsat school, but felt such statements stemmed from ignorance rather than mediareporting. A sensible political action for them was to try to educate their classmatesabout religion and world politics. However, there was ambiguity in their news cliptoo. It ended by paying respects to US soldiers fallen in Iraq, reproducing main-stream US news discourse at the time, yet Kit and Kat were critical of the war.Earlier we noted that Maira observed certain ‘prerequisites for speaking’ that USArab or Muslim citizens had to perform. Kit and Kat’s anomalous framing of USsoldiers as victims supports this. They were enacting a mainstream repertoire as aprerequisite to their longer news clip, as if this military homage must be performedin order to make space to achieve their objective of educating fellow students aboutreligion. Noor concludes, ‘This discrepancy is not a sign of their confusion; rather, itillustrates their multiple identities’ (Maira, 2009, p. 387).

Noor spoke to three Muslim students in the London borough of TowerHamlets, all British nationals but with diverse backgrounds. Jasmine (17 yearsold, Turkish), Hanan (18 years old, Gujurati Indian) and Sara (18 years old,Yemeni) were far more critical of mainstream media that Kit and Kat. They pos-sessed a greater degree of media literacy and were more familiar with transnation-al media networks. They presented suffering in Iraq as asymmetrical: Muslimswere suffering but USA or UK soldiers were not mentioned as anything otherthan perpetrators. The London students spoke less of discrimination at schoolthan Kit or Kat, but also presumed a national majority to be ignorant ofMuslim suffering. They blamed news media for this. News media omitted the‘truth’: It did not report Iraqi perspectives or Iraqi casualties in the war. Their




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news clip ended by presenting the audience with two options: pray for peace orprepare for more violence. They focused on warning a national audience, whileKit and Kat focused on drawing constructively ‘on the lessons of Americanhistory’ such as learning from Japanese internment that small acts of suppressioncan lead to total restrictions on freedom (Habiba Noor, 2007, p. 385). All coulddraw on media conventions to express their political arguments and each had astrong sense of a national mainstream and how it should be addressed. Theyexhibited the dual discursive competencies found by Gillespie (1995) amongyoung people in Southall and by Maira (2009) in New England.

Some young Muslim Londoners among the Shifting Securities participants didtake up political action. Again in Tower Hamlets, the ethnographer AmmarAl-Ghabban found among groups of 14–16-year-old British Bengali Muslimsthat many of the children had attended anti-war demonstrations in 2003.‘When the bombing of Baghdad began’, he writes, ‘some even left school in themiddle of a working day (without their parents’ knowledge) to march inprotest from East London to Parliament Square’ (Al-Ghabban, 2007, p. 317).Even though they did not speak Arabic they watched Arabic satellite televisionfor visual confirmation of the horror they expected, seeking the ‘truth’Jasmine, Hanan and Sara sought. Al-Ghabban also spoke to white, secular stu-dents. Their media menu was narrower and they possessed a more distant rela-tion to the war. He writes, ‘Didactic, one-sided and propagandistic newsappeared to provoke the young participants not only to cynicism . . . but alsoto some of the most ardent critique and political debate, and occasionally prac-tical political intervention, by drawing up or signing petitions and going ondemonstrations’ (ibid, p. 325). A more diverse media ecology shaped the socialpractice of news watching, affording young people in London the opportunityto watch Al-Jazeera, BBC or Fox News, which triggered comparative analysis ofnational discursive repertoires and stimulated political action.

Hence, efforts to construct more adequate representation also demand consid-eration about how these representations will be received and understood byothers. In the next section we explore how some young people felt pushed orpulled into engagement with political processes, and in the final section wereturn to the problem of constructing alternative media representations inorder to engage and education mainstream society.

3. Pulled and pushed to engage: Government consultationof women in Manchester

Government consultation is central to contemporary policy-making. Formal demo-cratic processes like voting may be too crude to diagnose strength of feeling, elicitthe voices of those marginalised from typical public debate and provide efficacy




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to those who are most affected by a decision. Locally oriented consultations allowthose directly affected by existing or proposed policy to feedback in various ways.The existence of consultations is about both input and output; drawing in local per-spectives, knowledge and information and enrolling citizens within a deliberativeprocess so that those citizens are receptive to, and might even help implement,any resulting decision. The policy project in question here was soliciting theviews of British Muslim women. Following the introduction of top-down andcommunity-level counter-terrorism policies (for an overview see Jarvis and Lister,2010), such audiences appeared, from the perspective of the British governmentin the mid-2000s, to be an identity/interest group who required consulting.

The network society described by Castells (2009) reconfigures and renewsstructural exclusions; unless a person has value to a network (economic, social)then they will find no place. Paradoxically, the media-security nexus suddenlyafforded high value to British Muslims. Suddenly, being consulted was anambiguous opportunity: we will listen, because you are dangerous. Such consult-ation may be transient, no guarantee of an enduring place within governance. AsCastells writes, value is . . . an expression of power. Whoever holds power . . .decides what is valuable (2009, p. 28; italics in original). The government wasstill deciding policy objectives and hence what counted as valuable. Consultationswere launched by government, not by citizens.

In 2005, after the 7/7 London bombings in July, the ethnographer Asad Iqbalmet with a group of three young Muslim female students living in Oldham butstudying in Manchester. Reshma, 21 years old, Bina, 21 years old, and Sofie, 19years old, were all involved in various Islamic societies at their universities.They were all of Bangladeshi origin. Reshma, Bina and Sofie were aware of phys-ical violence targeted against Muslim women. They recounted instances ofwomen being physically attacked and their own efforts to get better securityarrangements around the university where these attacks took place. One of thediscussants had herself been approached by two men with a dog who asked herif she had a ‘bomb in her bag’. They were pushed to act politically, complainingto the university. They were also pulled into political engagement.

This group had had some involvement in government consultation. They hadrecently met with Hazel Blears, a Minister in the Labour government, as part ofthe government’s drive to consult with Muslim communities (BBC News, 2005).They had been interviewed by news media journalists after the consultation. Theyfound this process quite tough, because the media personnel were looking foranswers to very specific questions about the government’s agenda and they didnot know how to answer such questions.

Responding to journalists’ agenda was one problem. Another was the repre-sentative function of the commission. Reshma felt anger towards a Muslimwoman on a government-sponsored commission for failing to represent the




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perspective of Reshma and other Muslim women at ‘grassroots level’. Her palp-able frustration is worth quoting at length:

The government, they listen to people who are leaders, who have higherstatus, who stand out in the community, but they [the leaders] don’tactually represent the community . . . the government, I’m reallyannoyed with them because they don’t actually go out there to findout what’s happening in the grassroots level work doing this commis-sion thing. They said this is the way to go to the grassroots level but stillI see this women’s commission . . . there’s some feminists, women I wasso annoyed [with] . . . some of the comments they were coming outwith, I was like hey, you’re supposed to be representing Muslimwomen here aren’t you? The comments they were coming out withand the ideas about what they should do, and what Muslim womenshould do and I was like hey, you’re actually going beyond the bound-aries of Islam here now and you’re supposed to be, supposed to berepresenting Muslims here. Now the policies the government is goingto make is going to be based on your findings and this is what you’rebasing your arguments on, and this is what you’re saying? And I wasjust like, if you as feminists come to our community and suggestyour ideas . . . you will be kicked out straight away because they willlook at you, look at you, they will see you as women and they willsee you coming up with these western ideas, feminism, this and that,feminism . . . they were extreme, proper extreme and I was like howcan you say you represent me, or how can you say you represent uswhen you don’t actually represent us, and this is what I feel, they’renot, we’re not represented at all . . . I’m just really annoyed with it,really annoyed with all this, and it’s just what can . . . you can’t give up . . .

With a spatial understanding of political community, Reshma adds that thesewomen came from the area originally but ‘once they go’, they become disembeddedexperts—‘feminists’ indeed—who can no longer represent that community’s inter-ests or identity. Indeed, if they returned they ‘will be kicked out straight away’.

This feeling of inadequate representation overlapped with her self-determinationto undertake political work in her community herself. Reshma was carrying out herown governance project, consulting and mediating the interests and opinions ofBangladeshi women more excluded than herself; an alternative or counter-networkto the government-led initiative (Castells, 2009, p. 48), based around an alternativeagenda of opportunity rather than war-on-terror security:

[You must] battle it all the way through this women’s commission andjust generally, just ‘cause I’m doing a project currently on women’s




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opportunities in the community, and Muslim women, Bangladeshiwomen, there’s hardly anything [for them] out there. So I’ve justbeen doing all this research interviewing women who think, thinkthat they actually do not have any choice, can’t do anything, menwho are leaders of these community schemes, they don’t actuallycare, that’s just been, that’s why I’m a bit fumed up, sorry . . .

Such representative work for those less expert or less able to represent themselvesis not new. In Southall in the early 1990s Gillespie found there were always the‘Chust’ (or smart) young people who became expert mediators and culturalbrokers between parents and peers, and across state/public and private/familydomains. This comes out of necessity, part of the self-reliance developed inmigrant families and networks. Reshma feels she is at the ‘grassroots’ level,unlike the ‘feminists’ she criticised earlier. However, she feels she failed to bringthese grassroots perspectives to government, through the Blears consultation;she couldn’t work on the terms expected by national journalists and politicians.

Having voice is not enough, in any case. For many British Muslims, having theopportunity to speak does not equate with a feeling of being listened to. Givingvoice to the voiceless is pointless if the voice goes unheard. Political efficacy—thesense that one’s political actions are followed by a response from leaders orauthorities—is short-circuited. A lack of response may only generate frustrationin the speaker, who may choose exit and disconnection rather than express a voicewithin and loyalty to the national public sphere (cf. Hirschman, 1970).

For instance, gender structures the capacity to speak and be heard. There wasmuch attention on giving voice to Muslim women both at home and in justifica-tions for interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, taking a position inpublic may create difficult trade-offs:

when [Muslimwomen] dowish to speakout against anti-Muslimdiscrim-ination andharassment, theydo sowith the encouragement and support ofMuslim communities, but are too often treated with hostility or indiffer-ence by those outside those communities. On the other hand, if theywish to speak about dysfunctional gender norms within Muslim commu-nities, they have little difficulty in finding an audience among non-Muslims, but their voices are appropriated and woven into anti-Muslimdiscourse, and they risk being labelled as disloyal by some members oftheir own communities. (Hussein, 2008, cited in Dreher, 2009, p. 4)

In her US study, Maira found that some women were invited to be photographedfor magazine covers as, effectively, signifiers of ‘moderate’ or safe Muslims—tobecome ‘a poster child in [a] project of defining Muslim American citizenship’(2009, p. 233). This ‘seemed to rest on a need to prove allegiance and assimilation




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into the nation based on a staging of cultural familiarity and translation of cul-tural unfamiliarity (particularly the “hijab”)’ (ibid). It is the moment governmenthas designated to ‘listen’.

In summary, young women like Reshma chose to operate tactically and prag-matically seeking to effect changes in everyday life. For those seeking to influencenational policy, government and media set the opportunities, timing and terms ofengagement. Muslim women faced the twin forces of exoticisation and vilifica-tion, manifest in the experience of being spat at on the street as well asthrough media treatment. This pushed individuals into reclaiming and remakingcitizenship on their own terms, as Reshma did in her own community. For BritishMuslim males the debates and responses to the media-security nexus often took arather different form.

4. Should we join mainstream parties/media or launch separateparties/media?

A recurring finding was that young people who had been asked to speak to mediafelt ‘burnt’. Reshma’s experience was not isolated. A common complaint was thejournalists had predefined stories and only spoke to those who would fit thatstory, either by representing a particular visual appearance or by putting acrossa point of view the journalist wanted. Following the 7/7 London bombings theethnographer Asad Iqbal spoke to a group of five young men in Oldham—AbuHamza (31), Rahal Khaliq (22), Salman Mather (31), Ahmad (22), AbdusSaboor (24)—all of Bangladeshi origin, who worked together in a voluntary cap-acity in an Islamic organisation. Iqbal reported that they felt that the stigmatisa-tion of Muslims was a deliberate media strategy. One of them gave an example ofhow he felt such stigmatisation had affected the children he was working with as ateacher. They spoke of being afraid and knowing others who were afraid. Theyfound themselves in an extensive form of engagement with the content of the cri-tique of the Muslim community through media whether this was to do withMuslims and terrorism or the clothing of Muslim women. But they also had per-sonal experience of being consulted by journalists. This group of young men hadbeen interviewed numerous times by various media outlets. Their contrastingexperiences with news journalists and documentary makers indicate both theirexpectations and hopes but also their frustrations:4

Iqbal: Have any of you been interviewed by the media?

Abdus: (Laughs) We have.

4Shifting Securities, Strand A, AI1, lines 138–150. See also IA2 lines 151–162, IA4 lines 90–97, AI6

lines 89–103.




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Iqbal: How has that affected your view of them?

Abdus: You see when they the questioning is different when they firstapproach you for the questioning its very very nice, they treat you sowell but it’s only when they turn the camera on they ask you that’s ita dagger through your heart.

Ahmad: These people are very well trained.

Iqbal: So you were saying about documentaries . . .

Abdus: Yeah, we’ve been interviewed by news reporters and also peoplewho come to do documentaries obviously I know the nature is differentbut the way they behave towards you is big different [. . .] The docu-mentaries they’re very relaxed they try to find out about all the differentkind of views that you have but when it comes to news journalists theywill angle it in a way that they wanna corner you and they will get fromyou what they want to hear.

Salman: Once we were interviewed by a particular channel and therewere sisters and brothers amongst us and the questions they wereasking us they were very general, you know, what do you think aboutthis and that, and the questions they were asking sisters [. . .] theywanna hear what they want, you know, something about oppression.They tried cornering the sisters in front of the brothers so they cansay this is what’s happening, it’s very very annoying when they dothat . . .

Journalists were trying to make Muslim women take a public position on genderin their communities, which creates a difficult set of trade offs. Some participantsspoke of complaining to media organisations when journalists ignored moderateMuslims in favour of setting up debates between ‘fiery’ Muslims and secularists.5

Others critiqued the moderate/extremist polarity as being part of the problemand dominant frame of pigeonholing. This exemplifies the intensification of mar-ginalisation and demonisation at times of critical events in the media-securitynexus—the reproduction of cycles of exacerbated racism and paradoxes youngpeople had to work with and untangle while holding on to an ethos of dissentingcitizenship.

Young people also soon learned of the practical difficulties of working withjournalists. The conversation continued:

5Shifting Securities, Strand A, AI6.




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Rahal: Me, Channel Four, they did an interview with us straight after theriots, they spent about twelve hourswith us and theydidn’t even show it, itwas quite frustrating. For twelve hours they followedus aroundand every-thing, do ten shots like walking up the street, it was quite frustrating theywere following us around and they didn’t even show it in themedia.Whatwas the point of that? After that I’m not too keen.

These structural difficulties led participants to consider strategic possibilitiesfor countering misrepresentation and the construction of these categorisationsin the first place. Kit and Kat wanted to educate the mainstream; Jasmineprayed the majority would get to see the truth of Muslim suffering; the youngmen in Northern England Iqbal spoke to trace a direct line between media stig-matisation of Muslims and fear present within Muslim communities. Would it bebetter to operate within the mainstream to change the mainstream, or challengethe mainstream by creating Muslim media or political parties? Nourredine Miladispoke to a group of young Muslim students in London who reflected on thisdilemma. Ahmed Aidarus (24), Rashid (25), Ali Ahwazi (23), Abu Rashid (22),Sami Said (22) and Wahid Rahimdil (24) were a mix of UK and non-UK citizens6

talking about the 5 May 2005 UKGeneral Election. The interview was on 15 May,with Tony Blair re-elected as Prime Minister, to the consternation of thoseopposed to the Iraq War and war on terror policies:

NM: So, for Sami what makes you motivated to take part in the elec-tions? Or expressing your political voice?

SS: Maybe if it is a Muslim country, or party.

SH: Can Muslims launch their own party, can they do that?

AAh: No one will prevent you.

NM: You can do it.

SH: So why [then] Muslims do not unite and establish their ownIslamic party?

AAh: How many Muslims are there any way?

WR: What’s your definition of an Islamic party?

SH: I don’t mean that something according to sharia, but Muslimsgetting together, why not Muslims are coming with a party likeRespect? To have a Muslim candidate?

6Shifting Securities, Strand A, N2 lines 154–176.




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NM: Who can answer this question? Ahmed maybe.

SH: I mean does the law permit such a thing?

AAh: That will be hard.

SH: I mean is it permissible.

AAh: The problem is that Muslims in this country are a minority. Evena majority of Muslims voted for that party, what they are going to get,five seats?

SH: Even one seat.

AAh: You cannot, comparing two million people with 60.

NM: But the voting system in this country is so complex that it is noteasy to win.

SH: Okay, in Bethnal Green Muslims are 40 per cent they can win.

AAh: But how many other constituencies in the country have thatmajority? It’s a good idea but at the end of the day it will not haveeffect on the political structure.

This conversation illustrates young people exploring logics of identity andrepresentation and numbers as they seek avenues for participation in democraticpolitics. The opposition to the Iraq war provided by the Respect Party had shownmany participants that alternative voices could receive public attention withinBritish political culture. The fact that the question arose of whether a Muslimparty would be permitted by law characterises the security context after the7/7 bombings. Indeed, security concerns were an obstacle to creating Muslimmedia. Young people spoke of surveillance and the danger of setting up websites.7

Hence, the security context could either push young people into the mainstreamor disconnect them from the public sphere.

Indeed, the views of some participants on the London bombings or state se-curity policy led them to self-censor and, in some cases, retreat into Muslim-onlyspaces of political and public debate (Gillespie and O’Loughlin, 2009a,b). Suchself-exclusion is one more aspect of fragility in how citizenship was lived andexperienced. That some citizens feel pushed out of the public arena harms plur-alism and diversity in political debate, fragments publics and diminishes capaci-ties for participatory democracy. The experience of poverty and feeling pushedaway from political engagement even led to some young participants living in

7Shifting Securities, Strand A, AI6 lines 90–97.




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London, in the context of the media-security nexus of this period, developingapocalyptic beliefs in which they conflated fears of natural disasters and terroristattacks and spoke of themselves as passive and ready to die in the face of suchglobal forces (Al-Ghabban, 2007). Such divergent responses underscore theimportance of continued engagement and public connection.

5. Conclusions

The Shifting Securities media ethnography makes clear that citizenship is experi-enced through a series of inter-related paradoxes: logics of representative govern-ment versus rolling consultation on policy output and implementation; what thestate should do and is doing; being stigmatised as a security threats while alsofearing further terrorist attacks; and what citizens say to researchers againstwhat they feel and do on a daily basis. There is no doubt that the developmentof young people’s political repertoires in this period was shaped by the media-security nexus. That context included the sense of loss and disappointmentexpressed by older generations as they experienced a more precarious citizenship.Without a ‘home’ country to consider returning to, young people had to consideroptions for engaging UK mainstream politics. Feeling demonised by media andpolitical statements and everyday racism, it was in their interests to engage themainstream and change this situation.

Dissenting citizenship is an expectant citizenship, not a revolutionary citizen-ship. It is also a national citizenship. It is not a call for a new regime altogether.

Dahlgren might argue that a general lack of efficacy in contemporary politics is‘the psychic devastation of late modernity’ (2009: 17), but among young people atleast there remains a desire and assumption that there can and should be a demo-cratic mainstream, despite diasporic relations, transnational media and the disap-pointment of the 2003 Iraq War.

Media are both opportunity and obstacle in these processes. On the one hand,young people gain skills and knowledge through their media engagements,boosting media literacy, seeing themselves positioned as expert ‘citizens-in-the-making’ (Buckingham, 2000: 59). Kit and Kat crafted their news clip toappeal to an imagined national audience, while Jasmine, Hanan and Sara com-pared and contrasted transnational news in order to debate presumed effectson mainstream audiences and how to counter these. On the other hand, partici-pants experienced negative personal experiences with journalists and expressedfrustration at the stereotypes media structure news around. It is these frustrationsthat drove participants to remedy perceived failings of media and political repre-sentation, whether by trying to educate school friends or enter journalism andparty politics. Many older participants in the Shifting Securities study expresseda cynical attitude to news, regarding it as biased and not worth engaging with.




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But the younger sample analysed here still seek a more critical engagement (Buck-ingham, 2000)—they have not given up on news media and actively discussedstrategies for reforming it.

What are the implications of our findings for the study of young people andparticipation generally? Set against the experiences of young people inthe UK, the experiences of young Muslims have commonalities and particular-ities. News media can address young people as tomorrow’s citizens, or‘citizens-in-the-making’, but recent research indicates young people as a categoryare represented in negative ways (Wayne et al., 2010). Young people are most fre-quently in news related to crime or violence, disproportionately to their actualinvolvement. Young people themselves notice this negative representation,leading to cynicism and mistrust towards mainstream news media which, wemight infer, may inform their relation to mainstream politics too (Youth Citizen-ship Commission, 2009). This pattern is intensified in the case of young Muslims,whose identity is already challenged as religion and terrorism are routinely con-nected in the media-security nexus. The difficulty of achieving the requisite com-petencies and repertoires to make oneself heard in media and politicalengagements is also likely to be common to young people but intensified forethnic and religious minority groups who become expert mediators and culturalbrokers between parents and peers, across state/public and private/familydomains and across national/English and international/multilingual media.These skills and experiences suggest young Muslims might show high levels ofpolitical dexterity, patience and understanding as the current generation ofyoung people move into political activities at all levels in the 2010s and 2020s.

The expression of legitimate dissent has only become a more pressing matterfor young people since the Shifting Securities project ended in 2007. In April 2011Patrick Mercer OBE, Conservative MP for Newark and member of the All-PartyParliamentary Group on Transatlantic and International Security, warned thatthe three security threats facing Britain are Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism, violence‘attached’ to student protests and ‘Irish terrorists’ attacking the royal wedding(Mercer, 2011). Drawing an equivalence between students and those engagedin terrorism cannot inspire confidence in young people that a diversity ofviews are welcome in democratic conversation. In addition, the latest versionof Prevent, the UK government’s counter-terrorism strategy, has switched atten-tion from addressing violent extremism to simply extremism. Extremism isunderstood as divergence from ‘mainstream British values’, defined as ‘democ-racy, rule of law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and the rights ofall men and women to live free from persecution of any kind’ (Home Office,2011, p. 34). Prevent calls for greater surveillance of student political activities‘on campuses’ and for staff to offer ‘support’ to those who may be drawn toextremism. Prevent urges the monitoring of potential extremism across all




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sectors. What was mainly a media-security nexus is projected across public andprivate institutions—adding precarity to the everyday lives of those who mayfeel their views stifled.

However, new imaginaries may have emerged too. After the Arab Spring, thefigure of the protestor seeking a national democratic system is a category in dailynews media. Given the importance of transnational media menus to diasporicand increasingly mainstream audiences, young people in Britain may be inspiredto protest for a more democratic system too. On the other hand, the England riotsof summer 2011 offer a more alarming figure—the alienated and even nihilisticyoung person entirely outside of politics.

Acknowledgements

We are also indebted to the ethnographers on the ESRC Shifting Securitiesproject: Ammar Al Ghabban, Habiba Noor, Awa Hassan Ahmed, Asad Iqbal,Akil N. Awan, Noureddine Miladi, Karen Qureshi, Zahbia Yousuf, DavidHerbert, Sadaf Rivzi, Somnath Batabyal, Awa Al Hassan and Olivia Allison.

Funding

The Shifting Securities project was funded by the ESRC as part of the New SecurityChallenges research programme (Award Ref RES-223-25-0063). See http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/my-esrc/Grants/RES-223-25-0063/read. The researchwas based at the Centre of Research on Socio-Cultural Change at The OpenUniversity (www.cresc.ac.uk) and led by Marie Gillespie.

Appendix

Summary of demographic information (total: 239 respondents)

Table 1

Frequency Percentage

GenderMale 100 41.8Female 139 58.2

Age0–17 44 18.418–24 44 18.425–34 58 24.335–44 38 15.9

Continued




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www.cresc.ac.uk

www.cresc.ac.uk

www.cresc.ac.uk

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Table 1 Continued

Frequency Percentage

45–54 27 11.355–64 18 7.565+ 10 2.4

ReligionChristian 36 15.1Muslim 166 69.5Hindu 17 7.1Jewish 2 0.8No religion 11 4.6Unknown 7 2.9

Place of birth if not UKSouth Asia 57 23.8East Asia 2 0.8Middle Easta 17 7.1

aIncludes Afghanistan and Turkey.

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Documents

Dissenting Citizenship? Young People and Political Participation in the Media-security Nexus