Lawrence Peter Ampofo


Semi-Structured Interviews



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Semi-Structured Interviews

Semi-structured interviews24 were conducted throughout 2009 – 2010 during fieldwork carried out in Spain between May 2010 and January 2011. They complement the internet research by providing contextualisation to the findings. Academics and commercial and public sector subject-matter experts were interviewed. It was decided that semi-structured interviews would provide the interviewer with the flexibility to obtain insight from a range of experts in different areas of expertise. To this end, experts from the Spanish and UK IT industries, UK security services, Spanish and British think tanks and members of the Spanish Government were interviewed.


A more detailed account of the semi-structured interviews, including the collection of questions posed, is included in Appendix Two. In addition, a list of the interviewees can also be found in Appendix One.


Conclusion

Effective, ethical and well-designed internet research that systematically analyses understandings of the relationships between the internet, terrorism and counter-terrorism in Spain requires a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Network analyses such as social and dynamic network analysis can be useful for providing insights into the structure of terrorist organisations and how information flows within such networks. In the midst of these quantitative advances, qualitative measures, such as survey research, continue to provide valuable understanding into audience understandings and opinions.


The increasing adoption of internet research methodologies is dovetailed by the ongoing development of computer processing power and specialist analysis tools, making the analysis of large data sets possible in a way that would not previously have been possible. To this end, political scientists are experimenting with new theories such as Bayesian econometrics and Monte Carlo modelling as ways of analysing complex adaptive systems.
These methodologies are gaining in popularity as a result of the increasingly vigorous debate amongst academics that research methods in political science need to be updated and made more robust to accommodate the new challenges it faces. Commenting on the possible new insights to be found in a robust analysis of Web data, King et al. argued ‘instead of studying the effects of context and interactions among people by asking respondents to recall their frequency and nature of social contacts, we now have the ability to obtain a continuous record of all phone calls, emails, text messages, and in-person contacts among a much larger group. In place of dubious or nonexistent [sic] governmental statistics to study economic development or population spread in Africa, we can use satellite pictures of human-generated light at night or networks of roads and other infrastructure measured from space during the day. The number, extent, and variety of questions we can address are considerable and increasing fast’ (King, G., Lehman Schlozman, K., & Nie, N.H., 2009: 93).
In light of these challenges, this thesis seeks to study the context and interactions in Spain of citizens, media, government and terrorist groups through mixed methodologies that capture naturally occurring communication data that allows for the tracing of changing patterns of communication. These patterns will be analysed to construct explanations of key shifts in the years 2004 to 2010. This is done through an examination of four themes, immigration to Spain, narratives during and after the 11-M, cybercrime in Spain and communities in Spain, which constitute the following chapters.
Ultimately, it is imperative that the advantages and disadvantages of internet research methodologies when conducting an analysis of a terrorism data set are understood. A mixed methods approach will encourage researchers to interrogate data in ways that have seldom been conducted and make greater inroads into understanding contemporary terrorism. A unified approach combining both data with theory and qualitative with quantitative methods will yield the most insightful conclusions.

Chapter Four: Immigration, Technology, Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Spain




Introduction

Understandings of immigration, technology, terrorism and counter-terrorism in Spain are emotive and involve many actors. Using the theoretical framework of commensuration as a social process is an analytically useful way of understanding such complexities.


This chapter has two aims. First, it sets out key developments in Spanish immigration policy since the 1990s, analysing their relation to terrorism and security policies. A tension emerges between technology-led and political/diplomatic approaches to immigration, terrorism and security. Second, it presents analysis of internet research of social media content from 2004 to 2010 based on the mixed methodology introduced in Chapter Three in order to illuminate understandings of these phenomena.
Previous chapters have explored the complex nature of technological development and terrorism in Spain. Chapter Three, in particular, outlined ways in which such complexity could be systematically analysed using a combination of traditional and internet research methodologies in addition to semi-structured interviews with subject matter experts. This chapter investigates immigration as one of the issues that emerged through the research processes and how these topics relate to understandings of technology, terrorism and counter-terrorism in Spain. As in subsequent chapters, internet research has been carried out into the 11 March 2004 bombings in Madrid and discussions and attitudes towards the event to gain insight into the issue of immigration in relation to this event and how it has changed over time (2004-2010).
This chapter, therefore, focuses on the nature of the relationships between the three independent variables – immigration, terrorism and counter-terrorism - arguing that it is analytically adroit to consider understandings of these relationships within the theoretical framework of commensuration as a social process. The utility of commensuration as a theoretical framework emerges as the result of a range of factors, one of which is the securitisation of the discourse pertaining to immigration and, secondly, the notion that Spain is becoming, as argued by Ulrich Beck, a risk society (1999).
Other elements support the notion that commensuration is a useful theoretical framework in which to conceptualise understandings of technology, immigration, terrorism and counter-terrorism. Notions of commensuration and securitisation of discourse relating to immigration, terrorism and counter-terrorism will be outlined in a systematic analysis of online discourse and behaviour. The research processes, therefore, attempt to highlight the complexity inherent within conceptualisations of the relationships between immigration, technology, terrorism and counter-terrorism amongst online users in Spain.
The issue of immigration in relation to technology, terrorism and counter-terrorism became a central area of analysis in Spain following the high volume of mainstream media attention paid to the topic in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Madrid on 11 March 2004. The terrorist attacks, as will be analysed in greater detail in Chapter Five, were, according to Elena Sánchez25, the driving factor linking terrorism, counter-terrorism, technology and immigration.
Understandings of immigration, technology, terrorism and counter-terrorism in Spain are complex and highly emotive. Increases in the numbers of immigrants entering the country, coupled with attacks by al-Qaeda-inspired groups in the Madrid bombings of 2004, have been interpreted by Government policymakers as signalling the need to enhance the security of immigration flows as a method of mitigating terrorist threats (Cesari, 2009).
This chapter will examine immigration flows into Spain and, subsequently, the official response to the ways in which such flows affect incidents of terrorism. In particular, this chapter will outline the ways in which the Government has conflated the issue of immigration and terrorism in the region. The conflation of these independent variables is a strong example of commensuration that, it will be argued, has been implemented with the intention of maintaining the existence of the state over and above that of the strategic objectives of non-state actors. This theoretical framework is useful in understanding the prevalence of related discussions during the research processes. In addition, it will be shown in the internet research within this chapter that commensuration is helpful in explaining the nature of the behaviour of online communities when engaging with other actors concerning the issues of immigration and terrorism / counter-terrorism in Spain.
Furthermore, this chapter will investigate the securitisation of official responses to immigration following terrorist attacks on Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. This is evidenced most starkly in the deployment of socio-technological solutions as a means for policing both immigration and terrorism in Spain. This chapter will conclude, therefore, that technological solutions to counter-terrorism and immigration reduce the complexity of understandings of immigration, technology, terrorism and counter-terrorism to numerical dimensions and might, as a consequence, contribute to the creation of a wider surveillance society.
In spite of the importance of the role played by commensuration in forging understandings of the relationships between immigration, technology and terrorism, it is clear that this issue plays a central role in the formulation of the theoretical frameworks by both Barnett (2005) and Bobbitt (2008), analysed in detail in Chapter Two. These conceptual frameworks are useful in helping to explain some of the Government’s actions in this chapter and help to formulate suggestions for future Government actions.
In his thesis entitled the Pentagon’s New Map, Barnett’s (2005) central hypothesis emphasised the notion that immigration, technology and terrorism are indelibly linked, therefore offering scholarly legitimation to the conflation or commensuration of the three phenomena, within a securitisation rationale. The element of his thesis, which pertains most strongly to the scope of this chapter, is the assertion that acts of terrorism and political violence are more likely to be caused by groups emanating from countries outside the Functioning Core of states than by those within the non-Integrating Gap26. Attacks from these groups, he claimed, as well as other macro or system-level threats, would manifest themselves as a result of the flows enabled by globalisation such as the free movement of capital, ideas and, most importantly, people. Barnett hypothesised that international migratory flows were one of the main enablers of international terrorism if left unchecked. He argued such threats could be averted if those states in the Functioning Core actively integrated those countries, which remain part of the non-Integrating Gap (Barnett, 2005).
The active assimilation, or connection, of countries and their peoples into the Functioning Core is, according to Barnett, a security imperative as a means of lowering the threat of international terrorism. Similarly, the US scholar Philip Bobbitt outlined in his thesis, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century that nation states are changing into market states.27 To this end, as states become more organised in a structure that resembles ‘VISA or MasterCard organisation charts than they do the centralized, hierarchical structures of nation state governmental organizations, including nation state terrorist groups (or, for that matter, the twentieth century corporate business structures of the nation state)’, the nature of the threats facing that particular state become simultaneously networked and cellular in nature. Bobbitt argued that international terrorism was a direct response to globalisation and, in a similar vein to the argument enunciated by Barnett, that international flows that characterise globalisation, such as immigration, are critical in shaping this new threat. He put it that;
‘Terrorism appeared as part of the underside of globalisation. It was already becoming apparent that the consequence of the openness in the international system, economically, as much as politically, was taking certain things out of control. The resulting globalisation was the reduced power of control. The result of globalisation was the reduced power of states, the movement of capital and people around the world as governments opened up their borders. This created new opportunities for those who wished to inflict harm on the established order’ (Bobbitt, 2008: 62).
Similarly, the terrorism scholar Audrey Curth Cronin argued that the growth of globalisation was facilitating the emergence of new threats that states had to confront in a different way, ‘[t]he current wave of international terrorism, characterized by unpredictable and unprecedented threats from nonstate [sic] actors, not only is a reaction to globalization but is facilitated by it…The increasing threat of globalized terrorism must be met with flexible, multifaceted responses that deliberately and effectively exploit avenues of globalization in return’ (Cronin, 2005: 6). Indeed, one of the ways in which Spain has actively developed its counter-terrorism strategy and adapted to the threats posed by international terrorism and market states of terror is by implementing public diplomacy strategies. In this way, it appears as if the Zapatero Government has heeded the advice from Cronin by implementing a ‘flexible, multifaceted response that…exploit[s] avenues of globalization’ (Cronin, 2005), through the creation of multilateral agreements with Morocco and the United Nations. Although the nature of these strategies is discussed in Chapter Two, recommendations for enhancing digital public diplomacy emerge from the findings of the empirical research. However, this chapter addresses Spain’s immigration policies and what they indicate about understandings of immigration’s relation to counter-terrorism.



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