Ballots & Bullets

Like every socialist French government of the post-Cold War era, President François Hollande had pledged to set an end to French interference in African affairs, to end “la Françafrique”. As has happened with every socialist French government, it took merely a couple of months to set an end not to Françafrique but to pledges of ending French fumbling around in …

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece that discussed a difficult balance that states and citizens must strike. The balance is between the effectiveness of the implementation of laws, and the acceptability of these laws not just to the law-abiding majority but also to the accused minority.

I discussed this balance in the context of the ‘release’ of …

On a module I convene – Terrorism and Insurgencies – I have been discussing Islamic radicalisation. The timing could not be more apt.  As well as the issues and debates surrounding the use of evidence obtained under torture, the release of Abu Qatada  signifies a fundamental problem that not only the UK but many other liberal democracies face when …

When I first read Edgar Wallace’s The Four Just Men (1905) I thought it was one of the most shocking books I’d ever read.  I mean that literally: the ending left me bewildered.

Wallace was a writer who just churned out stuff on a prodigious scale – mostly low-grade, thrilling page-turners, the sort of fiction that people read but critics …

The recent attacks in Oslo and Utøya by ‘lone wolf’ Anders Behring Breivik have prompted a tidal wave of reaction and analysis in the international press and blogosphere.

Here, Ballots and Bullets gathers together five pieces of essential reading which get to the heart of events:

Our own Matthew Goodwin argues that the attacks are symptomatic of a rise in politically-motivating …

While initially thought to be the work of Islamic fundamentalists, it now appears that the tragic events in Norway are the work of a far-right extremist.

Matthew Goodwin – an expert in the European far-right – provides expert analysis of the motivations of individuals like Anders Behring Breivik, a man widely described as a fundamentalist Christian with political views …