 I hear as the ending on a high for this term. My name is Dr. Amanda Chisholm. I'm a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies and I teach in research on gender and global security. I'm also the organizer of this weekly lunchtime seminar series and so very pleased to get the opportunity to showcase the amazing work our PhD and early career researchers are doing across the school and learning much more about the vibrant research and perspectives of thinking about global security most broadly. So today we have our presenter is Sophia Patel. She's a doctoral candidate at King's College London in the Department of War Studies. Her research focuses on gender and counterterrorism with a particular focus on UK's counterterrorism infrastructure. Prior to embarking upon a tutorial studies, Sophia worked as a counterterrorism analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra. Additionally, Sophia has worked in national security research with UK-based think tanks, Roussi, and Human Security at Connecticut. Sophia holds a BA from the University of Manchester in Arabic and Spanish and an MA from SOAS, University of London in Middle Eastern politics. Today she'll be presenting some of her doctoral work presenting title called Gendering Counterterrorism Institutions. Counterterrorism Discourses are constructed by actors and political institutions using words and symbols formally and informally. In this talk, Sophia Patel traces the construction of these discourses and practices by analyzing how the language and practice of counterterrorism is constructed through gendered securitization discourses. She argues that power relations are at the heart of institutions of counterterrorism, which are underpinned by norms and conventions on the one hand and regularize patterns of interaction between actors on the other. She uses the theoretical agendas and methods of new institutionalism, feminist institutionalism, and feminist security studies to create a framework through which she examines gender counterterrorism institutions. Overall, Sophia maps out the infrastructure of counterterrorism institutions in the UK to empirically trace the evolution of women as actors and targets within discourses and practices of British counterterrorism. So Ms. Patel is joined by Dr. Hannah Cattola who will act as her discussant. Dr. Cattola is a postdoc fellow in Worcester's department at King's College London, and she's held prestigious grants prior to this current position. Her research is at the intersection of feminist theory, political agency, gender, war, and peace building. Hannah has regional expertise in Nepal where she conducted extensive fieldwork focusing on experiences of women ex fighters and women activists mobilizing in the postwar context. Her research has had international recognition and has been published in security dialogue and international political sociology. So welcome both and welcome the audience. And I think some of you probably already heard, but how we're going to structure this presentation is Sophia has agreed to talk, share slides and talk for about 25 minutes for which then Hannah will discuss Sophia's presentation and brought our paper and thinking around this. And then we open up questions to you, the audience. So you can either ask the questions in the chat box or you can I think you can raise your hand or unmute yourself. Maybe just ask do questions actually in the Q&A box that that's the best. And if you want to ask it live, just put live and your question and then I can unmute you to ask live. I think that's how it works in webinars. I've been to we'll get through this together. It'll be great. So without further ado, Sophia, I'm going to hand the floor over to you. I'm sure you can figure out how to share your screen for your slides. And I will sit back and listen to your brilliance. Thanks very much, Amanda. Thank you for the intro. Hopefully you can hear me. Cool. Yeah, there's a lot of tongue twisting as you figured out with the abstract with lots of institutionalism and feminism and all this kind of thing. So hopefully I'll be able to do that seamlessly. Let me just share the screen. Here we go. Okay, can you see that? Yep. How do I slide? Oh, hold on. All right. Is that okay? Can you give me a thumbs up if it's okay? Yeah, great. Okay, great. Thank you. Right. Well, so thank you. Yeah. So as Amanda has said, my talk today forms part of my wider PhD research, which focuses on how and why and in what ways women are integrated within discourses and practices of counterterrorism in the UK. I'm going to talk about 25 minutes. And I'll touch on some things probably, I'll not explain them in as much depth as I would like to because of the time restrictions. But if I do mention something which you'd like me to explain further or to discuss later, then let me know as it's probably covered in the wider aspect of the chapter and the research. But yeah, basically just as a point of introduction about the PhD. So I'm in my third year and I've conducted a bunch of documentary and textual based research and I'm about to start doing the field work which was put on hold from this year obviously because of COVID related things. But my interest was motivated really by the actions of the 145 British women who left their home to join Islamic State, which forced the British government to recognise the complex and varied roles played by women in terrorist groups. The much publicised case of Shumi Mubagam who in 2019 sought to return to the UK, raised a series of security, legal and humanitarian questions surrounding UK counterterrorism policy, and in particular how it relates to female terrorist actors. So the objective of this research is to create an original and replicable framework through which I can map and theorise how and in what ways gender is understood, practiced and omitted within discourses and practices of counterterrorism in Britain. As I will discuss in due course my framework examines different institutional sites where counterterrorism discourses and practices are produced and practiced by different actors and organisations. I'm specifically looking at what factors have influenced how women have been integrated into counterterrorism institutional arrangements as agents and targets of policy and practice in Britain and how and whether these have evolved and in what ways. I focus on both agents and targets as I'm not only interested in how the state integrates women within counterterrorism discourses and practices, but I'm also interested in examining how women are affected by the counterterrorism practices and whether or not this response has been shifted by the experience of Islamic State. So the paper that I'm presenting will attempt to cover the following. I will first provide a brief overview of the gaps in the literature that I'm situating the research within. So this comprises feminist security studies, critical terrorism studies and feminist institutionalism. Second, I will engage in a discussion about gender and securitisation in the context of creating the language and practice of counterterrorism. Third, I will explain how the gender discourses and practices of counterterrorism become institutionalised and how they are sustained and how they evolve using feminist institutionist frameworks. And finally, if I have time, I'll outline the analytical framework and then briefly provide some preliminary findings from a pilot study I conducted of the UK's former Department of International Development as a case study for the empirical application of my framework. So although not a homogenous group, feminist scholars argue that society and actors within society as well as the institutions that we engage with are all gendered. This means that we accept that invisible norms based on ideals and the standards of masculinity and femininity are attributed to men and women and mapped onto their sex which prescribes and proscribes behaviours and characteristics as well as opportunities and restrictions for men and women. The way that counterterrorism has been constructed discursively and practiced operationally is not above this gendering of civil society. One of the most interesting and under-research challenges currently facing those responsible for designing and implementing counterterrorism policy and practice is how to integrate the female experiences of terrorism and counterterrorism without essentializing women or contributing to the reproduction of stereotypes about women in count in terrorism. Different bodies of feminist research have moved to the conversations about women and political violence forward over the past few decades and but there are still many gaps both within feminist security scholarship as well as within terrorism studies scholarship with regard to female experiences of political violence and terrorism. This research hopes to address some of these gaps. So firstly, feminist security scholars who have a deep knowledge and understanding of gendered political processes have often been reluctant to wade into questions related to terrorism and counterterrorism which has meant that policy responses have not adequately understood the gender dimensions of terrorism which has negatively impacted the men and women involved in counterterrorism responses in different ways. Second, studies that have examined women and terrorism have not always taken a feminist approach which has led to the add women and stir mentality which again doesn't adequately understand the gender dimensions involved in female experiences of terrorism and political violence. Third, there is very little literature that focuses on the gender dynamics of security institutions and the ways in which they impact and influence counterterrorism policy and practice. So although feminist security studies literature comprehensively examines gendered security issues and has engaged with questions of counterterrorism, this research has largely engaged with the negative effects of counterterrorism policy on women in conflict environments. Furthermore, feminist security studies literature has not engaged with feminist institutionless tools and methods in terms of how to interrogate how security institutions deal with gender in their approach to creating and impacting counterterrorism. Feminist institutions on the other hand have not really engaged with security questions and have concentrated gendered issues within political processes such as electoral registers, party politics and gender quotas. So Frank Foley's influential 2013 study on counterterrorism in Britain and France is the only study I've actually come across which examines state counterterrorism infrastructure through an institutionless lens but gender is not addressed in this study. On the other hand, Joanna Cook's comprehensive 2019 study on women in US counterterrorism does a superb job of tracing the evolution of women within discourses and practices of state architecture of counterterrorism but doesn't apply a feminist institutionist framework to the analysis. So there exists enough research already in the fields of feminist security studies, critical terrorism studies and feminist institutionism from which I can build a workable framework to be able to analyze the gender dimensions of counterterrorism using a feminist institutionist approach. So I situate my project at the intersection of these three literatures. So now I move to a discussion about gender and securitization. So the process of securitization is a way of constructing the threat discursively. Securitization theory explains how and why a certain social topic or issue obtains a status as a security issue. It refers to the process whereby elite actors designate issues as security threats or existential threats. This process moves the issue out of the normal political sphere and into the security sphere. Labeling something a security issue affects policy for threats to be considered valid security issues they have to meet clear criteria differentiating them from the political they have to be staged as existential threats. This process justifies adopting extraordinary measures that go beyond normal rules and procedures and lie outside the generally accepted framework of democratic governance. The whole premise of securitization discourse selectively includes and excludes certain actors on the basis of who the securitizing actors are and what their criteria for considering an issue a security matter includes. Much in the same way that counterterrorism language and practice comprises of reality making effect, securitizing the threat has nothing really to do with the reality of the threat but rather the use of discourse to define it as such and therefore is a political choice. Ole Wever who coined the process of securitization suggests that the designation of an issue as a security issue is obtained by the deployment of a speech act. This is defined as naming a certain development a security problem. This idea strongly situates the conceptualization of security or insecurity within within language. However, Wever's approach of defining securitization as a speech act automatically ignores the many instances where nonverbal communication can be just as effective in highlighting and documenting instances of security and or insecurity. Lena Hansen and Claudia Aradou observe this as a major conceptual gap in Wever's securitization framework and highlight that this demonstrates a clear lack of awareness of the gendered nature of security. Very often women are among those who are disproportionately negatively impacted when speaking out and if they do their security is compromised at the individual and collective levels. Both Aradou and Hansen suggest that the failure to engage with women's experiences of security and insecurity demonstrates a conceptual flaw whereby security requirements at the institutional level leave out gender in considerations of security. That's also how security is actually practiced. The process of securitization at the hands of elite actors therefore entirely lacks a consideration of gender which has clear material consequences for responding to security threats. Very often women are not considered in questions of security or insecurity and thus their requirements of security or experiences with insecurity are neglected or misunderstood in policies and practices that are implemented in the name of security. So, Fenula Nealane's research on gendered counterterrorism measures in Northern Ireland explicitly highlights how a lack of gender awareness in British counterterrorism policymaking had a hugely differential different impacts on women and men in practice. Similarly, in post 9-11 Britain the gender defects of counterterrorism laws and policies have impacted British Muslim men and women in different yet comparable ways. British Pakistani men are rarely depicted as contributing positively to society and commonly classified as high risk associated with terrorism, urban unrest and street crime. The media have profiled Muslim men as being disaffected, angry, controlling and violent and Muslim women are portrayed as weak and submissive as backward and non-integrationist. Their clothing is securitized and discussed in relation to security issues on the one hand and is presented as hostile to British culture on the other hand. Furthermore, there has been a distortion and conflation between cultural issues and security risks in which Muslim men and women have become enmeshed in discourses that conflate Islam with practices of female genital mutilation, forced marriage, honour killings, violent husbands and linking these factors to counter terrorism and countering violent extremism. Furthermore, gendered constructions of security threats are often inconsistent and appear contradictory in the deployment of counter terrorism policies demonstrating how complex and multi-layered the securitization process is. In the case of Muslim women, they have simultaneously been constructed as victims and threats almost in paradox by securitization in discourses. For example, on the one hand gendered discourses about women and non-violence has meant that security services tend to see women as less of a security threat. The Times quoted an unnamed security official in 2018 stating, I quote, the vast majority of those returning to Britain from Syria are women and children. The more concerning cases, particularly the men, have not been returning. End quote. This exemplifies the perception amongst security officials that women pose less of a threat than their male counterparts. Commander Richard Walton of the Metropolitan Police further fueled the narrative of vulnerability of female recruits to ISIS commenting on the Bethanel Green Girls' departure in 2015 that they would be extremely vulnerable. On the one hand, on the other hand, sorry, blood security policies such as criticism stripping has been applied to various members of ISIS, including one of the members of the Bethanel Green Girls, as we know, Shimima Begum. This practice, aside from being controversial with regards to human rights conventions, suggests that the state has changed their approach towards women of ISIS and now consider this individual to be highly dangerous and a security threat to the nation. So, Laura Sherberg and Karen Gentry have highlighted this inconsistency in gendered government discourse towards female members of ISIS. They say, if women who join ISIS really are as governments and media outlets alike frame them helpless and manipulated, then they would not be criminals. If the women who join ISIS really are as governments and media outlets alike have begun to frame those who would like to return criminals, then they would not be helpless and manipulated. These examples exemplify how inconsistent security discourses which are rooted in gendered assumptions about women's motivations and recruitment into terrorist organizations has led to equally gendered counterterrorism policies. My research hopes to examine how and in what ways counterterrorism policies are gendered and the effects of this gendering on the institution's response to the terrorist threat. So, if security discourses and the securitization process is so inconsistent and often contradictory, then how is it sustained and how does it maintain legitimacy? Richard Jackson states, a discourse can be considered successful when its words, language assumptions and viewpoints are adopted and employed uncritically in political discourse by opposition politicians for media, social institutions like churches, schools or universities and ordinary citizens. Further, Jackson points to the extent to which language concepts, assumptions and privileged knowledge of the discourse becomes institutionalized and normalized in the operation and practices of institutions. Thus, the role of institutions becomes notable to consider in the creation, dissemination and implementation of discourses and practices. I argue that we need to examine the institutional dynamics of security in order to explain how counterterrorism discourses and practices are created and how they are sustained and how they evolve. So, taking a feminist approach to my examination of institutions, feminist institutionist scholars argue that all institutions like the actors who operate within them are gendered. Their approach to understanding institutions to write from the new institutionist tradition, which understands institutions as being the rules of the game, the rules, norms and practices that structure political, social and economic life. Institutions, therefore, are broad and dynamic. They are interactive and mutually constitutive character of the relationship between institutions and individual actions and actors as emphasized. So, akin to their new institutionalist bedfellows, feminist institutionalists seek to interrogate the invisible or unwritten rules and norms which underwrite the formalized written institutional arrangements. Thus, they value going beyond examining just the formal institutional arrangements and seek to uncover the informal. Specifically, those feminist institutionists foreground gender in all aspects of their analysis and the interrogation of the formal and the informal. Feminist institutionalist scholarship has amalgamated particular new institutionist approaches to help explain and examine institutional evolution. In particular, discursive institutionist approaches of ideational processes and historical institutionist approaches of critical junctures and path dependence are of note. Vivian Schmidt uses the discursive institutionist approach of ideational processes to argue that institutions are internal to the actors serving both as structures that constrain actors and as constructs created and changed by those actors. Action in institutions is the process in which agents create and maintain institutions by using their background ideational abilities. This suggests that norms or conventions particular to a certain institutional setting inform and are informed by the actor's conscience to the extent that institutional change is dependent on the actor's ability to somewhat change position themselves. To a lesser degree but also useful is the historical institutionist principles of path dependence and critical junctures which are used to explain institutional evolution. In the context of UK counter-terrorism over the past 20 years we could point to 9-11, 7-7, Islamic States caliphate, Joe Cox's killing, the London Manchester bombings in 2017 as different kinds of critical junctures which have shifted the goalposts of counter-terrorism norms in different ways. So critical junctures and path dependence rely on a relatively linear or causative approach to expanding institutional evolution whereas discursive institutionalists offer a more dynamic exploration of institutional change whereby evolution is explainable across time through agents' ideas and discourses rather than largely static based because of path dependent structures and unexplainable critical moments. Thus a discursive approach to analysing institutional change allows the researcher not only to interrogate the critical juncture that caused the moment of change rather is able to uncover the how and the why that the particular moment of change occurred and as and when it did through the interrogation of the ideas and discourses that lend insight into how the historically transmitted path dependent structures are reconstructed. This idea is very useful for feminists attempting to locate and examine how gender regimes impact institutional dynamics and evolution. So how then do we locate gender within institutions? I suggest that we need to refocus on the informal institutional rules to interrogate the idea of norms through a feminist lens. Informal institutional rules are rooted in cultural practices and norms which are habitual patterns of behaviour that actors perform ritually and without questioning. Norms are social facts that are constructed through language and practice. Norms are the less visible unwritten institutionalised practices that exist in an institution and which have evolved over time. Gender is an example of a socially constructed norm which has been normalised and institutionalised in institutions and their discursive practices. Norms function at two levels, at the institutional level in the activities, practices, rules and behaviours of actors in an institutional setting and at the individual level where the actor is shaped by their experience within wider society and the effects of these are subsequently mapped onto the institutional setting through the actors interactions and practices. Institutional norms are therefore different from personal habits but personal habits of actors operating within specific institutional arenas may impact how institutions do evolve. This is because actors especially those in positions of power and influence within institutions are intrinsically linked to the institutions within which they are operating and are responsible for creating or limiting change. Norms can also be described as the institutional conventions or in a distinctly Foucaultian sense disciplines. Foucault writes the discourse of disciplines is about a rule not a juridical rule derived from sovereignty but a discourse about a natural rule or in other words a norm. Disciplines will not define a code of law but a code of normalisation. Norms therefore are relational and are rooted in concepts of identity of self and other which are themselves constructed through binaries that require one term's point of reference and meaning to be acquired from its opposite. Norms come to have meaning therefore in the presence of what is not the norm or what has not been normalized. In other words the norm establishes what is normal. I argue that norms and conventions are rooted in language or discourses. Tracing the relationship between norms and rules formal and informal can help us develop an understanding of how norms contribute to institutional evolution and change or lack thereof. Even though formal rules can be modified through the drafting of a new piece of policy or legislation and the signing of a piece of paper, norms tend to endure even long after formalized changes have been made and sometimes result in very limited types of institutional evolution. To touch on Mary Hawksworth research on female African American representation within US Congress, Hawksworth concludes that despite the existence of formal front facing legislative egalitarianism there remains widespread inequalities among representation and discrimination of women and racial minorities within Congress. Thus despite being formally enshrined in legislation and policy Hawksworth highlights how certain informal norms and rules about African American women in Congress persist which prohibit their advancement within this institutional setting. Hawksworth's research highlights the importance of examining both formal and informal norms and rules as well as the ways in which gender and racial norms intersect and permeate through institutional settings. Norms therefore are not are just as if not more effective in producing and reproducing gendered practices in an institutional context because they are hidden and therefore harder to see and harder to change. In an important contribution to feminist institutions literature, Louise Chappell and Georgia Whalen argue that gender operates in institutions in substantive and nominal ways. Nominal gender practices often refer to male dominance over women in an institutional setting for example in relation to numerical representation of women to men or in terms of female positions of power versus their male counterparts. Substantive gender practices function at a deeper level insofar as even if women reach parity with men in all political legal and bureaucratic positions there is no guarantee that the institution will operate differently. The institutional gender regime does not get disrupted because men's bodies have been replaced by women's rather this gender bias is governed by social norms and conventions that have become institutionalized in particular institutional settings over time in which are associated with preconceived notions, attributes and characteristics of femininity and masculinity. In institutional settings as in wider society agendaed logic exists which associates different traits and practices with femininity and masculinity this logic proscribed as well as proscribed acceptable masculine and feminine forms of behavior rules values for men and women within institutions. So far I've attempted to explain and outline the theoretical basis for my analytical framework. I now briefly turn to the framework itself which is based on Lena Hansen's intertextual approach for carrying out critical discourse analysis. The intertextuality of the framework draws analysis from the varied institutions, actors and discourses that exist in a wider milieu of counterterrorism in the UK. UK counterterrorism is an institution in and of itself but comprises different institutions and actors which function independently and within the broader milieu of counterterrorism discourses. The various government departments, agencies and organizations each have their own particular institutional dynamics while simultaneously function according to the rules norms and practices of the broad aims and objectives of UK counterterrorism. This means there are different discursive layers and institutional sites at which counterterrorism discourses and practices are sustained and where they evolve which needs to be unpicked. Therefore I shall examine the discourses and practices of counterterrorism at multiple levels at different institutional sites and at different times over the last 20 years based on specific security related events that have occurred in Britain and which have had an impact on the evolution of UK counterterrorism policy and practice. A variety of textual material is produced at each institutional site which includes ministerial speeches and statements, executive government departmental and agency documents, training manuals, guidance and strategies, non-governmental texts, documents and statements and other forms of discursive materials such as media, public commentary and public reviews. So I applied this framework that I've just shown you on the slide to a pilot study of the former department for international development and I asked the question how and in what ways has the war on terror impacted the UK's development and aid policy agenda and institutional analysis of DFID 1997 to 2020. I'll quickly try and go through the preliminary findings that I found but these are as I say preliminary as I haven't actually completed the entire research for this chapter yet. So first DFID presented very little formal institutional evolution in terms of gender perspectives of overseas development work. So despite some movement to construct women in different ways in relation to development, the majority of the documents and policies regarding women focused on the same 10 issues rooted in gender inequality, women's empowerment and women's limited access to civil society. The most recent national action plan on women, peace and security was the first formal document which referenced women in relation to perpetrating political violence and terrorism. But informally however DFID had funded and published a number of research papers which interrogated women's involvement in terrorism and violent extremism and the gendered motivations of political violence. So these findings however were not integrated in official policy documents or strategies. Second DFID's institutional direction was linked heavily to the minister in the role of secretary of state for international development. In keeping with the discursive institutionist understanding of institutional evolution, the department's scope for the gender agenda was strongly related to the individual at the top and their engagement with gender related concerns. So Hilary Benziers indicated that doing damage control and Britain's involvement in post reconstruction efforts in Iraq was prioritized as during this time there's very little gender related movement institutionally. Even the UNSCR 1325 had been passed four years previously. Under Claire Short, Justine Greening and Penny Mordent, gender related development issues were firmly prioritized. These ministers were highly engaged with gender issues which led to prioritizing the development and evolution of gender policies and gender strategies. So the most comprehensively developed national action plans, the strategy to end violence against women and girls and the strategic division for gender equality were published under Justine Greening and Penny Mordent respectively. I am reluctant however to conclude that women holding the role of secretary of state for international development resulted in a more thorough engagement and prioritizing of gender related development issues because three former female holders of that position also made very little movement in terms of advancing the gender development agenda. Third, after 9-11, the links between development and security agendas started to become emphasized in ways they had not previously been and development became securitized as part of the broader aims and objectives of the UK's counter-terrorism strategy. The securitization of development drew links between poverty and insecurity and the drivers of recruitment towards violent extremism. Overseas insecurity and instability now had a direct impact on the UK's security and stability. Without properly interrogating the gendered dimensions of political grievances and potential mobilization towards violent extremism, gender related development issues such as female empowerment and women's equality were seen to be stabilizing factors and were held up as bastions against extremism. The instrumentalization of women's rights in this way to achieve security objectives formed the basis for much development policy until the implementation of national action plans which formed the basis for a more comprehensive yet still quite limited and outward facing understanding of women in relation to security issues. So the fourth observation is that gender is very much linked to women and men and boys are not really considered in gender-related matters within DFID. There has been some progress to evolve this position during the last five years and documents such as the national action plan and the strategy papers on gender have discussed gender in relation to men and boys as well as women and girls. However, these discussions only examine gender as a variable rather than as a process and by this I refer to the ways that women are compared to men in relation to certain advantages or disadvantages like adolescent girls being three times more likely than boys to be living with HIV or girls being more likely to be victims of child abuse than boys. So these statistics explain what the gendered issues look like but they do not interrogate how or why these gendered issues persist or how they affect men and women differently. For example, men and women may require different types of support even if they experience the same type of trauma and that this type of support may not be the same. The types of interventions and programs implemented to help women living with HIV may not be the same as those required to help men. From a security perspective, interventions to stop men being recruited to join violent groups are likely to be different to those for women and the ways that women and men are engaged in prevention work also need to account for the specific varied and complex security requirements. Furthermore, understanding the security and insecurity requirements for men and women personally and collectively requires a highly nuanced interrogation of local gendered security, socio-cultural and political issues which determine what security means for men and women and why. The formal strategic documents do not appear to present this level of nuance or detail but perhaps these factors are tackled in country-level programmatic documents which are not publicly available. So this speaks to some of the limitations of the research and I was not fully able to grasp the extent of Diffords engagement with gender development issues or the nature of the training on the ground of the practitioners due to lack of information. I would have been able to glean more detail had I been able to carry out some in-person interviews but I've not managed to do that as yet and that's something I hope to do as a second part of this research moving forward. But the lack of in-person interviews also meant that I have a limited understanding of Diffords institutional culture and the institutional norms that underpin the creation and implementation of policies. Furthermore, I was not able to properly interrogate the level of inter-institutional cooperation and tension particularly between Difford, the foreign office and the Ministry of Defense. Given the very close operational relationship between these departments and historical tensions regarding funding as well as the securitisation of the development agenda in the years following 9-11, it would be valuable to conduct these interviews and I hope to do that at a later stage. In order to deepen my analysis and to draw more comprehensive conclusions about the department as a whole, I do need to be able to carry out these interviews which will unlock the links between the actors operating within Difford at the organisational level of the institution and how Difford operates in relation to the broader counter-terrorism institutional agenda at the government level. So I think I'll leave it there. I was going to propose a series of questions but maybe we can discuss that in the second part of this. But yeah, thank you. I'll hand over to Hannah now. Sorry, you should stop this shared, okay, thank you so much Sophia for such an exciting presentation. It was such a privilege to read your paper and as all good papers it prompted so many questions and so many interesting resonances to my own research but I will not speak too long so that there is also time for more broader conversation. But I also wanted to say a little bit about the kind of angle that I'm taking here because my specific expertise is not in the field of counter-terrorism but more in the field of sort of broader feminist security studies and feminist theory. But I hope that this feedback will be helpful in terms of raising some perhaps broader questions regarding your conceptual framework as well as methodology. So that's how I'm going about this. And I've organized my comments and questions in four sections so I thought I'd say a little bit first about the very exciting contribution of this paper and then move on to conceptual framework and then third I will talk about scope and methodology and then I had few questions regarding the specific case study that you discussed. So yeah first I thought that this specific paper is very clearly framed and I think your contribution specifically to feminist security studies and feminist institutionalist research is very interesting in terms of how you argue that you advance both by offering a new theoretical understanding of how the gender dynamics of security institutions affect directly policies and practices created and implemented as a response to security threats. But I think that the dimension of your argument that I found particularly fascinating is the one where you engage with institutions and norms. And I think specifically your examination of how gendered and racialized norms are sustained, evolve and permeate security institutions in this case the UK institutions of counterterrorism. But I think that because of this focus your wider project actually has huge potential to make a crucial contribution not only specifically to critical understanding understandings of counterterrorism or feminist security studies but more broadly to aya debates and theorization around norms institutions and questions of agency. So that's kind of how I read your paper that it was also very much a theoretical contribution into thinking how we understand norms and how people and institutions become invested in these norms. And having said that I move now to the conceptual framework and I have certain questions specifically regarding how you conceptualize norms. So first in the paper in several places you refer to the invisibility of norms and I thought this was really interesting. So for example you conceptualize gender as an example of a socially constructed informal invisible norm which has been normalized and institutionalized in institutions and their discursive practices. Then you also argue that norms are particularly effective because they are hidden and therefore harder to see and harder to change. So I wanted to ask you invisible to whom because I think that the gendered and racialized norms that you intend to examine I wonder whether they're invisible to the same extent to everyone within these institutions and in the same way or could it also be that these norms are felt acutely by some specifically by those who whom these norms subordinate if that makes sense. And this then leads to another related question which is which kind of came into my mind in terms of who are invested in these gendered and racialized norms. Is it only those who benefit from their sustenance or at least those who are not directly subordinated by them or also those whom these norms subordinate for lack of a better word. And I ask this specifically because you have situated your project as a feminist exploration and a study and I think that feminist theory is particularly well placed to offer insights into this crucial question of how we become invested in social norms and specifically how we continue to be attached to norms that subordinate. So perhaps this is because of my own research and actually research that I also collaborated with with Amanda but I would be very tempted to explore here the work of Judith Butler, Saba Mahmud as well as Sarah Ahmed because I think what is very clear from your presentation is that you have built a complex and very nuanced framework that allows you to examine the dynamic interaction between individuals and institutions. But I kind of want to put you a little bit further to think about this question about how exactly then do these individuals become invested in the norms. Because I think that will also tell us more about the institutions, if that makes sense. So for example, drawing on Ahmed, she argues that emotions play a crucial role in how people and institutions in her case become attached to gendered norms and why such norms are difficult to change as you argue. So I'm not saying you definitely have to take on this huge area of inquiry but I think there might be some potential kind of connections to be made here to feminist theory. And when I mentioned change, this leads me to another set of questions regarding agency and in your talk you mentioned how you look at how women are constructed not only as targets but also as agents. Then in the end of your paper you had a really interesting question which you didn't yet mention here but if it's okay I bring it up here because I really like this question. And that was who has agency in what is produced discursively and operationally in relation to women and counterterrorism? How is this revealed? And I think this question about how is this revealed is a key impact because to me this suggests that a part of your project in fact is to examine the multiple locations of agency in the UK counterterrorism institutions. I think the question then how is this revealed is a crucial one because it makes us think about how agency might take multiple forms. So for instance in the paper and in the talk you argue that those in powerful positions come to have an impact on how discurses evolve including in creating and preventing change. And I think this is a really fascinating point about preventing change and how also preventing change can be a form of agency not just affecting change if that makes sense. So if that's a manifestation of agency then I guess my question is what might be some of the other forms that agency takes and specifically if we are looking at locations other than those of position of power within an organisation. So how would you call about examining different modes of agency that are not necessarily kind of attached to this position of power that you already mentioned in the paper? So yeah these are obviously very extremely interesting questions to explore but not easy ones. So this fact that this is not easy leads me to questions about methodology. So scope and methodology and this first question might be an ignorant one because this is not my area of expertise but I just wanted to pin down a little bit more what your scope is here because you mentioned different state departments and various institutions and if it makes a lot of sense but I wasn't sure what else you were covering. And I think partly because you mentioned DFID my mind immediately thought that this is kind of a foreign policy issue but actually listening to you and we had a discussion a little bit before the presentation as well I realized that was not correct at all so you are looking very much both foreign policy and domestic policy but I maybe you could say a little bit more about how you have defined the scope. Then second one is perhaps a more practical one in terms of how you would go about combining the kind of textual part of the discourse analysis with qualitative interviews because as you mentioned and I thought this pilot study was fascinating for how it showed you the crucial importance of conducting this fieldwork interviews and I think this is very something that I very much agree with but I wondered what how have you thought about how you will bring together these two elements of the critical discourse analysis because I would understand them as complimenting each other but also very much giving you an ability to look at different dimensions and I did something similar in my PhD work and I did find it quite challenging to find ways of kind of I had in-depth interviews and then also discourse analysis of policy documents and I think lots of people have this type of combination but how to make most of it and I think this might be relevant Laura Sheppard's quite recent book called gender UMP's building and the politics of space she goes to some details to explain how she combined those two things and she looks at the UMP's building commission as an institution so I thought it might be an interesting interesting one to look at if you haven't yet and then I have few questions about the case study so my first question and I have focused on you talk about three kind of critical disjunctures of one of them is the 1325 resolution and I focus on that because that is where my expertise lies more and I wondered whether you were also going to look at how the women peace and security agenda itself has evolved because I think that that would be crucial because part of that involvement has been to integrate counterterrorism and preventing violent extremism so how did that shift have an effect or if it had any effect at all and then the second one and I finished with this is more of a comment so something I'm trying to figure out in my own mind but this is to do partly with the question about scope so if if we think about the women peace and security agenda and the national action plans in particular that you mentioned what's interesting about these national action plans coming from the so-called global north is that they tend to be externally facing as you mentioned as well so in a recent analysis of 22 national action plans from the global north sony harstrup and chenney hagen note how with the exception of island and to some extent Canada all these acts are seen as part of foreign policy and not domestic policy so in this context for example prevent would not be does not integrate wps agenda in the context of uk which is kind of baffling in a way and I would very much recommend Elizabeth Pearson's excellent recent book chapter on this titled between protection and participation affects countering violent extremism and the possibility of agency I can give you the reference if you haven't read that yet but the reason why it's interesting is that she points out this disconnect between the wps agenda and the uk strategy on countering violent extremism it's also interesting piece because it looks at agency and trust trust on Sarah Ahmed's work but the main point here is that so why is it relevant to look at this disconnect in terms of your work I think it could be argued that one of the ways in which gendered and racialized norms are upheld in the uk counterterrorism institutions is precisely by creating such artificial separations as I have pointed out here between the women peace and security agenda as something directed to conflicts and conflict affected women out there and not relevant for domestic policy so this is very much a racialized distinction so I wonder then if when you go back to thinking about how you select the institutions and specific sites that you engage with but the one way of going about this is to try and sort of draw out the politics of how these distinctions are drawn and what they enable so kind of looking at these type of contestations that was the something that sort of came into my mind when I was reading your paper and and connecting back to this kind of the colonial or post-colonial family scholarship on women peace and security great and I think I finished with that thank you very much great Sophia I'm going to chime in quickly just because of time and gosh you've learned so much just from this dialogue between you and Hannah thank you both for your awesome analysis and engagement it's just Sam um Livy has a question and then a quick follow-up question so I'm just going to add that to the list of questions that Hannah's already put on you and then Sophia you just pick what you choose to respond to in this forum but certainly this this is a folks you know further discussion and commentary in the future too so yeah so Sam asks a question that I think highlights conceptually also issues around temporality and time when you're thinking about vulnerability and threat at least that's how I read Sam's question but Sam asks on the issue of vulnerability and helplessness versus threat I would be interested to hear if you have looked at the transition of policy and actions and intent of individuals over time an individual at the point of travel to join IS may well be characterized as vulnerable but surely this vulnerability includes vulnerability to induction into activity other than which they may have been persuaded to join i.e. an individual may be persuaded they are joining for one reason but their vulnerability allows them to be persuaded into an activity which may then characterize them as a threat thus the individual can be both vulnerable and a threat over time question marks I get to you think about that and then the follow-up question was based on some of Hannah's commentary where it's just is more of a practical question or a question around empirical and just wonders in terms of the issue Hannah raised about influence have you had the opportunity to look at policy and influence in MI5 during Stella Rimmington's tenure as head so there you go Sophia the floor is yours thank you good wow Hannah that's a there was a lot of very interesting and very thought-provoking comments and questions and observations so thank you so much for taking the time to do all that to help me also progress with my research as well I don't have like exact answers to a couple of your questions for now but I think also your question about agency I could also tie into the question about temporality as well because I think there's a kind of a link there as well in the sense that well yeah I mean questions of agency is so complex and multifaceted so you know examining different forms of agency well the temporality is one form of agency I think we could discuss in the constrained agency of individuals being both victim and threat at the same time being vulnerable and a potential perpetrator of violence as well is totally correct so the quote that I did put up there which I think seemed to sort of distinguish quite starkly between victim and threat I I did realise that that wasn't necessarily the case all the time because you know as the the the person who asked the question on temporality observed yes it's possible of course to be both victim and vulnerable at different points and also simultaneously so the question of examining different forms of agency who has agency when and where and how and not just from you know a state perspective in terms of creating policy but also in terms of the people involved in the recipients of counterterrorism policy and practice is something that I need to examine to how it's revealed where it's revealed and what aspects of that are so whether it's revealed in terms of the creation of policy and practice whether it's revealed in terms of the implementation whether it's revealed on the receiving end as well so there's all these types of questions which I haven't yet actually tackled but they are sort of in my mind and thank you for bringing that up because they are very important to consider and I think that also relates to norms as well and your question about who is subordinated invisibility of norms so again I've been very much looking at it from a state perspective you know rather than I do say that you know I'm interested in both women as recipients targets and women as agents so I think I've concentrated too much on the agent side of things in terms of the issues of agency and norms in this institutions but also looking at it from the other side you know the kind of norms out there I suppose to be contested and the Foucaultian sense as well you know what has become normalized the norm becomes normalized in that way normalization as that process creates it so to contest that you know we can examine gender in that way and how women have been integrated in the way that norms have been created not just from a state-based perspective but from a response to target-based perspective I don't know if that makes any sense I'm sort of like trying to go through it quite quickly but yeah the research again it just hopes to redefine how women well how we think about norms as we discussed and you know what we know about norms in relation to counterterrorism policy and practice in relation to how women are engaged in it in relation to also how men are engaged with it as well so it's all these types of questions that I really do need to tackle much more deeply probably but I think it will come through with the more research I do the more departments the documents interviews I conduct a lot more of the answers I think to these types of questions will come through in that and so I'm looking forward to sort of framing my responses to those types of questions going forward in more detail hopefully then the question about the 1325 and how the WPS agenda has evolved yeah that's really interesting and I in fact read a really good report on the on just security only this morning about the ways that counterterrorism law legislation has been sort of integrated into the WPS agenda to sort of combat victims of sexual violence and conflict and sort of the problems with that so the ways I think that CT and CVE have been integrated into the WPS agenda has often been to the concern of feminist practitioners and feminist security studies scholars rightly so it's been done in a sort of haphazard sort of not thoughtless way but you know not necessarily actually fully grasping all the gendered aspects of security insecurity violence conflict and the reasons and the sort of expansion of counterterrorism as a hard security tool of governments and state infrastructure which has often been to the detriment of lots of men and women on the ground but mostly women and so you know the shift in terms of WPS practitioners I think has been sort of that well there's one camp which sort of I think Finland near lane sort of suggests that if we want to change the narrative of this conversation and to make counterterrorism and counter violent extremism and to integrate it in a way that we feel comfortable with and that really enhances and listens to the requirements and specifics of feminists and feminist security practitioners then we have to be part of that conversation we can't ignore it but on the other hand you know it's hard to sort of shift the goalposts of CT and CVE in such a way to integrate true gender perspectives and to actually prioritise those when they've never been prioritised in the first place in the construction or creation of these infrastructures from the from the beginning so it's a tension there but I think that you know it's moving to the right place and I think it's taken a long time but you know there's a lot of new research coming out from very important people like Fanola and Elaine and others in Laura Shepard and people like that who are real and really have really important contributions to make to that not necessarily the aligning but maybe the sort of the awareness of counterterrorism and WPS and how they link and where they link and where they don't and you know to do that carefully and properly and in terms of the what was the other one the methodology and the scope so initially I had basically had a quite a simple approach to the methodology which was to look at contest and to see which departments were included in contest as you know important in implementing counterterrorism policy and practice in the UK and there's a list of maybe 35 government departments but as I conducted the DFID study I realised the amount of detail required was very yeah it's very deep very time consuming and also the discrepancy between like not carrying up as as I said I have to I found it hard to just to gain all the information I needed from just the textual documents and I absolutely need to conduct interviews in order to gain the depth of analysis that I would like for this study so I'm probably going to rethink the number of departments that I'm going to look at and the number of organisations and I have to think about that again but I think I'll have to narrow it down to probably about a few key departments and a few key organisations within those departments that have had a really like drastic impact on different phases of counters and also that might not necessarily be you know I'm doing over a 20-year period so there might be different departments at different times which were more important than others so I will try and identify those and then hopefully to concentrate on those different stages in the analysis um and then I think the final question was about the MI5 I actually have I haven't looked at that specific time of the MI5's policy influence on counterterrorism but I will I've taken note of that and I will look that up later um I didn't really address a lot of Hannah's questions in much detail I'm sorry because I know it's 130 but I'd really value all of the comments you made um and it just showed that I need to actually do probably a lot more research and a lot has spent a lot more time um on certain parts of the project but you know thankfully I have some more time so it's been helpful to actually um get those brainwaves moving so thank you for that um I don't know if that's everything did I cover most things I think um yeah Sophia yeah I mean this is the thing discussants often throw a bunch of you know important things that and comments and critiques as Hannah no doubt did and I think it takes some time to absorb and think through so you don't necessarily need initially have to have a response for everything and going forward when you get hit with some pretty important questions or ideas it's totally fine to say thank you I'll think about that too so yeah Hannah are you thinking I wouldn't have answers to most of those questions even based on my own research and I have supposedly done my phd already so yeah um but they're very yeah I really like the question about you know um the invisibility of norms and who is subordinated um and and you know the intersection between the racialized and gendered um norms as well and how I become invested in them so that's something I definitely will um look into and I'm yeah thank you for that comment particularly and then just a final comment you don't have to respond now because we are over time now but um Frank Foley asked a really important question too first of all he says thanks for the great talk and looking at the chat every I too everyone's loving your talk you're really on to something really fascinating here and so um we're all excited to learn how your research progresses but um Frank asked if you had any further thoughts on how norms get transferred into habits or regularize patterns of interaction between actors um or does it not work like that and do you have any examples from your initial research so you know that's that's something you can respond now or think about too and before you respond I just want to echo Hannah's comment and abuse my position as chair to also um really get you to uh encourage you to look at emotions and affect because I do think that they say something very interesting and important about again like Hannah said why we get attached why institutions but also people get attached to certain regularized ways of being behaving and thinking um and emotionally connecting to certain ideas and patterns but I would thank you um on Frank's question that's something actually that I have gone back and forth with a couple uh a lot because um as he would know because he wrote his book um there's a very Frank offers a very clean distinction of norms in institutions and I struggles to create such a clean distinction because um I think that I was I think well the informality of norms sort of lends itself to be a bit more blurred to sort of incorporate external dynamics within institutions and the internal institutional dynamics also well affect and influence the ex and I think that also speaks a bit to the emotions and the effect comment that you have just um highlighted for me so why we get attached how we create these behaviors and habits and what the role of emotions or um other factors could be in terms of regulating those patterns and maintaining them and sustaining them so yes I mean it's something that I hope that this research will um well give me that distinction at some point in the end but currently I don't actually have a clear concise understanding of norms yet in this context but maybe that is the case maybe it's um something that I will find that is not possible to really clearly define and it depends on lots of different factors and each institution has a different um example of what it means to that particular institution um but that's something I'm hoping the research will um sort of tell me rather than me tell it kind of thing well that's lovely um oh I just want to quickly read the last thing on the chat um okay well look look uh there Sophie I have you read Rosie's comment you might have some um oh here we go the research thank you that's very kind thank you very much I'll definitely talk to you about that then um if we can yeah yeah follow up yeah Rosie um you're you're welcome to pop me an email and I can put you in in touch with um Sophia if you want to email her directly that would be great um thank you great I want to thank you so much Sophia for ending our term one new voices on such a high such I I just I love leaving these discussions because I feel you know intellectually enriched and happy about the day and I think you know as we're leading up to the end of term one it's really great to to find some spaces of happiness and intellectual engagement so thank you for presenting your fascinating research and I as the rest of the audience I'm sure look forward to seeing how it progresses so maybe in a year's time you can come back and tell us all of your fascinating findings too and thank you Hannah for your thoughtful insightful um engagement with with um Sophia's work this is this is lovely and this is what you know the intellectual spaces are supposed to be like right so um and thank you the audience for attending and for not laughing too loudly about my bloopers at the beginning I appreciate your kindness that way um this will be recorded or this is recorded the recording will be circulated through social media um through the security studies defense studies and war studies on twitter accounts and facebook and it's also located on the new voices war studies um soundcloud and uh youtube um so you can come back and check it out and I just want to wish everyone a very lovely day and thank you again for coming along thank you thanks very much Hannah and Amanda thank and thank you to everybody for coming and listening thanks thank you