Abstract
The ‘war on terror’ has had an enormous impact on citizens’ legal rights and legal status. Using data from interviews with British Pakistani Kashmiri Muslims, this paper explores how the change to citizens’ legal rights and legal status in the ‘war on terror’, the legal dimension of citizenship, has impacted the psychological dimension of citizenship. Through denoting legal rights, equality and status the study revealed the powerful role of the state and the police in shaping citizens’ perceptions of the legal dimension of citizenship. The paper explores how changes to participants’ perceptions of their legal status and legal rights are instrumental in shaping the psychological dimension of citizenship—participants’ sense of loyalty, belonging and attachment to their British identity and their Islamic identity.
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Notes
All interviews were conducted in 2007, after the London bombings of 7 July 2005. The data is still highly relevant in terms of understanding British Muslims’ attachment to their various identities and although the data is from 2007, through relating the data to the concepts of attachment and belonging, this paper aims to make a contribution to non state centric criminological approaches to the ‘war on terror’.
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Ahmed, S. Citizenship, Belonging and Attachment in the ‘War on Terror’. Crit Crim 24, 111–125 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-015-9279-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-015-9279-2