Ahmed Ajil was awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council to conduct his 5-year research project TRACES: Terrorism, Race and Embodied Security.
The grant, valued at EUR 1.5 million, was awarded for a five-year project titled “Terrorism, Race and Embodied Security” (TRACES). The research aims to examine how counterterrorism is put into practice and its effects on individuals and groups in Central Europe, specifically focusing on Switzerland, Germany, and Belgium.
Key Details of the Grant:
- Project Title: Terrorism, Race and Embodied Security: Unpacking the matrix of contemporary counterterrorism (TRACES).
- Funding Amount: EUR 1.5 million.
- Duration: 5 years.
- Host Institution: University of Lucerne (with affiliations also noted at the University of Neuchâtel in official ERC documentation).
- Research Focus: The project investigates counterterrorism as a social phenomenon, analyzing the impact of security laws and practices on the everyday lives and emotions of those directly or indirectly affected.
Summary of TRACES
Practices and policies of counterterrorism (CT) have been criticised for killing innocent civilians, challenging the rule of law, infringing on civil liberties and silencing political dissent. As the “War on Terror” intensifies in the Middle East, scholarly scrutiny of the broader impacts of CT has become more pressing than ever.
However, scholarship on CT remains inchoate. It struggles to provide measurable evidence of how CT instruments (i.e., laws and policies) operate in practice (gap 1), fails to demonstrate how power dynamics permeate CT instruments and reproduce social hierarchies (gap 2) and lacks fundamental insights into how CT impacts lives and societies (gap 3).
TRACES, a five-year project involving a PI and two team members, aims to address these shortcomings by building a heuristic model of counter-terror power (CTP) that draws on biopolitics, intersectionality and theories of embodiment:
- TRACES will address gap 1 by conducting a hitherto unseen mixed-method analysis of a large dataset of legal decisions and prevention programmes in Switzerland, Belgium and Germany to uncover CTP’s outcomes and priorities (WP1).
- It will address gap 2 by applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to legal decisions and case files to trace textual manifestations of CTP and examine how knowledge hierarchies and social markers such as race, religion, class or gender, impact decision-making at the micro level (WP2).
- Finally, it will address gap 3 by studying the everyday lives of humans directly and indirectly targeted by CT measures using ethnographic methods to reveal the physical, psychological and behavioural repercussions of CTP.
TRACES seeks to transform how we understand the intersections of security, race and power in modern societies. Its ground-breaking research protocol will provide a comprehensive examination of contemporary CT practices and make significant advancements in the fields of criminology and anthropology, sociolegal and security studies.
The research will be conducted at the University of Lucerne, in combination with the Zug Institute of Blockchain Research (ZIBR). Dr. Ahmed Ajil will be promoted to the position of Assistant Professor of Behavioural Sciences, with a focus on Criminology and Security Studies.