Anna Meier, Ph.D.
anna.meier@nottingham.ac.uk
Assistant Professor
The University of Nottingham
About Me:
I am an assistant professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. I study what it means to "know terrorism when we see it"—and who gets to decide. I do this by talking to national security bureaucrats and policymakers in Germany and the U.S. and seeking to understand how the people who make counterterrorism policy understand what terrorism is, where it comes from, and what makes it different from other forms of violence. My research is published or forthcoming in International Studies Quarterly and Critical Studies on Terrorism, and my commentary has appeared in Lawfare, The Washington Post's Monkey Cage and Political Violence at a Glance. Prior to beginning my Ph.D., I worked at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and the Project On Goverment Oversight (POGO). I received my Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2021.
Research Interests
Terrorism
Political Violence
Conflict Processes & War
Text as Data
State Narratives
Counterterrorism And Counterinsurgency
Far-right Extremism
Countries of Interest
Germany
United States
My Research:
I am broadly interested in how state actors use responses to political contention to advance their own power. My dissertation project, The Idea of Terror: A Critical Approach to Consequences of the "Terrorist" Classifier, unpacks the intuition that “we know terrorism when we see it” and probes how the concept of “terrorism” preserves power structures that privilege whites in Western democracies. While differential treatment of Islamist and far-right extremists by governments is well-documented, we lack an understanding of how counter-terrorism and counter-extremism discourse and law in Western societies interact to produce a system that naturalizes such differential treatment in the first place, thereby making the “we know terrorism when we see it” logic possible and widely intelligible. I ask: whose interests are served by labeling divorced from law, and how do groups atop power hierarchies maintain their positions by strategically employing the “terrorist” classifier, both in discourse and in national security policy? Using a grounded theory approach, I conduct interviews with current and former national security bureaucrats and policymakers in Germany and the United States to gain insight into how the people making counterterrorism and counter-extremism policy securitize various ideologies as “threats” and think about their roles in combating those threats. I find that even individuals who view far-right extremism as a dire threat to national security nevertheless express a sense of hopelessness at the ability of existing institutions to address that threat—and, moreover, that these individuals are unable to imagine profound structural changes to their respective countries’ security architectures. I draw on critical race theory to understand this duality as a display of hegemonic power, in which the construction and persistence of whiteness demands that it not be probed too deeply, even when its detrimental effects on national security are obvious.The rest of the project traces the implications of my theory for online security, militant organizations, and international norms surrounding the use of force. Using a variety of computational text-as-data methods, as well as close reading of primary sources in multiple languages, I show how technology companies promote government interests, military action abroad legitimizes them, and militant organizations co-opt them for their own propaganda. In doing so, I connect seemingly ad-hoc applications of the “terrorist” classifier and near-instinctual intuitions of what “terrorism” means to paint a more comprehensive picture of how the “terrorism” label acts as a site of power production and reproduction for state actors—and how this particular process of preserving status quo hierarchies can in fact be counterproductive for reducing political violence. Read more about my research on my website.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
How do counterterrorism policies in the United States reproduce anti-Black racism? Research on U.S. domestic counterterrorism post-9/11 has largely focused on the experiences of Muslim Americans while marginalising both overlapping and separate effects of counterterrorism policy on non-Muslim people of colour, particularly non-Muslim Black communities. I argue that domestic counterterrorism policy, as an act of determining what kinds of political contention the state finds non-threatening, has roots in the historical treatment of Black resistance and continues to derive power and legitimacy from oppressing Black communities. Using the case of the Black Liberation Army and its members, I show that federal counterterrorism institutions were shaped by opposition to Black liberation, alongside more well-studied threads of xenophobia and Islamophobia. This article thus extends understandings of discrimination and prejudice within the U.S. counterterrorism apparatus and advocates for greater attention to anti-Blackness not only in policing but in security institutions more broadly.
Despite the recent global uptick in white supremacist terrorism, governments continue to face accusations of not taking the threat seriously, either discursively or in terms of policy responses. Why do acts of white supremacist violence consistently fail to constitute turning points for policy change? Rather than considering acts of political violence as critical junctures for change, I argue that such acts instead reveal how persistent institutions of power actually are. I develop a theory of hegemonic components of national identity that links institutionalized white supremacy to the differential treatment of non-white perpetrators, even when they are deemed terrorists, through a process of institutional reproduction. Drawing on interviews with German national security elites, I show that even when white supremacist violence is treated as terrorism, both legally and discursively, it does not engender policy responses and attitudinal changes on par with those following other terrorist threats.
Media Appearances:
TV Appearances:
Interview on Islamic State online recruitment and propaganda strategies
Newspaper Quotes:
Quoted on the role of social media companies in defining and monitoring terrorist activity.