Description
In 1999, Professor Paul Wilkinson – a leading Terrorism Studies scholar – stated that setting aside the possibility that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) could resume its campaign, “the Animal Liberation Front and its various splinter groups or offshoots are the most serious domestic terrorist threat within the United Kingdom” (Wilkinson, 1999). Yet, the British Government has decided to not add such groups to the Terrorism Act 2000. Terminology matters because it has direct consequences on the responses that governments orchestrate. Monaghan (2013: 934) argued that “the resources and measures to counter such political violence and to aid those targeted are not as great as they would have been if they had been recognized and considered terrorism.” Simultaneously, by doing so, Mills (2013) argued that the British Government allowed the British criminal justice system to criminalize animal rights and environmental groups and organizations that do not carry out acts against the law because the term “domestic extremism” is “too broad and use of the word ‘extremism’ too synonymous with that of terrorism” (p. 31). Applying Buzan et al.'s (1998) Securitization Theory, the present research sheds light on the discursive construction of the Radical Environmentalist and Animal Rights (REAR) movement by British Members of Parliament.
