The Duck of Minerva

Ben O'Loughlin

Ben O'Loughlin is Professor of International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is Director of the New Political Communication Unit, which was launched in 2007. Before joining Royal Holloway in September 2006 he was a researcher on the ESRC New Security Challenges Programme.

Recent Posts

7/7 five years on: Conflicting memories make an official record difficult

7/7 five years on: Conflicting memories make an official record difficult

by Ben O'Loughlin | 13 December, 2010 |

Aldgate station plan, London undergroundA month into the official inquest into the ‘7/7’ London bombings of July 2005, it is clear that the governmental imperative to arrive at a clear, authoritative and final account of what happened on the day might prove impossible because of the unreliability of human memory. This was an event in which cameraphone footage from the scene was reaching the BBC within 20 minutes of the first of four explosions, and iconic images and memorial rituals were in place within days and weeks. Yet it took police four months to take witness statements and now five...

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7/7 five years on: Conflicting memories make an official record difficult

BBC spy miniseries upsets China, but how real is it? Let’s play Spooks bingo!

by Ben O'Loughlin | 15 November, 2010 |

The BBC has offended the Chinese government because its primetime show Spooks (Mi5 in North America) has depicted Chinese intelligence agents in an unflattering light, reported here and here in the last few days. The plot saw MI5 trying to prevent an ‘ethnic weapon’ falling into Chinese hands, with much chasing around London and a few sinister and, perhaps, stereotypically Chinese baddies (judge for yourself in the Guardian screenshot here). As somebody who has written about Spooks and the war on terror (Chapter 7 of this), only to meet gentle mockery from my students, colleagues and indeed...

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7/7 five years on: Conflicting memories make an official record difficult

After Wikileaks; or, the next phase of Diffused War

by Ben O'Loughlin | 3 November, 2010 |

In Diffused War, Andrew Hoskins and I argued we’ve entered a new paradigm of warfare. The wikileaks stories seem to confirm much of this account. War is mediatized, we wrote, as the institutions of war and those affected by war take a form governed by continual media recording, display and archiving. This creates diffuse causal relations between action and effect, since mediatization can amplify or contain the cognitive and emotional response any action generates in ways not dependent on the initial action itself. Militaries, NGOs, insurgents, journalists – none can predict the outcomes of...

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7/7 five years on: Conflicting memories make an official record difficult

Too many bodies? Communicating the population question

by Ben O'Loughlin | 21 October, 2010 |

The question of human over-population of our planet seems to resurface every few decades, driven by fears that there are too many people to feed, clothe and shelter, or that the sheer volume of human beings working, travelling and polluting is causing environmental damage. But the persuasiveness of such claims is weakened empirically and normatively. In terms of facts, it does not help the over-population claimants that every time the population question is raised, humanity seems to deal with the problem. People do find food, clothing and shelter. And in terms of values, the notion of...

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7/7 five years on: Conflicting memories make an official record difficult

A gulf in understanding?

by Ben O'Loughlin | 4 October, 2010 |

Last week I participated in a workshop at the Al Jazeera Center for Studies in Doha, Qatar, which brought to an end the ESRC’s Radicalisation & Violence programme of research projects, led by Prof. Stuart Croft. I was one of several researchers invited to present recent research on ‘terrorism, resistance and radicalisation’. My fledgling experience of academia has thus far been that debates rarely get politicised. It is noteworthy when it happens, triggering a visceral thrill or horror as we depart from our scripts of professional civility. The Radicalisation & Violence programme has been...

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7/7 five years on: Conflicting memories make an official record difficult

Cyber warfare and legal responsibility: drifting further apart?

by Ben O'Loughlin | 23 September, 2010 |

Two cyber warfare trends are catching the eye, but both raise the same major question. First, cyber attacks have been democratised in recent years because of social media and easy to use denial of service attack (DDoS) tools. Popular armies have returned, made up not of a mass of bodies charging, a Clausewitzian centre of gravity on a field, but constituted by curious and enthusiastic citizens on the internet. As William Merrin argued at a keynote in 2009, security has been crowdsourced. US officials set up webcams along the Mexico border so that citizens can sit at leisure and watch for...

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