Rachel Briggs
Director, Hostage UK
Rachel Briggs is Director of Hostage UK, a charity chaired by Terry Waite. It aims to provide support and practical help to the families of hostages and the hostages upon release, and also offers educational services to organisations sending employees to work in kidnap hot spots. For more information, see www.hostageuk.org Rachel runs Hostage UK part-time, and spends the rest of her time as a visiting fellow of UCL where she conducts research on radicalisation. She is also a freelance...
"identity"
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- Open Standards for Resilience? I'm in Prague speaking at a NATO conference on what they call in the business 'open standards for resilience'. For those of us not up to speed with the jargon, that's all about the need for non-state actors to do their bit for national resilience (private sector, ngos, communities, citizens, and the like). As I pointed out in my presentation this afternoon, though, it's exactly this kind of jargon that hampers the involvement of non-state actors who haven't grown up in the closeted... from : rachelbriggs 11th March 2007
- We're bringing it home... In December, we published Bringing it Home: Community-based approaches to counter-terrorism. Among it's key recommendations were the need for the government to get local in its approach; to talk to a much wider range of individuals and organisations; and to open up safe spaces for dissent, where the real and perceived sources of grievance could be given the air time they need.The Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) will publish a new strategy in the coming... from : rachelbriggs 18th March 2007
- 7/7 Public Enquiry in the Dock Yesterday's guilty verdicts for the five 'fertiliser bombers' and the revelation of partial links between them and two of the 7/7 bombers (Kahn and Tanweer) has renewed calls for a public enquiry into the events leading up to the 7/7 bombing. As a fan of greater openess in the area of security, I am supposed to be supportive of such an enquiry. But I'm not. Not because of the substance of what it might show us, and the important precedent it would set in the openess stakes. But because of the... from : rachelbriggs 1st May 2007
- Oooooh Vienna.... ......That is where my references to 80s classic pop tunes end! Once again, I find myself in an airport departure lounge after a day of international schmoozing. Todays theme was community-based counter-terrorism at a conference organised by the OECD. I delivered one of the key note speeches. Oh er. And yes, todays venue was, er, Vienna. What was reassuring was the extent to which there seemed to be genuine buy-in for the idea that communities need to be central to our responses to... from : rachelbriggs 31st May 2007
- Who's afraid of the Respect Party? Dissent and cohesion in modern Britain For a demographic group that makes up approximately 3 per cent of the UK’s population, the Muslim community manages to command more than its fair share of newspaper headlines. Rarely does a week pass without controversy, whether it be veil-wearing women in MP’s surgeries, demands for sharia law, young men burning flags outside the Danish embassy or fundamentalist clerics preaching hatred of the West. Not to mention the wouldbe suicide bombers hiding within our communities. from : mollywebb 21st September 2007
- Who's afraid of the Respect Party? I've got an article in this month's Renewal arguing that the government's approach to Britishness (broadly characterised as an attempt to agree upon what we agree upon) needs to focus more on the areas where we disagree. Attempts to 'construct' Britishness in a top down, stage-managed way is producing a vision so content-lite that it is emotionally unengaging. We need to acknowledge the problems and conflicts created by diversity and then work through them together. It's only by embracing the... from : rachelbriggs 21st September 2007
- The Commonwealth Gets Teeth The Commonwealth Heads of Government, currently meeting in Uganda, have for once made a good decision. They have (temporarily) booted Pakistan out of the Commonwealth because of the terrible political situation there.So what? You might say. Isn't the Commonwealth just an anacronistic waste of time? Well, for the UK it might not compete with our membership of the G8 or our permanent seat on the UN Security Council. But for many member states of the Commonwealth and their leaders, membership... from : rachelbriggs 23rd November 2007
- A new race Cold War? You would be forgiven for thinking that I'm talking about the fallout from the Beijing Olympics torch relay, but in fact I am referring to a speech being delivered today by Trevor Philips to mark the 40th anniversary of Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech. Philips argues that Powell was wrong to predict a 'hot war' between races, but that the UK instead now faces the emergence of a 'cold war', with relations between different races and ethnic groups at a low.Two points come to mind:First,... from : rachelbriggs 20th April 2008
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