Michael Stohl

• Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara

Organizational communication scholars have historically conducted research in large for-profit businesses, governmental agencies, and a few high-profile nonprofits/NGOs—all of which are relatively easy to access and presumably “safe” to study. It is largely unsurprising, then, that limited scholarship addresses the challenges associated with conduc...

After 11 September 2001 it was routinely declared that 9/11 ‘changed everything’ and that what had changed was immutable. Following the synthesis on democracies’ war justifications over the last three decades presented by Anna Geis and Wolfgang Wagner, Michael Stohl focuses on US-American justifications of the ‘war on terror’: He explores how 9/11...

We examine how and why al-Qa'ida and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have come to dominate discourse of the international terrorist threat in the post-9/11 era, through their emergence as the primary referents for understanding terrorism, the organizations that employ it, and the actions taken to combat it. We propose a simple mechanism-based o...

A common observation in the digital age is that new technologies are making people’s behaviors, decisions, and preferences more visible. For scholars who study organizations and their effects upon society, increased information visibility raises the hope that organizations might become more transparent. Typically, we assume that increased informati...

In the years since 11 September 2001, pundits, politicians and scholars of terrorism and international relations routinely have declared that 9/11 “changed everything”. This article explores not only how those decisions transformed the United States and the global response to terrorism, but also how both the decisions and response sustained a sense...

This article explores the construction of extremism in media discourse, the factors driving specific constructions and the implications of these constructions for counterterrorism policy. We contend that extremism has predominantly and increasingly been framed as a security issue. This article explores the implications of this practice through the...

By chronicling the continuing contest over the reach, range, and regime of rights, Contracting Human Rights analyzes the way forward in an era of many challenges. This multidisciplinary book contributes to building understanding of the maturation of human rights, from a dissident doctrine to a dynamic parameter of global governance and civil societ...

Terrorism is communicatively constituted violence. Multiple types of organizations, state and insurgent, employ terrorism. Terrorism is used as a strategy either to maintain a regime or to create the conditions for a new governing system, but both state and insurgent organizations employ terrorism tactically to advertise the cause, to secure conces...

In the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda emerged not only as the specific perpetrator of the act but also as the focus of the “war on terror.” Until 2014 or so, and during the almost decade and a half following 9/11, al-Qaeda did not recede from its perceived position as a primary (if not the primary) international terrorist...

Discussions about the meaning of terrorism are enduring in everyday language, government policy, news reporting, and international politics. And disagreements about both the definition and the class of violent events that constitute terrorism contribute to the difficulty of formulating effective responses aimed at the prevention and management of t...

This article explores the phenomenon of Islamist foreign fighters, more specifically the movement of European Muslims to participate in the insurgencies in Syria and Iraq connected to the Islamic State/Daesh as well as the anti-Assad forces in Syria and the implications for European state stability. Drawing on personal psychology, social psychology...

The actual structures and motivations of terrorist organizations like Daesh (aka. IS, ISIS, ISIL) are often invisible to the general public, and given their clandestine nature, often opaque to all external actors (including governments, militaries, and others). For the general public, the ‘picture’ of terrorism and terrorist organizations is often...

Clandestine/hidden organizations are composed of groups of people who keep their affiliations secret and conceal internal and external organizational activities. Since the early 2000s, the prominence and notoriety of clandestine organizations have made them the subject of much discussion, debate, and research, although they have existed throughout...

What we see, what we show, and how we look are fundamental organizational concerns made ever more salient by the affordances, dynamics, and discourses of the digital age. Contemporary organizing practices are awash with material, mediated, and managed visibilities: Companies erect glass buildings with open and networked office spaces to efficiently...

Organizational transparency is in vogue. When technologies make it possible for information, decision processes, and behaviors to be visible to others, actors and organizations will presumably be forced to behave more responsibly because they can be held accountable for their actions. In this article, we question the theoretical assumption that hig...

Introduction What we see, what we show and how we look are fundamental organizational concerns made ever more salient by the affordances, dynamics, and discourses of the digital age. Contemporary organizing practices are awash with material, mediated and managed visibilities: companies erect glass buildings with open and networked office spaces to...

Chapter Overview: This chapter argues that there are many parallels between discussions of cyber terrorism and cyber war on the one hand, and discussions of terrorism and state terrorism on the other. The chapter begins by tracing these parallels. Next, the chapter explores the development of cyber war capabilities by the major powers and others an...

The book defines and clarifies what we mean by fragile states, examining their characteristics in relation to "weak" and "failed" states in the global system, and explaining their development from pre-colonial times to the present day. It explores the connections between fragile statehood and violent conflict, and analyses the limitations of outsid...

This study presents experimental findings on the impact of media framing of the 2005 London bombings. A total of 371 American participants were exposed to one of two frames to test their effect on public attitudes towards civil liberties and Muslims, and support for counterterrorism policies. Results show that the “domestic homegrown” frame produce...

It became commonplace after 11 September 2001 to declare that the events changed ‘everything’ and that the world would never again be as it was before that date. Many spoke of the dividing line of the pre-9/11 and post-9/11 world, and it became commonplace to assert that the events conclusively demonstrated the validity of the thesis that there was...

Given consistent findings concerning the media’s effect on shaping attitudes related to minority groups, it is important to understand the impact of the common anti Muslim portrayals currently appearing in many facets of US media. The current study implements an experimental design with five conditions (negative hard news, positive hard news, negat...

This special issue challenges scholars to consider the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of viewing organizations as ‘constituted in and through human communication.’ Interrogating the work of one of the most influential approaches to the study of the constitutive nature of organizing, the oeuvre of James Taylor and his collea...

Purpose The paper seeks to explore how globalization processes have shaped the nature, scope, and time frame of considerations of social responsibility and the development of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) regime. The paper identifies three generations of human rights' values embedded within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and ai...

In this important book veteran researchers Grabosky and Stohl draw on organized crime to illuminate the neglected terrain between terrorism and more ordinary forms of illegal behavior. The book is required reading for anyone interested in the critical intersection between political violence and illegal business. - Gary LaFree, Director, National Co...

Since 9/11, both the phenomenon and study of international terrorism-- also known as transnationaI terrorism-- has become more prominent in government, media, scholarly, and educational circles. This chapter provides a brief overview of international terrorism, including domestic and international responses to the phenomenon. This approach includes...

The "Global War on Terror" commenced with President Bush's address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, with his much-cited quote "Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated." Much previous work within communicat...

Globalization theories posit organizational convergence, suggesting that Codes of Ethics will become commonplace and include greater consideration of global issues. This study explores the degree to which the Codes of Ethics of 157 corporations on the Global 500 and/or Fortune 500 lists include the “third generation” of corporate social responsibil...

This paper addresses both the connections between criminals and terrorists and the potential overlap and meshing of their networks and considers the implications of these intersections for counterterrorism policies and actions. It concludes with a focus on the community and community policing’s role in the disengagement of terrorists from terrorist...

This article argues that the chief challenge for developing and sustaining internationalization in the context of the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century is the engagement of the faculty. It argues that although higher education has been successful in providing mechanisms for student mobility because institutions have not successfully...

Very little has been written in scholarly or popular venues on the conceptualization and utilization of the term network to describe terrorist organizing. In this paper, we identify critical disjunctures between the assumptions of contemporary communication network theory and the assumptions and appropriation of network concepts by the current U.S....

Should business strive to be socially responsible, and if so, how? The Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility updates and broadens the discussion of these questions by bringing together in one volume a variety of practical and theoretical perspectives on corporate social responsibility. It is perhaps the single most comprehensive volume availa...

Over the past two decades there has developed a voluminous literature on the problem of cyber terrorism. The themes developed by those writing on cyber terrorism appear to spring from the titles of Tom Clancy’s fiction, such as Clear and Present Danger, The Sum of All Fears and Breaking Point, or somewhat more cynically, Patriot Games. This essay e...

This article adapts Burt's 1992 network theory of structural holes to explore dynamic developments within global organizational networks, questioning the proposition that alternative forms of organizing are replacing the nation state as the central figure on the global stage. Our analysis of structural holes within the emerging global human rights...

Paper prepared for the workshop on Failed and Failing States

This study furthers the inquiry into the relationship between human rights and U.S. bilateral foreign aid. We build the most comprehensive data set to date, extending the time period (1976–1995) and enlarging the number of countries under review (140). Rhetoric aside, human rights considerations did play a role in determining whether or not a state...

Throughout the 1980 presidential campaign, candidate Ronald Reagan clearly and sharply criticised the Carter human rights policy, arguing that it was morally unsound, ineffective, and threatening to United States’ security interests. According to the Reagan view, the policy was morally tenuous because it created a double standard, condemning minor...

This chapter explores the context within which we may understand the persistence of state and in particular, superpower, violence and terrorism in domestic and international affairs.1 The analysis begins with the introduction of an expected utility approach and the assumptions which underlie it in the context of understanding the choice of terroris...

Stohl and Lopez argue that such developments in international aggressive policies demand more serious scholarly attention than has up to now been paid them, and they suggest a number of emerging trends that warrant examination by political scientists. Such trends include superpower deployment of the troops of regional power centers to avoid direct...

In a recent study, David Cingranelli and Thomas Pasquarello (1985) discovered a modest positive relationship between certain types of U.S. foreign assistance and human rights behavior. We believe a number of factors raise concerns over the validity of these results. Following some discussion, a brief and simplified reanalysis is presented, which va...

The paper begins with a brief discussion of the conditions under which genocide and other instances of mass killing occur and discusses recent levels of reporting of such instances. The core of the paper is an examination of the circumstances and structural conditions which have allowed these crimes against humanity to go relatively undernoticed an...