Researcher
Rita Augestad Knudsen
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Summary
Rita Augestad Knudsen is a Senior Researcher at NUPI’s research group for Security and Defence. She currently works especially on counterterrorism, in particular prevention, as well as cyber, and on the intersection between political and legal discourse on different aspects of international security. She is the managing director of the Consortium for Terrorism Research and affiliated with C-REX (Centre for Research on Extremism, University of Oslo)
Rita Augestad Knudsen’s publications include current and historical analyses of terrorism-related risk assessment, mental health, criminal responsibility legislation and frameworks, legal/political discourse and ideational formation on various issues of international security, including radicalization, self-determination, freedom, international sanctions and international statebuilding. Geographically, her main focus is the UK (including Scotland), as well as other parts of Europe.
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Resilience, Peacebuilding, and Preventing Violent Extremism: A Complex Systems Perspective on Sustaining Peace
How can resilience and peacebuilding help address the root causes of violent extremism? This seminar marks the Norwegian book launch of a new volume exploring this challenge.
From Lessons to Strategic Choices: Implications for long-term defence planning (StratLess)
This project looks at how militaries identify and draw so-called strategic lessons, and how this influences and shapes military planning. ...
Counter-terrorism and mental health
We are looking into experiences and challenges from the UK’s Counter Terrorism Clinical Consultancy Service.
Riskification and the production of threat: A comparison of risk assessments in cybersecurity and counter-terrorism
This article foregrounds the riskification of cybersecurity – the transition from pre-empting threat to governing risk – through a comparison of the U.S. government intrusion detection system EINSTEIN and parts of the UK counter-terrorism programme Prevent. Extensively theorised within both cybersecurity and counter-terrorism, calculating, profiling and governing risk has become the default mode of security governance, algorithmically producing subjects of insecurity. However, a closer, comparative read of the sociotechnical configurations that underpin specific modalities in risk assessment systems reveal important differences: Whereas Prevent more clearly presupposes normative subjects and standards of (in)security, EINSTEIN’s anomaly detection engenders threat not as a binary or normative distinction but as a separate category of risk. Highlighting these differences enables a deeper understanding of speculative security practices as such, and of how they may be theorised. In particular, the article shows how ‘meaning-making’ and ‘sense-making’ are processes that shape both security responses and timelines through which risk is conceptualised in different ways. Moreover, it reveals that rather than being fixed, risk and (in)security is perpetually co-produced with the tools used for assessment: The production of (in)security hence has little to do with real or imagined risk but rather emerges from a particular configuration of social, political and technological relations.
Fra arkivet: 20 år etter 11. september
Vi ser nærmere på utviklingen de 20 årene som har gått etter 11. september 2001.Dette er et opptak av et NUPI-seminar som ble holdt i regi av Kons...
Research on radicalisation and countering radicalisation: Taking stock and ways forward
The Consortium for Terrorism Research invites you to a seminar about research on radicalisation and countering radicalization, with Joel Busher and Sarah Marsden.
Mental health exemptions to criminal responsibility - between law, medicine, politics and security
Ill mental health is a key category for exempting individuals from criminal responsibility. Even in cases where a defendant has been found to have carried out the act, if mentally ‘ill enough’, the person could either be fully exempt from criminal responsibility and found not guilty – or be partially exempt and receive a reduced or special sentence on mental health grounds. Such outcomes might entail diversion into mental health treatment, sectioning – or release. In determining whether a mental health exemption is warranted in individual cases, ordinary practice is that psychologists or psychiatrists forensically assess the severity and nature of the accused’s impairment or disorder. While this might seem like a straightforward medical-juridical procedure of establishing evidence, this article uses a modified ‘genealogy of the present’ to show how mental health exemptions to criminal responsibility involve significantly more complexity. Looking to Norway and the UK, this article highlights differences in frameworks and implementation, including on matters of burden and nature of proof, and on causality. The article uses as an example the particular category of terrorism-related cases to bring out some of the contingencies involved. By doing so, the article shows the tensions inherent to the principle and practice of mental health exemptions, and its location between law, medicine, politics and security.
Algorethics: Responsible governance of artificial intelligence
How can we develop artificial intelligence ethically?
Naturalisation through mainstreaming Counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation in UN and EU discourse
In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, counter-terrorism was initially pursued throughout the world as a matter of exceptional ‘hard security’. International and national authorities generally position terrorism as a uniquely threatening phenomenon warranting delineated budgets, systems, and structures within the law enforcement and defence realms. However, with the growing focus on radicalisation as assumedly essential in leading to terrorism and counter-radicalisation as an ever more central part of counter-terrorism, its scope was expanded far beyond the ‘hard security’ field; counter-radicalisation enabled the growth and integration of counter-terrorism into ‘softer’ societal sectors. This chapter argues that this shift from a hard security framing of counter-terrorism to a broadening of its scope through a foregrounding of counter-radicalisation should be conceptualised as a process of ‘mainstreaming’. After explaining the concept of mainstreaming and how it captures this development, the chapter offers a brief discourse analysis of such mainstreaming through the lens of key official UN and EU counter-terrorism documents. On the basis of this investigation, the chapter finds that the discursive mainstreaming of counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation suggests their ‘naturalisation’.