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Restating the Case for the Suspect Community: A Reply to Greer

NCJ Number
236597
Journal
British Journal of Criminology Volume: 51 Issue: 6 Dated: November 2011 Pages: 1054-1062
Author(s)
Christina Pantazis; Simon Pemberton
Date Published
November 2011
Length
9 pages
Annotation
The authors of this article reply to Greer's critique of their thesis on a suspect community.
Abstract
In 2009, in an article for this journal, the authors argued that UK legal and political developments, following the events of September 2001, had designated Muslims as the 'enemy within' and served to construct Muslims as the principal suspect community (Pantazis and Pemberton 2009). This work sought to utilize and extend Hillyard's original (1993) thesis, which postulated that, during the period of Irish political violence during the 1970s and into the 1990s, the whole Irish population had become a 'suspect community'. In 2010, Steven Greer responded with an uncompromising critique of these combined works. In this reply, the authors rearticulate their case and demonstrate why Greer's arguments are fundamentally flawed. (Published Abstract)