We at tPP could not be more pleased to announce that in April 2019, two members of our Steering Team published the first peer-reviewed journal article based around the Prosecution Project data set!
The stellar team of Athena Chapekis and Sarah M. Moore published, “The prosecution of ‘others’: presidential rhetoric and the interrelation of framing, legal prosecutions, and the Global War on Terror“, as part of a four article Special Section in the journal Critical Studies on Terrorism. The journal portion, titled ‘Emergent Voices in Critical Studies on Terrorism,” featured five undergraduate student researchers each acting as first time authors. The papers were able to pass a standardized double blind peer review, and met strict academic and professional standards.
The abstract for the article is included below, and we invite you to read the complete article, available here!
Abstract
In examining the Global War on Terror, the effects of presidential rhetoric on the framing of terrorism has been well documented. However, little previous work links terrorism and its status as an “othered” phenomenon to differential legal prosecution in a post-9/11 era. Using the Prosecution Project data set, we compared “othered” individuals, as defined by a Muslim, Arab/Middle Eastern, and/or foreign-born status, to “non-othered” individuals charged with terroristic felonies. Furthermore, we subdivided the dataset into three analytical time blocks: the George W. Bush administration immediately post-9/11, the latter half of the Bush administration, and the Obama administration. For the first and third time blocks, we found that “othered” individuals were prosecuted significantly more frequently than “non-othered” individuals. These findings call into question the effect of presidential rhetoric and the national framing of terrorism on the legal prosecution of “othered” individuals.