The project explored the objectives and methods of post-terrorist memorialisation in Europe and the United States, between 2001 and 2018. Interviews were conducted with memorial designers, design competition jury members, and activists in the following case studies: the World Trade Center Manhattan, the Oslo Government Quarter, Utoya island, the 2005 London bombings, the Boston Bombing, the 2004 Madrid bombing and the Memorial to Victims of Terrorism in Vitoria Gasteiz (under development 2018-19). Very specific individuals were contacted for interview, based upon their involvement with memorial planning, design or protest. Dataset includes interviews with 6 designers/curators of post-terrorist memorials, 6 civil servants involved in memorial planning and design competitions, 5 persons active in protesting memorial projects, and an academic.States organise bombsite reconstruction and memorialisation in an ad-hoc fashion through committees which act without policy guidance. This project explores the methods and objectives of such redevelopment, generating the data necessary for identification of best practice through the assessment of redevelopment at the World Trade Center Manhattan, the Oslo Government Quarter, Utoya island, the London bombings, the Boston Marathon Bombing and the Madrid bombing. It is important to address bombsite recovery to assess the implementation of resilience. In the contemporary era, security is practiced against risks and threats which haven't yet occurred in an attempt to prevent disaster. This is particularly true of resilience policies which anticipate a multitude of threats, some of which cannot be prevented, in order to build the capacity to recover from future disasters. But what can we know about resilience if we only anticipate threats, and do not examine practices which enable the recovery of disaster space? This Future Leaders project interrogates a gap at the heart of national and international resilience policy which follows from this anticipatory temporality: there is no codified account of how to manage and reclaim sites of terrorist attack, despite the positing of unpreventable events within resilience and security discourse. Resilience policy is targeted towards the mediation of the next disaster, not the steps by which a previous disaster site can be made resilient. This project changes the temporality of existing security research. It explores whether projects to rebuild, redesign and memorialise sites of terrorist attack mediate threats in a retrospective, rather than anticipatory, manner. Does reconstruction enable resilience? And how can rebuilding be optimized to avoid protest and public dissatisfaction? It is important to assess the efficacy of post-terrorist reconstruction because extensive public funds are committed to the redevelopment of sites ($10bn at Ground Zero in Manhattan; and at least 650m Kroner is allocated for Oslo's Government Quarter) without codified policy guidance for the undertaking of reconstruction and memorialisation. Additionally, despite the best of intentions of redevelopment committees, few redevelopment projects in recent years have escaped contestation. For example, dozens of self-organised family groups have organised protests against the delayed reconstruction of the WTC in New York, against the abstract memorial which won the vote of 9-11 memorial jury, and the housing of human remains in the 9-11 museum; similarly the lack of official clarity about the future of Oslo's bombed Government Quarter provoked considerable activism from the Norwegian public. To address these responses and assess the efficacy and appropriateness of post-terrorist reconstruction, I will deploy a secondary research question: 'When have reconstruction efforts upon sensitive sites provoked hostility and activism from victims' families and protest groups?' Once the methods and objectives of redevelopment are identified, and the situations in which it provokes protest, my final research question draws the research together in the direction of influencing policy: 'What examples of effective and appropriate practice are evident in contemporary case studies of bombsite redevelopment, such that policy guidance might be produced to aid the 'resilience' of post-terrorist space?' As a result, this Future Leaders project is dedicated to the identification of effective and transparent practice in the reclamation of post-terrorist space. This project builds upon existing research into the practice of political violence and its suppression through counter-terrorism. It makes an original contribution to the study and practice of security by taking the resilience-paradigm-shift seriously: if events are now unpreventable, then research must assess the implementation of resilience at the bombsite.

Very specific individuals were contacted for semi-structured interviews, based upon their involvement with memorial planning, design or protest. My dataset includes interviews with 6 designers/curators of post-terrorist memorials, 6 civil servants involved in memorial planning and design competitions, 5 persons active in protesting memorial projects, and an academic.