Value-talk after terrorism: articulating a united ‘we' and a divided ‘us'

ABSTRACT

Whether Muslim immigrants can adapt to Western values is a recurring theme in European contestation over diversity. Yet, a review of literature that engages with ‘values’ in studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism reveals a dominant and narrow conceptualisation: values as core trait of groups. This conceptualisation reinforces an idea that values mark strict boundaries between homogenous and dichotomous ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘Values’ figure particularly prominently in post-terror public debates. An analysis of value-talk after the 2011 terror attacks in Norway shows a prevailing narrative of value-based unity: an enlarged ‘we’ that supersedes ethnic and religious divisions. Simultaneously, the post-terror setting shows an ‘us’ articulated in contrast to the extremist Other who attacks ‘our values’, the immigrant Other that threatens those ‘values’, and the multiculturalist Other who fails to protect them. Drawing on well-known insights on the complex dynamics of racial, ethnic, and national relations, this article untangles the variability in ‘us’ and ‘them’ articulated through value-talk. It thus challenges widely accepted approaches to values as core traits that divide cultural or political groups. Instead, it brings attention to how value-talk works as expressions of multiple and changing constellations of ‘we’, ‘us’, and ‘them’ in contestation over diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Norway
• post-terror
• us-and-them
• values
• value-talk

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank those who have commented on various versions of this paper, including Marta Bivand Erdal, Grete Brochmann, Kristian Berg Harpviken, Cindy Horst, and Henrik Syse. Thank you to Rebecca Lowen and Christopher Butler for language editing, and the editors and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Online Appendix 1 for a full overview of the articles reviewed. The review shows a wide range in using ‘values’ as a term. The articles where ‘values’ figure as ‘side points’, without being made subject to explicit analysis, are not included in this discussion.

2 I collected the op-eds through the Norwegian news database Retriever, with keywords such as ‘22 July’, ‘Utøya’, and ‘Breivik’ (the perpetrator's name). 56 additional op-eds either mentioned 22 July or used it as an example without making it a main topic.

3 I do not analyse the 114 op-eds that I had categorised under ‘the perpetrator’, ‘security’, or ‘miscellaneous’.

4 All op-eds were published in Norwegian and translated by the author. The writers’ titles indicated reflect their positions at the time when the op-ed was published.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Research Council of Norway under the SAMKUL programme [grant number 220797].