Beware! Here (might) be terrorists: Constructing the threat of terrorism in foreign travel advice

Abstract

This article offers an original discursive analysis of the construction of terrorism within travel advice published by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). It argues that this advice positions terrorism as a very specific – omnipresent, Islamist, and non-state – security threat from which British nationals will never be safe. Three contributions are made. First, empirically, the article offers a descriptively rich exploration of terrorism’s production in an entirely neglected site of discourse. Second, analytically, it details the work done by specific rhetorical mechanisms within FCDO guidance, including the recycling of generic claims relating to terrorism, quantifications of risk, and the imagination of hypothetical attacks. Third, conceptually, it demonstrates the contingent and precarious character of this discourse by highlighting important exclusions that cohere and constitute terrorism as constructed in travel advice. These exclusions – notably the violences of right-wing actors and of states themselves – contribute to a very specific construction of terrorism that helps foreclose discussion of UK responsibility for, or involvement in, terrorism.

Introduction

The British government, like others around the world, communicates directly with its citizens on potential security threats. A regular National Risk Register shares findings from the UK’s National Security Risk Assessment activity, offering ‘the government’s updated assessment of the likelihood and potential impact of a broad range of risks that may directly affect the UK and its interests’.¹ Preparedness advice on potential emergencies distributes disaster guidance on hazards from power cuts to wildfires and cyber-attacks.² Prominent documents, including its National Security Strategy³ and Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy,⁴ disseminate information on geopolitical and other challenges that is subsequently cascaded through media briefings, news commentary, expert analysis, and so forth. And more piecemeal guidance on specific threats – from terrorism to organised crime, pandemics, and beyond – is delivered through a wider communication ecology that includes government speeches, manifestos, factsheets, and published statistics.⁵

Through its Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO), the UK government also generates direct guidance on overseas security risks to British nationals considering international travel. Designed to ‘help make sure you have a trouble-free time while you’re abroad’,⁶ the guidance provides country and territory specific advice on topics including insurance, entry requirements, healthcare, and overseas assistance. Each set of country guidance incorporates tailored information on ‘Safety and Security’, organised into succinct statements on potential risks such as a country’s political situation, crime, cultural differences, and transport risks. Of especial prominence within these statements – and the focus of this article – is the risk posed by terrorism to would-be travellers.

In this article I argue that FCDO guidance not only communicates the threat of terrorism to British nationals but also constructs it. I make this argument via an original discursive analysis of published warnings around terrorism for each of the 226 countries or territories on which the FCDO produces travel advice. The FCDO’s construction of terrorism, I suggest, emerges through a range of discursive techniques including quantification rhetoric, the listing of precedents, the imagination of hypothetical future attacks, and the construction of equivalences between terrorism and other security risks. Through these, terrorism is produced as: (i) an omnipresent risk from which UK nationals are never entirely safe; (ii) a generic threat that cuts across the impression of nuance and detail afforded by country-specific guidance; and (iii) a threat overwhelmingly concentrated on non-state ‘Islamist’ organisations, such as al Qaeda, Daesh, and al-Shabaab, and their hostility to British values rather than actions or interests.

In making this argument, this article offers three contributions to knowledge. First, empirically, it provides original analysis of primary data in the form of the country-specific travel advice produced by the FCDO. This advice has been entirely, and surprisingly, overlooked in the large and vibrant scholarship that has traced the discursive construction of terrorism in a wide range of sites, including political speech,⁷ academic discourse,⁸ the news media,⁹ and everyday language,¹⁰ as well as in less conventional spaces such as calendars¹¹ and obituaries.¹² Analysing this corpus in its entirety is important, therefore, in broadening existing understanding of the politics of (counter-)terrorism through interrogation of this neglected site of political communication. Second, analytically, the article delineates the work done by seven distinct rhetorical mechanisms that contribute to the construction of terrorism in FCDO guidance: repetition, quantification, precedent-listing, the imagination of hypothetical scenarios, citation, constructed relations of equivalence, and extrapolation. These mechanisms, I suggest, concretise and accentuate the threat posed by terrorism, while de-emphasising potentially important contexts of violence. Third, conceptually, the article demonstrates the contingent and precarious nature of this discourse through highlighting constitutive exclusions on which it relies. Notable here are the violences of right-wing and other non-state actors, as well as the violences of states themselves. These exclusions, I argue, contribute to a very specific construction of terrorism in this guidance as an essentially non-state religious phenomenon that helps foreclose discussion of UK responsibility for, or involvement in, terrorism.

The remainder of the article proceeds in five sections. I begin by situating my analysis within existing scholarship on the discursive construction of terrorism to contextualise my argument and detail the theoretical moorings of my approach. A second section then introduces FCDO travel advice and its place within counterterrorism policy, before outlining my epistemological and methodological approach to this data. A third section contains the article’s original analysis, organised around the seven rhetorical mechanisms detailed above, which leads to a fourth section discussing the implications and exclusions of this discourse. The article concludes by reflecting on the importance of this particular site of terrorism’s discursive construction, before outlining opportunities for future research.

Terrorism, discourse, and constructions of risk

Academic work on terrorism – within the field of terrorism studies and beyond – has traditionally approached this entity as a particular kind of political violence. Although a consensual definition of terrorism remains famously, even notoriously, elusive,¹³ a considerable amount of time and energy has been put into debating the core characteristics of this phenomenon in order to distinguish it from other actions, tactics, and harms.¹⁴ Notwithstanding competing prognoses of the likelihood of ever resolving this debate,¹⁵ the assumption, typically, has been that there is something – some identifiable, perhaps even objective, essence – that marks terrorism out from other violences.¹⁶ Depending on the author, that essence might include publicity, communication, indiscrimination, the deliberate targeting of civilians, non-state protagonists, the pursuit of fear, or the existence of underpinning political or ideological motivations that help distinguish this violence from other forms of criminality, warfare, or political activity.¹⁷ Achieving definitional clarity, moreover, has importance in this literature for multiple reasons, including the pursuit of terminological accuracy or consistency, the possibility of moral judgement or political delegitimisation, the strengthening of counterterrorism strategy, policy, or legislation, and (in more explicitly critical contributions) enabling scholars to ‘call out’ inconsistent or hypocritical uses of this lexicon by powerful actors.¹⁸ This tacit ontological foundationalism and instrumental search for definitional clarity, for critics, evidences a wider ‘problem-solving’ ethos within terrorism research that derives from the subfield’s academic and political proximities to disciplines such as strategic studies, as well as to the state and its interests.¹⁹

These efforts to capture the meaning of terrorism have been complemented (or, perhaps better, challenged) in recent years by a growing body of work in which terrorism is approached not as a form of political violence, but rather as a social or discursive construction.²⁰ Such an approach entails shifting analytical focus away from the essence of terrorism itself, in order to investigate how acts, individuals, or organisations become positioned and therefore made meaningful as terrorist by others.²¹ ‘Terrorism’, here – often written in apostrophes to illuminate its constructed and therefore contestable character – is a label applied to entities in the world, rather than an extra-discursive entity ‘out there’ to be identified and explained.²² In Alexander Spencer’s summary: ‘There are real people who conduct real actions, but what these people and their deeds mean is a matter of interpretation. It is this interpretation in discourse that constitutes a certain group of people as “terrorists” and their actions as “terrorism”.’²³

An exhaustive review of existing scholarship on terrorism discourse is beyond the scope of this article. To summarise briefly, however, existing work in this area has been important in demonstrating how terrorism’s discursive production takes place across a wide range of social sites including political speech,²⁴ popular culture,²⁵ and the ‘vernacular’ language of ‘ordinary’ citizens.²⁶ It has mapped the prominence of diverse identity constructions within terrorism discourse – including the vulnerable self, the heroic first-responder, the dangerous ‘terrorist’ other, and the nefarious state sponsor of terrorism – tracking the production of these subject positions through articulated similarities and differences between individuals and groups.²⁷ Such work has documented how long-standing tropes and figures such as ‘the barbarian’ or ‘savage’ become reactivated or repurposed in contemporary constructions of terrorism, deliberately or otherwise.²⁸ And this speaks, of course, to the often racialised, gendered, and homophobic nature of terrorism discourse, the consequences of which are compounded by the selectivity with which this language is applied to particular subjects rather than others.²⁹ Work in this area has explored the widespread use of figurative language such as metaphors – ‘draining the swamp’, ‘cutting the head off the snake’, and so forth – within prominent constructions of terrorism.³⁰ And, it has emphasised the value-laden assumptions within terrorism discourse, evident in the demonisation of those designated ‘terrorists’ through rhetorics of evil or monstrosity, and in the valorisation of those threatened by, or tasked with responding to, this threat.³¹ Although less prominent than linguistic analyses, related work, finally, has also documented the contribution of visual images to contemporary constructions of terrorism.³²

As the above suggests, conceptualising terrorism as a product of discourse rather than an extra-discursive reality involves an analytical shift as much as an ontological one. Rather than seeking to identify or explain acts of terrorism, the research emphasis here turns to the contexts in which ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorists’ are produced, and the contingency of dominant or other productions thereof. In Hülsse and Spencer’s provocation: ‘Instead of asking what terrorism is like (what structures, strategies and motivations it has), we need to ask how it is constituted in discourse.’³³ How is it, for instance, that some actors get designated ‘terrorist’, whereas others – with ostensibly similar motivations or conduct – do not?³⁴ This emphasis on the contingent – hence chosen (and therefore avoidable) designation of ‘terrorism’ – has clear normative underpinnings, as Ian Hacking summarises of constructivist work more generally: ‘Social constructivists about X tend to argue that … X need not have existed or need not be as it is. X, or X as it is at present, is not determined by the nature of things; it is not inevitable.’³⁵ In discursive work on terrorism, this sort of claim is frequently articulated through a concern with the social and political consequences associated with hegemonic constructions of this violence. Such consequences include the alienation or stigmatisation of particular (often already-marginalised) communities³⁶ and the legitimisation of costly and harmful forms of counterterrorism activity.³⁷

Although heterogeneous, work such as the above tends to gesture towards a vision of academic responsibility organised around critique rather than the immediate policy relevance associated with terrorism research as traditionally constituted.³⁸ Nowhere is this clearer than in work focused specifically on the terrorism threat as produced within political speech, national strategies, warning systems, and so forth: a threat that, for critics, is frequently presented in exceptional, existential, or hyperbolic registers.³⁹ Here, we find quantitative juxtaposition of terrorism’s casualties to those caused by more mundane, and less frequently securitised, sources of harm, in efforts to highlight the gap between social fear and objective danger.⁴⁰ Comparisons such as these possess political significance, not least in documenting the inconsistent allocation of financial and other resources to diverse threats, as Stewart and Mueller provocatively summarise:

The annual fatality risks from terrorism of all kinds in the developed world are a thousand times lower than the current murder rate. The odds of being killed in a traffic accident are 4,000 times higher than perishing from a terrorist attack. Applying conventional standards, then, under current conditions terrorism presents a threat to human life in the Western world that is, in general, acceptable.⁴¹

Work such as this pursues a broadly ‘objectivist’ strategy for critiquing prominent constructions of threat⁴² aimed at correcting empirical miscalculations of harm. Closer to this article’s focus, though, is more explicitly interpretivist work attentive to the discursive positioning of terrorism as a threat to specific referents such as national security or citizens’ lives.⁴³ Such work speaks to, and often draws on, wider critical international relations scholarship on (in)security, which attempts ‘to look in more detail at how dangers are actually identified, and the political stakes and effects of strategies seeking to control those dangers’.⁴⁴ Here, an emphasis on the accuracy or otherwise of threat perception is replaced by attentiveness to the emergence and effects of constructed dangers that provide ontological scaffolding to (equally constructed) national identities⁴⁵ and render possible particular kinds of political intervention, while militating against others.⁴⁶

This attention to the processes through which threats are constructed and communicated brings us to risk as a particular register for calculating danger. The language of risk has become an increasingly prominent one in a wide range of areas – from the climate crisis, to natural disasters, cyber-attack, nuclear weapons, terrorism, and beyond.⁴⁷ As a concept, risk is typically differentiated from ostensible equivalents like threat due to its emphasis on calculating both ‘the probability and consequences of a potentially harmful event’.⁴⁸ Such calculations have an intrinsically temporal orientation, becoming manifest through ‘rationalities and technologies to monitor and predict dangerous occurrences in the future’.⁴⁹ And yet, as Charlotte Heath-Kelly argues, the monitoring, calculating, communication, and address of future harms – often through a pre-emptive disposition emphasising early intervention – is itself constitutive, and contributory to the production of ‘risk’ itself.⁵⁰ It proceeds via a diverse range of calculative and imaginative practices aimed at rendering the inherently unknowable future knowable or foreseeable.⁵¹ And, terrorism, the focus of this article, as Aradau and Van Munster argue, has an especial place in contemporary dispositifs of risk, given its representation – particularly in the post-9/11 period – ‘as doubly infinite in its catastrophic effects and the uncertainty of its occurrence’.⁵² Because we can never be fully secure from the future risk of terrorism we are always, in a sense, ‘waiting for terror’, such that ‘the most ominous sign is the absence of a sign, which only confirms that this has to be simply the lull before the storm. It can only be the silence of the enemy while plotting the unknown sudden attack.’⁵³

The discussion that follows explores the production of terrorism as risk within FCDO advice, which operates as both a counterterrorism practice and a form of public communication. Nothing in the argument is intended as a bad faith characterisation of this advice, and my analytical engagement is based on no claim about the accuracy thereof, the intentions or motives beneath it, or, indeed, the effectiveness of this advice in keeping publics safe from terrorism or other harms.⁵⁴ Rather – and in line with existing interpretivist work on terrorism, insecurity, and risk discussed throughout this section – my focus is on how particular risks are established and communicated – including through particular temporal imaginaries⁵⁵ – in a prominent, yet underexplored, site of discourse in ways that might have been otherwise. As demonstrated below, this involves attention to both presence and absence in this discourse: to what is written about terrorism, as well as to the constitutive work of omissions therein.⁵⁶ As post-structural, feminist, and other critical work has long argued, all texts contain or are built upon silences, and those silences have political significance.⁵⁷ The challenge, therefore, to paraphrase Laura Sjoberg, is to identify which silences exist, and to reflect on the work they do for a particular text and its audiences.⁵⁸

FCDO advice and its analysis

In this article I draw insight from discursive work including the above to explore how terrorism is constructed as a particular risk within FCDO travel advice. The UK is far from alone in generating this advice, and the practice is a relatively widespread one found in a range of states including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the USA.⁵⁹ The contingent nature of travel warnings might be inferred from the considerable variation in those produced by states towards particular destinations, and in the opacity of the criteria underpinning these constructions.⁶⁰ According to the FCDO, its own travel advice is compiled through ‘a number of sources, including: local knowledge from our embassies abroad; information provided by the local authorities in each country; [and] in some cases, information gathered by the intelligence services’.⁶¹ This advice represents an explicit attempt at ‘objective judgement’ and is triangulated on occasion through links to other relevant sources. The length and detail provided on specific countries, however, varies considerably, both in relation to security risks in general and in connection with terrorism specifically.⁶²

Although neglected as a source of terrorism discourse, foreign office travel warnings have received a little attention within wider scholarship on tourism and travel. Causal analyses have sought to map the consequences that follow issuance of travel advice, including the impact of such advice on visitor numbers to ‘risky’ destinations.⁶³ Such work explores temporal dynamics including the longevity of impact had by travel warnings, as well as spatial variations relating to source and destination countries.⁶⁴ This scholarship speaks to a much larger and older literature on the relationship between security – including terrorism – and tourism more generally.⁶⁵ Audience-based research complements this work by asking how travellers read and interpret official travel advice, often through qualitative methods such as focus groups and interviews with their capacity for descriptive richness.⁶⁶ Although the connections are typically deemed complex and variable, work here indicates that travel warnings do have potential to intervene in traveller decisions to visit particular destinations.⁶⁷

Closer to the purposes of this article is critical research on the politics of danger construction within travel warnings. Oded Löwenheim’s study, for instance, helpfully situates travel advice within wider trends of neoliberal governmentality, arguing that foreign office warnings contribute to the contemporary ‘responsibilisation’ of citizens.⁶⁸ This is done, in part, through making state support for those who find themselves in trouble conditional on their having followed government travel advice.⁶⁹ A similar constructivist impulse is found within content analyses of ‘alarmism’ in foreign office alerts, and the ways in which representations of risk therein tend to outlast the original reasons for their designation.⁷⁰ Work here again highlights the contingent and constructed nature of travel guidance that exists as both interpretation and production of the world and its risks, rather than an unproblematic reflection of its realities.

Travel advice on terrorism specifically – the focus of this article – has additional significance in the UK context because of its contribution to a wider counterterrorism architecture.⁷¹ For twenty years, this architecture has been built around CONTEST, the UK’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy, which, despite its evolution across this period (including in response to terrorist attacks),⁷² remains organised around four alliterative work strands – Prevent, Pursue, Protect, and Prepare – delivered across government agencies including the FCDO and Home Office. FCDO advice contributes to Prepare through communicating the threat posed by terrorism in specific overseas territories.⁷³ In so doing, it reflects the strategy’s contribution to a ‘wider imperative within the UK to ensure a state of permanent readiness for emergencies’,⁷⁴ evident, inter alia, in efforts at improving citizen counterterrorism literacy and readiness.⁷⁵ Such efforts speak to the emphasis on resilience within CONTEST (and the Prepare and Prevent strands in particular),⁷⁶ for which publics are prepared through a wide range of initiatives including counterterrorism workshops and training events.⁷⁷

My analysis in the remainder of this article offers the first sustained analysis of the construction of terrorism across the ‘safety and security’ travel advice published by the UK FCDO. The data on which I draw is publicly available and complete in its inclusion of the travel advice for 226 different countries or territories accessed directly from the FCDO website.⁷⁸ Because the focus of this research is on depictions of terrorism globally, the data was collected as one static sample in March 2025 to provide a single snapshot of this discourse at a particular moment in time.⁷⁹ Every published entry was read in full and coded around eleven primary codes: (i) generic advice on terrorism; (ii) terrorist targets (places; times; categories of potential victim); (iii) current terrorism threat (quantifications and other indicators; organisations; motivations); (iv) other causal factors; (v) modes of attack; (vi) historical precedents; (vii) characteristics of terrorism (e.g., indiscriminate; religious); (viii) connections with other security threats (e.g., drug trafficking; hostage-taking; political disorder); (ix) wider political and geopolitical contexts; (x) advice for citizens; and (xi) miscellaneous/other. The codes were derived inductively from my first reading of the FCDO advice and guided by my overarching concern with constructions of terrorism in this particular discourse.

The remainder of the article now proceeds via a double reading that moves between faithful description of the content of FCDO advice and a critical exploration of its taken-for-granted assumptions, silences, and contradictions. This enables reflection on the ‘broader political and ethical consequences – the wider ideological and historical-material effects’ of this particular discourse,⁸⁰ asking what work it does in establishing the meaning of terrorism and its contemporary threat. Such a reading is intended as explicitly critical in the manner famously outlined by Michel Foucault:

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest… Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult.⁸¹

In this sense, my approach mobilises a form of discursive ‘inventionalism’⁸² that (i) sees FCDO advice as an invented, or constructed, effort to render the world meaningful, and (ii) approaches my own reading thereof as an equally inventive one: a product of my own research questions, interpretive work, coding framework, and so forth. I make no claim here to objectivity or replicability, and instead approach the validity of my analysis according to two criteria. First is completeness, understood both in my analysis of this discourse in its entirety – having read, coded, and analysed every FCDO entry on terrorism in full at the moment of data collection – and in relation to the ‘workability’ or ‘fit’ of my theoretical and analytical claims for the country warnings discussed below.⁸³ The second criterion is coherence, and the extent to which my analysis offers a persuasive account of this particular site of terrorism discourse.

Constructing terrorism in/as travel advice

My analysis of the discursive construction of terrorism in FCDO guidance focuses on seven rhetorical mechanisms (see Table 1): (i) generic representations of the terrorist threat; (ii) quantification; (iii) the listing of precedents; (iv) imagined hypothetical scenarios; (v) citation; (vi) relations of equivalence; and (vii) extrapolation. All of these mechanisms, I argue, contribute to the FCDO’s articulation of ‘terrorism’, shaping this violence’s meaning and magnitude as an omnipresent threat.

Table 1. Constructions of risk in FCDO discourse on terrorism.

FCDO advice on international travel leaves little doubt as to the significance of terrorism as a risk to British nationals. Although, as shown below, this discourse makes reference to some geographical and temporal variation, all of the country-specific guidance is housed within a ubiquitous and generic construction of terrorism as a pervasive, omnipresent danger. Three features that repeat throughout the country descriptions contribute in particular to this writing. First, is the repeated use of ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorists’ as abstract nouns within FCDO advice that echoes wider post-9/11 discourse in which (plural) terrorisms are frequently reduced to the singular ‘terrorism with a capital T’.⁸⁴ Although illustrated, as argued below, with specific examples on occasion, many countries’ entries discuss ‘terrorism’ only as a threat that is decontextualised from specific groups, motives, or histories.⁸⁵ Potential travellers to Jordan, for instance, are warned that ‘Terrorism attacks could be indiscriminate, including in places visited by foreign nationals’.⁸⁶ The Saudi Arabia advice, relatedly, notes – again without example or detail – that ‘Terrorists have threatened to carry out attacks in the Gulf region’.⁸⁷ Terrorism, here, is not (only) a tactic or method. It is an identity that is presented to potential travellers without – or with very rare – reflection on the contingent and political usage of this abstract noun as a label.⁸⁸ Second is the hierarchical positioning of ‘terrorism’ as the very first entry in the listed ‘safety and security’ concerns for every state on which guidance is offered. Terrorism here takes precedence over a wide range of other potential hazards, including ‘crime’, ‘political situation’, ‘laws and cultural differences’, ‘extreme weather and natural disasters’, and ‘transport risks’, irrespective of the assessed risk any poses to travellers to a particular territory. The third feature is the repeated statement of generic threat that prefaces every country-specific assessment, and that renders very explicit terrorism’s global reach and magnitude:

There is a high threat of terrorist attack globally affecting UK interests and British nationals, including from groups and individuals who view the UK and British nationals as targets. Stay aware of your surroundings at all times.

UK Counter Terrorism Policing has information and advice on staying safe abroad and what to do in the event of a terrorist attack. Find out how to reduce your risk from terrorism while abroad.

This generic statement introduces the FCDO safety and security advice irrespective of whether one is travelling to Afghanistan, Antarctica, or Australia. No equivalent is given for any of the other risks discussed within this travel guidance, with this warning’s generic construction meaning it bears no relation to the assessed risk of terrorism within any particular country. This is important, because it serves to emphasise the threat’s unbounded reach to all places travellers might visit, as the entry for the Czech Republic clarifies: ‘You should be aware of the global risk of indiscriminate terrorist attacks which could be in public places, including in places frequented by expatriates and foreign travellers.’⁸⁹

Generic constructions of terrorism emphasise this threat’s severity through delinking risk from specific times and places.⁹⁰ A second prominent rhetorical mechanism in FCDO guidance – quantification or counting – does the opposite, conveying threat through a sense of precision rather than generalisation. Quantification here includes numerical listing of events and casualties as evidence of risk within particular locations. Mozambique’s entry, for instance, begins with a brief introduction to IS-Mozambique (IS-M) – a ‘terrorist group with links to Daesh’ – and a summary count of its recent activities in the northern Cabo Delgado province: ‘Since January, IS-M have been associated with 76 incidents (violent attacks, robberies, looting, threats) across Cabo Delgado which has resulted in over 125 deaths.’⁹¹ More frequent, though, is the use of ‘non-numerical quantification rhetoric’⁹² to contribute a sense of scale to the threat posed by terrorism. Such rhetoric is evident in the summary assessments that begin each country-specific account – ‘terrorists are very likely to carry out attacks in Mali’⁹³ – as well as in the descriptive information that later elaborates on such summaries: ‘There is a high threat from terrorism throughout the country [Burkina Faso], including increasingly in the capital, Ouagadougou.’⁹⁴ Quantification is evident, too, in the use of ‘non-numerical number words’ or ‘unspecified number plurals’⁹⁵ that convey both magnitude and an impression of numerical precision without counting in any meaningful way, for instance: ‘Hamas has taken hundreds of hostages, including British nationals, across the border and into Gaza’⁹⁶ and, ‘Terrorist attacks have taken place in Moscow and St Petersburg and other Russian cities in recent years, resulting in large numbers of casualties’.⁹⁷ These quantifications are present, tellingly, not only in contexts deemed especially dangerous – such as the Occupied Palestinian Territories – but also in places where the risk of terrorism is deemed far less severe: ‘Terrorist attacks in Moldova cannot be ruled out’⁹⁸ and, ‘Although there’s no recent history of terrorism in North Korea, attacks cannot be ruled out’.⁹⁹

FCDO quantifications of terrorism contribute to terrorism’s significance as a threat because they always result in a positive outcome: in contrast to other safety and security risks, the risk of terrorism is never zero, never absent. Their contribution here is particularly powerful, in the first instance, because numbers convey a sense of precision, offering an ostensibly accurate rendering of risk, rather than a contingent construction thereof. In this sense, the FCDO’s usage of numbers reflects their proliferation across many sites of discourse precisely because of this capacity for conveying exactness, even objectivity, such that: ‘the gradual oversight of statistics’ origins and initial purpose, leading them to be treated as accurate facts – invests numbers with an authoritative force that resists questioning’.¹⁰⁰ These connotations of precision, moreover, dovetail with the impression of neutrality enjoyed by numbers that appear impartial and lacking in evaluative dimension. In Joel Best’s words, ‘In our society, statistics are a sort of fetish. We tend to regard statistics as magical, as though they are more than mere numbers. We treat them as powerful representations of the truth.’¹⁰¹ And yet, counting – of terrorisms past, let alone of terrorisms to come – is always inherently political because counting is contingent on contextually specific decisions around inclusion and exclusion: decisions of what to count, when to count, how, who, and where to count.¹⁰² These numbers, in other words, are (like all numbers) both precarious and performative rather than straightforwardly descriptive, as Wendy Espeland neatly summarises:

Numbers do things. They highlight and obscure. They integrate and disaggregate. They mark and measure. They represent and intervene. They tame and inflame. They structure people’s interactions. They create new objects and new kinds of people. They possess a power that hides itself. They are rhetoric that is anti-rhetorical.¹⁰³

Directly linked to counting is the brief detailing of relevant precedents to depict the sort of incident travellers have experienced, and therefore may in future encounter, in specific countries. This discussion of precedents links current risk to past attacks through the construction of linear temporalities connecting discrete events, often through listing – another numerical structural device¹⁰⁴ – the times, places, tactics, and casualties of attacks. In the case of Israel, for instance:

Examples of recent significant attacks include:

In 2025:

• • On 3 March, one person was killed and 3 injured in a stabbing attack in Haifa

• • In February, one person was killed and 12 people were injured in a ramming and stabbing attack at Karkur Junction near Pardes Hana-Karkur, south of Haifa

• • In February, 3 bombs exploded on 3 separate busses in the Tel Aviv area. Two other buses were found with bombs which failed to explode. There were no casualties…

In 2024:

• • 7 people were killed in a shooting and stabbing attack in Jaffa

• • 3 people were killed in a shooting attack at the Allenby Bridge Crossing

• • one person was killed and 17 injured during a ramming attack in Ra’anana.¹⁰⁵

In Burkina Faso, similarly:

Examples of significant attacks include:

• • in August 2024, at least 400 people were killed in a village attack in Barsalogho, Sanmatenga

• • in July 2024, the office of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) was attacked by gunfire in Djibo, Sahel

• • in February 2024, at least 15 people were killed in an attack on a church in Essakane, Oudalan

• • in February 2024, at least 12 people were killed in an attack on a mosque in Natiaboani, Gourma

• • in 2023, two foreign nationals were killed in an attack on a commercial truck convoy on the N3 (near Diori), Sahel

• • in 2023, around 20 people were killed in attacks on 6 villages in the southwest of Seytenga including Foufou, Mira and Lipsi.¹⁰⁶

Less common and less parsimonious than listing is the narrative description of historical precedents as direct evidence of the contemporary ambitions and capabilities of terrorist organisations, such as in Syria, where, ‘Terrorist groups continue to pose a significant threat to civilians living in Syria and have shown they can carry out co-ordinated attacks against military and security targets, and civilians’.¹⁰⁷ Such precedents – both listed and described – work through interpellation to concretise the threat of terrorism by encouraging readers to identify with, or position themselves as, potential or future victims of terrorism.¹⁰⁸

If the listing of precedents produces risk through a backward-oriented gaze encouraging reflection on past violences, a fourth (and particularly prominent) discursive strategy focuses on future violences in the imagination of hypothetical attacks. Very common here are categorisations of the type of location – typically abstract and generalised – that ‘terrorists’ might target within particular countries, as, for instance, in the case of Russia:

Terrorist attacks could be indiscriminate, including in places visited by foreign nationals, such as:

• • large gatherings, such as concerts

• • popular tourist sites

• • seasonal, festive, or religious activities in public places

• • areas that are not controlled by security, such as open-air events and markets

• • transportation networks.¹⁰⁹

In the case of Chad, similarly:

Terrorist attacks could be indiscriminate and occur without warning, including in places visited by foreign nationals, such as:

• • hotels, restaurants, bars and nightclubs

• • shopping areas and markets

• • airports and other transport hubs

• • places of worship (especially churches)

• • national parks

• • foreign embassies and other diplomatic or military facilities

• • national and local government facilities.¹¹⁰

Hypothetical scenarios and assumptions such as these are common within terrorism discourse. As Frank argues, ‘whenever spectacular, mass-mediated acts of international terrorism occur, they tend to trigger a proliferation of hypothetical scenarios speculating about possible future assaults’.¹¹¹ Structured similarly to, and sitting alongside, the details of past attacks, the pared down listing of specific potential scenarios connotes facticity, while connecting FCDO advice to wider imaginations of risk¹¹² and allowing some variability across the guidance provided. Religious sites and gatherings, for instance, are listed as potential targets in Pakistan and Mali, yet not in Somalia. Transport hubs are listed as potential targets in Syria and Niger, yet not in Cameroon. Such hypotheticals also again highlight the importance of temporality to risk discourse,¹¹³ for instance via warnings about the heightened threat of future terrorism during times of symbolic or other importance: ‘Take particular care during elections and public holidays, and periods of national or religious significance’, in Mali, for instance,¹¹⁴ or ‘The risk of attacks in Somalia, including Somaliland, may be further heightened during religious holidays’.¹¹⁵

Post-structural and other approaches have long argued that texts always speak to others,¹¹⁶ and FCDO advice on terrorism is no exception. Although less prominent than the above mechanisms, a fifth strategy – of citation – sees explicit reference to threats that have been made by terrorist organisations as evidence of the risk they pose to travellers to particular countries. Such citation may be vague, as with Kuwait and Oman where readers are told, ‘Terrorists have threatened to carry out attacks in the Gulf region’.¹¹⁷ Alternatively, it may be specific and attributed to particular organisations. Of Yemen, for instance, potential visitors are told that ‘Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) propaganda has called for continued kidnapping of westerners’.¹¹⁸ In Djibouti, ‘Al Shabaab has issued public threats’,¹¹⁹ while in Ethiopia, similarly: ‘Al-Shabaab has said it intends to commit further attacks in the area.’¹²⁰ A very different form of citation, however – but one that similarly evidences the threat posed by terrorism – is to the counterterrorism discourse of other states. Examples include FCDO advice on Germany, where ‘German authorities regularly report that they have disrupted planned attacks and made arrests’¹²¹and the Netherlands, which has elevated ‘its National Terrorist Threat Level. This means that they assess there is a heightened risk of a terrorist attack in the Netherlands’,¹²² as well as the direct linking to national terrorism threat levels in countries including Belgium¹²³ and Canada.¹²⁴ Citational practices such as these situate FCDO advice within wider intertextual relations, adding credibility to risk assessments through borrowing from the authority of external sources with privileged knowledge in this context.¹²⁵

A sixth strategy for shaping the meaning and significance of terrorism in this guidance involves the construction of relations of equivalence between locally specific terrorist threats and other criminal activities or organisations. Such relations posit connections between potentially distinct entities, amplifying their significance through their shared threat to the imagined reader.¹²⁶ Potential travellers to Colombia, for instance, are told that ‘Drugs, organised crime and terrorism are inextricably linked in Colombia’.¹²⁷ This connection between terrorism and organised crime is apparent, similarly, in Yemen, where ‘armed tribes and criminal groups have also carried out kidnaps in the past. There is a high risk that such groups would sell any hostages on to AQAP [Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula].’¹²⁸ In Somalia, it is pirates rather than drug traffickers with whom terrorism is equivalenced: ‘Terrorists and criminal groups, including piracy groups, are involved in kidnapping’,¹²⁹ while in Mali terrorist involvement in communal violence is a concern: ‘Security incidents between and within communities continue in many parts of the country, most notably in Mopti and Segou regions. In some instances, terrorist groups have become involved in these conflicts.’¹³⁰

Relations of equivalence are also constructed, in FCDO guidance, through associations between local groups and larger, better known organisations, especially al Qaeda and Daesh/Islamic State. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for instance, the primary danger from terrorism is posed by ‘ADF, a militant group with links to Daesh’.¹³¹ In Algeria, similarly, ‘The main terrorist threat is from Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and other regional Islamist groups including Al Murabitun and Daesh affiliates’.¹³² In Togo, ‘The main threat is from Al-Qaida in the Islamic Magreb (AQIM) and its associated groups, who are active mainly in the northern region of the country near the Burkina Faso border’,¹³³ while in Côte d’Ivoire the ‘main threat’ is ‘from Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and other al-Qa’ida (AQ) affiliated groups, including al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)’.¹³⁴ These constructed connections – through groups’ actions, motivations, or formal associations – again amplify the danger posed by terrorism, locating local organisations within wider threat matrices and situating terrorism alongside other dangers to British nationals considering overseas travel.

A final rhetorical technique involves the extrapolation of local risk from wider regional or geopolitical contexts. In Liberia, for instance, ‘Although there is no recent history of terrorism in Liberia, attacks cannot be ruled out’,¹³⁵ because ‘Terrorist groups in West Africa continue to mount attacks in the region’.¹³⁶ In Algeria, there exists ‘a threat of kidnapping by groups operating in North Africa, particularly from Libya, Mauritania and groups originating in the Sahel’.¹³⁷ In Senegal, ‘Terrorist groups in the Sahel region in West Africa have shown their capability and intent by mounting attacks in Mali, which shares a border with Senegal’,¹³⁸ while in Malaysia, finally, ‘Some groups operating in the southern Philippines, including factions of ASG, have pledged allegiance to Daesh and are likely to regard westerners as legitimate targets’.¹³⁹ The threat of terrorism, in these examples, is predicated on two forms of inference.¹⁴⁰ First is inference about the mobility of terrorism itself, positioned here as a borderless threat able to travel across state boundaries characterised as porous and therefore inadequate guarantors of security. Second is inference from constructed regional proximities, such that threats or attacks in one territory are taken to be indicators of risk in others. These inferences speak to the deterritorialisation of terrorism noted above, while further highlighting the importance of spatial – as well temporal – assumptions within terrorism imaginaries such as the FCDO’s.¹⁴¹

Implications, omissions, and exclusions in constructions of threat

As the above indicates, terrorism within FCDO security advice is positioned or constructed as a generic, omnipresent threat that is always possible, never entirely absent, and from which British nationals will never be safe. Even countries and territories with no recent (or other) recognised history of terrorism – Wallis and Futuna in the South Pacific,¹⁴² perhaps – see would-be travellers warned that future terrorist attacks cannot be ruled out. Terrorism, here, therefore has unique standing within the FCDO travel advice: other risks – criminal kidnaps, perhaps, or, political protests, food spiking, or extreme weather – are documented and discussed only where deemed directly relevant, and never uniformly across the world.

Following Michael Frank, this consistent drawing of attention to the threat posed by terrorism makes use of a fundamentally anticipatory logic involving the ‘fear of a next time’:¹⁴³ a logic, as we have seen, that draws both on precedents such as past attacks and on imagined hypotheticals and inferences. Readers of FCDO advice are guided through potential encounters with terrorists – in hotels, places of worship, and so forth – via a more or less detailed ‘what-if’ grammar that saturates other sites of counterterrorism discourse¹⁴⁴ and encourages preparation for imagined future acts of violence. Yet, where other sites of counterterrorism – such as counter-radicalisation programmes – emphasise and produce (racialised, gendered) subjects as risky,¹⁴⁵ it is times and places that feature most prominently in this advice. As we have seen, the fact that those designated ‘terrorist’ have not been somewhere (recently, or perhaps even ever) is, for the FCDO, no reliable indicator of their continuing/future absence.¹⁴⁶

This construction of terrorism as an omnipresent threat – and its differentiation from others that feature less pervasively in FCDO travel advice – is made possible, in part, because of assumptions about the strategic and tactical nature of terrorism. Across the guidance, we find depictions of this threat as both ‘indiscriminate’,¹⁴⁷ thus rendering all travellers potential targets, and unpredictable such that attacks might occur ‘without warning’¹⁴⁸ and at ‘any time’.¹⁴⁹ Although typically discussed in abstract, generalised terms, some country entries concretise this generic construction with reference to specific types of protagonist in the form of categories of terrorism – ‘There is also a risk that lone actors target foreigners’¹⁵⁰ – or, more frequently, specific named groups.¹⁵¹ Particularly prominent here are organisations such as al Qaeda, Daesh, and al Shabaab that are widely depicted and understood as examples of religious or ‘Islamist’ terrorism, and often explicitly depicted as such in this advice.¹⁵² In the section on terrorist kidnap in Mozambique, for instance, readers are warned: ‘Due to the presence of groups with links to Islamist extremism, there is a threat of kidnap in Mozambique’.¹⁵³ ‘Islamist’ groups or extremists are a threat, similarly, in countries including Burkina Faso, Indonesia, and Niger.¹⁵⁴

Even with those entries that mention specific organisations, or types thereof, there is little explicit discussion on the motivations for terrorism. Where this is provided, the emphasis is frequently on cultural antagonism, rather than political hostilities. In Afghanistan, for instance, al Qaeda is seen to hold ‘strong anti-western views, which could make any British interest or person a target’.¹⁵⁵ In Bangladesh, similarly, ‘Some groups have targeted people who they consider to have views and lifestyles contrary to Islam’.¹⁵⁶ Taken together, the attention given to high-profile ‘Islamist’ groups, and the writing of these groups around cultural or identitarian antagonism with the West, sees considerable resonance between FCDO advice and far-wider constructions of ‘new’ types of terrorism characterised by religiously motivated and indiscriminate belligerents that have been identified and explored within diverse sites of political, media, and other discourse.¹⁵⁷ The outcome here – as elsewhere – is a curiously apolitical conception of terrorism that focuses on what – or, better, who – ‘the West’ is, while militating against potentially relevant questions around what ‘the West’, and states such as the UK, do, or have done.¹⁵⁸

There are, to be clear, a small number of examples in which terrorist organisations are written in more overtly political terms. The threat posed by al Shabaab in Kenya, for instance, is explained, ‘in part, due to Kenyan military intervention in Somalia’.¹⁵⁹ The same group is depicted as a threat in Burundi ‘because of its support for the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia’.¹⁶⁰ Yet seldom, if ever, are those political contexts explicitly related to British foreign policy, military interventions, or to the violences of colonial or post-colonial contexts. British interests and actions, in this discourse, are affected by political terrorism; they do not shape or affect it. And the British state’s agency in the wider politics of terrorism, at least as depicted here, is diminished to the limited assistance it is able to provide to its citizens, as generic FCDO guidance reproduced across countries and territories makes clear:

The long-standing policy of the British government policy is not to make substantive concessions to hostage takers. The British government considers that paying ransoms and releasing prisoners builds the capability of terrorist groups and finances their activities. This can, in turn, increase the risk of further hostage-taking. The Terrorism Act (2000) makes payments to terrorists illegal.

The ‘filling’ of the generic ‘terrorism’ signifier with particular examples of terrorist organisations written as indiscriminate, unpredictable, and often religiously inspired points us to two further important omissions or silences in this discourse. First is the absence of types of terrorism that do not cohere with the emphasis on ‘Islamist’ examples within FCDO guidance. Left-wing terrorism, for instance, is detailed as a threat only in relation to the Naxalites in India; anarchist terrorism is referenced on one occasion, in relation to Chile; and the entry on Ireland – a place where ‘Terrorist attacks…cannot be ruled out’ – contains no mention of dissident republican violence. Perhaps more striking, though, is the absence of right-wing terrorism here: a threat widely understood in other sites of terrorism discourse as significant and growing.¹⁶¹ Brenton Tarrant’s 2019 attack on two mosques in Christchurch receives no mention in the advice for New Zealand, despite the reference to the Easter bombings of the same year in the advice on Sri Lanka. Similarly, no white supremacist, neo-Nazi, or anti-abortionist groups are discussed in the travel advice for the United States, with high-profile attacks such as in El Paso (2019) and Buffalo (2022) notably absent – despite this country being one in which ‘terrorists are very likely to carry out attacks’.¹⁶²

If terrorism is an overwhelmingly religious phenomenon in FCDO discourse, it is also – without exception – a non-state phenomenon. Nowhere does the travel advice mention the risk of ‘state terrorism’ or its variants such as ‘state-sponsored terrorism’: a prominent concern within academic typologies.¹⁶³ Travellers are, in some instances, cautioned about political regimes that might elsewhere or previously have been designated ‘terrorist’, such as the Taliban now again ruling Afghanistan. But such risks are discussed as ‘political’ or related to harms such as ‘detention’, and distinguished, therefore, from the threat posed by terrorism, which is associated, in Afghanistan, with al Qaeda, Daesh, and unnamed other groups.¹⁶⁴ Violences by other states regularly accused of state terrorism by their critics – Israel, North Korea, Russia, and so forth – are similarly absent within FCDO advice on terrorism, even if risks of harm or ill-treatment are discussed under other headings or labels.

The repetition of guidance on the risk posed by terrorism, and the narrow focus on specific types of – non-state, ‘Islamist’ organisation – contributes, I argue, to the flattening of differences between types of terrorism in FCDO security advice. Despite the detailing of country-specific targets and precedents, the outcome is a production of this violence as a relatively coherent and global entity rather than a nuanced, context-specific phenomenon. This construction, as demonstrated above, entails or relies upon important exclusions that give coherence to this discourse and the subjects it describes.¹⁶⁵ While the FCDO recognises that states may commit acts of violence – and may cause harm to British nationals – there is no space in this framing for understanding those violences as ‘terroristic’ in ambition or consequence. Thus, although terrorism is a consistently generic and relatively open signifier, its filling with particular illustrative examples and assumptions around terrorism means that a wide range of actors and ideologies, such as associated with the far right, are never labelled thus in this discourse. And, if the UK is deeply concerned with the politics of terrorism, it is only, here, as a potential victim of violence: one that is stripped of any agency for creating the conditions in which terrorism might become manifest (or, more provocatively, of any responsibility for historical or contemporary state terrorisms of its own).

Conclusion

This article has argued that FCDO travel advice consistently positions terrorism as a security risk to which British nationals need be attuned irrespective of where they travel. This construction of terrorism as a generic, omnipresent threat distinguishes it from every other risk communicated by the FCDO, giving it a magnitude and importance not associated – in this advice, at least – with other dangers from organised crime to natural disasters or disease. This omnipresent threat is built up through a series of discursive strategies that extend both backwards – as with the selection of particular precedents; and forwards – as with the imagination of hypothetical attacks. The indiscriminate, unpredictable threat that emerges here is also overwhelmingly illustrated or ‘filled’ with ‘Islamist’ groups depicted in primarily religious terms, at least as they relate to UK nationals. This discourse as a whole therefore produces a generic but narrow conception of terrorism that conceals the violences of far-right and other non-state organisations, as well as the violences conducted by states potentially readable as ‘terrorist’. In so doing, the UK is positioned as a perpetual victim of terrorism, never a cause or contributor to its contexts.

In making this argument, the article extends existing work on terrorism discourse in three ways. First, empirically, it provides original engagement with FCDO travel guidance as an important but hitherto ignored site of terrorism discourse. As detailed above, this article offers the first systematic analysis of terrorism as constructed in this guidance through analysis of the entire corpus of advice on all 226 different countries and territories covered by the FCDO. Second, analytically, the article details the work done by seven rhetorical mechanisms within FCDO advice, situating these within wider literature on risk, security, and discourse and exploring their contribution to the writing of terrorism as an identity and threat. Third, conceptually, the article identifies important constitutive exclusions that shape terrorism’s construction in this context, and the role of these in positioning British nationals as potential victims of terrorism.

Although neglected in critical work to date, foreign travel advice is an important site of the state’s construction of terrorism. First, this advice has a reach to everyday life not enjoyed by all political communication because it operates, as Löwenheim argues, as an exercise in power that helps shape the conduct of citizens while also intervening in interstate relations.¹⁶⁶ Second, this advice is a direct contributor to wider security architectures, including – as discussed above – the UK’s CONTEST Strategy for countering terrorism. In this, it has a practical as well as a communicative function that involves diminishing the threat of terrorism as well as informing publics about that threat. Third, travel advice also provides insight on states’ temporal and spatial imaginations, precisely because it relates to the international movement of citizens. Distinct from – but connected to – other initiatives such as ‘travel bans’, such advice sheds light on how states (or their institutions) picture the distribution of risk around the world, and how they communicate such understandings in order to influence individual behaviour.¹⁶⁷

As a first exploration of this site of terrorism discourse, future work could profitably build on this article in a number of ways. Comparative analysis of travel advice produced by other states would shed light on the distinctiveness or otherwise of the FCDO’s construction of terrorism. Longitudinal analysis could explore transformations in UK travel advice as published on or across particular states, including charting how this changes in relation to specific attacks or events. Audience-based research could explore the role of advice such as the above for public understandings of terrorism, while interdisciplinary work drawing insight from geography, migration studies, and other fields could situate this advice within wider efforts to manage and govern mobility. Direct engagement – for instance, through surveys or elite interviews – with authors and publishers of this guidance would generate greater understanding of the intentions and understandings beneath it, as well as of operational considerations affecting its production. Such work would also, finally, pose rich potential for impact and engagement activity, perhaps with scope for greater academic contribution to this advice.¹⁶⁸

Lee Jarvis is Professor of Security and Society at Adelaide University and holds honorary professorships at the University of East Anglia, UK, and Loughborough University, UK. He is author or editor of seventeen books and over sixty articles on the politics of security. Lee’s work has been funded by the ESRC, the AHRC, the Australian Research Council, NATO, and others. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-4149-7135.