Research, Information and Communications Unit

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Creation and purpose

The Sunday Times reported in December 2007 that:

The alleged airline plot in August 2006 caused another of the government’s periodic rethinks. For all the work on pursuing terrorists, the government realised that its strategy on preventing more taking their place was not working. After a bureaucratic tussle, the Home Office has become the centre for a new strategic hub for all counterterrorism policy: the Office of Security and CounterTerrorism.
The rethink also led to the creation of the nebulously titled Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU). Officials deny this is in any way a propaganda department, although one conceded: “It does sound horribly cold war.”
Its task is to analyse the way in which key audiences at home and abroad (in other words, Muslims) react to messages from the government and to try to give more coherence to those messages to undermine the ideology of Al-Qaeda. In the counterterrorist jargon of the day, its job is to build and promote a counter-narrative to the single narrative that Al-Qaeda and its allies propagate. “You can do it without it looking like government propaganda, because if it looks too much like government propaganda then I don’t think people are going to listen, nor should they,” argues Mottram.[1]

Size and staffing

Activities

Language of Counter-Terrorism

The RICU demands civil servants not to use phrases such as "Islamist extremism" and "jihadi-fundamentalist." This is due to the fact that the organization wishes to thwart any ideas of a fundamental connection between islamic beliefs and terrorism. Civil servants are required to refer to terrorism and terrorist groups as "violent extremism," "criminal murderers," and "thugs."

Conference presentations

On Tuesday, 7 October 2008 at 15:00, Jonathan Allen, Head of the RICU, spoke at a conference called "Public Diplomacy: Meeting New Challenges" held at Wilton Park in West Sussex. He spoke during a section of the conference called, "How to Change Public Behavior: A Foreign Policy Context." His fellow speakers during this section of the conference included Klavs Holm (Under Secretary, Ambassador, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Copenhagen), and David Kenning (Chief Strategist, Bell Pottinger Sans Frontieres, London).

RICU discussed with Pakistan government

November 2008, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith met with Pakistan's Information and Broadcasting minister Sherry Rehman at the House of Commons to discuss bilateral issues and combating terrorism. Smith said that military force alone will not stamp out terrorism. Smith discussed the British counter-terrorism strategy, which is the RICU, with Rehman. Smith said that the RICU "...plans advances and amplifies the objectives in todays crowded mobile world." She then said that Rehman has Britain's support in creating and implementing a similar organization in Pakistan. Rehman discussed Pakistan's problem with terrorism using the assassination of Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto as an example.


People

Staff

Journalists in touch with RICU

  • Frank Gardner BBC Security Correspondent who ran a story bearing uncanny similarities to plans in a leaked RICU document.

Resources

Publications

  • CounterTerrorism Communications Guidance: Communicating Effectively with Community Audiences (RICU/12/07)[3]

Notes

  1. ↑ Gordon Corera Don’t look now, Britain’s real spooks are right behind you The Sunday Times December 2, 2007
  2. ↑ Jim Armstrong, Candace J. Chin, Uri Leventer The Language of Counter-Terrorism: When Message Received is Not Message Intended Harvard Kennedy School Policy Analysis Exercise, Prepared for the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office, British Consulate-General, New England, April 2008: Acknowledgements
  3. ↑ Home Office Part 2 of the government's Prevent Strategy, Objective 5: Addressing Grievances, published 3 June 2008. accessed 7 February 2009
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