Research, Information and Communications Unit

From Powerbase
Revision as of 12:40, 29 May 2009 by Lisa Ritchie (talk | contribs) (→‎Location of RICU)
Jump to: navigation, search

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]

Location of RICU

The RICU is part of the Home Office.

The Home Office is located at 2 Marsham Street, London, SW1P 4DFCite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag

Staff

Journalists in touch with RICU

Others in contact

Resources, Publications, Contact

Resources

Publications

  • CounterTerrorism Communications Guidance: Communicating Effectively with Community Audiences (RICU/12/07), September 2007[5]

Contact

http://security.homeoffice.gov.uk/about-us/RICU/

Notes

  1. ↑ Gordon Corera Don’t look now, Britain’s real spooks are right behind you The Sunday Times December 2, 2007
  2. ↑ Newsxchange 08 Delegate List 2008, accessed 20 April 2009
  3. ↑ 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
  4. ↑ Stephen Rimmer Allegations made in the Panorama programme 'Muslim First - British Second' on Monday 16 February, 17 February 2009, accessed 1 April 2009
  5. ↑ cited in Home Office Part 2 of the government's Prevent Strategy, Objective 5: Addressing Grievances, published 3 June 2008, p.44. accessed 7 February 2009
Retrieved from "https://powerbase.info/index.php?title=Research,_Information_and_Communications_Unit&oldid=89805"