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This chapter presents policy makers with a series of recommendations to consider in formulating a response to the dissidents. They include drawing a greater distinction between violence and ‘dissent’, ensuring that the dissidents continue to be de-legitimized as a result of their involvement in organized crime, and outlines a strategy for how the dissidents can be the subject of a ‘counter-narrative’ approach to counter-terrorism. The chapter outlines and explains the various roles to be played by numerous actors across Northern Ireland and the potential for each in a counter VDR strategy.

Chapter Four examines stories in which pain does function as a marker of meaning. In some texts, martyrs experience bodily pain apart from persecution; severing worldly ties, for instance, may be painful, but the texts do not associate this pain with persecution for the faith. In other texts, confessing Christians are insensitive to the pain of torture, but apostates are not: in these cases, the experience of pain is a marker of faithlessness. In still other texts, injury is transferred from the martyr to the persecutor. Suffering, therefore, is directly related to torture, but it is surprisingly located: the persecutor rather than the martyr experiences the physical trauma.

By 1938, Hitler “had taken over and was dictating the narrative of European history,” Rosenfeld notes. Virginia Woolf's books—including her diary—offer a counter narrative. In March, as Hitler marches into Austria, Woolf finishes Three Guineas. Through her acute sensitivity, she captures the precise world state with a haunting diary image: Hitler and Stalin are “like drops of dirty water mixing” (D 5: 129). Her challenge from 1938 onwards becomes how to keep moving—how to escape being drawn into the mud. In August, as the world waits, suspended, as Hitler pauses at Czechoslovakia’s door, she takes heart from the newly found Diary of the Reverend Francis Kilvert, the Victorian vicar (and poet) from the river Wye. His diary's “gipsy beauty” lives again in the character Mrs. Manresa in Woolf's final novel Between the Acts—as do his amusing cows. Kilvert gives Woolf a lush natural human voice amid the welter of war.

This chapter discusses the Islamic State’s field-guide on propaganda. Entitled, ‘Media Operative, You Are Also a Mujahid,’ it was published in April 206 by the Islamic State’s official propaganda channel on the social media platform Telegram. The identity of the author was not provided, but the text was attributed to the group’s central publishing house, al-Himmah Publications. A ‘revised and updated’ edition of a similar booklet that appeared in a video produced by the group the year before, it straddled the middle ground between ‘jihadi strategic studies’ and more stereotypically exhortative propaganda. The document was conceived with a view to setting out the importance of propaganda and eschewing the concerns of media operatives that they, as cameramen not gunmen, were participating in a watered-down version of jihad.

Individual and collective stories provide insight into how people make sense of the world. Such narratives are laden with cultural meaning and can provide the seeds for opposition to dominant systems. In the case of logistics, personal narratives were critical to the construction of a warehouse-worker identity that challenged the dominant pro-growth discourse or the pro-logistics “regime of truth” by referencing devalued immigrant bodies as a foil against boosterish claims. The chapter uses warehouse workers’ stories as an epistemic bridge that connects Latinx Studies and the theoretical tools of the testimonio to Clyde Woods’s blues epistemology and Robin Kelley’s freedom dreams by turning the body as a site of deprivation into bodies as sites of counter-narratives and collective identities. These stories became the backbone of a campaign by the Change To Win labor federation to improve warehouse workers’ conditions in inland Southern California.

Writing against the limitations of conventional historiography and nineteenth-century slave narratives, Toni Morrison, in her novel Beloved, addresses the unspoken and unspeakable: the sexual exploitation of black women. The author journeys to a “site of memory,” and through memory and imagination, she reconstructs from the “traces” and “remains” left behind “the unwritten interior life” of her characters. Like the author, her character Sethe must learn to speak the unspeakable in order to transform residual memories (“rememories”) of the past into narrative memory. In order to reclaim herself, Sethe must reconfigure the master’s narrative (and its inscriptions of physical, social, and scholarly dismemberment) into a counter-narrative by way of an act of reconstitutive “re-memory.” Through the fundamentally psychoanalytic process of “remembering, repeating, and working through,” Sethe reconfigures a story of infanticide into a story of motherlove. Private memory becomes the basis for a reconstructed public history, as personal past becomes historical present.

The chapter examines the narrative that the East German and Soviet party-controlled press and television constructed for the East German border opening between the accidental day of November 9, 1989, and the ceremonial day of December 22, 1989 (the opening of the Brandenburg Gate). The chapter argues that the East German and Soviet media framed November 9, 1989, as an undistinguished moment in a complex, deliberate, and continuous reform process. Instead of a unique and dramatic event, a stand-alone item, the “new travel regulation” was presented as part of a chain of occurrences. This counter-narrative was no less accurate than the Western coverage; it may in fact have been more accurate. The “Eastern” coverage did not strip the border opening from its larger social, political, and cultural context. Instead, the coverage kept the border opening embedded in a broader web of social actions and political circumstances.

This chapter examines more articulate entries and offers a performative reading of those entries. Performative Discourse Analysis brings performance and ethnographic sensibilities into the study of utterances and interaction. These performances are condensed commemoration narratives, the majority of which amount to a retelling of the site’s hegemonic ethnonational narrative. Performative-oriented reading sheds light on how visitors’ utterances vary in terms of their ideological positioning and identifications, and their abilities to recognize performances that are subversive and oppositional in different ways. Two types of resisting and oppositional performances are examined: Theological non-Zionist challenges and Hyper-Zionist ethnonational challenges.

This chapter explores the relationship between local and global jihadist narratives in Afghanistan by examining the public messages of the Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda since 2011. It argues that the two groups have formed a closer partnership following the emergence of the Islamic State and its affiliate group the Islamic State Khorasan Province. Unlike the events of the Arab Spring, which had little impact in Afghanistan, the rise of the Islamic State and its offshoot in the region forced the Taliban and Al-Qaeda to create a robust counter-narrative which has brought the two groups closer together. This development marks a new era in the relationship between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and has significant negative implications for the peace process in Afghanistan.