This book introduces a novel research approach to capture event effects: ‘chasing’ the direct associations actors make with them. Thijs van Dooremalen applies this approach to the meaning-making of 9/11 and a variety of other cases — the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Madrid train and Charlie Hebdo attacks, the Arab Spring, the first Trump election, and COVID — across the American, French, and Dutch public spheres. Combining computational and qualitative text analyses, he ‘chases’ these events from 2001 to 2021. This results in key lessons on how foreign events spark domestic debates, under which conditions they evoke social change, and their long-term, path dependent ‘lives’.

Thijs van Dooremalen is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University, the Netherlands. He previously worked at the University of Amsterdam, KU Leuven, and Harvard University.