Abstract
This chapter explores the constitutive linkages between the states’ discourse of terrorism and specific (external) discursive formations of terrorism knowledge that can be seen as inducing effects of power while being subjected to this power’s effects at the same time. At the most general level, there seems to be little doubt that the basic discourses in which the terrorist has been ‘othered’ as the perpetrator of illegitimate violence, and in particular the basic discourses of order/chaos and civilization/barbarism, have been conditioned on the modern constitution of sovereign reason, which recognizes itself by excluding madness and chaos from the realm of civilization – incidentally, the central topic of Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (Foucault 1961). In international relations, as Ashley (1984) notes, the sovereignty of the reasoning man has served as a universal regulative ideal that enables a global domestication of men into particular territorial sovereignties and normalizes a certain historically contingent economy of power. The terrorist is located outside the pale of this ordered and civilized world.1 At the same time, he or she is neither confined nor exiled, but thanks to his or her mobility and elusiveness he or she challenges the very paradigm on which global political normality is based.
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Notes
‘Terrorism,’ Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. XIV, ed. Edwin Seligman (New York: Macmillan, 1934).
William Henry Chamberlin, ‘The Evolution of Soviet Terrorism,’ International Affairs, vol. 13, no. 1 (1934): 113–121.
J. O. Herzler, ‘The Typical Life Cycle of Dictatorships,’ Social Forces, vol. 17, no. 3 (1939): 303–339.
Hans Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).
Cf. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2005 [1922]);
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996 [1927]). Shortly before Marseilles, Morgenthau wrote that the reality of a legal norm was founded in the sanction, which depended on the actual constellation of power. The very existence of international law, he added a year later, was conditioned on this balance.
Hans Morgenthau, La réalité de norms, en particulier des norms du droit international (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1934);
Hans Morgenthau, ‘Théorie des sanctions internationales,’ Révue de droit international et de législation compareé, vol. 36, no. 4 (1935): 809–836.
Koskenniemi (2004b) points to the genealogical relationship between liberal theory and the concept of non-intervention, suggesting that the founding of the dichotomy ‘inside/outside’, which is crucial for the dominant understanding of sovereignty, was established as a reflection of a liberal dichotomy of private/public.
Some concepts from the Convention on Counterfeiting Currency (1929), which in the period’s academic literature would be described as an ‘international crime of virulent and insidious character’ that injured public order and monetary sovereignty and harmed all states because of existing economic interdependence (Ernestine Fitz-Maurice, ‘Convention for the Suppression of Counterfeiting Currency,’ The American Journal of International Law, vol. 26, no. 3 [1932] 533), would find their way into the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism. The most notable borrowings were the collocation ‘prevention and punishment’ (art. 1) and the wording of the constraint on extradition (art. 8).
In contrast, it did not seem to relate in any way to the discourse of ‘systematic terrorism’ developed in the law of war, which referred more particularly to the occupation. See H. de Watteville, ‘The Military Administration of Occupied Territory in Time of War,’ Transactions of the Grotius Society, no. 7 (1921): 133–152;
Edward William Hall, A Treatise on International Law, Eighth Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924);
or George Whitecross Paton, A Textbook of Jurisprudence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).
International Conference on the Unification of Criminal Law, Madrid (1933), Actes de la conference (Paris: A. Pedone, 1935) 335.
Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944).
Thomas Givanovitch, Terrorisme: Rapport (Copenhague: Conférence internationale pour l’unification du droit penal, 1935). Givanovich also presented a similar report to the Committee of Experts, where it was registered as Doc. C.R.T.9 (1935).
Albert Camus, The Rebel (London: Penguin, 2000);
Albert Camus, Réflexions sur le terrorisme (Paris: Nicolas Philippe, 2002).
Albert Camus, ‘The Just Assassins,’ in Caligula and Three other Plays (New York: Vintage, 1962). For a commentary on Camus’ justification of such violence in the play see Evangelista (2008: 40).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism (New York: Routledge, 2001).
Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Preface,’ in Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
For Lenin’s most notorious analysis of imperialism see ‘Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,’ in Essential Works of Lenin (New York: Bantam Books, 1966). The rhetoric was even more salient in statements by the revolutionary movements, which rendered the liberation struggle in terms of class struggle (whereas the conventional war, with its limits, was a bourgeois war), or characterized themselves as the vanguard of the mass movement that would follow its lead. Cf. Manifesto of the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in Voices of Terror, ed. Walter Laqueur (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2004) 149–152; and for a more general survey see Harkabi (1968).
It should be noted that Freud himself, in his analysis of the psy-ché, employed geographical metaphors, rendering Ich, Es and Überich as Reichte, Gebiete, and Provinzen in a multiethnic state (such as the Habsbourg Empire). There is also a distinct power aspect to his theory that lends itself easily to the analysis of the colonial situation, as Überich (posing as a great power) allies with Es (the middle tier) and together they represent the archic and the stable, and mediate external reality to the dependent and repressed Ich, standing for the anarchic and unstable, whose repressed impulses are from time to time expressed, but within the boundaries of what Freud called ‘internal foreign territory’. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (London: Penguin, 1991).
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Fort Washington, PA: Harvest Books, 1951);
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963);
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970);
Carl Joachim Friedrich, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New York: Praeger, 1965), written in collaboration with a young Zbigniew Brzezinski.
E. Victor Walter, Terror and Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).
Walter Laqueur, A History of Terrorism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001 [1977]) 146.
Michael Stohl, ed., The Politics of Terrorism. New York: Marcel Dekker, 1979. For Stohl’s recent use of the same approach see ‘Old Myths, New Fantasies and the Enduring Realities of Terrorism,’ Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol. 1, no. 1 (2008): 5–16.
Cf. Richard Shultz, ‘Conceptualizing Political Terrorism: A Typology,’ Journal of International Affairs, vol. 32, no. 1 (1978): 7–16; Jenkins (1974: 3);
Brian Jenkins, Will Terrorists Go Nuclear? (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1975a);
Martha Crenshaw, ‘The Causes of Terrorism,’ Comparative Politics, vol. 13, no. 4 (1981): 377–399.
Cf. Gerald McKnight, The Terrorist Mind (Indianapolis: Bobbs and Merrill Co., 1974);
Charles Russell and Bowman Miller, ‘Profile of a Terrorist,’ Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, vol. 1, no. 1 (1977): 17–34;
Irving Louis Horowitz, ‘Political Terrorism and State Power,’ Journal of Political and Military Sociology, vol. 1, no. 1 (1973): 147–157;
Albert Parry, Terrorism: From Robespierre to Arafat (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1976); Laqueur (2001 [1977]);
Frederick J. Hacker, Crusaders, Criminals, Crazies: Terror and Terrorism in Our Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977).
Gurr’s relative deprivation model of explaining violence was based on an influential refinement by Berkowitz of Dollard’s frustration-aggression thesis, which itself was heavily indebted to Freudian psychoanalysis. Berkowitz expanded the model to account for a variety of responses to frustration, which may be seen as resonating in the FWD replies to the TWD’s discourse of underlying causes. Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970);
Leonard Berkowitz, Aggression: A Social Psychological Analysis (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962);
John Dollard et al., Frustration and Aggression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939).
Eugene Meehan, The Theory and Method of Political Analysis (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1965).
Chalmers Johnson, ‘Perspectives on Terrorism,’ in ed. Walter Laqueur, The Terrorism Reader (New York: New American Library, 1978).
Paul Wilkinson, Political Terrorism (London: Macmillan, 1974). In Terrorism and the Liberal State Wilkinson would add ‘epiphenomenal terrorism’
to this grid. Paul Wilkinson, Terrorism and the Liberal State (London: Macmillan, 1977).
Cf. also Thomas Thornton, ‘Terror as a Weapon of Political Agitation,’ in Internal War: Problems and Approaches, ed. Harry Eckstein (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964).
Brian Crozier, A Theory of Conflict (New York: Scribner, 1974).
For a period survey of contending claims about terrorism, including, for example, claims about its effectiveness, cf. Bowyer Bell, A Time of Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1978); see also the review in Jenkins (1978), op. cit.
Cf. Thornton, op. cit.; Jenkins (1974; 1975a); Brian Jenkins, International Terrorism: A New Mode of Conflict. Research Paper no. 48, California Seminar on Arms Control and Foreign Policy (Los Angeles: Crescent Publications, 1975b); Horowitz, op. cit.
Cf. Walter Laqueur, ‘The Futility of Terrorism,’ Harper’s Magazine (March 1976); Laqueur (2001 [1977]); Rapoport (1977);
Yonah Alexander, ‘Terrorism, the Media and the Police,’ Journal of International Affairs, vol. 32, no.1 (1978);
Yonah Alexander and S.M. Finger, ‘Terrorism and the Media,’ Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, vol. 2, no. 1–2 (1979);
Richard Clutterbuck, ‘Terrorism is Likely to Increase,’ Times of London (Apr. 10, 1975).
Cf. Jenkins, (1974; 1975b), op. cit.; Stephen Sloan, ‘International Terrorism: Academic Quest, Operational Art and Policy Implications,’ Journal of International Affairs, vol. 32, no. 1 (1978): 1–5; Jenkins (1980: 2); Shultz, op. cit., 8; Wilkinson (1974).
Cf. Mason Willrich and Theodore Taylor, Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards (Cambridge: Ballinger, 1974);
Augustus Norton and Michael Greenberg, Studies in Nuclear Terrorism (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979);
Thomas Schelling, ‘Thinking about Nuclear Terrorism,’ International Security, vol. 6, no. 4 (1982): 61–77; Laqueur, (2001 [1977]), 226–234. For a more comprehensive review see Cameron (2004). On the other hand, based on the subjectification of the terrorist as an instrumentally rational person minimizing costs and maximizing outcomes and the metaphor of terrorism as theater, Jenkins would be sceptical about the prospect of nuclear terrorism: ‘Terrorists wanted a lot of people watching, not dead.’ Jenkins, 1975a;
cf. also Brian Jenkins, The Potential for Nuclear Terrorism (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1977).
Cf. Jenkins (1974); Brian Jenkins, ‘International Terrorism: Trends and Potentialities,’ Journal of International Affairs, vol. 32, no. 1 (1978): 115–123.
Cf. Claire Sterling, Terror Network: The Secret War of International Terrorism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980);
Samuel T. Francis, The Soviet Strategy of Terror (Washington: The Heritage Foundation, 1981);
Ray S. Cline and Yonah Alexander, Terrorism: The Soviet Connection (New York: Crane Russak, 1984);
or Benjamin Netanyahu et al., Terrorism: How the West Can Win (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986).
For an early criticism of the international terror network paradigm cf. Edward Herman, The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda (Boston: South End Press, 1982).
Cf. most notably Paul Wilkinson, Terrorism versus Liberal Democracy: The Problems of Response (London: Institute for the Study of Conflict, 1976); Wilkinson 1977.
Cf. John Yoo, ‘International Law and the War in Iraq,’ American Journal of International Law, vol. 97, no. 3 (2003): 563–576.
Antonio Cassese, ‘Terrorism is also Disrupting some Crucial Legal Categories of International Law,’ European Journal of International Law, vol. 12, no. 5 (2001): 993–1001.
Cf. Ian Ward, Law, Text, Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
Marja Lehto, ‘Terrorism in International Law: An Empty Box or Pandora’s Box?’ in Jarna Petman and Jan Klabbers, eds, Nordic Cosmopolitanism: Essays in International Law for Martti Koskenniemi (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003);
Dominic McGoldrick, From ‘9–11’ to the ‘Iraq War 2003’ (Oxford: Hart, 2003);
Theodor Menon, ‘Is International Law Moving towards Criminalization?’ European Journal of International Law, vol. 9, no. 1 (1998): 18–31.
Rosalyn Higgins, ‘The General International Law of Terrorism,’ in Rosalyn Higgins and Maurice Flory, eds., Terrorism and International Law (London: Routledge, 2003) 28.
Cf. Lee Jarvis, ‘The Spaces and Faces of Critical Terrorism Studies,’ Security Dialogue, vol. 40, no. 1 (2009): 5–27;
Richard Jackson, Marie Breen Smyth and Jeroen Gunning, eds., Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda (London: Routledge, 2009);
Jeroen Gunning, ‘A Case for Critical Terrorism Studies?’ Government and Opposition, vol. 42, no. 3 (2007): 363–393.
Cf. Richard Jackson, ‘Genealogy, Ideology and Counter-Terrorism: Writing Wars on Terrorism from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush Jr.,’ Studies in Language and Capitalism, vol. 1, no. 1 (2006): 163–193;
Richard Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-terrorism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005);
James Der Derian, ‘9/11 and Its Consequences for the Discipline,’ Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, vol. 11, no. 1 (2004): 89–100;
James Der Derian, ‘Imaging Terror: Logos, Pathos and Ethos,’ Third World Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1 (2005): 23–37;
Claudia Aradau and Rensvan Munster, ‘Insuring Terrorism, Assuring Subjects, Ensuring Normality: The Politics of Risk after 9/11,’ Alternatives, vol. 33, no. 2 (2008): 191–210;
Barry Hindess, ‘Terrortory,’ Alternatives, vol. 31, no. 3 (2006): 243–257;
Michael Stohl, ‘Old Myths, New Fantasies and the Enduring Realities of Terrorism,’ Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol. 1, no. 1 (2008): 5–16;
Anthony Burke, ‘The End of Terrorism Studies,’ Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol 1, no. 1 (2008): 37–49;
Cynthia Weber, ‘Popular Visual Language as Global Communication: The Remediation of United Airlines Flight 93,’ Review of International Studies, vol. 34, no. 1 (2008): 137–153;
Sandra Silberstein, War of Words: Language, Politics and 9/11 (London: Routledge, 2002);
John Collins and Ross Glover, eds., Collateral Language: A User’s Guide to America’s New War (London: New York University Press, 2002);
Richard Devetak, ‘The Gothic Scene of International Relations: Ghosts, Monsters, Terror and the Sublime after September 11,’ Review of International Studies, vol. 31, no. 4 (2005): 621–643;
Robert Ivie, ‘Savagery in Democracy’s Empire,’ Third World Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1 (2005): 55–65;
Michael Bhatia, ‘Fighting Words: Naming terrorists, Bandits, Rebels and other Violent Actors,’ Third World Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1 (2005): 5–22;
Alexander Spencer, The Tabloid Terrorist: The Predicative Construction of New Terrorism in the Media (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010);
John Edwards, ‘After the Fall,’ Discourse and Society, vol. 15, no. 2 (2004): 155–184;
Rainer Hülsse and Alexander Spencer, ‘The Metaphor of Terror: Terrorism Studies and the Constructivist Turn,’ Security Dialogue, vol. 39, no. 6 (2004): 571–592.
Didier Bigo, ‘Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease,’ Alternatives, vol. 27, no. 1 (2002): 63–92.
Didier Bigo et al., Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes: The (In)Security Games (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006);
Didier Bigo, Sergio Carrera and Elspeth Guild, The Challenge Project: Final Policy Recommendations (Brussels: CEPS, 2009).
Leonard Weinberg, Ami Pedahzur and Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler, ‘The Challenges of Conceptualizing Terrorism,’ Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 16, no. 4 (2004): 777–794;
Alex Schmid and Albert Jongman, Political Terrorism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006).
Cf. Jessica Stern, The Ultimate Terrorists (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). There are indeed other reasons cited for the need of a definition, including improvement of the practice of counter-terrorism, eliminating abuse of the term, and simply achieving a better understanding of the current events. For a review of these positions cf. Schmid (2004), and for the last position see, for example,
C.A.J. Coady, ‘Defining Terrorism,’ in Igor Primoratz, ed., Terrorism: The Philosophical Issues (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004);
Gerhard Hafner, ‘The Definition of the Crime of Terrorism,’ in Giuseppe Nesi, ed., International Cooperation in Counter-Terrorism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006);
Ariel Merari, ‘Terrorism as a Strategy of Insurgency,’ Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 5, no. 4 (1993): 213–251;
Louise Richardson, ‘Terrorists as Transnational Actors,’ Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 11. no. 1 (1999): 209–219.
Cf. Schmid and Jongman (2006); Brian Jenkins, The New Age of Terrorism (Santa Monica: RAND, 2006).
Cf. the synthetic definitions of Weinberg, Pedahzur and Hirsch-Hoeffler (op. cit.) and of Schmid and Jongman (op.cit.); see also Martha Crenshaw, ‘Psychology of Terrorism: An Agenda for the 21st Century,’ Political Psychology, vol. 21, no. 2 (2000) 406; or Stern (2001: 11).
Cf. Igor Primoratz, ‘What is Terrorism?’ Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 7, no. 2 (1990) 131; Stern (2001);
Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Ronald Crelinsten, quoted in Schmid and Jongman (2006: 23).
Some authors would engage in the profiling practice ostentatiously only to show the ‘futility’ of such an enterprise, that is, to show that there are no shared characteristics that could constitute a general terrorist profile. Cf. Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004);
Ehud Sprinzak, ‘Rational Fanatics,’ Foreign Policy, no. 120 (2000): 66–73.
Robert Pape, ‘The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,’ American Political Science Review, vol. 97, no. 3 (2003): 343–361. Pape conceives of terrorism as a strategy, an extreme case of Schelling’s rationality of irrationality concept.
Cf. Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).
For some other contemporary examples of rationalist views on terrorism see Lawrence Freedman, ‘Terrorism as a Strategy,’ Government and Opposition, vol. 42, no. 3 (2007): 314–339;
Brian Jenkins, ‘The Organization Men: Anatomy of a Terrorist Attack,’ in James Hoge and Gideon Rose, eds., How Did This Happen? Terrorism and the New War (New York: Public Affairs, 2001);
Martha Crenshaw, ‘The Logic of Terrorism: Terrorist Behavior as a Product of Choice,’ Terrorism and Counter Terrorism, vol. 2, no. 1 (1998): 54–64.
Cf. John Horgan, Psychology of Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2005);
Max Taylor and John Horgan, ‘The Psychological and Behavioural Bases of Islamic Fundamentalism,’ Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 13, no. 4 (2001): 37–71;
Max Taylor and John Horgan, ‘A Conceptual Framework for Addressing Psychological Process in the Development of the Terrorist,’ Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 18, no. 1 (2006): 1–17.
M.J. Post, ‘The Mind of the Terrorist: Individual and Group Psychology of Terrorist Behavior,’ a testimony for the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, Senate Armed Services Committee (November 2001);
cf. also Richard Pearlstein, The Mind of the Political Terrorist (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1991).
Cf. Donatella della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
Jeffrey Ian Ross, ‘The Psychological Causes of Oppositional Political Terrorism: Toward an Integration of Findings,’ International Journal of Group Tensions, vol. 24, no. 2 (1994): 157–185;
Jeffrey Ian Ross, ‘A Model of the Psychological Causes of Oppositional Political Terrorism,’ Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, vol. 2, no. 2 (1996): 129–141; cf. also Reich, op. cit.
Cf. Bruce Hoffman, ‘The Contrasting Ethical Foundations of Terrorism in the 1980s,’ Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 1, no. 3 (1989): 361–377;
Bruce Hoffman, Terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction: An Analysis of Trends and Motivations (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1999);
Charles Kegley, ed., The New Global Terrorism: Characteristics, Causes, Controls (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003);
Hoffman (2006), op. cit.; Walter Laqueur, ‘Postmodern Terrorism,’ Foreign Affairs, vol. 75, no. 5 (1996): 24–37;
Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998);
Ashton Carter, John Deutsch and Philip Zelikow, ‘Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger,’ Foreign Affairs, vol. 77, no. 6 (1998): 80–94;
Xavier Raufer, ‘New World Disorder, New Terrorism: New Threats for Europe and the Western World,’ Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 11, no. 4 (1999): 30–51;
David Rapoport, ‘Terrorism and Weapons of the Apocalypse,’ National Security Studies Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 3 (1999): 49–67;
Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin, ‘America and the New Terrorism,’ Survival, 42, no. 1 (2000): 59–75;
David Tucker, ‘What’s New about the New Terrorism and How Dangerous is It?’ Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 13, no. 1 (2001): 1–14; Sageman, op. cit.; Stern, 2001;
Paul Beuman, Ter ror and Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003);
Ulrich Beck, ‘The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited,’ Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 19, no. 4 (2002): 39–55;
Brian Jenkins, The New Age of Terrorism (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2006).
See above, and also, for example, Robert Litwak, ‘The New Calculus of Pre-Emption,’ Survival, vol. 44, no. 4 (2002): 53–80.
The concept of new terrorism has been subjected also to criticism in the field. Cf. Isabelle Duyvesteyn, ‘How New Is the New Terrorism,’ Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, vol. 27, no. 5 (2004): 439–454;
Alexander Spencer, ‘Questioning the Concept of “New Terrorism”,’ Peace, Conflict and Development, vol. 8, no. 8 (2006): 1–33;
Albert Bergsen and Omar Lizardo, ‘International Terrorism and the World System,’ Sociological Theory, vol. 22, no. 1 (2004): 38–52.
Walter Laqueur, ‘The Terrorism to Come,’ Policy Review 126 (2004) 59–60. For the concept of new terrorism as a total war see also Hoffman (1989).
The dehumanization of the terrorist, including also the metaphor of terrorism as a cancer, has some precedents from the 1980s, for example, those in the following notorious edited volume: Benjamin Netanyahu, ed., Terrorism: How the West Can Win (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).
Gray, op. cit.; Stanley Hoffman, ‘Clash of Globalizations,’ Foreign Affairs, vol. 81, no. 4 (2002): 104–115;
Daniel Byman, ‘Al-Qaeda as an Adversary: Do We Understand our Enemy?’ World Politics, vol. 56, no. 1 (2003): 139–163;
Audrey Cronin, ‘Behind the Curve: Globalization and International Terrorism,’ International Security, vol. 27, no. 3 (2002): 30–58. For a critical review of those narratives cf.
James Gelvin, ‘Al-Qaeda and Anarchism: A Historian’s Reply to Terrorology,’ Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 20, no. 4 (2008): 563–581.
For the understanding of globalization as engendering a need for expressive violence by the powerless in the face of the normalization of the world order, cf. Christopher Coker, Globalization and Insecurity in the 21st Century: NATO and the Management of Risk, Adelphi Paper no. 345 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Cf. Sageman, op. cit.; John Arguilla and David Ronfeldt, eds., In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age (Santa Monica: RAND, 1997);
or the notorious book by Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al-Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). For criticism of the use of the network concept by governments,
see Cynthia Stohl and Michael Stohl, ‘Networks of Terror: Theoretical Assumptions and Pragmatic Consequences,’ Communication Theory, vol. 17, no. 2 (2007): 93–124.
Louise I. Shelley and John T. Picarelli, ‘Methods not Motives: Implications of the Convergence of International Organized Crime and Terrorism,’ Police Practice and Research, vol. 3, no. 4 (2002) 306;
cf. also Tamara Makarenko, ‘The Crime-Terror Continuum: Tracing the Interplay between Transnational Organised Crime and Terrorism,’ Global Crime, vol. 6, no. 1 (2004): 129–145.
Cf. Bruce Hoffman, ‘Holy Terror’: The Implications of Terrorism Motivated by a Religious Imperative (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1993);
Mark Jurgensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: Berkeley University Press, 2000);
Mark Jurgensmeyer, Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State (Berkeley: Berkeley University Press, 2008);
Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
Cf. Bernard Lewis, The Assassins (New York: Basic Books, 1968);
Walter Laqueur, A History of Terrorism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001 [1977]);
David Rapoport, ‘The Politics of Atrocity,’ in Yonah Alexander and S.M. Finger, eds., Terrorism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: John Jay, 1977);
David Rapoport, ‘Introduction: Religious Terror,’ in David Rapoport and Yonah Alexander, eds., The Morality of Terrorism: Religious and Secular Justifications (New York: Pergamon, 1982);
David Rapoport, ‘Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions,’ American Political Science Review, vol. 78, no. 3 (1984): 658–677.
The causal relationship between religious fanaticism and suicide bombings has been criticized, for example, by Robert Pape, who has argued that in the majority of cases suicide campaigns have been intended to compel a (democratic) government to withdraw from a disputed territory. Pape, 2003; cf. Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005).
The secular orientation of the groups practicing terrorism in the Middle East was also pointed to, for example, in Ariel Merari, ‘The Readiness to Kill and Die: Suicidal Terrorism in the Middle East,’ in Walter Reich, ed., Origins of Terrorism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Samuel Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ Foreign Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3 (1993) 22;
cf. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Simon and Schuster, 1997).
Cf. Laqueur, 2003; Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2004);
Quintan Wiktorowitz, Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Approach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004);
Quintan Wiktorowitz, ‘A Genealogy of Radical Islam,’ Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, vol. 28, no. 2 (2005): 75–97;
John Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). The last book would be complained about by Sudan during a session of the Sixth Committee; see Doc. A/C.6/48/SR.12 (1993).
Because of its implicit Orientalism Huntington’s clash of civilizations would soon become a subject of criticism by Edward Said himself; cf. his ‘The Clash of Ignorance,’ The Nation, Oct. 22, 2001; and, for a more general view, Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003 [1978]);
and Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Vintage, 1997) 75–88.
Bernard Lewis, ‘Islamic Terrorism,’ in Benjamin Netanyahu, ed., Terrorism: How the West Can Win (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986);
see also Bernard Lewis, ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage,’ The Atlantic (September 1990).
For a later explicit formulation of the concern about the rise of the Hobbesian anarchy associated with a resurgence of religion in international politics, cf. John Gray, Al-Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (New York: Faber and Faber, 2003).
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Ditrych, O. (2014). Power and Knowledge. In: Tracing the Discourses of Terrorism. Central and Eastern European Perspectives on International Relations Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394965_7
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