Moral panics by design: The case of terrorism

Abstract

This article assesses the relationship between terrorism and moral panics to expand understandings of the latter's eruption and orchestration. Answering calls for deeper considerations of folk devils' agentic properties, it interrogates how terrorist methods – the deployment of shocking and exceptional violence to incite fear and stimulate political change – challenge extant understandings of the moral panic framework. Specifically, it argues, in the case of terrorism, that the exaggerated threats and disproportionate responses that define moral panics are not driven solely by moral entrepreneurs or social control agents, but are informed by the strategic practices and rationalities of folk devils themselves. Through its approach, this research enhances social-scientific treatments of terrorism, broadens the scope of moral panic analysis, and extends understandings of how fear and anxiety are manipulated for political purposes.

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DOI: 10.1177/0011392116633257
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Moral panics by design:
The case of terrorism
James P Walsh
University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada
Abstract
This article assesses the relationship between terrorism and moral panics to expand
understandings of the latter’s eruption and orchestration. Answering calls for deeper
considerations of folk devils’ agentic properties, it interrogates how terrorist methods –
the deployment of shocking and exceptional violence to incite fear and stimulate political
change – challenge extant understandings of the moral panic framework. Specifically, it
argues, in the case of terrorism, that the exaggerated threats and disproportionate
responses that define moral panics are not driven solely by moral entrepreneurs or
social control agents, but are informed by the strategic practices and rationalities of
folk devils themselves. Through its approach, this research enhances social-scientific
treatments of terrorism, broadens the scope of moral panic analysis, and extends
understandings of how fear and anxiety are manipulated for political purposes.
Keywords
Fear, folk devils, moral panics, political violence, social problems construction, social
reaction, terrorism
Introduction
Over four decades old, the moral panic framework has displayed enormous import for
scholarship concerning the construction and amplification of social problems. For its
early proponents (Cohen, 2002; Hall et al., 1978) the term was meant to capture episodes
– initiated by moral crusaders, perpetuated by media sensationalism, and reproduced
through state practice – involving hysterical reactions and hyperbolic fear towards ‘folk
Corresponding author:
James P Walsh, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, 2000 Simcoe Street North, Oshawa, ON
L1H 7K4, Canada.
Email: james.walsh@uoit.ca
633257CSI0010.1177/0011392116633257Current SociologyWalsh
research-article2016
Article
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2 Current Sociology
devils’ conceived as threatening social order and communal values. While its signifi-
cance endures, to preserve its analytic purchase, the concept has been re-evaluated in
light of shifting cultural, institutional, and structural arrangements (Garland, 2008; Hier,
2011; McRobbie and Thornton, 1995).
This research contributes to such efforts by interrogating the critical case of terrorism.
While hardly new, 9/11 and other spectacular attacks have catapulted terrorism to the
forefront of public consciousness, producing an extreme moral panic defined by exag-
gerated threats, moralistic discourse, and disproportionate responses. Despite its rele-
vance, analyses of terrorism’s implications for moral panic theory remain tentative and
impressionistic. When assessing the terrorism–moral panic nexus scholars have done so
in conventional terms, specifying how societal reactions constitute moral panics
(Kappeler and Kappeler, 2004; Morgan and Poynting, 2012; Rothe and Muzzatti, 2004;
Shafir and Schairer, 2013; Welch, 2006). While insightful, without considering the stra-
tegic and tactical repertoire of dissident organizations, extant analysis occludes a full
appreciation of terrorists’ distinctiveness as folk devils and their consequences for
broader debates surrounding the moral panic paradigm. If terrorism were of marginal
importance, such neglect would be inconsequential. However, as detailed below, terror-
ism and the reactions it engenders display far-reaching consequences for, among others,
state sovereignty, democratic arrangements, and perceptions of risk and insecurity.
By interrogating an exceptional or ‘deviant’ case that unsettles the moral panic para-
digm’s core tenets and assumptions, this article expands the field of analysis and assists
in developing more flexible frameworks that can accommodate the concept’s vicissi-
tudes and diverse manifestations. Specifically, in existing studies moral entrepreneurs,
media outlets, and social control agents exogenously orchestrate moral panics, while folk
devils represent innocent or passive victims. For terrorism, however, panic is endoge-
nously cultivated by folk devils themselves. As an asymmetrical ‘weapon of the weak’,
terrorism has been embraced by dissidents to produce conditions resembling moral
panic, and, thereby, compensate for their military inferiority and punch well above their
weight. Put differently, those constituting the source of alarm are actively invested in
inflating their threatening status and inducing hysteria. This article aims to demonstrate
how this admittedly extreme case can deepen understandings of moral panics and the
actors, processes, and forces structuring their emergence. Additionally, in assessing ter-
rorism’s relationship with moral panics’ defining properties (disproportionality, hostility,
volatility, etc.) it enlivens ongoing debates regarding tensions and shortcomings associ-
ated with the concept.
After defining its terms of reference – moral panics and terrorism – and interrogating
their complex relationship, this article’s remaining sections detail how terrorists’ actions
are calibrated to facilitate moral panics and thereby stimulate political change.
Specifically, they highlight terrorists’ use of violence that: is affective, psychologically
traumatic, and socially disruptive; attracts extensive media coverage and sensationalism;
and provokes disproportionate overreaction. While largely informed by the War on
Terror (WOT), to sufficiently elaborate the terrorism–moral panic nexus and avoid the
presentism of scholarship on both topics, empirical examples are drawn from the four
‘waves’ of modern terrorism (Rapoport, 2002): anarchist (1880s–1920s), anti-colonial
(1920s–1960s), new left (1960s–1990s), and religious (1979–present).
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Walsh 3
Before proceeding three caveats are in order. First, characterizing reactions to terror-
ism as moral panic is not to dismiss the issue as inconsequential. Terrorism represents a
real, albeit often embellished, threat responsible for genuine fear and victimization.
Second, this research’s scope is selective. Given its interest in how terrorists engage
moral panics’ core dimensions to compensate for their limited size and resources, its
analysis is limited to dissident groups. This does not imply ‘terrorism from above’ is
insignificant, as state terrorism has been far more injurious. Instead, given differences in
scale, resources, and opponents, both actors demand distinct analytic treatment (Goodwin,
2006). Finally, given the extensive literatures on terrorism and moral panics, this article’s
findings and propositions require more rigorous scrutiny than can be provided here.
Accordingly, its spirit is exploratory, oriented towards exposing ambiguities, and pro-
voking as much as convincing. Nonetheless, by emphasizing folk devils as powerful
agents in producing societal alarm it advances conversations regarding the relation
between and forces and processes underlying terrorism and moral panics. Ultimately,
such an approach promises to enhance social-scientific treatments of terrorism, broaden
the scope of moral panic analysis, and illuminate the complex and contentious politics of
risk, fear, and insecurity within late-modern societies.
Moral panic
Moral panics refer to punctuated moments of alarm in which, more than sources of risk or
harm, specific events and behaviors are perceived as threatening society’s normative
foundations. Introduced in Cohen’s (2002) seminal study of ‘Mods and Rockers’ in 1960s
Britain, the concept has since been extended to multifarious issues, whether street crime,
pornography, undocumented migration, pedophilia, drug use, or welfare fraud. Essential
to moral panics are ‘folk devils’: those deemed responsible for the behavior in question.
As targets of enmity and enhanced social control folk devils are constructed as evil per-
sonified, ‘visible reminders of what we should not be’ and the antithesis of stability, order,
and security (Cohen, 2002: 2; cf. Hier, 2002). Folk devils are not randomly selected and
are typically constructed in moralistic and overbroad terms, with marginalized groups and
‘cultural scapegoats’ being especially susceptible, even when the vast majority of mem-
bers are law-abiding (Garland, 2008: 15). Moreover, although characterized as threaten-
ing social and moral order, reactions to folk devils are ‘out of all proportion to the actual
threat’ (Hall et al., 1978: 16). While risk perception and evaluation are often far from
objective and beset by ‘dispute and collective negotiation’ (Garland, 2008: 13; cf. Douglas,
2002; Watney, 1987), for Cohen (2002: xviii) ‘there are … many panics where …
judgment[s] of proportionality’ – whether in relation to public atavism, available empiri-
cal evidence, or comparisons with equivalent or more serious concerns – ‘can and should
be made – even when the object of evaluation is vocabulary and rhetorical style alone’.
To differentiate moral panics from legitimate societal concern, Goode and Ben-
Yehuda (2010) have enumerated five essential attributes: (1) concern (the issue is fear-
some and anxiety-inducing); (2) hostility (those deemed responsible are subjected to
intolerance and revulsion); (3) consensus (anxiety is widespread); (4) disproportional-
ity (the issue provokes overreaction); and (5) volatility (panic emerges and dissipates
with stunning alacrity).
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4 Current Sociology
Far from spontaneous, moral panics stem from the interlocking reactions of social
control agents, the media, and publics. In conventional accounts they encompass three
developmental pathways: grassroots, interest group, and elite-engineered (Goode and
Ben-Yehuda, 2010). In the first moral panics are organic and initiated by perceptions and
sentiments broadly diffused among the lay public, and eventually incorporated into
media coverage and political discourse. In the second, alarm stems from the deliberate
actions of moral entrepreneurs who work to direct attention towards a particular moral
‘evil’. The final model represents a coordinated propaganda campaign designed to
orchestrate hegemony and divert attention from and avoid solutions to deeper structural
problems that threaten elite interests.
Whether they percolate up from genuine public concern or are manufactured by state
experts and moral entrepreneurs, the media represent ‘the prime movers and … benefi-
ciaries’ of moral panics (Garland, 2008: 12; cf. Altheide, 2009). Since the vast majority
of those swept up in the collective alarm do not directly experience the issue in question,
media outlets act as informational gatekeepers that ‘visualize deviance, concentrate and
publicize outrage … offer perspectives on social control’ and bring folk devils into exist-
ence (Cohen, 2002: 89; cf. Altheide and Michalowski, 1999). Accordingly, they play an
agenda-setting role in constructing reality and determining what is ‘socially thinkable’
(Altheide, 2002; Welch et al., 1998).
Such dynamics are significant since moral panics not only identify threatening groups
and behaviors, but, through the process of ‘deviancy amplification’, actively create and
intensify the problem (Cohen, 2002). Here, society labels a group deviant, then isolates
and stigmatizes its members. The resulting alienation begets increased deviance and
more intense media alarmism, political handwringing, and public indignation, thereby
producing powerful and ongoing feedback loops. As fear and condemnation become
widespread, hardline policies and a control culture are institutionalized, creating further
polarization, intensifying real and perceived deviance, and confirming popular stereo-
types (Jewkes, 2010).
Despite their continued importance, several scholars have re-evaluated moral panics
given changes in late-modern societies. One issue distinctly relevant for this research
concerns folk devils’ under-theorization ‘as social actors’ (DeYoung, 2011: 120) with
‘structural origins, values and interests’ (Meades, 2011: 145). According to such accounts,
orthodox appraisals privilege the actions of publics, the mass media, moral crusaders,
and social control agents, while treating the targets of hysteria and indignation as ‘hap-
less victims’ (DeYoung, 2013: 142) and denying the complex web of social relations
underpinning moral panics. For McRobbie and Thornton (1995) technological advances
facilitating the diversification of media production, and the proliferation of advocacy-
based civil society organizations have ensured folk devils and their advocates are increas-
ingly empowered to mobilize resources, exercise agency, and contest the former’s
vilification. Alongside underscoring the fractious nature of social and moral regulation
(Ungar, 2001), such outcomes suggest folk devils may independently affect the dynam-
ics and consequences of societal reaction.
Despite its significance, the issue of agency has yet to be fully plumbed. For existing
works emphasis has been placed on folk devils’ capacity to contest unjust treatment,
defuse moral panics, and ‘fight back’ (McRobbie, 1994). However, as this work
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Walsh 5
demonstrates, in certain instances, folk devils, whether for political or other reasons, may
seek to actively catalyze and intensify the very conditions underpinning moral panics’
gestation and eruption.
Terrorism
As an ‘essentially contested’ concept, terrorism is elusive and difficult to analytically
delimit.1 Alongside its complexity and overlap with other forms of political violence
(warfare, insurgencies, etc.), terrorism’s indeterminacy stems from its situational and
pejorative nature, qualities captured in the oft-quoted statement ‘one person’s terrorist
is another’s freedom fighter’. Reflecting such dynamics, political articulations of ter-
rorism are often employed by governments to arouse public sentiment, demonize
adversaries, exonerate their own acts of terror, and accumulate power and legitimacy
(Goodwin, 2006).
While a full elaboration exceeds its ambit, following others (Hoffman, 2006;
Schmid and Jongman, 1988; Tilly, 2004; Wilkinson, 2011), this work defines terrorism
as the deployment of extra-normal violence against random or symbolic targets for the
purposes of: (1) inducing fear and anxiety; (2) affecting audiences beyond the immedi-
ate victims; and (3) stimulating political change by influencing the decision-making
and behavior of governments, societies, and communal groups. Through horrific unex-
pected acts that transgress conventions concerning the legitimate exercise of violence,
terrorism aims to inflict extreme psychic trauma, and activate anxieties concerning
safety and security. Additionally, it represents an expressive vehicle of communica-
tion. As attention-seeking violence, terrorism’s immediate targets constitute ‘message
generators’ (Schmid and Jongman, 1988) for victimizing broader audiences.
Accordingly, terrorism represents a form of signaling in which violence is intended to
communicate the target’s vulnerability, the existence of perpetrators, and their capacity
to strike again (Tilly, 2004). Finally, terrorism is oriented towards inciting particular
responses and interactional dynamics that will significantly transform the existing
sociopolitical order. Alongside capitulation, violence is often orchestrated to provoke
overreaction and repressive reprisals. Since the 19th century several organizations
have employed terrorism to initiate a dance macabre of terror against terror, with the
goal of unmasking the targeted regime’s malevolent qualities and galvanizing support
for their cause (Parker, 2007).
Together these properties unite a variegated ensemble of actors possessing distinct
motives, capacities, and strategic and ideological orientations. Ultimately, their embrace
of fear and violence as mechanisms of political and historical change renders terrorists
an exceptional class of criminals and deviants (Hoffman, 2006). Unlike conventional
folk devils associated with youth hooliganism and social and sexual deviance, terrorists
belong to formalized networks displaying collective behavior, intentionality, and explicit
political goals and aspirations. This final property also distinguishes terrorists from
organized criminal networks, which, while also embracing the utility of violence, are
non-ideological and driven by instrumental goals of profit-seeking. Only terrorists exist
as ‘violent intellectual[s]’ that wield violence in the service of coherent causes and belief
systems (Hoffman, 2006: 38).
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6 Current Sociology
Terrorists’ distinctiveness is also witnessed in the type of threat they pose, an issue
distinctly salient as globalization and ‘space-shrinking’ technologies have facilitated
paradigmatic changes in terrorism’s scale, organizational structure, and potential
impact. On the one hand, rapid transport and information and communication technolo-
gies have enhanced terrorists’ logistical capacity, expanding physical access to targets
and making it easier to dispense destruction and impact audiences on a planetary scale
(Black, 2004; Juergensmeyer, 2000). Moreover, such dynamics have assisted in creat-
ing an ‘unpredictable topography’ of phantom cell networks whose spectral maneuvers
and concealment deep within society render terrorism impossible to definitively survey
and guard against (Mythen and Walklate, 2006: 387). Finally, technological moderniza-
tion has intensified terrorism’s possible impact. Given potential access to biological
agents, radioactive ‘dirty bombs’, and other high-tech weapons, security experts have
highlighted the possibility of mass-casualty attacks, labeling terrorism a vital threat to
global security (Laqueur, 2000).
Given these features, terrorism typifies broader shifts in contemporary sources of
social anxiety and occupies a medial space between conventional moral panics and the
‘potential political catastrophes of a risk society’ (Ungar, 2001: 271). At present, experi-
ences of risk are defined by faceless, shadowy parties and stem from hazards (GMOs,
nuclear accidents, climate change, etc.) that are extra-territorial, techno-scientific, future-
oriented and cannot be easily calculated or insured against (Beck, 1992; cf. Mythen and
Walklate, 2006). Terrorism’s transnational reach, cataclysmic potential, and unpredicta-
ble and unknowable qualities reflect and entrench this ‘wider culture of insecurity, fear,
and victimization’ (Cohen, 2002: 16), making the issue a source of social anxiety that
‘do[es] not quite fit the moral panic paradigm’ (Ungar, 2001: 272). Nonetheless, while
terrorism resonates with the inchoate fears of ‘risk society’, it remains a distinctive haz-
ard as danger is understood in moral as much as technical terms.
Terrorism as moral panic
Utilizing Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s (2010) taxonomy, this section outlines the relation-
ship between official and popular reactions to terrorism and the central tendencies of
Cohen’s model. As it indicates, while leading scholars agree that contemporary responses
clearly embody moral panics (Altheide, 2006; Garland, 2008; Goode and Ben-Yehuda,
2010; Hunt, 2011), as a deviant case, terrorism accentuates important tensions and
debates concerning the framework, whether, inter alia, those associated with gauging
concern, disproportionality, or volatility.
Consensus and concern
Public concern and consensus regarding terrorism have often reached seismic propor-
tions following an attack. Underpinned by its violent and unanticipated nature, and fur-
ther stoked by the volume and intensity of media and political discourse, terrorism
produces a ‘culture of fear’ (Furedi, 2006), dynamics witnessed in public opinion sur-
veys, newscasts, official alerts, security checkpoints, warning posters, armed guards,
concrete barriers, and other signs of a siege mentality (Savitch, 2014). Further, direct
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Walsh 7
behavioral evidence, whether increased expenditures on personal safety, refusals to fly or
travel internationally, or spikes in hate crimes and vigilantism directed towards those of
Muslim or Middle Eastern background, provides more immediate proof of heightened
anxiety (Mueller, 2006; Welch, 2006).2 Such dynamics are also evidenced in rituals of
solidarity and security. Like other external threats, terrorism may produce significant,
albeit fleeting, displays of patriotism, unity, and loyalty. Faced with a threatening enemy:
‘people draw together; symbols are rallied around; leaders exalted; control becomes
more centralized’ (Collins, 2004: 53).
Hostility
Terrorism also produces intense enmity towards its perceived perpetrators. Approached
as fanatical, nihilistic, and ‘ultra-deviant’, terrorism’s practitioners are constructed as
inhuman and beyond reason and civilization, dynamics frequently displaying collateral
consequences for entire national, religious, and racial groups with no connection to polit-
ical violence (Mythen and Walklate, 2006; Welch, 2006). Typifying such dynamics,
around the start of the 20th century Anarchists and political radicals in Europe and North
America were characterized as ‘wild animals’, ‘lunatics’, and a ‘growing bacillus men-
acing the … body politic’ (Miller, 2013: 124). Additionally, the military dictatorship in
1970s Argentina framed small bands of revolutionary terrorists as threats to Christendom
and Western Civilization, claims legitimating massive acts of state terror against almost
anyone expressing sympathy for leftist ideologies (Oplinger et al., 2013). Finally, in the
early 1980s, American judge Arthur Goldberg characterized terrorism as a ‘clear and
present threat to [civilization’s] very existence’ (Townshend, 2011: 33).
Amid the WOT, virulent rhetoric has been ratcheted up considerably. Political elites
have not only channeled, but actively cultivated public resentment through hardened
distinctions between friend/enemy and good/evil, dynamics positing an in-group of
respectable citizens and an out-group of threatening others. Characterized as a ‘new kind
of evil’ (Hoffman, 2006: 30), President Bush claimed Al-Qaeda endangered collective
morality and the very order of American society, seeking ‘not merely to end lives but to
disrupt and end a way of life’ (Jackson, 2005: 194). Terrorism’s moralization was also
witnessed in official explanations. The 9/11 attacks were depicted as an assault on
America’s exceptional moral and political qualities, whether its democratic, open, or
pluralistic character.3 This depoliticized framing reduced the attacks to the evil deeds of
deranged, pathological individuals, denying the possibility that American militarism and
aggression within the Islamic world might have contributed to the violent acts the coun-
try was attempting to liquidate. Like other elite-engineered moral panics, such rhetorical
moves functioned to unite citizens in collective opprobrium, reaffirm their morality and
identity, and divert attention from more pressing and intractable issues.
Disproportionality
As the primary indicator of moral panics’ emergence disproportionality also represents
a ‘central problematic of the moral panic literature’ (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 2010: 29).
Several critics have argued it is often impossible to definitively prove the revealed
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8 Current Sociology
extent of a problem is incommensurate with societal reactions (Ungar, 2001; Waddington,
1986), dynamics uniquely applicable to ‘future-oriented’, unquantifiable, and poten-
tially catastrophic threats like terrorism. While risk assessments and forecasts indicate
societal reactions are disproportionate (Mueller, 2006), they neglect that, more than
sources of harm, terrorist acts augur deeper, more prevalent threats. While many folk
devils are conjured solely through media and political campaigns, terrorists actively
cultivate uncertainty and manufacture a deferred future haunted by the quotidian pos-
sibility of violence. Nonetheless, while terrorism produces a frightening and unpredict-
able landscape, the available evidence suggests official and popular reactions are
unwarranted when compared to more harmful issues. For example, between 1969 and
2013 5755 Americans, domestically and internationally, died in terrorist attacks, a fig-
ure dwarfed by deaths from domestic gun violence in 2013 alone (33,636 [CDC, 2014]).
Given this information, surely terrorism’s characterization as a civilizational threat and
expenditures in excess of US$1 trillion on homeland security are disproportionate and
exaggerated.
In terms of specific manifestations, official responses to terrorism frequently entail
punitive rhetoric and policies that provoke irrational fear. To be clear, state responses
are not preordained and remain contingent upon, among others, regime type, public
sentiment, the severity of the perceived threat, and elite interests. Although many gov-
ernments have adopted hardline orientations, others have responded with measured
assessments and reactions.4 Nonetheless, the historical record reveals government
reactions frequently represent ‘extreme example[s] of … disproportion[ality]’ (Hunt,
2011: 59).
Severe responses to terrorism are often informed by precautionary logics, pre-
emptive measures, and the exploitation of anxiety regarding future devastation. Through
allusions to shadowy threats and worst-case scenarios state managers have frequently
manipulated genuine public concern for political purposes, whether boosting legiti-
macy, achieving consent, or advancing initiatives (military interventions, immigration
restriction, political repression, heightened surveillance and policing, etc.) previously
lacking the requisite support (Altheide, 2006; Walsh, 2015). Around the turn of the 20th
century governments throughout Europe and North America exaggerated the menace of
Anarchist violence, advancing claims of a global network and conspiracy in which
Anarchists were secretly ‘lurking all over the continent’ (Miller, 2013: 114). Alongside
promoting labor repression, for several countries, such assertions galvanized support
for mass round-ups and deportations of foreign radicals associated with ethnic and reli-
gious minorities. At present, ‘the … impossibility of estimating the terrorist risk has
enabled political elites to circulate decidedly fanciful claims’ regarding the threat of
radical Islam (Mythen and Walklate, 2006: 387). In justifying the WOT’s politico-legal
architecture, Vice President Cheney emphasized terrorism’s unknown and potentially
cataclysmic nature, noting ‘If we make the wrong choice, the danger is that we will get
hit again … in a way that is devastating’ (Altheide, 2006: 415). President Bush echoed
such sentiments, claiming, ‘We cannot wait for the final proof … in the form of a mush-
room cloud’ (Welch, 2006: 23).
In terms of institutional responses, terrorism, like other moral panics, typically
inspires escalations of social control and discipline, whether police repression, the
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Walsh 9
abrogation of human rights, techniques of social defense, or the bending, suspension,
and circumvention of the law (Cohen, 2002: 66–72, 140–145). Such measures are often
exceedingly elastic and based on group-based profiles where shared social characteris-
tics (nationality, phenotype, religion, etc.) incite suspicions of malevolence and crimi-
nality. While visible in several cases, whether the Red Scare or the Battle of Algiers
(Crenshaw, 1972; Miller, 2013), these dynamics are especially conspicuous at present.
With its appeals to ‘infinite justice’ and global conflict without clear adversaries and
parameters, the WOT has provided an alibi for creating a fluctuating net of enforcement
that can be ‘cast over any form of resistance to sovereign power’ whether activists,
domestic minorities, foreigners, or other suspect populations (Gregory, 2003: 319).
Such trends are uniquely applicable to the contemporary climate of Islamophobia.
Specifically, terrorism’s interpretation through registers of racial and religious differ-
ence has incited ‘signification spirals’ (Hall et al., 1978) in which fears and threats
stemming from small-scale subversive and antagonistic groups (jihadists) result in the
construction of entire collectivities (Muslims in general) as folk devils that are inher-
ently risky, dangerous, and other.
Volatility
Traditionally conceived as ‘eruptive … and quick to subside’ (Hunt, 2011: 57), it is
increasingly acknowledged that moral panics vary in ‘intensity, duration, and impact’
(Garland, 2008: 13). While many are transient and ephemeral, others, whether regarding
drugs, street crime, or terrorism, represent persistent sources of unease. When coupled
with the rise of a globalizing mass media and 24-hour news cycle these developments
have transformed moral panics from brief eruptions into enduring states of anxiety and
insecurity (Carrabine, 2008). For terrorism, while the hysteria it produces may abate, it
displays long-lasting repercussions, whether a lingering sense of vulnerability that can
quickly transmutate into full-blown panic or the entrenchment of intensified policing and
securitization.
Creating crisis and orchestrating alarm: Terrorists’ role in
engineering moral panics
A central task for terrorism scholars is explaining how ‘groups with little or no … politi-
cal power … can achieve effects … out of all proportion to their numerical or [military]
power’ (Wardlaw, 1989: 3). While their weapons are often primitive, their asymmetrical
tactics – ‘the use of directed terror … [and] widespread panic’ – are quite sophisticated
(Wardlaw, 1989: 3). Specifically, terrorists believe their efforts will produce an ‘illusion-
ist’s trick’, injecting them with an authority and influence they previously lacked
(Fromkin, 1975: 685).
Informed by these issues, this section assesses terrorism’s strategic dimensions and
elaborates their role in initiating moral panics. In doing so it identifies a fourth model of
emergence – provocateur – not captured in the existing typology of grassroots, interest
group, and elite-engineered. As detailed below, while societal reactions embody moral
panics’ core dimensions, for modern terrorist organizations, such responses are desired,
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10 Current Sociology
anticipated, and central to their calculations and designs. Rather than exogenous targets
whose threatening status is constructed by publics, states, and moral entrepreneurs, ter-
rorists’ strategic logic and practices are endogenous to moral panics’ orchestration.
Specifically, when carrying out attacks terrorists utilize three tactics that facilitate moral
panics: (1) the deployment of affective violence; (2) the exploitation of the mass media;
and (3) efforts to incite disproportionate overreaction.
Affective violence
Terrorists represent specialists in affective violence or forms of aggression oriented
towards evoking particular moods and emotional states. While warfare is physical and
instrumental, terrorism constitutes a symbolic and gruesome form of political drama-
turgy (Alexander, 2004). Its first-order objectives are not to kill or destroy but, through
scenes of devastation, whether of corpses, mangled transportation, or collapsed build-
ings, to instill unremitting fear. While the extent of physical destruction is typically
miniscule, terrorism’s social and psychological effects – irrational panic, collective
alarm, and ‘intrusive, repetitive recollection’ – are often profound and long-lasting
(Schmid and Jongman, 1988: 19).
Terrorism’s unsettling character stems from its effects on citizens’ interior land-
scapes and sociopolitical order. By producing perceptions of vague, unpredictable, and
ubiquitous threats, terrorism is acutely unnerving and evokes visceral feelings of per-
sonal danger and vulnerability. Exemplifying these dimensions, the Algerian National
Liberation Front’s (FLN) official journal, El Moudjahid, claimed the organization’s
campaign of random and intermittent attacks on pied noirs sought to deliver an ‘incon-
testable psychological shock’ and foster ‘panic, insecurity … and fear in the enemy
camp’ (Crenshaw, 1972: 386). According to Feraoun, an Algerian novelist and school-
teacher, this strategy instilled ‘panicky fear without a precise object, without founda-
tion’, an imminent, but unspecified, sense of catastrophe (Crenshaw, 1972: 388).
Indistinguishable from ordinary citizens (they lack uniforms and insignia), terrorists
subvert distinctions between the battlefield and everyday life and exist as ‘predatorial
unmarked strangers’ (Valier, 2002: 321) that render security a chimerical task. Moreover,
at present, mundane and seemingly innocent objects (shoes, backpacks, underwear,
Stanley knives, the mail, etc.) are appropriated as weaponry and transmogrified into
sources of fear, uncertainty, and potentially unspeakable destruction. Consequently, ter-
rorism displays a spectral quality, establishing pervasive unease and conjuring ‘imagi-
naries of eschatological dimensions’ (Miller, 2013: 5).
Terrorists also exploit modern societies’ defining properties to unsettle political order
and sociality. Terrorism transforms the ‘open society’ from a mark of distinction into a
liability. Despite their military prowess, economic power, and political influence, highly
complex, differentiated, and densely populated societies are exceedingly difficult to
defend against unconventional attacks. Consequently, terrorism shatters myths regarding
the state’s capacities of security, sovereignty, and order enforcement, thereby reintroduc-
ing the very element of disorder – the bellum omnium contra omnes – it emerged to
domesticate. Further, the anxiety terrorism produces often stems from its targeting of the
spaces and infrastructures of daily life, including mass-transit, zones of entertainment
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Walsh 11
and consumption (shopping districts, hotels, cafes, theaters, etc.), and sites of worship.
Beyond denuding social life of its pacific stability, attacking such areas supplants trust
and interdependence with suspicion and paranoia. According to Savitch (2014: 53),
‘Once people … interpret normal activities as “a dare”, they have converted personal
trepidation into a nub of civic distrust.’ When everyone appears potentially threatened
and threatening, and no one knows what behavior to expect from others, communal
bonds and associations collapse into a mass of anxious and atomized individuals
(Wardlaw, 1989).
Threat amplification
Alongside its role in moral panics’ promulgation, the mass media double as a crucial
component of terrorism. Terrorists seek and utilize media coverage to publicize their
struggle, maximize their audience, and facilitate deviancy amplification in which media
coverage distorts and exacerbates their threatening status. Accordingly, modern terror-
ism would never have assumed the prominence it has without the media, a situation
leading scholars to label it ‘mass-mediated violence’ (Weimann, 2008; cf. Wardlaw,
1989). According to Carlos Marighella’s Mini-Manual, a sourcebook for dissidents
across the world, ‘the war of nerves … the psychological war’ hinged on the effective
‘use of the mass-media’ (1982: 87–90). Reflecting this statement, groups ranging from
the Tamil Tigers to the Red Army Faction (RAF) have devoted entire wings of their
organizations to publicity and media relations (Hoffman, 2006).
The terrorism–media relationship is one of reciprocal exploitation and dependence
(Tuman, 2009). Terrorists routinely orchestrate attacks that evidence a sophisticated
grasp of the nature of mass communications and audience dynamics. Seemingly aware
that media representations are not mirrors that objectively reflect ‘reality’ but, by provid-
ing ‘images … much sharper than reality’ (Cohen, 2002: 43), enter directly into its con-
stitution, terrorists have often fashioned and staged their violent methods, whether in
terms of their symbolism, victimization, or spectacular nature, to meet the media’s ‘insti-
tutionalized “need” for moral panics’ (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 2010: 90). Given the
drama of horrific violence and accompanying ‘images of pantomime villains, Hollywood
styled attacks, and heart-wrenching victims’, terrorism is a media spectacle of the first
order and clearly embodies the melodramatic nature of media events identified by Cohen
(Vertigans, 2013: 38). As noted by one former member of the German RAF and Italian
Red Brigades, ‘We give the media what they need: newsworthy events … [they] are very
invested in our actions … [which are often] planned for the media’ (Schmid, 2005: 147).
As the quote suggests, while the media are integral to terrorism, terrorism also facilitates
the news media’s ceaseless efforts to boost ratings amid the ‘rigors of intense … glo-
balized competition’ (Reiner, 2013: 149), and shock, captivate, entertain, and otherwise
affect the emotions of increasingly voyeuristic audiences (Altheide, 2002).
For terrorists, mass communications drastically expand the size of the ‘witnessing
public’ (Coleman and Ross, 2010). Without media, terrorism’s impact would only affect
those in the attack’s immediate vicinity. Even before the age of electronic media,
European Anarchists embraced the press’s strategic significance, believing the publicity
it generated would ‘create a myth of global revolutionary pretensions … stimulat[ing]
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12 Current Sociology
fears and suspicions disproportionate to its actual impact’ (Hoffman, 2006: 7). Facilitated
by technological advancements (portable cameras and satellite uplinks) terrorist acts
increasingly represent globally legible events with mass-psychological effects for spa-
tially dispersed publics. For Black September’s hostage-taking and murder at the 1972
Munich Olympics, approximately 800 million individuals witnessed the events on televi-
sion, leading the group to claim the incident was ‘like painting the name of Palestine on
a mountain’ visible ‘from the four corners of the earth’ (Hoffman, 2006: 70). For
September 11, the attacks – whether their nature, targets, or timing – were designed to
maximize media coverage. According to an Al-Qaeda training manual, by targeting ‘sen-
timental landmarks’ the organization sought to acquire ‘intense publicity’ and produce
pervasive fear (Nacos, 2003: 4–5).
Terrorists also exploit media outlets’ appetite for dramatized coverage and how it
distorts perceptions of risk and danger. With the drift towards ‘infotainment’ the gram-
mar and symbolic representations of media coverage are crafted in ways that offer sim-
plistic narratives and privilege formats that are ‘visual, brief, action-oriented, and
dramatic’ at the expense of in-depth analysis and ‘referentially derived information’
(Altheide, 2002: 47). As publics are increasingly sensitized to accept stylized and ste-
reotypical accounts as more arresting and factual than dispassionate journalism, sensa-
tionalist media narratives not only resonate with, but sharpen, public sentiment
(Altheide, 2006). Through editing and the inclusion of high-production sound, music,
and graphics, the news media relay scenes of spectacular violence, stunning visual
imagery, alarming threats to collective security, and moral conflicts between good and
evil. As demonstrated in New York, Madrid, and London, vivid repetitive coverage of
attacks and their aftermath reverberated throughout the televisual landscape, priming
‘the cognitive and emotional processes that help[ed] create a disproportionate sense …
of vulnerability’ (Breckenridge and Zimbardo, 2007: 123). Ultimately, by selecting and
organizing content in ways that shape audience assumptions about terrorism, the media
promulgate a ‘fear narrative’ defined by ‘the pervasive communication … awareness,
and expectation that danger and risk are … central feature[s] of the effective environ-
ment’ (Altheide, 2006: 114).
Moreover, like crime, media depictions of terrorism conform to the ‘law of opposites’
in which coverage accentuates extreme, shocking incidents at the expense of more rou-
tine offenses (Surette, 2014). While terrorist episodes are typically quantitatively small
in frequency and injury, the volume and tenor or media coverage makes otherwise
obscure organizations appear more menacing, capable, and effective than they actually
are, thereby perpetuating myths about ‘twenty foot tall’ and ‘all-knowing, all-seeing
terrorist[s]’ (Friedman, 2004: 36; cf. Tuman, 2009). Researchers have demonstrated that,
since the 1980s, Americans have routinely identified terrorism as a leading source of
concern, eclipsing other social problems that, to the extent they can be objectively ascer-
tained, are far more devastating (Breckenridge and Zimbardo, 2007).5
Provoking punitiveness
Beyond generating fear and publicity, terrorism frequently represents a strategy of prov-
ocation in which weaker actors turn their opponents’ military and coercive superiority
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Walsh 13
into liabilities (Parker, 2007). Under such arrangements terrorists exploit the symbiotic
relationship between folk devils and social control agents in which each responds to,
feeds on, and magnifies the other. Here the essential idea is that vengeful unrestrained
reprisals will erode the targeted regime’s legitimacy, exposing its true colors as a des-
potic force and sharpening the contradictions of the established order. Accordingly, to
create terror and carnage they are incapable of effectuating on their own, terrorists rely
on an inherent hazard of counter-terrorism: mimesis and imitation. For Agamben (2001:
45) a security-obsessed state ‘is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terror-
ism to become itself terroristic’.
Ultimately, strategies of provocation seek to induce conflict and polarization. Whether
operating domestically or transnationally, terrorists stand to benefit as harsh reactions
may alienate important constituents, inflame tensions, radicalize moderates, destabilize
societies, and diminish democracy, outcomes which embolden terrorists and exacerbate
the root causes of political violence (Juergensmeyer, 2000). By increasing the resonance
of terrorists’ claims regarding their struggle and adversary, overwrought responses pro-
vide ‘propaganda capital’ (Wardlaw, 1989: 70) allowing them to mobilize valuable
resources, whether ideological support, additional recruits, or weapons and financial
assets. Accordingly, through repressive responses ‘states “socially construct” more resil-
ient … terrorist organizations’ and, as such, may become ‘their own worst enemies’
(Parker, 2007: 155–156).
As a strategy, provocation is rooted in 19th-century Anarchism. Drawing on the
notion of ‘propaganda by deed’ several figures, whether Most, Kropotkin, or Nechayev,
embraced agitational violence as a necessary catalyst to seize the masses’ attention and
impel the state’s organs of coercion into indiscriminate brutality. According to the
Russian Anarchist Kropotkin, terrorist acts were designed to generate ‘savage repres-
sions’ that would succeed in uniting the masses, ‘awaken[ing] the spirit of revolt’, and
‘driving the rebels to heroism’ – a strategy which has since been embraced by numerous
thinkers and organizations, including Carlos Marighella, Regis Debray, the FLN, the
Tupamaros, and Al-Qaeda (Townshend, 2011: 57).
Gripped by shock, vulnerability, and outrage, rather than carefully calibrated responses
in proportion to the injury sustained, there is an intense desire among victimized groups
to pursue retributive and cathartic responses. Following 9/11, a New York Times poll
uncovered widespread support for military action against terrorists even if ‘many thou-
sands of innocent people’ were killed (Breckenridge and Zimbardo, 2007).6 Ultimately,
all-consuming demands for social defense exonerate drastic expansions in state sover-
eignty and a turn to ‘gloves-off crime control’ (Hudson, 2003: 45). Historically, manifes-
tations of counter-terrorism, whether expansions in policing power, preventive – and
often indefinite – detention, secret trials, warrantless searches, intrusive surveillance,
torture and ‘enhanced interrogation’, assassinations, or aggressive military strikes and
pre-emptive wars, embody forms of ‘counter-law’ (Ericson, 2008); governmental prac-
tices that operate with impunity and are institutionalized in the absence of political delib-
eration, legal oversight, and public consent.
While state repression may facilitate their liquidation, history is replete with examples
of provocation advancing terrorists’ proximate and long-term objectives. For nationalist
and anti-colonial groups, the spiral of violence produced by terrorist attacks has often
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14 Current Sociology
succeeded in estranging and alienating colonial subjects from the metropole. In 1940s
Palestine, Britain’s response to the Irgun, whether curfews, checkpoints and partitions,
executions, or martial law, created ‘an image of the army and police as oppressors rather
than protectors’, dynamics contributing, in part, to Israel’s eventual independence
(Hoffman, 2006: 52). For Algeria, provocative violence was central to the FLN’s strategy
and eventual victory. France’s response, which included torture, public assassinations,
and mass round-ups and forced relocation, backfired catastrophically, transforming FLN
members into martyrs, galvanizing opposition among native Algerians, and outraging
public opinion in France (Fromkin, 1975). Moreover, in both contexts, government
responses established sympathy beyond each organization’s theater of operation, trans-
forming local struggles into global issues commanding the international community’s
attention (Rapoport, 2002).
In Europe, IRA attacks against Britain’s security forces in the early 20th century were
conducted, in part, to elicit violent and politically useful reactions (English, 2003). Their
response came in the form of the Black and Tans, special constables whose indiscrimi-
nate attacks ‘did more than anything … to undermine the British effort to keep Ireland
within the UK’ (Townshend, 2011: 125). More recently, the IRA and ETA coordinated
attacks on police, military, and security forces in the hopes of provoking excessive
repression (Zirakzadah, 2002). For the former, the Thatcher government’s policies of
internment and coercive interrogation failed to effect its operational capacity, while rein-
forcing Republicans’ legitimacy and producing a flood of recruits, money, and weapons
(White, 1989). Similar strategies were visible for revolutionary groups, like the RAF,
whose campaign of kidnappings and bombings sought to enrage the state and ‘make fas-
cism visible’ in West Germany (Vertigans, 2013).
Finally, provocation represents a central strategy of radical Islamist groups. Although
the precise objectives of organizations like Al-Qaeda remain opaque, the available evi-
dence suggests their actions represent a calculated effort to elicit extreme responses,
thereby facilitating their broader goals of mobilizing, uniting, and radicalizing the
world’s Muslim population (Nacos, 2003). In orchestrating their attacks Al-Qaeda seems
to have appreciated that, given its hawkish militarism and aggressive unilateralism, the
Bush administration was susceptible to provocation.7 Ultimately, the organization hoped
American reprisals could be framed as an anti-Islamic crusade and cosmic war between
good and evil, believers and infidels.
While Al-Qaeda’s objectives remain unfulfilled, America’s response has proven
counter-productive. Alongside torture, prisoner abuse, and drone strikes, Operation Iraqi
Freedom in particular ‘breathed new life into the organization’, vindicating its claims of
Western imperialism and inspiring a sustained insurgency (Byman and Pollack, 2008:
56). Producing approximately 500,000 civilian causalities and 2 million refugees, the
war served as a major recruitment tool and source of radicalization in the Middle East,
Western Europe, and elsewhere (Welch, 2006). Moreover, America’s actions eroded
international support, particularly in the Muslim world, while support for Al-Qaeda,
indicated through funding and recruitment levels, rose considerably.8 Consequently, ‘far
from shrinking, the spaces of lawlessness, the training grounds for global terrorism,
expanded to unheard of dimensions’ (Bauman, 2013: 102). Further, domestic reactions,
whether enhanced surveillance, racial profiling, or revanchist nationalism evidenced in
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Walsh 15
Islamophobia, racism, and hate crimes, have bred mistrust, discrimination, and harass-
ment, thereby facilitating the radicalization of pockets of domestic minorities, and vali-
dating claims regarding Western opposition to Islam.9 Although it remains unclear if
such outcomes are intended or desired, their effects – treating entire populations as
threats and folk devils – have amplified and entrenched the very tensions and divisions
on which terrorists depend and feed (Morgan and Poynting, 2012).
Conclusion
In an effort to contribute to debates concerning the construction and amplification of
social problems this article has documented terrorists’ role in producing moral panics.
The preceding indicates that, for many dissident groups, terrorist acts present invaluable
tools for accumulating ‘power made possible by fear’ (Savitch, 2014: 50). While rarely
discussed as such, terrorism aims to produce and benefit from the very conditions – ele-
vated anxiety, intense indignation, and punitive overreaction – that define moral panics.
By deploying violence that is horrific, unanticipated, and directed towards quotidian
spaces and infrastructures, terrorists seek to invoke affective states of extreme fear and
intense psychic and social disruption. Moreover, in doing so, terrorists exploit the ten-
dencies of the two most important institutions implicated in moral panics’ eruption: the
media and state institutions of social control. To obtain notoriety and multiply percep-
tions of vulnerability and imminent danger well beyond their concrete capacities and
material impact, terrorists depend on the anticipated publicity afforded by spectacle-
hungry media outlets. Additionally, the disproportionate reactions of security-obsessed
states represent an important resource for terrorist organizations. By eroding legitimacy
and breeding support for their cause, the collateral consequences of indiscriminate and
clumsy reprisals are a central means by which terrorists amplify their impact, mobilize
resources, and acquire and sustain their strength.
In interrogating these dynamics this research not only clarifies the terrorism–moral
panic relationship, but suggests fruitful ways of extending the moral panic paradigm
beyond its initial conceptual moorings. As an outlier or deviant case terrorism displays
attributes that resonate with, but are not entirely captured by, received definitions. While
other sources of social anxiety more closely reflect the expectations of the moral panic
paradigm, the case of terrorism, whether in regard to its political underpinnings, associa-
tion with sweeping collectivities, relationship to the inchoate hazards of risk society, or,
most importantly, orientation to actively promulgating hysteria, deviates from estab-
lished generalizations regarding the character of folk devils and activation of social anxi-
ety. In particular, by highlighting instances in which folk devils are, not external to, but
directly and intentionally implicated in inflating public fear, cultivating uncertainty, and
triggering exaggerated reactions from state authorities, security experts, and media out-
lets, terrorism is particularly useful in identifying new facilitating conditions and causal
pathways. If, as is argued, terrorism represents a potent source of contemporary fear and
alarm, then such findings cannot be easily dismissed. While these features suggest extant
modes of analysis are found wanting in their explanatory mettle, this does not imply the
moral panic concept should be overhauled or jettisoned, but sharpened and refined to
better account for the diverse agents and mechanisms involved in the production and
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16 Current Sociology
exploitation of collective alarm. Put differently, by weakening ‘the original proposition’
and suggesting a ‘modified proposition that will be stronger’, critical or deviant case
studies like terrorism display ‘great theoretical value’ and can assist in opening new
avenues of investigation concerning the shifting sources and consequences of contempo-
rary unease (Lijphart, 1971: 692).
Alongside deepening understandings of the potential actors, practices, and conditions
guiding and initiating moral panics’ eruption, this article has implications for the policy
alternatives open for the future. The preceding suggests that fearful, retributive, and venge-
ful reactions to terrorism undermine the very conditions – security and democracy – they
are purported to protect and preserve. Whether in relation to intrusive surveillance, pre-
emptive policing, group-based profiling, or unchecked sovereign power, hardline responses
attenuate constitutional protections and democracy’s consensual character, creating an
environment of suspicion, hostility, and atomization that corrodes communal bonds and
solidarity. Second, while they may succeed in disrupting terrorist organizations, efforts to
fight terror with terror are equally likely to produce greater opposition, strengthen support
for the terrorists’ cause, and foment ongoing spirals of violence. Additionally, indiscrimi-
nate responses create conditions – collateral damage, precarity, and social exclusion – that
contribute to terrorism’s ‘root causes’. Such outcomes suggest an intrinsic risk of counter-
terrorism is the inclination towards imitation. Accordingly, when responding to terrorist
acts, whether executed by states or dissidents, Nietzsche’s aphorism should be heeded:
‘Whoever fights monsters should see to it that … he does not become a monster. …
[W]hen you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you’ (Nietzsche, 2010: 89).
Acknowledgements
This article has benefited greatly from the thoughtful comments and suggestions of three anony-
mous reviewers. I am also grateful to the students in my course on terrorism at the University of
Ontario Institute of Technology. Their insightful comments and probing questions in our weekly
meetings played an important and generative role in this research.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. Underscoring these dynamics Schmid and Jongman (1988) have identified 123 academic and
official definitions.
2. While conventional proxies of concern (media coverage, political discourse, public opinion)
only offer ‘low resolution’ images, behavioral indicators provide prima facie evidence of
anxiety (Ungar, 2001: 280).
3. As President Bush stated ‘America was targeted … because we’re the brightest beacon for
freedom and opportunity’ (Croft, 2006: 72).
4. The latter include conciliatory efforts that address terrorism’s ‘root causes’ whether negotia-
tions, social and political reforms, or peace accords (Maras, 2013).
5. Formal risk assessments reveal Americans are more likely to drown in a bathtub or be struck
by lightning than die from terrorism (Mueller, 2006).
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Walsh 17
6. Additionally, at the WOT’s height, over half of the American population supported ethno-
racial profiling and subjecting Muslims to intensive scrutiny dynamics also witnessed in
Europe (Savitch, 2014: 60; cf. Nussbaum, 2012).
7. According to Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda found it ‘easy to provoke this administration’ (Kydd and
Walter, 2006: 71).
8. In 2000 52% of Turkey’s population held favorable views of the US versus 9% in 2007.
Similar polls in Indonesia revealed a decline from 75 to 29%. Moreover, by 2007 two-thirds
of Jordanians and Palestinians, and 41% of Egyptians perceived Al-Qaeda as a legitimate
resistance movement (Von Hippel, 2008: 183).
9. Alongside laws banning the construction of minarets, practice of Sharia law, and wearing
of the burqa, niqab, and hijab in several Western countries, such dynamics are evidenced in
surges in victimization, whether in the form of physical attacks, harassment, vandalism, or
experiences of discrimination concerning employment, air travel, and the use of public space
(Nussbaum, 2012; Welch, 2006).
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Political Violence 14(4): 66–92.
Author biography
James P Walsh is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at the
University of Ontario Institute of Technology. In addition to terrorism, his research focuses on
crime and media, immigration law and policy, globalization, neoliberalism, and border surveil-
lance and policing.
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20 Current Sociology
Résumé
Cet article examine la relation entre le terrorisme et la panique morale (moral panic)
afin de mieux saisir les conditions de l’apparition et la construction de cette réaction
disproportionnée. Afin de permettre une meilleure compréhension des propriétés
agentielles des démons populaires (folk devils), ce travail s’interroge sur les conséquences
des actes terroristes - qui font appel à des formes extrêmes et choquantes de violence
pour semer la peur et inciter au changement - sur notre entendement du cadre de valeurs
de la panique morale. Cet article suggère que, dans le cas du terrorisme, la perception
exagérée des risques et la réponse disproportionnée qui caractérisent les paniques
morales ne sont pas seulement initiées par les chefs moraux (moral entrepreneurs) ou
par les agents du contrôle social, mais alimentées par les rationalités et les pratiques
stratégiques des démons populaires eux-mêmes. En adoptant cette démarche, ce travail
vise à améliorer le traitement social et scientifique du terrorisme, à élargir le champ
d’analyse de la panique morale et à mieux comprendre l’instrumentalisation politique
des peurs et des angoisses.
Mots-clés
Démons populaires (folks devils), terrorisme, violence politique, peur, paniques
morales, réaction sociale, construction des problèmes sociaux
Resumen
En este artículo se analiza la relación entre el terrorismo y pánico moral para ampliar la
comprensión de la erupción y la orquestación de este último. Responder a las llamadas
de las consideraciones más profundas de propiedades de agente de los demonios
folclóricos, se cuestiona cómo los métodos terroristas -el despliegue de la violencia
impactante y excepcional para incitar el miedo y estimular el cambio político- desafía
el entendimiento existente del marco teórico sobre pánico moral. En concreto,
se argumenta que en el caso del terrorismo, las amenazas exageradas y respuestas
desproporcionadas que definen el pánico moral no son impulsados únicamente por
los emprendedores morales o agentes de control social, pero son informados por las
prácticas estratégicas y racionalidades de los propios demonios folclóricos. A través de
su enfoque, esta investigación mejora el tratamiento científico-social del terrorismo;
amplía el alcance del análisis sobre pánico moral; y se extiende la comprensión de cómo
el miedo y la ansiedad son manipulados con fines políticos.
Palabras clave
Demonios folclóricos, Terrorismo, Violencia Política, Miedo, Pánico Moral, reacción
social, construcción de problemas sociales
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