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Globalising the 'war on terror'? An analysis of 36 countries
Abstract
The war on terror as a discourse assumes that terrorism is an essential threat of global proportions, is mostly perpetuated by Islamist networks, and requires a strong international response. This discourse had tremendous impacts on both domestic and international politics. Consequentially, a large number of studies analyse the assumptions underlying and the policies legitimised by the war on terror discourse. However, existing work mostly focusses on one or a few cases, predominantly in the global north. This article introduces a novel dataset containing information on the war on terror discourse in the school textbooks of 36 countries, representing around 64% of the world's population, for the period 2003-2014. Based on this dataset, I present the first comprehensive analysis of the global diffusion of the war on terror discourse. The study finds that the discourse has by no means globalised but is mostly limited to wealthy countries in Europe and North America. There are hence clear limits to the USA's soft power and the hyper-globalisation of terrorism discourses. Factors like terrorism intensity, armed conflict and authoritarian regime have little predictive power. This is despite clear incentives for challenged (authoritarian) regimes to adapt the war on terror discourse. Contrary to common assumptions in critical security and terrorism studies, the war on terror discourse is hardly associated with an emphasis on terrorists' irrationality and hatred or with the marginalisation of socio-political grievances.
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The article examines the extent to which Islamic State (IS) has affected jihadi terrorism in Europe. We look at the scope of attack activity, perpetrators and their networks, modus operandi and funding. For all the talk of a new threat we argue that, apart from scope, less is new than most assume. IS wants largely the same as al-Qaida did by attacking Europe. Their tactics are similar and their networks overlap in time and space. The core dynamics of the threat endure. It is premature to talk of a new paradigm in recruitment, but more terrorists are instructed online than before. Patterns in funding remain relatively stable, but there is an increase in plots financed from abroad. Despite military setbacks, IS remains a formidable terrorist actor, with territorial control, economic muscle and thousands of Europeans in its ranks. These things, combined with the group's skillful social media usage, are exhausting European security services' capacities. So is the refugee situation, which is exploited by IS to transfer personnel. If IS's territorial control persists, we foresee attempts at large-scale operations, including attempts at using improvised chemical or radiological devices. If IS continues to lose ground, small-scale attacks by single actors will become even more frequent.
This paper compares the security paradigms for combating terrorism, drugs and irregular migration and argues that while these have largely failed on their own terms, they have also proven rather successful for the actors shaping them. Through a spatial political economy analysis of systems of intervention, the paper shows how vested interests have helped perpetuate counterproductive approaches, while risks (including that of human suffering) have routinely been ‘exported’ into geographical ‘buffer zones’. In analysing the stakes in such systems, we deploy the metaphor of games. This term allows us to highlight divergences between ‘official’ goals, such as ‘winning the war,’ and unstated aims, such as perpetuating security investments, relocating risk or stoking fear for political gain. Equally important, game terminology helps us highlight the spatial and social dynamics of collaboration, conflict and rule-manipulation within the system. In exploring these dynamics, the paper puts focus empirically on the complex collaborations between Western states instigating intervention and poorer ‘partner states,’ showing how a skewed geopolitical distribution of risk may tilt security interventions in the instigators’ favour while maintaining ‘skin in the game’ for less powerful actors.
This cross-nation, multi-event study examined 142 news stories from CCTV and CNN on two major terrorist attacks in China and the United States. It aimed to unveil how press system and national interest come into play in influencing media coverage of terrorism. Framing analyses were conducted in terms of attitude toward local government and perpetrators, news origin and source, coverage theme, definition of the incident, and attribution of cause of the incident. Findings suggest that, in reporting these two significant terrorist attacks, media of the two countries employed varied framing strategies based on their ideological backgrounds and national interests. The framing strategies utilized by the two media outlets are interpreted and discussed.
Global rates of terrorism have skyrocketed since 9/11, yet the aggregate increase tells us very little about the distribution of attacks across different regime types. Contrary to the traditional scholarly view and popular perceptions in the West, reasonably high-quality democracies enjoy a robust and growing "triple democracy advantage" in facing the scourge of post-9/11 terrorism. Not only are liberal democracies and polyarchies less prone to terrorist attacks than all other regime types, but the rate of increase in the number of attacks among these democracies is substantially lower in comparison to other regime types, and they are significantly better at minimizing casualties. © 2018 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press.
What is the relationship between Thailand’s human rights crisis during Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s leadership (2001–2006) and the USA-led post-9/11 war on terror? Why did the human rights situation dramatically deteriorate after the Thaksin regime publicly supported the Bush administration’s war on terror and consequently received US counterterror assistance? This article offers two conceptual arguments that jointly demonstrate a constitutive theoretical explanation, which shows that counterterror and militaristic transnational and national discursive structures enabled the strategy of state repression in Thailand under Thaksin. The first concept refers to strategic localization, which refers to how the Bush administration’s global war on terror—and its consequent overarching emphasis on military security—provided an opportunity for the Thaksin administration to strategically localize the global threat of terrorism in ways that could seem relevant to the local Thai context. The second concept pertains to resource mobilization, which shows how converging US and Thai discourses on military security facilitated Thaksin’s strategy of increased state repression that led to the proliferation of state-led human rights abuses. This research article contributes to the human rights literature in two ways: (1) by highlighting how foreign aid programs and its constitutive political discourses shape recipient countries’ domestic human rights situation (2) and by tracing the macro-political factors that lead to the eventual democratic decay of contemporary Thailand.
This article, employing a poststructuralist Critical Discourse Analysis reveals cracks, discrepancies and inconsistencies in Pakistan's discourse on terrorism and practice. I argue that Pakistan continuously constructs a ‘monstrous enemy’ and magnifies it in a way that conceals alternative representations of reality which could show that the state, by presenting itself as a victim of terrorism, is using phenomena of political violence to serve its political objectives inside and outside the boundaries of the state. The article argues that after a militant attack on a school in northwest Pakistan, critical, liberal and dissenting narratives mingled with the dominant state discourse in a fashion that strengthen illiberal practices in the country thus undermining the ideals of democracy.
The existing literature in the terrorism field does not address the
absence of terrorism scholarship in developing countries. This
article focuses on this intellectual gap using the case of Pakistan.
It argues that most decolonised states, including Pakistan, are yet
to grasp the complexities of traditional approaches to the study of
terrorism, let alone its critical dimensions. The article explores
some of the prevailing conditions in developing countries, specifically
decolonised states such as Pakistan, which prevent the
development of a robust academic discourse on terrorism and
the development of a strong field of study. It suggests that the
main barriers that account for this shortfall include the state’s
legitimacy deficit, a flawed education system that nurtures fictions
as truth and inhibits knowledge production, the institutionalised
role of conspiracy theories in national politics and the multiplicity
of terrorism discourses among government and sociopolitical entities.
The conclusion highlights a number of reasons that might
help to explain this persistent condition and offers a few policy
recommendations.
Many have noted the rise of the global in academic and popular discourse. We ask how this global frame of reference has been incorporated into secondary social science textbooks, a realm traditionally dominated by nationalist discourse. Utilizing a data set from more than 500 secondary school textbooks from around the world, spanning 1970–2008, we describe the incorporation of mentions of globalization and global citizenship into textbooks over time and then use a multilevel model to determine the textbook and country-level variables associated with mentions of each. We find that globalization and global citizenship are both predicted by the textbook content's reflection of the external world, including international events and mentions of human rights. However, no cross-national economic or political differences systematically predict incorporation of these topics. We argue that mentions of globalization and global citizenship in textbooks are two manifestations of a world culture that increasingly emphasizes interconnectedness in postnational society.
This article is a historical study of how states have articulated statements about terrorism since the 1930s; under what conditions these statements have been articulated; and what effects the discourses made up of these statements have had on global politics. This includes the constitutive role of the present discourse on what is posited as a terrorism dispositif. The inquiry is inspired by Foucault’s historical method, and comprises the descriptive archaeological analytic focused on the order of the discourse (including basic discourses in which the terrorist subject is constituted) and the genealogical power analysis of external conditions of emergence and variation of discursive series, whose treatment benefits also from Carl Schmitt’s concept of the nomos.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks and later attacks such as those in London and Madrid shocked the world and found their way into the newspapers of many countries. The authors study the international coverage of these events in the context of globalization versus localization and the creation of the dominant post-cold war frame of the War on Terror. Using automatic co-occurrence analysis based on the notion of associative framing, they investigate whether these events were mainly framed in a local or global way in the American, British, and Dutch press. The authors found that although proximity is still a strong determinant of attention for events, the framing of these events was more affected by the global event of 9/11 than by local considerations.
As the costs of the invasion and occupation of Iraq mount, scholars have sought to explain how the United States came to launch this war in the first place. Many have focused on the “inflation” of the Iraq threat, and indeed the Bush administration did frame the national dialogue on Iraq. We maintain, however, that the failure of most leading Democrats to challenge the administration's case for war in 2002–2003 cannot be explained fully by the bully pulpit, Democrats' reputation for dovishness, or administration misrepresentations. Rather, we argue that leading Democrats were relatively silent in the run-up to war because they had been “rhetorically coerced”, unable to advance a politically sustainable set of arguments with which to oppose the war. The effective fixing of the meaning of the September 11 attacks in terms of the “War on Terror” substantially circumscribed political debate, and we explain why this discourse became dominant. The Bush administration then capitalized on the existing portrait of Saddam Hussein to bind Iraq tightly into the War on Terror and thereby silence leading Democrats and legitimate the war. The story of the road to war in Iraq is not only one of neoconservative hubris and manipulated intelligence. It is also the story of how political actors strove effectively after 9/11 to shape the nation's discourse of foreign affairs and of how the resulting dominant narratives structured foreign policy debate. Behind the seemingly natural War on Terror lurk political processes of meaning-making that narrowed the space for contestation over Iraq.
This paper deploys a discursive approach to the ‘scripting’ of the November 2008 Mumbai ‘terror attacks’ and their aftermath, including ensuing debates about counter-terrorism in India. It explores the perspectives of a range of actors who participated in very different ways in the social construction of the attacks, including media consumers and producers, key participants in public debates, and even the masterminds of the attacks. Important insights into the planning and implementation of the attacks are drawn from phone conversations intercepted by Indian intelligence, between the gunmen and their ‘controllers’. The Mumbai attacks were scripted and staged in a conscious effort to obtain maximum media coverage, which also made the masterminds dependent on the media. The war story created by the media featured violence simply as a means of ‘fighting a battle’, obscuring the significant role of violence as a display of force by both security forces and ‘terrorists’.
Two North American political geographers situate contemporary terrorism in the world within broad historical trends and geopolitical structures. They employ Rapoport's "four waves of terrorism" to illustrate the changing geography of terrorism (from an intra-state to an international phenomenon) and place it within the context of broad historical shifts in modes of warfare that envisages terrorism as a form of war stemming from imperialism and state-building. The authors broaden the structural setting of terrorism to include geo-economics and the concept of relative deprivation, using empirical analysis to argue that con-temporary terrorism is primarily a feature of the semi-periphery of the world-economy (middle-income countries). Specific characteristics of the Global War on Terror are inter-preted by relating processes of imperialism and state-building to a situation in which the U.S. is facing geopolitical challenges and a possible decline in global-power status. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: I390, O100, Y900. 3 figures, 1 table, 52 refer-ences.
The role of education in political socialisation and the importance of terrorism discourses in promoting (or silencing) certain interests have long been acknowledged. This study combines both themes by asking: How do school textbooks, sanctioned by states that are violently challenged by internal opposition, discuss the issue of terrorism? I draw on, and contribute to, four distinct, yet related streams of research: critical geopolitics, critical terrorism studies, geographies of education, and young people's geographies. Simultaneously, while most work on the topic focuses on individual cases (typically of Western countries), I conduct the first comparative analysis of twelve countries from different world regions: China, Egypt, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Russia, Spain, Sri Lanka and Turkey. Contrary to recent claims, considerable heterogeneity persists regarding geopolitical imaginations of terrorism, while US-coined discourses are only infrequently adapted. However, there is still recognisable functionalist convergence as the states under analysis utilise their control of the education system in their internal struggles, mainly by portraying their opponents as evil, by ascribing a positive identity to themselves, and by calling for support by their citizens (including restrictions of human rights and democracy).
Why do some rebel groups resort to terrorism tactics while others refrain from doing so? How rebel organizations finance their rebellion creates variation in the extent to which terrorism undermines their legitimacy. Rebel organizations pay attention to the legitimacy costs associated with terrorism. Organizations that rely primarily on civilian support, and to a lesser extent on foreign support, exercise more restraint in their use of terrorism. Rebels who finance their fight with lootable resources such as gems or drugs are least vulnerable to the costs of alienating domestic supporters. Thus, they are more likely to resort to terrorism and to employ more of it. The article elaborates this legitimacy-cost theory and tests it using new data on Terrorism in Armed Conflict from 1970 to 2007. We find robust support for the hypothesis that groups who finance their fight with natural resources are significantly more likely to employ terrorism (though not necessarily to conduct more deadly attacks) relative to those who rely on local civilian support. Groups with external sources of financing, such as foreign state support, may be more likely to engage in terrorism than those who rely on local civilians, but not significantly so.
This paper is intended to contribute to the widening literature on the complicated links between education, the state and violence. It also builds on previous analyses of Pakistan Studies textbooks, and utilises notions of citizenship to illuminate inequalities and the theoretical lens of cultural violence. To do this, I present an in-depth analysis of the Pakistan Studies Textbook for Secondary Classes used in government schools in Islamabad Capital Territory. This textbook analysis was conducted as part of a case study of one girls’ secondary school in 2014 which linked citizenship education to Galtung's 1990 violence triangle. I also demonstrate through classroom observations of the case study school the power that the textbook holds as the voice of authority in the classrooms in which it is used. The analysis is situated it in the broader historical context of the process of nation building. I illustrate the specific ways the textbook contributes to the narrative of exclusion of some Pakistanis from equal citizenship which has the potential to normalise violence against excluded groups.
Japan’s kyōkasho mondai (history textbook controversy) is at a crossroads. This article tries to exemplify it through the analysis of three issue areas at three levels (international, domestic, and societal). Internationally, the study looks into the failure of much anticipated joint history writing projects with China (2006-2010) and South Korea (2002-2005, 2007-2010). Domestically, this study problematizes the recent politicization of the textbook adoption system through the analysis of the Yokohama and Tokyo cases. The article also discusses the role of Nippon Kaigi (The Japan Conference), an influential rightist lobbying group, in this process. In this conjunction, at the societal level, there seems to have been the growing sense of frustration and resignation with China / South Korea among the Japanese public (i.e., apology fatigue). All these suggest that there has been an underlying change in the landscape of history textbook controversy in Japan, which also cogently shows the on-going practical difficulty in building trustworthy relationships between Japan and China / South Korea. This study tries to offer a contextual understanding about the underlying conditions for (and, hence, the changing societal expectations about) textbook production, content and reception.
Young People and Everyday Peace is grounded in the stories of young people who live in Los Altos de Cazucá, an informal peri-urban community in Soacha, to the south of Colombia’s capital Bogotá. The occupants of this community have fled the armed conflict and exist in a state of marginalisation and social exclusion amongst ongoing violences conducted by armed gangs and government forces. Young people negotiate these complexities and offer pointed critiques of national politics as well as grounded aspirations for the future. Colombia’s protracted conflict and its effects on the population raise many questions about how we think about peacebuilding in and with communities of conflict-affected people. Building on contemporary debates in International Relations about post-liberal, everyday peace, Helen Berents draws on feminist International Relations and embodiment theory to pay meaningful attention to those on the margins. She conceptualises a notion of embodied-everyday-peace-amidst-violence to recognise the presence and voice of young people as stakeholders in everyday efforts to respond to violence and insecurity. In doing so, Berents argues for and engages a more complex understanding of the everyday, stemming from the embodied experiences of those centrally present in conflicts. Taking young people’s lives and narratives seriously recognises the difficulties of protracted conflict, but finds potential to build a notion of an embodied everyday amidst violence, where a complex and fraught peace can be found. Young People and Everyday Peace will be of interest to scholars of Latin American Studies, International Relations and Peace and Conflict Studies.
Media organizations all over the world spent a large amount of 2014 covering the influence and activities of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). This study compares ISIS-related coverage among American, British and Middle Eastern media organizations, identifying the media frames used by these organizations. The findings reveal differences both in the amount of coverage and in the ways that each organization chose to frame its coverage.
Many scholars and practitioners claim that labeling groups or individuals as “terrorists” does not simply describe them but also shapes public attitudes, due to the label's important normative and political charge. Yet is there such a “terrorist label effect”? In view of surprisingly scant evidence, the present article evaluates whether or not the terrorist label—as well as the “Islamist” one—really impacts both the audience's perception of the security environment and its security policy preferences, and if yes, how and why. To do so, the article implements a randomized-controlled vignette experiment where participants (N = 481) first read one out of three press articles, each depicting a street shooting in the exact same way but labeling the author of the violence with a different category (“terrorist”/“shooter”/“Islamist”). Participants were then asked to report on both their perceptions and their policy preferences. This design reveals very strong effects of both the “terrorist” and “Islamist” categories on each dimension. These effects are analyzed through the lenses of social and cognitive psychology, in a way that interrogates the use of the terrorist category in society, the conflation of Islamism with terrorism, and the press and policymakers' lexical choices when reporting on political violence.
This article explores findings from focus group research in which UK publics were asked, If you were in government, what would you do about terrorism? After situating our research within contemporary ‘bottom-up’ work on counter-terrorism, we discuss the diversity of answers we received to this question, which included improving education, addressing social fracture, and the need for more punitive counter-terrorism powers. These exercises in public political imagination are important, we argue, for several reasons. These include the questions they pose for widespread claims about public disconnection from (security) politics as well as their likely impact on the everyday lives of our research participants.
This article presents and analyzes the “Obama support terrorism” campaign, which was launched in Egypt in late June 2013 and was instrumental to the framing of some Islamist groups as terrorist both before and after the 3 July 2013 coup. The analysis of the visual material of the campaign highlights its reliance on various Western discourses from the War on Terror, including some whose religious and racial content is an odd fit for a non-Western, Muslim country like Egypt. Yet, despite the lack of a clear and unified causal narrative to justify such framing, the success of the campaign was crucially aided by the symbolic and rhetorical power its slogan, which provided a credible “schema of interpretation” for its supporters.
This article posits empirical and political reasons for recent ‘micro-moves’ in several contemporary debates, and seeks to further develop them in future International Relations studies. As evidenced by growing trends in studies of practices, emotions and the everyday, there is continuing broad dissatisfaction with grand or structural theory’s value without ‘going down’ to ‘lower levels’ of analysis where structures are enacted and contested. We suggest that empirics of the last 15 years — including the war on terror and the Arab Spring — have pushed scholars into increasingly micropolitical positions and analytical frameworks. Drawing upon insights from Gilles Deleuze, William Connolly and Henri Lefebvre, among others, we argue that attention to three issues — affect, space and time — hold promise to further develop micropolitical perspectives on and in International Relations, particularly on issues of power, identity and change. The article offers empirical illustrations of the analytical purchase of these concepts via discussion of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring uprisings.
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Citizens increasingly occupy a central role in the policy rhetoric of British National Security Strategies, and yet the technocratic methods by which risks and threats are assessed and prioritized do not consider the views and experiences of diverse publics. Equally, security studies in both ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ guises has privileged analysis of elites over the political subject of threat and (in)security. Contributing to the recent ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday’ turns, this article draws on extensive critical focus-group research carried out in 2012 across six British cities in order to investigate (1) which issues citizens find threatening and how they know, construct and narrate ‘security threats’, and (2) the extent to which citizens are aware of, engage with and/or refuse government efforts to foster vigilance and suspicion in public spaces. Instead of making generalizations about what particular ‘types’ of citizens think, however, we develop a ‘disruptive’ approach inspired by the work of Jacques Rancière. While many of the views, anecdotes and stories reproduce the police order, in Rancière’s terms, it is also possible to identify political discourses that disrupt dominant understandings of threat and (in)security, repoliticize the grounds on which national security agendas are authorized, and reveal actually existing alternatives to cultures of suspicion and unease.
This article analyzes how the fundamental challenge of decolonization has resonated in history textbooks published in France since the 1960s. It therefore contextualizes textbook knowledge within different areas of society and focuses on predominant discourses that influenced history
textbooks' (post)colonial representations in the period examined. These discourses encompass the crisis of Western civilization, modernization, republican integration, and the postcolonial politics of memory. The author argues that history textbooks have thus become media, as well as objects
of an emerging postcolonial politics of memory that involves intense conflicts over immigration and national identity and challenges France's (post)colonial legacy in general.
This article considers popular ways of representing terror activists, and the metamorphoses that approaches to representation in the American media have undergone. A part of the article deals with terrorism in the media over time, common stereotypes, and how they affect the representation of Arabs and Muslims. The article then discusses Sleeper Cell (2005), a mini-series which focuses on a Jihad terror group. The article addresses questions including: How are Arabs and non-Arab Muslims portrayed in the series? Can a real change be observed over time in the method of portraying them? Twentieth-century historical considerations precede the pointed topical discussion.
This article contrasts the parallel ‘wars on terror’ that liberal and authoritarian states have prosecuted since 9/11 to determine their broader significance for the pursuit of ‘purposes beyond ourselves’ in an increasingly multi-polar world. While acknowledging that states rallied to defend their monopoly on legitimate violence after 9/11, I maintain that the ensuing ‘wars on terror’ have simultaneously exacerbated longstanding disagreements between liberal and authoritarian states over the fundamental principles of international society. Under American leadership, liberal states have sought to eradicate jihadism through the transplantation of liberal values and institutions to Muslim-majority societies, countenancing sweeping qualifications of weak states’ sovereignty to advance this goal. Conversely, authoritarian states led by Russia and China have mounted a vigorous counter-offensive against both jihadism and liberal internationalist revisionism, harnessing counter-terrorism concerns to reassert illiberal internationalist conceptions of state sovereignty in response. Reflecting international division more than solidarity, the ‘wars on terror’ have illuminated a deeper triangular struggle between revisionist liberal internationalism, jihadist anti-internationalism and illiberal authoritarian internationalism that will significantly complicate Western efforts to promote liberal values in coming decades.
For nearly forty years, debates on a definition of international terrorism as part of a comprehensive convention have been preoccupying the United Nations. This article challenges conventional approaches referring to divergences in national interests and preferences, or to institutional constraints and national legal traditions, to explain why no definition has been agreed upon. It analyzes the inconclusive debates from a critical perspective and argues that the continuous search for a definition can be understood through the prism of collective identity struggles: the desire to define terrorism is not only the desire to give a precise content to terrorism and, thereby, create the identity of an Other. It is also the desire to create a collective identity, a “Self,” representing and uniting those who oppose terrorism. By applying a discursive understanding of collective identity construction to analyze the UN debates, the article elucidates how strongly the definition of terrorism hinders a common understanding among those who are opposing terrorism. Thereby, the analysis highlights that the demonization of terrorism foremost impedes a homogeneous understanding of a collective Self, ready to confront and define terrorism in the first place.
The new Orientalism idea is predicated on the clash of civilisations thesis of Samuel Huntington and others—an outlook which has spread swiftly in Western states since September 11. I explore the implications of the new Orientalism and the assertion of white supremacy for diaspora Muslims in Western societies. Its expression in the media in the form of raced and gendered portrayals and demonised cultural representations of Muslims and Islam, with the accompanying assumption of the superiority of Western culture, is identified here as incendiary racism. This racism also underpins the simultaneous vilification of Muslims and Islam, a claim supported by my analysis of media coverage of the 'niqab debate', terrorism and sports. Thus, at one level, I analyse the Western media's depictions. At another, I examine the consequences of securitisation and the Long War, and critically assess the argument that securitisation has existed from time immemorial and represents nothing new—which leads me to challenge its ahistorical assumptions, and the treatment of the securitiser and the securitised as coeval.
The aim of this article is to identify some of the discursive properties of the Uruguayan media coverage of the events of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath. The specific focus is on the construction of inand out-group identity through representation of the events and its participants. In addition, the article explores how local political agendas are advanced by arguments that connect these events to local struggles/issues. The analysis is from a critical perspective that conceives language as a social practice construed by, and at the same time construing, the social. This conceptualization of the relationship between language and the social allows us to explore the political sphere through its realizations in language. The aim is to problematize the ‘naturalized’ or hegemonic aspects of the discursive practices identified.
This article examines the main characteristics and evolution of European Union counterterrorism discourse, primarily through a comparison with United States counterterrorism discourse since September 11. It argues that while both actors share a great deal in common in the language they employ about terrorism, there are a number of subtle but highly significant differences. The article also argues that there have been a number of important evolutions in the discourse of EU officials over the past five years. The article concludes that the nature and construction of official EU terrorism discourse has a number of important analytical, normative and practical implications, not least because it rests upon a series of highly contested assumptions and narratives about the nature and causes of the terrorist threat.
This introductory paper identifies some of the core background themes and theories through which the ‘politics of naming' and other forms of discourse conflict can be examined. The focus is on the nature, power, role and function of names, with a final section examining the ethics of naming and examining terrorism. The central unifying theme is the contested relationship between the actual nature of a movement and the name applied, particularly in terms of the attempt to identify the essence or true nature of a movement and how this relates to other dissenting or surrounding factors. Once assigned, the power of a name is such that the process by which the name was selected generally disappears and a series of normative associations, motives and characteristics are attached to the named subject. Indeed, the long historical relationship between the naming of opponents, empire and colonialism, as well as the manner in which the global media frame armed conflict, only provide further reason to doubt the truthfulness of the names assigned, and their ability to address the micro-realities involved in these conflicts and movements.
Has the emergence of international jihadist terrorism led to common threat perceptions and responses in Europe? The article argues that the homogenization thesis is based around a misguided functionalist notion of a single ‘optimal response’ to an alleged new and potentially catastrophic kind of threat with uniform consequences for all ‘Western’ countries. Drawing on insights from different bodies of literature, the article elaborates a theoretical framework to understand variations in threat perceptions vis-à-vis international terrorism and enrich the socio-linguistic securitization approach of Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde (Security: a new framework for analysis, London: Lynne Reinner, 1998). The article then empirically examines the rise and fall of threat perceptions among selected European publics between 2000 and 2008. Threat perceptions did converge in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, but soon afterward started diverging. The article considers the reasons for this finding as well as the implication for the evolution of counter-terrorist policies in the European Union.
This paper examines two case studies of how the United States-led ‘Global War on Terror’ has impinged on the Philippine government's peace negotiations with the country's two major rebel groups: the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the communist-led National Democratic Front (NDF). For four decades, these home-grown rebellions, not externally inspired terrorism, have been the main national or human security problem of the Philippines. The Global War on Terror has caused significant damage to the Philippine peace process aiming to end these conflicts. This contradicts the view that the Global War on Terror has boosted these processes by keeping these rebel groups honest through ‘terrorist organisation’ designations and listings, as well as the very definition of terrorism as applied to these groups. These designations should not be loosely applied on the basis of isolated terrorist acts; such acts must be systematically employed by the concerned organisation to characterise it as a terrorist organisation.
The Copenhagen school's theory of securitisation has mainly focused on the middle level of world politics in which collective political units, often but not always states, construct relationships of amity or enmity with each other. Its argument has been that this middle level would be the most active both because of the facility with which collective political units can construct each other as threats, and the difficulty of finding audiences for the kinds of securitisations and referent objects that are available at the individual and system levels. This article focuses on the gap between the middle and system levels, and asks whether there is not more of substance there than the existing Copenhagen school analyses suggests. It revisits the under-discussed concept of security constellations in Copenhagen school theory, and adds to it the idea of macrosecuritisations as ways of getting an analytical grip on what happens above the middle level. It then suggests how applying these concepts adds not just a missing sense of scale, but also a useful insight into underlying political logics, to how one understands the patterns of securitisation historical, and contemporary.
This article interrogates the production of the ‘radicalisation’ discourse which underpins efforts to govern ‘terrorism’ pre-emptively through the UK's PREVENT strategy. British counter-terrorism currently relies upon the invention of ‘radicalisation’ and related knowledge about transitions to ‘terrorism’ to undertake governance of communities rendered suspicious. The article argues that such conceptions make terrorism knowable and governable through conceptions of risk. Radicalisation knowledge provides a counterfactual to terrorism—enabling governmental intervention in its supposed production. It makes the future actionable. However, while the deployment of ‘radicalisation’ functions to make terrorism pre-emptively governable and knowable, it also renders PREVENT unstable by simultaneously presenting ‘vulnerability indicators’ for radicalisation as threats to the wider collective—these conducts are framed as both ‘at risk’ and ‘risky’, both vulnerable and dangerous. This instability speaks to ad hoc production of the radicalisation discourse by scholarly and policy-making communities for the governance of terrorism through radicalisation knowledge. This article analyses the production of the radicalisation discourse to explore its performance as a form of risk governance within British counter-terrorism.
This article considers the post–September 11 challenges faced by the U.S. national security machinery and analyzes the relationship between the new threat environment, the United States’s role in the world, and decision–making structure. Homeland security is defined as a subset of national security. The threat of foreign terrorist organizations acting on U.S. soil should be seen in the political context of the pursuit of U.S. national interests in an often anarchic world. Two models for homeland security organizational structures are considered: a departmental model and an interagency model. The interagency model, embodied in the Homeland Security Council, is a better fit given the nature of the threat, the crucial need for coordination, and the realities of governmental decision making. The organizational challenges that may complicate the government’s preparations, decisions, and implementation of a major homeland defense mission stem from three rivalries: executive–legislative, cabinet–staff, and Homeland Security Council–National Security Council.
The paper explores shifts in the nature, volume, trajectory and content of aid to education in the wake of post-9/11 Western preoccupations with the rise of Islamic radicalism. The paper develops a framework for understanding the dynamics of how educational aid appears to be becoming increasingly politicized in strategic conflict and post-conflict countries. The approach links up with broader debates within the field of development studies on the ‘militarization of development’ while attempting to shed light on the specificity of how ‘educational aid’ becomes caught up in these processes. The paper argues that particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan educational aid is becoming submerged under the counterinsurgency strategy of the Western occupying forces with detrimental effects not only for long-term development progress but also for the personal security of development workers.
That 'terrorism research' is mired by epistemological, methodological and political-normative problems is well established. What is usually overlooked is that, beyond the difficulties inherent in 'terrorism research', these problems are exacerbated by two further factors: the predominance of what Cox called a 'problem-solving' approach, and the dispersed nature of much of the more rigorous, 'critical' and conceptually innovative research on 'terrorism' in cognate fields that, for ideological, theoretical or practical reasons, are reluctant to engage with 'terrorism studies'. A 'critical turn' is needed to reverse both these trends, but it must be inclusive and seek to be policy relevant.
Is the use of torture ever justified? This article argues that torture cannot be justified, even in so called ticking bomb cases, but that in such extreme situations it may be necessary. In those situations, judgements about whether the use of torture is legitimate must balance the imminence and gravity of the threat with the need to prevent future occurrences of torture and maintain a normative environment that is hostile to its use. The article begins by observing that the use of torture and/or cruel and degrading treatment has become a core component of the global war on terror. It tests the claim that the use of coercive interrogation techniques does not constitute torture, showing that similar arguments were levelled by both the British and French governments in relation to Northern Ireland and Algeria respectively and found wanting. It then evaluates and rejects Dershowitz's claim for the legalization of torture and the more limited claim that torture may be permissible in ticking bomb scenarios. In the final section, the article questions how we might maintain the prohibition on torture while acknowledging that it may be necessary in some hypothetical cases.
Terrorism in the Textbook: A Comparative Analysis of Terrorism Discourses in Germany, India, Kenya and the United States Based on School Textbooks
- Jack Holland
- Ty Solomon
Jack Holland and Ty Solomon, 'Affect is What States Make of It: Articulating Everyday
Experiences of 9/11', Critical Studies on Security, 2(3), 2014, pp. 262-77; Tobias Ide,
'Terrorism in the Textbook: A Comparative Analysis of Terrorism Discourses in Germany,
India, Kenya and the United States Based on School Textbooks', Cambridge Review of
International Affairs, 30(1), 2017, pp. 44-66.
The Evolution of the European Union's "Fight Against" Terrorism Discourse: Constructing the Terrorist "Other
- Tariq Amin-Khan
Tariq Amin-Khan, 'New Orientalism, Securitisation and the Western Media's Incendiary
Racism', Third World Quarterly, 33(9), 2012, pp. 1595-610; Christopher Baker-Beall, 'The
Evolution of the European Union's "Fight Against" Terrorism Discourse: Constructing the
Terrorist "Other"', Cooperation and Conflict, 49(2), 2014, pp. 212-38.
Analysing the BBC's Representations of "Al-Qaeda" in the Aftermath of the
- Jared Ahmad
- a Shifting Enemy
Jared Ahmad, 'A Shifting Enemy: Analysing the BBC's Representations of "Al-Qaeda" in
the Aftermath of the September 11th 2001 Attacks', Critical Studies on Terrorism, 9(3),
2016, pp. 433-54; Holland, Selling the War on Terror.
The Evolution of the European Union's "Fight Against
- Baker-Beall
Baker-Beall, 'The Evolution of the European Union's "Fight Against" Terrorism Discourse'.
Legislating for Otherness'; Newmann, 'Reorganizing for national Security and Homeland Security
- Legrand Jarvis
Jarvis and Legrand, 'Legislating for Otherness'; Newmann, 'Reorganizing for national
Security and Homeland Security'.
Editor's Introduction: Views From the "Others" of the War on Terror
For example: Ayla Göl, 'Editor's Introduction: Views From the "Others" of the War on
Terror', Critical Studies on Terrorism, 3(1), 2010, pp. 1-5;
International Terrorism, Domestic Coverage?
- Schäfer Gerhards
Gerhards and Schäfer, 'International Terrorism, Domestic Coverage?'.
Editor's Introduction
- Göl
Göl, 'Editor's Introduction'.