Right‐wing terrorism in a comparative perspective: The case of split delegitimization

The purpose of this article is to identify the distinctive features of right‐wing terrorism and to develop an analytical typology of particularistic terrorist organizations. The article is based on the conceptual framework of the process of delegitimization developed earlier by this author. It argues that right‐wing radicals usually reach terrorism through a trajectory of split delegitimization, which implies a primary conflict with an ‘inferior’ community and a secondary conflict with the government. Six sub‐types of right‐wing terrorism are identified: revolutionary terrorism, reactive terrorism, vigilante terrorism, racist terrorism, millenarian terrorism and youth counterculture terrorism.     

“International terrorism” in the League of Nations and the contemporary terrorism dispositif

This article recovers states’ discursive practices regarding “international terrorism” in the 1930s. It examines the internal conditions of the discourse of terrorism among states in this period with a particular focus on its conspiratorial elements and suggests external conditions for this discourse’s emergence and order. Furthermore, it points to continuities and discontinuities between the 1930s discursive series and the constituent discursive forms of the contemporary global terrorism dispositif – an assemblage of power practices which bear on individual human bodies, populations or (rogue or fragile) states and which are all strategically oriented through the concept of terrorism. The purpose of such a genealogical history is to expand the space of dissent to power practices in the dominant structures of (terrorism) knowledge by problematising their object and the ways in which these formations are productive of human subjectivity.     

Terrorism and the media: Problems,solutions, and counterproblems

This article is divided into two main parts. The first part frames the problem of “terrorism and the media” in terms of a complex interaction involving three kinds of relationships. The first is the relationship between terrorists and governments; the second is the relationship between terrorists and the media; and the third is the relationship between government and the media. The second part examines the specific roles of the media in covering terrorism and the impact of such coverage. Four kinds of solutions to the problems deriving from this impact are examined in turn: the use of media guidelines, the use of legislation and legal sanctions, media‐government cooperation, and training and education. Finally, the practicality of these solutions is examined by highlighting the kinds of problems or “counterproblems” that are inherent in each solution.     

Homegrown Terrorism in the West

The London bombings in 2005 led to the perception that the terrorist threat had changed from external to internal. This became conceptualized shortly after as “homegrown terrorism.” This article deals with the meaning and scope of this phenomenon. We begin by tracing an ambiguity in the term “homegrown,” which is both about belonging in the West and autonomy from terrorist groups abroad. A quantitative study of Islamist terrorism in the West since 1989 reveals an increase in both internal and autonomous terrorism since 2003 and that most plots are now internal—but not autonomous. Finally we suggest that an increase in autonomous terrorism is a transitory phenomenon.     

Terrorism as treated by the Christian science monitor, 1977–1987

Standing uniquely apart from journalistic sensationalism in its reportage of terrorism, the Christian Science Monitor (CSM/“The Monitor”) has taken a stance of trying to keep perspective on what individual events mean in terms of a wider framework.

It is perhaps critical to state at the outset that this researcher is not of the Christian Science faith, but has been a faithful reader of the Monitor for 15 years. When approached several years ago by The Terrorism and the News Media Research Project to contribute to that scholarship, an immediate response was that her primary newspaper would be inadequate to the task. A preliminary check into the Christian Science Monitor Index confirmed that fact: there were no entries under the heading of “terrorism” for 1975, 1976, 1977, and for 1978 it directed the researcher to see “violence”.

But then some dramatic changes took place in the mid‐1980s. The newspaper was undergoing major transitions internally, and terrorism was becoming an increasingly hot topic internationally.

This paper discusses terrorism as treated by the Christian Science Monitor, 1977–1987 both quantitatively and qualitatively. The approach is to delineate some of the underpinning philosophy of the newspaper, to discuss its chronological treatment of terrorism, and then to draw some implications from the study.     

Terrorism and the blind men's elephant

Terrorism is best understood as a form of warfare. Considerable division exists among researchers on the issue of defining terrorism. A minority propose that terrorism is a form of warfare, possibly identical to guerrilla warfare. However, the majority disagree with this position, instead viewing terrorism as a distinct and separate phenomenon. This divergence has been fuelled by the distinctive questions of morality which cloak any consideration of terrorism. The impact of this special morality dimension to the problem is examined, with the focus being directed to biases arising from the moral standpoint which has been adopted by most. It is argued that many of the so‐called distinctions between terrorism and warfare are illusionary. The article concludes that while there are solutions to the current conceptual deadlock these are unlikely to be realised in the near future.     

“Dynamite bombs of New York manufacture”: the terrorist perspective in the Stevensons,Greer and James

This article examines the first three literary reactions to Fenian terrorism: Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson’s co-written novel, The Dynamiter (1885); Tom Greer’s A Modern Daedalus (1885) and Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima (1886). Although these works approach terrorism from different angles, they set the pattern for subsequent treatments that will “give primary voice to the perspective of the terrorist”. “Zero”, the hapless bomb-makers in The Dynamiter, is a surprisingly urbane, sympathetic figure; Greer illustrates both the necessity and the moral quandaries of terrorism and James shows considerable sympathy for anarchism’s causes, even though terrorism threatens high art and culture. I also hope to show that fiction can provide excellent source material for studying the cultural imaginary of terrorism and, by extension, make a bid for the inclusion of literature scholars under the umbrella of Critical Terrorism Studies.     

Women defining terrorism: ethnonationalist,state, and machista terrorism

This article explores definitions of terrorism according to various women in the Basque regions of Spain and France. We ask how women in social movements and government institutions define terrorism, how terrorism influences them, and whether they are viewed as victims of violence and/or as political agents who challenge terrorism. We discuss three definitions of terrorism: ethnonationalist terrorism of ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), state terrorism against ETA operatives and supporters, and terrorismo machista (or intimate terrorism seen as gender violence). The article uncovers multiple women’s lived experiences related to terrorism, and by problematising agency and definitions of terrorism, it challenges the binary in international relations of women as either victims or violent perpetrators of terrorism and it establishes terrorismo machista as political violence closely related to other forms of political violence. We conclude that women are important political agents regarding multiple types of terrorism.     

US anti‐terrorism policies: Lessons to be learned to meet an enduring and changing threat

The evolution of United States anti‐terrorism policies has been marked by inconsistency and the lack of a unity of action. The declaratory no ransom policy enunciated by President Nixon has been constantly violated. In addition, the absence of a consensus on the nature of terrorism has been exacerbated by bureaucratic turf battles. This debate has created negative administrative and operational impacts on the organizations that are responsible for meeting the terrorist threat. Bureaucratically, despite the attempt to coordinate action through the lead agency concept, Washington's anti‐terrorism mechanism remain unnecessarily complex. Furthermore, different operational approaches to combating terrorism have impeded the development of an integrated counter‐terrorism capability. The need for streamlining has become critical in the rapidly transforming international arena. The use of terrorism by governments who seek regional hegemony and the development of the ‘Gray Area Phenomenon’ where non‐state actors employ terrorism as a means of realizing their objectives will challenge Washington's resolve. The political leadership faces the task of reconciling the present budgetary constraints with the requirements to identify and effectively respond to future threats.     

The dual myths of ‘narco‐terrorism’: How myths drive policy

When held up to the reality and complexity of the relationships between drug traffickers and insurgents, the concept of ‘narco‐terrorism’ falls short of serving as a useful explanatory device. Properly analyzed, ‘narco‐terrorism’ emerges as a political myth based on a stereotypic view of the Andean drug trade, peasant insurgency and the relationships between them. The myth of ‘narco‐terrorism’ coincided with the Latin American policy interests of the Reagan and the Bush administrations. Ironically, the myth's transparency served the policy interests of the opponents of these administrations, who used it to further their own politicized agendas ‐ creating yet another myth. This research traces the evolution and politicization of this concept and shows how it has hindered both scholarship and policy making. The research confirms, in part, earlier work of Australian criminologist Grant Wardlaw and American expert on the Andean drug trade, Rensselaer Lee.     

Terrorism and democracy: What recent events disclose

This paper is the second in a series of analyses which explore relationships between terrorism and democracy. In this instance, the authors use the Rand‐St Andrews Chronology of International Terrorism for 1994, as well as the US State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism collection of events for 1995. The authors use these data sets to determine if there is a linkage between the occurrence of terrorist attacks and the type of incumbent political regime in the countries where they are perpetrated. The two classifications of political regimes were drawn from Robert Wesson's 1987 study Democracy: a Worldwide Survey and the Freedom House Publication Freedom in the World for 1984–85 and 1994–95, in order to evaluate the impact of regime change on the incidence of terrorist events. Our principal finding, consistent with earlier work, is that terrorist events are substantially more likely to occur in free and democratic settings than in any of the alternatives. We do discover, though, that change in and of itself makes a difference. Countries which underwent regime change in the period under consideration were more likely to experience terrorism than countries which did not.     

Terrorism,Human Rights and Law Enforcement in Spain

ABSTRACT

Terrorism systematically violates human rights and disrupts basic political processes common to liberal democracies. Combating terrorism is thus necessary in order to protect these fundamental rights and maintain the well functioning of tolerant polities. However, state initiatives put in place to cope with terrorism may also damage human rights, even when these measures are formulated by elected accountable authorities and implemented in the context of open societies. Spain has precisely been among those European countries most affected by the wave of terrorism initiated more than three decades ago across western industrial societies, and thus where violations of fundamental rights as well as obstacles to the exercise of civil liberties as a consequence of such violence became particularly severe. Also, a case where effective rule of law was temporarily damaged in the fight against the ethnonationalist terrorism perpetrated by ETA (an acronym for Euskadi ta Askatasuna, meaning Basque Homeland and Freedom) but successfully restored by efforts from both state institutions, as a result of an effective division of power, and civil society. It is therefore an experience providing substantive knowledge and valuable insights on how to counter terrorism in accordance with the principles and procedures of democracy. Accordingly, this paper aims at a better understanding on the interrelated issues of terrorism, human rights and law enforcement in a context of political change.     

Epistemological failures: everyday terrorism in the West

This article attempts to problematise the disparate levels of attention paid to similar violences globally, whereby violence against women in the developing world is seen as a security concern to the West, and yet violence against women in the West is minimised or ignored. It will do this, first, by demonstrating that everyday violences, better known as everyday terrorism, in the West are subjugated knowledges within Terrorism Studies. To demonstrate this, Half the Sky, Sex and World Peace and The Better Angels of Our Nature serve as exemplar texts that reflect Western exceptionalism and non-Western savagery, particularly within Muslim societies, and deflect from everyday terrorism within the West. This reifies the West as an exceptional saviour and the non-West as a problematic savage. This article looks to flip that reification on its head by recognising that everyday terrorism happens everywhere and is not bound to non-Western identities.     

A Critical Perspective on Terrorism: Case Study of Jundallah and Jeish ul-Adl in Iran

ABSTRACT

An extensive body of traditional terrorism research exists where the focus is on Iran as a terrorist state and a terrorism sponsor. This article explores an alternative terrorism narrative by examining the non-state actors, Jundallah and Jeish ul-Adl. The deficiency of information in the literature is addressed by applying the first and second-order critique approach of Richard Jackson’s knowledge, power and politics theoretical framework in contrast with the traditional terrorism studies approach. A first-order critique seeks to destabilise the accepted knowledge that Iran is both a terrorist state and a terrorism sponsor. This provides the grounds to study other aspects of “knowing” in relation to the second-order critique, where a critical ground outside the discourse suggests that Iranian officials have declared that the non-state terrorist actors of Jundallah and Jeish ul-Adl constitute a threat to Iran’s political stability. The outcome of the analyses here bridges the gap between the new aspect of terrorism, the non-state actors, and critical terrorism studies in order to contest the traditional discussion of terrorism in Iran. The rationale behind new terrorism varies and necessitates that new meanings and strategies be adopted in relation to Iran.     

A Review of: “Rogelio Alonso. The IRA and Armed Struggle.”

ABSTRACT

In the conceptual literature on terrorism, there is no shortage of answers to the question: “What is terrorism?” Indeed, the terrorism literature has been heavily criticized for a deluge of definitions. And yet the booming quantitative terrorism literature generally examines a narrow set of “what is terrorism?”: how country-level factors explain variation in the number of terrorist attacks. This article demonstrates the variety of ways in which scholars currently operationalize terrorism and compares them to the ways it could be operationalized. I replicate studies using alternative operationalizations of terrorism to examine the consequences of the terrorism literature’s collective bet to focus on attack counts at the country level. Finally, I discuss the implications of the narrow set of operational choices with an eye towards how a greater variety of approaches would produce a more robust research agenda.     

Change and continuity across the 9/11 fault line: rethinking twenty-first-century responses to terrorism

This article asks the following questions. Which terrorism threats, challenges and responses did key players consider to have been decisively changed by 9/11? On close inspection now, nearly two decades after those attacks, how are we to assess such claims? What did 9/11 really change regarding terrorism and counterterrorism? And what remained unaltered? The article’s central argument is this: some western states exaggerated the extent to which terrorist threats and challenges had been changed by 9/11 and, as a consequence, they did significantly alter some of their responses to terrorism; but at the heart of this ironic process was the tragic reality that, had there been a more serious-minded and historically sensitive recognition of how little had necessarily been changed by 9/11 in terms of terrorist threats and challenges, then the twenty-first-century experience of non-state terrorism would have been much less painful than has been the case in practice.     

A Trojan horse of a different colour: counterterrorism and Islamophobia in Alan Gibbons’ An Act of Love and Anna Perera’s Guantanamo Boy

Alan Gibbons’ An Act of Love and Anna Perera’s Guantanamo Boy offer a poignant treatment of a personal and political desire for vengeance in response to terrorism, and of the consequent erosion of particular communities. This article provides a critical reading of Gibbons’ and Perera’s novels through the lens of postcolonial and terrorism studies. It argues that they can be read as instances of the refashioning of individual and communal identities in response to increased surveillance and disciplinary measures overseen by the British state and shows that the undermining of simplistic dichotomies in these novels is the primary route by which principles of familial and communal responsibility are re-established. From this perspective, the novels are seen to open post-9/11 British social and political relations to postcolonial critique. The article draws attention to the contemporary children’s novel as a socially and politically engaged form that offers powerful fictional interventions into the post-9/11 landscape, where some groups have been affected more than others by the repercussions of acts of terrorism and violence.     

The phenomenon of conservative terrorism

In his studies of loyalist terrorism in Northern Ireland, Steve Bruce introduces the concept of ‘pro‐state’ terrorism, whereby terrorists carry out attacks in order to eliminate threats which they believe should have been eliminated by the state's security forces. This article argues that whilst the actions of loyalist terrorists may have a pro‐state element, they can more properly be seen in the wider context of conservative terrorism.     

Structural Influences on Involvement in European Homegrown Jihadism: A Case Study

This article empirically assesses the applicability of structural-level hypotheses for involvement in terrorism within the context of European homegrown jihadism. It uses these hypotheses to study how structural factors influenced involvement in the Dutch “Hofstadgroup.” Structural factors enabled the group’s emergence and its participants’ adoption of extremist views. They also motivated involvement in political violence and a shift in some participants’ focus from joining Islamist insurgents overseas to committing terrorism in the Netherlands. Finally, structural factors precipitated an actual terrorist attack. No support is found for the frequently encountered argument that discrimination and exclusion drive involvement in European homegrown jihadism. Instead, geopolitical grievances were prime drivers of this process.     

Terrorism and Public Opinion: The Effects of Terrorist Attacks on the Popularity of the President of the United States

This article uses a large-n dataset to investigate the effect of terrorist attacks with American victims on the popularity of the U.S. president. The study uses two broad theoretical frameworks to analyze this effect, the score-keeping framework and the rally-effect framework. The findings of the study show that, when excluding the effect from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, actual terrorist attacks have no generalizable short-term impact on the popularity of the U.S. president. This indicates that even though the topics of national security, terrorism, and the president’s ability to handle these issues are important in the political debate in the United States, actual terrorism has little or no short-term impact on presidential approval ratings.