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.     

Negotiating U.S. policy to counter terrorism

Conclusion Terrorists have been active throughout history. Their threat, just like the threat of national warfare, ebbs and flows with events and personalities. To counter this threat, U.S. policy should be mature, honest, flexible, farsighted, publicly known, and consistent with our highest values. At this time, the Bush Administration has a good opportunity to reassess U.S. policy and develop a balanced response to the threat of terrorism.Effective counter-terrorism policy can only evolve from an effective process for evaluating and developing that policy. And the key to successful process is sound negotiation theory. This focus on process, bringing with it a broad view of the problem and a preference for joint activity, creates a workable approach to dealing with the serious threat of terrorism in our world. John S. Murray is President and Executive Director of the Conflict Clinic, Inc., a private not-for-profit organization affiliated with the Center for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030. Mr. Murray's sister is Jean Sutherland, whose husband Tom was kidnapped in Beirut by Islamic Jihad on June 9, 1985.     

The Importance of Europe in the Global Campaign Against Terrorism

ABSTRACT

Terrorism and how to respond to it looms large in the current transatlantic debate, with the Europeans often being accused of failing to recognise terrorism as the major strategic issue of the early twenty-first century and thus putting their own security as well as that of others at risk. This is both true and false. It is true in the sense that fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, the Europeans still lack a global strategic vision, never mind how the threat from terrorism might impact upon it. But it is false in the sense that it understates what the Europeans can and are doing to reduce and manage terrorism on a global scale. The article is structured into four sections. The first examines terrorist activity in Europe post-9/11. The second deals with how the Europeans responded to 9/11 collectively within the EU. The third section focuses on what are termed the “outreach” activities of the Europeans via the United National Security Council, G-8, OSCE, NATO, and the European Union. And finally the article concludes that it is this outreach by the Europeans that holds the most promise for effectively countering international terrorism, that the Americans are dependent on this activity, and that the Europeans have to modify their strategic vision in order to deliver more effectively.     

WMD terrorism and US intelligence collection

Many analysts argue that better intelligence collection is necessary to improve the United States’ ability to prevent, deter and defeat WMD terrorism, but few give any concrete analysis of exactly what various types of intelligence can contribute to better understanding the WMD terrorist threat. This study outlines the emerging WMD terrorist threat and discusses the respective contributions that technical, human and open source intelligence can make in assessing the various stages of a WMD terrorist act. According to this analysis, neither imagery nor traditional human collection is capable of providing the critical information needed by policy makers. Rather, information collected by case officers working under unofficial cover and by clandestine means offer the best chance of identifying groups interested in producing and using WMD.     

Disregard for Security: The Human Rights Movement and 9/11

ABSTRACT

International human rights NGOs have warned that human rights have been threatened since September 11. However, the matter is complicated since what is involved is in reality a relationship between two concepts: human rights and security against terrorism. This article demonstrates that there is a tendency for international human rights NGOs to brush aside questions on security against terrorism. NGOs have stipulated that human rights values should be superior, or they have maintained, but failed to show, that there is no goal conflict between security and human rights—even that human rights fulfil a considerable instrumental function with respect to freedom from terrorism.     

Striking Home: Ideal-Type of Terrorism

ABSTRACT

This essay presents some preliminary notes in an anthropological perspective on terrorism. The following aims to be a questioning review of issues that haunt informed students of terrorism, and yet also an introductory text to the study of terrorism. It is revisionist but didactic. The essay is based on extended research of Palestinian and Israeli terrorism cases, and on critical integration of the literature on terrorism. It offers an alternative approach to the problem of the definition and distinct character of terrorism, expands on overlooked aspects of terrorism, like its relationship to the concept of “home,” emphasizes under-theorized subjects, like the randomness of the targets, and discusses hitherto untouched topics, like the “bad death” of terrorism’s victims. Terrorism is examined in terms of liminality and hybridity, and consequently as more subversive than coercive, threatening our ontological security no less than our physical security.     

Make Hegel great again: on Hegel’s epistemological contribution to critical terrorism studies

ABSTRACT

Despite the contribution of Foucaultian inspired approaches to Critical Terrorism Studies, this article invites us to consider Hegel’s epistemological insights. Foucault’s power-knowledge nexus is an invaluable intellectual tool which reveals how terrorism can be a “social fact”, yet it rests on a genealogical account of history and a passive notion of subjectivity determined by power (regimes). Hegelian philosophy maintains some of the benefits met in Foucault’s approach (sociality and contingency of knowledge) while providing a richer epistemological account. This article introduces Hegel’s epistemological insights to: i) challenge the portrayal of terrorism as a major external threat against the western liberal democratic states in the vein of “New Terrorism” or the “Clash of Civilizations”; and ii) domestically explore how the concept of liberal democratic rights, equality, freedom affect the interpretation of counter-terrorist bills, the threat perception of terrorism and domestic polarisation. Hegel’s insights critically interrogate the notions of “liberal rights”, “equality” and “freedom”, revealing how their ambiguous definition accommodates inherent contradictions which can fuel a controversial interpretation of counter-terrorist bills, leading to domestic polarisation and (reciprocal) radicalisation. Therefore, Hegel’s epistemological insights reveal how the defective definition of human rights, equality and liberty can amplify the effects of Terrorism and radicalisation.     

Restorative justice in the aftermath of politically-motivated violence: the Basque experience

ABSTRACT

An emerging body of literature discusses how restorative justice can contribute to the response to terrorism. This paper expresses concerns about the uncritical acceptance of many orthodox assumptions about terrorism inherent in the search for a “restorative response” to terrorism. When restorative justice embraces the label “terrorism” in what appears to be a politically neutral sense, rather than opening up a critical discussion of realities of political violence and the factors that had propelled it, it may form part of the efforts designed to inculcate “truths” that help control political dissent. With its key aspiration being to restore a presumed healthy order disrupted by terrorist offences, restorative justice may be enlisted to help entrench social relations that led to the violence in the first place. The paper illustrates this danger by examining attempts to use restorative justice techniques by Spanish authorities in the aftermath of ETA or Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (“Basque Homeland and Freedom”) violence. It is argued that rather than searching for a “restorative response” to terrorism, a more adequate framework for restorative justice in the aftermath of politically motivated violence may be found within broader projects of reparation for historical injustices, remembering and political reconciliation.     

Religion,state, and terrorism: A global analysis

ABSTRACT

This article investigates two ways in which state involvement in religion—minority and majority restriction—generates terrorism. Using a time-series, cross-national negative binomial analysis of 174 countries from 1991–2009, this study finds that when religiously devout people find themselves marginalized through either form of religious restriction, they are more likely to pursue their aims through violence. The article concludes with recommendations for policymakers.     

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.     

The Rational Foraging Terrorist: Analysing the Distances Travelled to Commit Terrorist Violence

Abstract

This paper applies the distance-to-crime approach to the case of Improvised Explosive Device (IED) and shooting attacks conducted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) during the Northern Ireland conflict, 1970–1998. The aim is to (a) measure the typical ‘distance to crime’ (b) detect whether a distance-decay effect is noticeable and (c) investigate whether there is a discernible difference in the distance traveled depending upon individual offender characteristics or aspects of how the offence was committed. In particular, it highlights that many of the same dynamics that influence offender decision making within the volume crime world, also apply within the terrorism realm. Five findings stand out in particular. First, a distance decay effect is identifiable. Second, younger offenders travel significantly smaller distances. Third, complex attacks typically involve greater distances. Fourth, our results show the ability of leading decision-makers within PIRA to impact upon the day-to-day operations of the field operatives. Together the results reinforce the argument that when we focus on terrorism from a preventative angle, we should focus on their behaviors: what they do rather than remain preoccupied with concerns about who they are and/or what they might be like. Collectively the results also highlight the fact that for a finer-grained understanding of terrorist behavior we need to disaggregate on a number of levels: within the cadre of operatives, across terrorist attacks, across targets and within conflicts.     

Responsibility to Protect in the Age of Global Terror: A Methodological Reassessment

Abstract

Ten years after its formal adoption, the R2P doctrine remains an incomplete project in a world of continuing conflicts now aggravated by the existential threat of global terrorism. The debate on the permissibility of military action to stop mass atrocities when authorisation to use force is not forthcoming from the Security Council has produced only a plurality of conflicting theories but hardly any progress at the normative level. A two-pronged approach could be used to consolidate R2P as a doctrine fully integrated into the corpus of international law. The first prong requires the revamping of the largely neglected Article 48 of the ILC Draft on State Responsibility; the second involves using R2P as a platform to initiate a reform of customary international law to make it more consistent with elementary principles of justice and universal human rights.     

Making sense of terrorism: a narrative approach to the study of violent events

ABSTRACT

How does violence become understood as terrorism? In this article, we show how a narrative approach to the study of violent events offers a conceptually productive way to understand the process of “seeing” an event as a terrorist act, one that explicitly integrates the phenomenology of violence. While the collective practice of defining terrorism in academia and the policy arena has struggled to produce a universal definition, we identify a set of “common sense” characteristics. We argue that if the framing of violent events prominently features these characteristics as discursive anchors, this primes processes of sensemaking toward interpreting violence as terrorism. While terrorism markers are often articulated as being pragmatic and apolitical indicators of terrorist acts, we show that they are indeed at the core of political contests over historical and physical facts about violent events. The narrative approach we develop in this article underscores that intuitive leanings toward interpreting violence as terrorism are a sign of political agency precisely because they are produced through the stories political agents tell.     

An epistemic break from “expertise”: Misunderstanding Terrorism by Marc Sageman

ABSTRACT

Professor Marc Sageman’s latest contribution to terrorism “studies” builds on an ever-increasing critique of a field in which “expertise” is something that is largely taken for granted, rather than empirically “known”. His book Misunderstanding Terrorism seeks to refocus our attention towards what is knowable through a Bayesian analysis based on his unique access to acts of terrorism within the Western world. Key, however, is his framing of what terrorism “is”, and to that effect, this review article first assesses the work of two individuals writing on terrorism, Rafaello Pantucci and Shiraz Maher, to place Sageman’s significant book within a wider context of terrorism literature.     

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.     

The Security Council and Counterterrorism: Global and Regional Approaches to an Elusive Public Good

ABSTRACT

This paper explores contemporary counterterrorism efforts as an instrument for attaining peace as a ‘global public good’. It notes the lack of an agreed definition of terrorism, the distinction between freedom-fighting and terrorism, and the issue of ‘excessive use of force’ by the state. It assessed the extent to which US counter-terrorism policy has influenced policy in the UN Security Council, and the shortcomings in Council policy that require redress. The paper concludes that counterterrorism will be successful only when a ‘global law enforcement’ approach prevails over the national security-driven ‘war-on-terror’ and when genuine efforts are undertaken to address the root causes of terrorism, including the forward basing of US forces in the Arab world.     

Humanitarian Intervention and Communal Civil Wars:

How do policymakers in democratic nations mobilize support for hard-line strategies? Existing answers to this question emphasize the exaggeration of external threats. Yet this overlooks an important dilemma: because democratic citizens expect their leaders to explore peaceful solutions or less aggressive alternatives when foreign dangers are ambiguous, the same conditions that make threat inflation necessary also make it difficult to employ successfully. To mobilize support for hard-line measures when the public wants its leaders to demonstrate restraint, policymakers may therefore attempt to shift blame onto an adversary by using “counterfeit diplomacy.” Specifically, democratic leaders may adopt more cooperative or less coercive options than they believe are necessary, but which they anticipate will fail. This approach can be a risky one, however, because an opponent might accept a nation's demands, accede to its conditions, or offer counterproposals in the hope of diffusing support for more confrontational measures.