Terror,War, and Democracy: An Interview with Stephen Eric Bronner

Stephen Eric Bronner is a Professor of Political Science and a member of the Graduate Faculties of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Rutgers University. The Senior Editor of Logos, an interdisciplinary internet journal, Bronner is also a member of the Editorial Board of New Political Science and a longtime contributor to this journal. In an interview conducted by Antonia Werbell, Bronner elaborates on themes in his most recent book Blood in the Sand: Imperial Fantasies, Right-Wing Ambitions, and the Erosion of American Democracy (University of Kentucky Press, 2005) and offers a critical analysis of US democracy in the context of the Bush administration's “war on terror.”     

Atomised Terror and Democratic Citizenship

This essay connects the 2103 Boston Bombings to the dynamics of a highly individualist, modern society. The perpetrators (Tsarnaev brothers) represent an atomized stratum of Americans, disconnected from communal institutions and organizations; socially insignificant men, ready to commit publicized, albeit isolated, acts of violence. With the exception of the World Trade Center, major terrorist attacks in the past two decades have been perpetrated by asocial, isolated individuals. An expansive security and welfare state is an inadequate response to atomized terror and is potentially problematic for our liberties. An approach more consistent with security and freedom is to nurture the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship.     

Strategic Terror and Amateur Psychology

Terror is defined as deliberate acts of violence designed to create a psychological effect—terror—with the intention of causing a shift in the target's attitudes and behaviour. A distinction is drawn between tactical terrorism, when such acts are undertaken as part of a multifaceted campaign, and strategic terrorism, where they are undertaken as an independent means of achieving the desired political ends. This follows a familiar distinction in airpower theory. A set of historical examples from both airpower and terrorism, as well as the fictional works of H. G. Wells and Joseph Conrad, is used to demonstrate the reliance on amateur psychology, concerning the likely social responses to forms of attack. This helps explain why strategic terror is rarely successful, though tactical terror can be.     

Terror and the loss of citizenship

Terror in the name of God and the specter of returning fighters for the so-called ‘Islamic State’ have recently moved some Western states, including Britain, Canada, and France, toward revoking the citizenship of terrorists. To critics, this constitutes a ‘return to banishment,’ a ‘fate universally decried by civilized people,’ as an American Supreme Court Chief Justice put it in the late 1950s. In a double reflection on the changing nature of terror and of citizenship, this paper argues that denationalization is, in principle, the adequate response to terror. This is because terror, particularly of the Islamist kind, is no ordinary crime but attack on the fundaments of citizenship. But what is right in principle may not be the right thing to do, because denationalization raises serious practicality problems.     

The Quality of Terror

I present a model of the interaction between a government, a terrorist organization, and potential terrorist volunteers in which, as a result of an endogenous choice, individuals with low ability or little education are most likely to volunteer to join the terrorist organization. However, the terrorist organization screens the volunteers for quality. Consequently, the model is consistent with two seemingly contradictory empirical findings. Actual terrorist operatives are not poor or lacking in education. And yet lack of economic opportunity and recessionary economies are positively correlated with terrorism. The model also endogenizes the effect of government counterterrorism on mobilization. Government crackdowns have competing effects on mobilization: they decrease the ability of terrorists to carry out effective attacks (making mobilization less attractive), and they foment ideological opposition to the government and impose negative economic externalities (making mobilization more attractive). This provides conditions under which government crackdowns increase or decrease mobilization.     

Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime

In the intellectual confusion prevailing since the demise of Marxism and "marxism", the attempt is made to define democracy as a matter of pure procedure, explicitly avoiding and condemning any reference to substantive objectives. It can easily be shown, however, that the idea of a purely procedural "democracy" is incoherent and self-contradictory. No legal system whatsoever and no government can exist in the absence of substantive conditions which cannot be left to chance or to the workings of the "market" but must be posited as objectives of political activity. The confusion results from a deficient understanding of what makes a society and an empty idea of "freedom". The objective of politics is not happiness, an affair to be left to the individuals, but it certainly is liberty understood as participation in the governance of the polity; it is also the pursuit of the common good, defined as the sum of the prerequisites and facilitations of individual autonomy depending on collective action, and as the realization of commonly agreed collective goals.     

World Risk Society and War Against Terror

I interpret the 'war against terror', declared following September 11 2001, as adopting concepts drawn from the work of Ulrich Beck, as a projection of world risk society. Despite its global character, war against terror is constructed through outmoded vocabularies of national security and sovereignty, within which the reasoned negotiation of risk is marginalized. This exclusion contributes to the intensification rather than reduction of terror and terrorism. In so doing the moment of violence inscribed within the concept of the political resurfaces in the constitution of war against terror, Homeland Security, and the identities and anxieties that they reproduce. Contrary to Slavoj Žižek's claim that risk society is incapable of resolving the dilemmas that it exposes, Beck's approach cuts across established ideological and methodological boundaries, anticipating key transformations of discourse required to address the prevailing global predicament through the vocabularies and logic of cosmopolitan risk, rather than those of absolute security, terror and war.     

Democracy and populism

He is currently president of the New England Political Science Association and has been a member of the Advisory Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His books include America’s Constitutional Soul; Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power; Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories;and a new translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince.     

Democracy and socialism

This paper shows that Marx's theory of agricultural rent is not an adjunct to his theory of capital at the level of distribution but is inseparably developed from it. The forms of differential and absolute rent are shown to correspond to the formation of market value and price of production in the agricultural sector respectively, these in turn depending upon the barriers posed by landed property to intensive and extensive cultivation. In appendices, Marx' critique of Ricardo's theory of rent, differential rent on the worst land, a critique of other interpretations of Marx, and the ‘historical transformation problem’ are each considered briefly.