Governing the suicide bomber: reading terrorism studies as governmentality

This article engages with the suicide bomber as he or she appears in the terrorism studies literature. In contrast to sensationalised narratives of the suicide bomber as pathological or fanatical, terrorism studies has increasingly come to view suicide bombing as a rational phenomenon that follows an identifiable strategic logic. Following Foucault’s articulation of governmentality, I read this literature as a governmental practice that attempts to understand the latent rationality of suicide bombing so that the phenomenon may be effectively governed and managed. With this understanding, I look specifically at the terrorism studies accounts of female suicide bombers and argue that the concerns they articulate regarding the superior capacity of these women to go undetected, such as with the use of fake pregnancies as disguises, produces the female suicide bomber as a uniquely risky and ungovernable subject.     

State terrorism: orientalism and the drone programme

This article builds on the recent and growing scholarship on the negative effects of the drone programme. Current literature has shown that the drone programme terrorises the civilian population that it keeps under surveillance. Furthermore, it has articulated the drone programme’s violence as biopolitical and its surveillance as a necropolitical technology of distinction. It is argued in this article that the Orientalist attitudes and logic necessary for drone targeting form the basis for the biopolitical and necropolitical component of the drone programme. This article explores the Orientalism that suffuses the US drone programme in order to juxtapose it with governmental discourses that characterise the drone programme and its surveillance as neutral and humane – demonstrating the gap between government discourses of modernity and the actual drone programme. The necropolitical logic of distinction used for targeting leads to the assimilation of those under the drone’s gaze to a population that can be put to death, leading the drone programme to operate indiscriminately. The biopolitical logic is visible in the US practices, which I argue constitutes terrorism with the corroboration of civilian testimonies.     

The Ancient Fire: Religion and Suicide Terrorism

Does religion lead to greater destructiveness from suicide terrorism? And if so, how does it influence this form of political violence? Recent analyses of terrorism point to the significance of religion, but are divided as to whether religion itself matters, or certain types of religious terrorist groups are actually driving suicide terrorist violence. This article draws on social movement theory and recent work in the study of suicide terrorism to argue that religion influences the severity of suicide terrorist attacks as an ideology groups use to justify their struggle and gain public support. This effect occurs regardless of a group's goals or organizational nature. The theory is tested using a generalized estimating equation to account for multiple attacks by several groups. The study finds that the religious ideology of a group greatly increases the number of deaths from a suicide attack, even if varying group motivations and structural factors are taken into account. The article helps to clarify the effect of religion on contemporary terrorism, contributing to the study of both terrorism and religion and politics.     

The Escalation of Terrorism: Microlevel Violence and Interstate Conflict

Following the 9/11 attacks, transnational terrorism is seen as a potential catalyst for interstate war. Yet, the willingness of states to fight in response to terrorist violence is puzzling, given that the damage created by terrorism is relatively marginal. This raises the question: if terrorists are so weak and create such little damage, and interstate conflicts are so costly, why are states willing to initiate seemingly ruinous wars to fight terrorist groups? This essay proposes an explanation to address this question using current theoretical and empirical research on terrorism and interstate violence. Recent work indicates that while terrorists appear weak compared to states, terrorists can wield significant coercive power in smaller geographic areas. I argue that if these areas are strategically crucial to the government, such as areas with oil wells or mineral deposits, terrorist activity may precipitously weaken states relative to their rivals. I therefore argue that even if groups are only capable of killing at low levels, terrorism may lead to macrolevel power shifts, which may contribute to interstate violence.     

The Challenge of Talking about Terrorism: The EU and the Arab Debate on the Causes of Islamist Terrorism 1

The Arab “hegemonic debate” on the causes of Islamist terrorism nurtures (pan-) Arab, anti-Western sentiments and delegitimizes criticism of the political status quo. The European Union's emphasis on multilateral means of conflict resolution and trade promotion leads to official pronouncements that barely address the Arab world's domestic problems, instead referring to international tensions such as the Arab-Israeli conflict as a particular cause of Islamist terrorism and the need for cooperation with Arab governments. By failing to challenge the official narratives of authoritarian Arab regimes the EU obstructs interests in the democratization of the region and the delegitimization of Islamist violence.     

Thinking about terrorism and just war

Since 2001 a new urge to moralize the use of violence as an instrument of state policy has appeared in liberal democracies. The American idea of a War against Terror, and the European notion of confronting a global terrorist threat, have together merged with a discourse on humanitarian military action: the political/moral ‘responsibility to protect’ is no longer to be confined to one's own citizens. Renewed interest among academics in ‘just war’ theory, the tradition that seeks to humanize war through law, reflects this development. This article questions the assumption that there is an essential difference between war (civilized violence) and terrorism (barbaric violence). It argues that their similarity appears more clearly if we set intentions aside—such as the deliberate or accidental killing of ‘innocents’—and focus instead on three main facts: (a) modern war strategies and technologies are uniquely destructive, (b) armed hostilities increasingly occupy a single space of violence in which war and peace are not clearly demarcated, and (c) the law of war does not provide a set of ‘civilizing’ rules but a language for legal/moral argument in which the use of punitive violence is itself a central semantic element.     

Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami: Evaluating the Threat Posed by a Radical Islamic Group That Remains Nonviolent

ABSTRACT

Hizb ut-Tahrir is a transnational movement that currently finds support among young Muslims in Central Asia and Western Europe. It presents a complex challenge to both Western and Muslim governments because it calls for the unification of all Muslim countries into a single Caliphate but has consistently rejected violence as a tool of political change. In this paper we focus on Hizb ut-Tahrir in Uzbekistan, a country that is a key U.S. ally in the war on terrorism. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Central Asia, we find that social movement theories (resource mobilization theory, political opportunities theory, framing theory) cannot explain why Hizb ut-Tahrir has remained opposed to violence under the same circumstances in which the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the other important radical Islamic group in the region, has embraced violence. We suggest that ideology is crucial for understanding why Hizb ut-Tahrir remains peaceful, and consider several scenarios in which the group might reconsider its ideology and turn to terrorism.     

Totalitarian tendencies in drone strikes by states

Lethal drones or unmanned combat aerial vehicles have been used to kill thousands of persons suspected of complicity in terrorism. Despite concerns aired by legal scholars that drone strikes outside areas of active hostilities violate international law, the US government contends that targeted killing is distinct from assassination, and has persisted in the practice to the point where it has become normalised as a standard operating procedure and taken up by other nations as well. Drone strikes have been championed by Western politicians as a “light footprint” approach to war, but the institutional apparatus of remote-control killing rests on totalitarian, not democratic principles. Secretive targeting criteria and procedures are withheld from citizens under a pretext of national security, resulting in a conflation of executive with judicial authority and an inversion of the burden of proof, undermining the very framework of universal human rights said to be championed by modern Western states. Moreover, lethal drones hovering above in the sky threaten all persons on the ground with the arbitrary termination of their lives and as such represent a form of terrorism no less than the suicide bombings of jihadist groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS.     

International terrorism? Indian popular cinema and the politics of terror

The first decade of the twenty-first century has been marked by the decisive entry into our media landscape of the so-called global war on terror, with countless films and TV series from all over the world addressing the issue of international terrorism. Even Indian popular cinema, which has been addressing the issue of domestic terrorism since the late 1980s with films such as Roja (Ratnam, 1992), Drohkaal (Nihalani, 1994), Maachis (Gulzar, 1996), has, since the new millennium, begun to tackle the topic of international terrorism. In this article, I will analyse the shift in the construction of the terrorist discourse in Indian popular cinema from a domestic to an international perspective in order to highlight the close proximity between the two, as in fact, the “global war on terror” narrative seems to offer Indian filmmakers the possibility to simultaneously address international and domestic terrorism. In particular, I will refer to Karan Johar’s film My Name Is Khan as a text which, while discussing the consequences of the American war on terror on its minorities, problematises the official discourse on terrorism and its neo-Orientalist character. It also draws a parallel between the situation of minorities in the United States and India. In so doing, the film triggers a reflection on the state of the Indian nation and questions the state of the secularist values of newly independent India after decades of communal violence.     

How Does Violence Threaten the State? Four Narratives on Piracy

Violence characterized by similar actions, actor motivations, group structures, or level of damage still poses qualitatively distinct genera of threats to states. For instance, “terrorism” can threaten a particular state, be used by a state, or threaten the entire state system. Building on the threat construction literature, this study argues that threat is best understood through narratives on the relationship between violence and the boundary-producing practices that construct the state. Four ideal-typical basic narratives on this relationship are produced—entrant, resource, revisionist, and criminal. Each narrative is then demonstrated by looking at how it was used in a historical case of piracy. The action (piracy as raiding at sea) is held constant while the threat in each varies with the narrative. Understanding how threat is narratively constructed can help us to understand particular historical episodes of violence and state responses to them.     

“Unthinking” sexual violence in a neoliberal era of spectacular terror

The article begins with a question about the value of revitalising the equation between sexual/intimate violence and terrorism in the current neoliberal/post-feminist political and epistemological landscape. We argue that the intensifying international interest in sexual violence, and an accompanying hyper-visual imagery, is implicated in the cauterisation of critical thought about sexual violence. We offer the more mobile and expansive concept of sexed violence to “unthink” dominant narratives that reproduce heteronormativity and white, Western hegemony. Through an analysis of the film Unwatchable, we consider why non-white raced bodies consistently materialise as less “comprehensible” as violatable than white bodies. We further suggest that a move to sexed violence can help to think more critically about both sexual violence and feminism.     

A history of drones: moral(e) bombing and state terrorism

This article argues that an historical investigation of air power makes possible the critique of current regimes of drone surveillance and bombing as a practice of state terrorism. By identifying certain key themes regularly used in terrorism studies for the classification of violence as “terrorism”, this article shows that early air power theorists understood military aircraft as essentially instruments of terrorism. A central argument permeating these theorists’ conception of air power was that the military value of aviation lay in its capacity to target the enemy’s population and, by means of bombing, generate a significant “moral effect” – that is, a psychological effect against the morale of civilians. This strategic formula constituted a central component of British air control schemes during the interwar period, where terror bombing was deployed systematically in order to control and pacify colonial populations. In arguing that widespread and long-lasting terror remains an inalienable feature of air power, this article concludes with a call for a critique that accounts for the fact that current deployments of armed drones – for instance, the US “targeted killings” programme – effectively reproduce these historical and material conditions of terrorist violence.     

自杀性恐怖主义的行动模式 及其根源

作为恐怖组织常用的一种行动模式,自杀性恐怖主义在历史上就长期存在,尤其是九一一事件的发生,更使得自杀性恐怖主义成为恐怖组织在恐怖袭击中惯用的一种手段。相比其他形式的恐怖袭击,自杀性恐怖主义具有简单、廉价、机动性强、引起的社会恐慌大以及造成的人员伤亡严重等特征。自杀性恐怖主义在世界多地都已经发生过,被各种类型的恐怖组织广泛使用,针对的对象多样化,并且具有相对固定的行动流程。目前学术界从个体、组织、社会、文化和环境等方面对于自杀性恐怖主义的产生原因进行了分析。从个体的角度来看,一个人是否愿意进行自杀性恐怖袭击,最为重要的是当事人的理性计算,即个人通过自杀性恐怖袭击获得的好处是否能为自己带来更大的个人收益、是否可以增进家庭的福利、是否可以增加所在共同体的利益。在未来的反恐与应对中,国际社会可以通过增强重要设备的科技含量、增加双方对话与谈判的可能性、加强公共外交的力度、增进各国间的相互合作等方式以应对自杀性恐怖主义威胁。     

The Dynamics Of Nationalist Terrorism: ETA and the IRA

Nationalist terrorism aspires to independence or greater autonomy for some territory. The combination of territorial claims and armed struggle gives rise to a very definite strategy, violence intended to coerce the State. Nationalist terrorist organizations kill repeatedly with the aim of breaking the will of the State. They engage in a peculiar sort of war of attrition with the State. This paper analyzes comparatively the war of attrition strategy in two organizations, ETA and the IRA. The focus of the paper is on strategy: it examines how ETA and the IRA understood their activity in terms of war of attrition and how they developed their strategy subject to some constraints, such as the moderate preferences of their supporters. I show that popularity constraints account for the high degree of selectivity in their killings. The analysis is based on a combination of historical information, internal documents, and a large data set I have constructed of the killings of these two organizations.     

Against state terror: lessons on memory,counterterrorism and resistance from the Global South

Critical theory avows that “where there is power there is always resistance”. However, the practical implications and consequences of particular modes of resistance remain, within World Politics, under-theorised. In critical terrorism studies (CTS), this critical imperative to resist has recently emerged in the proposal to remember state terrorism. With this move, CTS aims to disturb the legitimacy of forms of violence/terror that emerge from the state. In this article, I argue that such an agenda of “resistance through memory” has already been put forth in the Global South (specifically, Latin America). Drawing on this historical experience, I elucidate some problems with the critical imperative to resist. More specifically, I show how in Brazil the Global South counter-memorial narratives of state terror share a common ground with the Global North counterterrorism discourses. I do so by analysing three underlying tropes of Brazilian remembrance that replicate Global North representations of terrorists: bestialism, pathology and dehumanisation.     

Willingness and Opportunity: A Study of Domestic Terrorism in Post-Cold War South Asia

Domestic terrorism, as a form of intrastate violence, has varied widely in South Asia along with the post-Cold War period of global economic integration and political openness. How are these two phenomena—economic integration and emergence of democracies—related to domestic terrorism in South Asia? I argue that resorting to terrorism is a rational choice when individuals'/groups' cost of heterogeneity—deprivation from public goods due to geographical and ideological distance—increases; opportunity is provided by democratization and integration into the global economy. The testable hypotheses derived from the theory are empirically tested on a dataset of five South Asian countries for the time period between 1990 and 2007. The results show that both minority discrimination and presence of unconsolidated democratic institutions increase terrorism in the highly heterogeneous South Asian countries. International trade in the presence of minority discrimination increases homegrown terrorism, but foreign direct investment neither increases nor decreases such incidents.     

Terrorism, ‘pure justice’ and pure ‘ethics’

The argument in this article is that ‘terrorism’ is not necessarily unethical. It begins with the argument that terrorism should not be denned as immoral. It is also argued that terrorism should not be condemned categorically. Finer judgments are needed. By analogies to other forms of political violence, especially in war, some of the criteria appropriate to assessing the ethics of terrorism are suggested.     

Terrorism and revolutionary violence: the emergence of terrorism in the French Revolution

Accounts of terrorism, which locate the emergence of the concept in the French Revolution, tend to accept two premises. First, they assume that the concept of terrorism names a particular form of violence. Second, they regard Robespierre as the first practitioner of terrorism, thus suggesting an understanding of the term as state violence. While this article substantiates the second premise by way of a discussion of the first systematic articulation of terrorism by Tallien in 1794, it problematises the first premise through an examination of archival evidence from the period between 1794 and 1797. By identifying a variety of conceptual uses of terrorism as a form of government, political philosophy and political identity, I argue for an expansion of the conceptual space within which terrorism is primarily understood as a form of violent action.