NEIU JUST 315F Law and Terrorism
Liberation Central
Follow the Money
USA History: A Quick Study for Students
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Links, Movies, and Websites
Engaged Research Methodologies
NEIU 241 Skills for Inquiry
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NEIU 301 Theories of Justice
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NEIU JUST202 Justice and Inequality
NEIU JUST 315F Law and Terrorism
Columbia College Media and Politics
Columbia College Race and Ethnic Relations
USA MILITARY OPERATIONS HISTORY
War is Terrorism
NEIU Justice Studies
Dr. June Terpstra
Course Description
Whether used by governments, groups or individuals, terrorism is a tactic and strategy of war instilling an intense, overpowering fear caused by the threat and use of violence. Violence, whether utilized "legally" or illegally is always used to coerce, control, and destroy. This course examines various categories of terrorism focusing on the so called "war on terrorism", global domination, invasion and occupation. Additionally, we will analyze how, in the name of national security--governments are systematically erecting vast legal apparatus of social control, which in both principle and practice violates national sovereignty, human rights and liberties.
Course Text: All readings are either at my website at juneterpstra.com or URL linked and referenced in the syllabus.
Course Requirements
1. Weekly written Assignments. Drawing upon the readings and class discussions, you are to reflexively discuss your responses, thoughts, and opinions on the weekly readings. This means that you analyze the manner in which your responses may be influenced by media, economic class, ethnicity, creed, orientation, gender and experience. 300 pts
2. Two Research Presentations and papers. You are required to complete 2 research projects for our course of study. One is due at mid-term and the other towards the end of the semester. The midterm focus of the presentations and papers is to research tactics, strategies and weapons of war since WWII used by countries waging aggressive campaigns examining who benefits from the wars. The final will examine resistance and revolutionary groups, also called terrorists, insurgents and/or guerilla factions in today's rhetoric. Once again, your method is in examining who benefits from the struggle. A bibliography will be required with your 15-29 minute presentation or your paper. 200 points for each presentation or paper. 400 pts
3. Class attendance and participation. You are required to participate in formal classroom discussions and in-class exercises and discussions. 300
Tentative Schedule
Week 1 Defining Terror
Conducting Our Research-War is Terrorism
Read and Respond:
1. Terrorism: Theirs and Ours by Eqbal Ahmad http://www.sangam.org/ANALYSIS/Ahmad.htm
2. The Many Definitions of Terrorism --http://terrorism.about.com/od/whatisterroris1/ss/DefineTerrorism.htm
3. Terrorism Defined - by Stephen Lendman http://www.countercurrents.org/lendman310507.htm
4. Forget Terrorism from Crimethink
http://www.crimethinc.com/911/
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=881321004838285177
Week 2 State Terrorism
Read and Respond:
1. Constant Conflict http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3011.htm
2. How NOT to Counter Terrorism by Coleen Rowley http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/how-not-to-counter-terror_b_52853.html
3. A Critical Review of the Objectives of U.S. Foreign Policy in the Post-World War Ii Period by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq13.html
4. CENTCOM's Master Plan and
Film: The Power of Nightmares
Week 3 Religious Terrorism Crusades, Colonialism, Imperialism
Choose Your Research Topic
Read and Respond:
1. Deuteronomy 20 (King James Version) Http://Www.Biblegateway.Com/Passage/?Book_Id=5&Chapter=20&Version=31
2. Apologetic History of the Indies by Bartolomé De Las Casas Http://Www.Columbia.Edu/Acis/Ets/Ccread/Lascasas.Htm
3. Meanings of Jihad http://www.religioustolerance.org/isl_jihad.htm
4. Zawahiri: Realities of the Conflict between Islam and Unbelief
Dec 20, 2006, Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, http://www.archive.org/details/Conflict-Between-Islam-and-Unbelief
Week 4 Political Terror
Read and Respond:
1. Concerning Violence by Frantz Fanon, 1963 http://www.tamilnation.org/ideology/fannon.htm
2. The Politics of Terror by David Hoffman Http://Www.Constitution.Org/Ocbpt/Ocbpt_13.Htm
3. The Uncensored Anger Manifesto-Part I, IV and V by Layla Anwar
http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/2006/11/uncensored-anger-manifesto-part-i.html
http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/2007/02/uncensored-anger-manifesto-part-iv.html
http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/2007/04/uncensored-anger-manifesto-part-v.html
Film: Occupation 101
Week 5 Law
1. The Divine Right to Occupy the Land John Cotton, (London, 1630) at http://www.healingtheland.com/resources/discovery/cotton.html
2. The Geneva Conventions: the core of international humanitarian law: Key Issues
http://www.icrc.org/Web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/htmlall/genevaconventions
3. How the Rules of War Work. 1-6
by Julia Layton http://people.howstuffworks.com/rules-of-war.htm
Weeks 6-8
Research Seminars on Ideologies, Tactics, Strategies, Weapons and Warfare post WWII. Your analysis should examine the warring factions, external invading forces, internal oppositional groups, and resistance and revolutionary groups.
Week 9 Laws
Read and Respond:
1. The Laws of War Miscellaneous Treaties, Conventions and Agreements http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/lawwar.htm
2. Sovereign Equality Principle in International Law
Snigdha Nahar - 3/28/2008 http://www.globalpolitician.com/24351-international-law
3. The End of Terrorism Studies by Anthony Burke: see below.
Film: Why We Fight http://freedocumentaries.org/film.php?id=93
Week 10 Follow the Money
Read and Respond:
1. How the Bush family made
its fortune from the Nazis Posted by Robert Lederman http://www.tetrahedron.org/articles/new_world_order/bush_nazis.html
2. War Profits Trump the Rule of Law
By Chris Floyd http://www.truthout.org/article/chris-floyd-war-profits-trump-rule-law
3. How Much Does It Cost Your Household for War? by Bill Sardi http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi59.html
Week 11 The New World Order and the Fourth World War
Read and Respond:
1. War Criminal Nation by Paul Craig Roberts
http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts163.html
2. "Some People Push Back--On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" By Ward Churchill
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/WC091201.html
3. War against Terrorism or Expansion of the American Empire? By William Blum http://members.aol.com/bblum6/speech.htm
4. The Fourth World War by Subcomandante Marcos by http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/auto/fourth.html
Film: Fourth World War
Weeks 12-14
Research Seminars -Revolutionaries, Resistance fighters, Guerillas, insurgents and terrorists strategies, tactics and accomplishments. Who Benefits?
Week 15 Exams Week
*****************************************************
The End of Terrorism Studies
Published in In Motion Magazine November 11, 2001.Author: Anthony Burke
Affiliation: School of Social Sciences and International Studies,
University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Published in: Critical Studies on Terrorism
Volume 1, Issue 1 April 2008
Ever since the early works of Michel Foucault, we have known that no
knowledge is neutral, however scientific its appearance. We now
know, in contrast to the positivistic and instrumental assumptions
of natural science, that knowledge is not a mirror of the real nor a
tool that lies reliably in the hands of man. It was not what Francis
Bacon foretold modern science to be: a vehicle for the restoration
of man's 'empire over creation' (Bacon 1620/1952). Instead, we all
too often find knowledge serving power as it conceals its political
function within claims to objectivity and expertise. We find that it
harbours secrets: its discourse of expertise and epistemological
mastery, of policy rationality, sitting visibly above a silent
bedrock of assumptions about the nature of culture, the political,
the necessary and the good. These it reinforces, without making them
audible.
Knowledge, argued Foucault, is utterly intertwined with the exercise
and production of power, but it is not a pre-existing knowledge that
serves a pre-existing power, whose forms we understand and accept.
Rather, through a series of complex and conflictual operations, it
produces and limits the possibility for each, creates a working
system of relations between them, and sets a machinery into
operation. Knowledge classifies, imagines, orders and constructs.1
Foucault conceived this theory as one that could be applied across
the human and social sciences. My interest, on the occasion of the
inauguration of a journal entitled Critical Studies on Terrorism, is
in a particular, global social field which terrorism and counter-
terrorism as practices traverse, affect and transform. This social
field intersects with a relatively new social science known
as 'terrorism studies', one drawing its methodologies and
assumptions from other social sciences (sociology, political
science, security studies) and that claims an authoritative
understanding of a relatively stable object. Of particular salience
is the fact that terrorism studies is not dominated institutionally
by universities so much as by think tanks, policy institutes,
intelligence agencies, militaries, media organizations, and the
ideological activity of political parties and ministers. The
traditions of critical scholarship possible in the university here
yield to a more immediate and pragmatic concern with effectiveness.
Even as it asserts ontological certainty, the knowledge of
terrorists and terrorism produced in such institutions is thoroughly
engaged.
What then, can this tell us about 'terrorism'? About
(critical) 'terrorism studies'? What is the nature of this
intellectual field and its object, terror? Critical terrorism
studies has insinuated itself into an intellectual, institutional
and political space shaped by 'terrorism' and 'counter-terrorism' .
There it exists, uneasily and problematically, pulled back and forth
between the disparate (and often antithetical) tasks of study,
critique and policy. There it must consider its purposes, forms and
functions; the kind of 'power' it wants its 'knowledge' to become.
This, to me, means that - like terrorism itself - terrorism studies
cannot ignore its normative impact. However, cautiously and
reflexively, it must set out and pursue a normative agenda.
Terrorism, counter-terrorism and cultural power
At the outset it seems important to acknowledge the radical
instability (and thoroughly politicized nature) of the unifying
master-terms of our field: 'terror' and 'terrorism'. It is now
commonplace to acknowledge that there is no commonly agreed
definition of terrorism (Record 2003). While there does appear to be
a consensus that it is a form of instrumental political violence,
disputes continue over by whom and against whom this violence is
exercised, and with what motive and justification. Disputes also
continue over what kind of political violence it constitutes, in
distinction from or in similarity to others. Is terrorism a form of
warfare, insurgency, struggle, resistance, coercion, atrocity, or
great political crime? And then there is that strange suffix that
gives it such dark semiotic resonance: '-ism'. How is what most
analysts agree to be a 'method' given the character of an ideology?
When paired in neoconservative discourse with 'Islamism', which in
turn mutates into 'Islamofascism' , it takes on a disturbing semiotic
and cultural power (Fukuyama 2002, Jackson 2007). Any 'critical'
terrorism studies must keep this radical instability and inherent
politicization of the concept of terrorism at the forefront of its
analysis. Each author may set upon a working definition of
terrorism - as I do below - but without a conscious reflexivity
about the most basic definition of the object, our discourse will
not be critical at all.
This begs the question of what else may be distinctively 'critical'
about critical terrorism studies. These and other pages are already
simmering with debate about how narrow or wide this field should be,
how close or antagonistic to governments and institutions, how
integrated with or distinct from dominant strands of political and
international theory, and from where it might draw its philosophical
wellsprings. We could, I suppose, rehearse in a new context debates
about the nature of critical international theory or critical
security studies, which are obviously of great relevance. My own
view is that, whatever the importance of such debates, the greatest
possible pluralism and engagement consistent with the critical
enterprise should be encouraged - one that can encompass works that
are, in their concerns and conception, profoundly challenging to
elites and policy practitioners, works much closer in style and
focus to theirs, and everything in between. In this sense the
normative agenda of critical terrorism studies can be wide: it may
encompass radically progressive normative visions of socio-political
change or be limited to things as mundane - but surely not
unimportant - as policy concerns about security from terrorism. We
may have strong preferences along this continuum, but none should be
excluded from the enterprise.
What remains essentially critical within such diversity then is an
attitude. While I have always liked the classic
division between 'critical' and 'traditional' theory (along with
Robert Cox's Gramscian twist, between 'critical' and 'problem-
solving' theory), my own view of this attitude draws also on the
style of critique visible in Martin Heidegger. In such a view,
critical theory questions the question: it questions the ontological
status of a 'problem' before any attempt to study, map out or
resolve it. In this way it can challenge what Horkheimer (2002)
called the 'one-sidedness that necessarily arises when limited
intellectual processes are detached from their matrix in the total
activity of society' (p. 199).
My aim is not to engage in postmodernist sophistry or cleverness, or
to so discredit the concept of terrorism that it disappears as a
coherent object of enquiry. The inauguration of this journal indeed
suggests broad agreement that there is a phenomenon called
terrorism, and that it constitutes a problem of great moral,
political and sociological importance. Phrasing the issue in this
way already takes the inquiry well beyond the concerns of 'policy' -
even if it would indeed be useful to policy - because we are
beginning to develop a set of concerns about how terrorism studies
and policy are related to the 'total activity of society'. To say
that the discourses and practices of terrorism and counter-terrorism
have sociological importance is to say that both their raw
occurrence, and the systems of representation and circulation which
arise from and shape them, have profound social and cultural
effects. They shape individuals, their families, and their
communities as much as larger systems of government and
international relations. The sociological effects of
counter/terrorism are thus worth serious study.
Terrorism: a normative or strategic challenge?
Traditional governmental discourses of terrorism define it in both
helpful and highly political ways. Definitions cited by Hoffman
(1999) see it as 'politically motivated violence perpetrated against
non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents'
(US State Department) or 'the unlawful use of - or threatened use
of - force or violence against individuals or property to coerce or
intimidate governments or societies' (US Department of Defense).
Hoffman himself prefers to define it (in my paraphrase) as a form of
political violence designed to have far-reaching psychological
repercussions that is conducted by an identifiable organization with
a chain of command whose members wear no uniform or insignia, and
which is a subnational group or non-state entity (Hoffman 1999, pp.
38, 43). While such definitions provide analytical value, they
specifically exclude states as possible perpetrators and privilege
them as targets, and they block normative clarity about terrorism's
social and moral consequences.
My preferred definition of terrorism is as follows: terrorism is a
form of political violence directed against civilians with a
coercive intent that rests on the production of a state of fear or
terror.2 It might be that the object to be coerced lies elsewhere -
the collectivity of the civilians attacked or their government - but
the specific or primary targets will be civilians. This enables me
to distinguish between a range of common definitional possibilities,
and to argue its normative significance more tightly.
Terrorism is a form of political action that raises a significant
normative problem, which arises in two ways: through the use of
violence against civilians, and in the distinctive desire to sow
fear and terror for instrumental political purposes.3 Its normative
impact is then magnified through the way meanings associated with it
circulate through social spaces, texts and institutions; through the
kind of moral and normative examples set by terror and counter-
terror and the reality - the new normal - they potentially bring
into being (Burke 2007b, p. 40).
This brings me to a second crucial point and line of critique. The
exemplary nature of an act or campaign of terror may be seen by its
perpetrators in purely negative terms - as a warning - but its
effect will also be creative and hard to control, exemplifying a
standard of behaviour and action which steadily gains currency and
legitimacy until it becomes almost universal. This, more than its
immediately destructive or murderous impact, is the true nature of
the threat posed by terrorism: that terrorism could become a new
normal.
Yet whereas the debate over the legitimacy, objects and purpose of
various forms of military violence (i.e. 'just war' theories and
other ethical writings on war) fills libraries and influences
numerous international conventions, political violence as such
remains stubbornly immune from critique. By this I mean violence
conceptualized as a form of instrumental reason that assumes a
relatively predictable translation between means and ends, as most
famously expressed in Von Clausewitz's (1976) definition of 'war as
an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will' (p. 75). This
assumption is commonplace in mainstream strategic thought and
policy - and thus influences counter-terrorist policy - but is also
visible in otherwise incisive critical writings on terrorism. For
example, Barkawi (2004) argues that 'today, instruments of mass
effect can be wielded by men armed with box-cutters and pilots
manuals' and that 'many of al-Qaeda's bombings and other operations
have had great strategic effect in return for lives and resources
expended, not least on 9/11 itself' (pp. 19, 29). If (by reading
their numerous speeches and statements) we can surmise that Osama
bin Laden and other al-Qaeda figures conceived the strategic
objectives of their campaign in terms of bringing justice and
security to Palestinians, Muslim communities, the people of Iraq,
and other victims of US and Israeli power, they have almost
universally failed and in many cases often helped to worsen such
situations.
The reasons for this failure lie in the perverse normative effect of
terrorist strategies - as exemplified by al-Qaeda or the many
Palestinian factions who staged bombings against Jewish civilians
inside the 'green line' between 2000 and 2006 - which is intimately
related to their semiotic and sociological impact. The perpetrators
of violence do not control how their acts and results are
interpreted, narrated and circulated and how they shape
subjectivities and systems of consent. Even if widespread fear and
anxiety are provoked, they do not result in a linear or controllable
system of effects. Rather than deepen popular understandings of
injustice and heighten desires to reverse it, such strategies
entrench them by making violence into a norm, a necessity and a
virtue. To describe al-Qaeda, as Barkawi (2004) does, as 'as a
hybrid form of anti-colonial resistance' might say something about
its roots and objectives, but the argument ignores the complex and
chaotic processes that al-Qaeda's acts set into train, and is deaf
to their terrible normative impact.
In such contexts, the perverse strategic effect produced by violence
is a function not of its physical, but its normative force. By
targeting Jewish civilians in a cultural context where the use and
incitement of violence against Jews would be interpreted as a
contemporary echo of the Holocaust, Hamas and other radical factions
in Palestine played directly into the hands of those conservative
Israelis who portray Israel as a threatened island in a sea of
fundamentally hostile Arabs and wish to deflect international
pressure for peace. Terrorist attacks on civilians have also helped
create a permissive political environment for harsh Israeli policies
such the economic blockade of the
and checkpoint system in the West Bank, and brutal military
operations against
and continuing settlement of the occupied territories have provoked -
often quite directly - many Palestinian attacks. While it must be
extraordinarily difficult to remain passive in the face of Israeli
policy, the ceasefire (at least in terms of suicide bombings) held
by Hamas and other factions since 2005 has undoubtedly helped create
an environment for more active US diplomacy and pressure for a
Palestinian state in 2007 after years of deeply partisan and
destructive pro-Israeli policy. This is an example where non-
violence can help achieve the very strategic effect that violence
sought and failed to.
In this way, strategic and terrorist violence can take on a similar
character. What is so dangerous is that, historically, they can form
into a never-ending chain of mutually enabling supposition. Consider
9/11, and then work back. In 1998, bin Laden was interviewed by an
American ABC network journalist who asked him to whom his 'fatwa'
directing Muslims to kill Jews and American applied. Bin Laden
replied:
American history does not distinguish between civilians and
military, and not even women and children. They are the ones who
used the bombs against
infants and military? The only way for us to fend off these
assaults is to use similar means. (Miller 1998)
Three years later we found that he certainly was not joking. The
normative chain established here is built on a view that our crimes
legitimate and necessitate theirs, and vice versa; so long as
injustice prevails, such moral distinctions cannot hold. It is also
vested in a crude form of instrumental/ strategic reason that sees
civilian populations as objects of effective coercion. This has long
been an element of the doctrine of strategic bombing - as expressed
by Guilio Douhet (1972), updated in more recent years by Buzan
(2002), and put into action in Israel's 2006 war against Lebanon -
but was also there at the beginnings of the nuclear age.
In his Danger and Survival, Bundy (1988) recounts how, when a
committee established by President Harry S. Truman considered the
most effective use of the atomic bombs produced by the Manhattan
Project, 'every target recommended, and every one approved by
Truman, was a city' (p. 67). Secretary of War Stimson argued that
while 'we could not concentrate on a civilian area we should seek
to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the
inhabitants as possible' (p. 70). The Cold War analyst Thomas
Schelling put the strategy in even starker terms: 'the political
target of the bomb was not the dead of
they worked in, but the survivors in
Such strategies are, in my view and that of the Secretary-General' s
High Level Panel, inherently terrorist in nature. Surely, as the
panel defines terrorism, they are acts:
intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-
combatants, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context,
is to intimidate a population, or to compel a Government or an
international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.
(United Nations 2004, p. 26)
On this definition, the strategic intent behind the
sanctions against
us that states practise terror, but to show how mainstream strategic
doctrines are terrorist in these terms and undermine any prospect of
achieving the normative consensus required if such terrorism is to
be reduced and eventually eliminated. My argument is echoed by the
High Level Panel, which puts the view that:
the strong, clear normative framework of the United Nations
surrounding State use of force must be complemented by a normative
framework of equal authority surrounding non-State use of force.
Attacks that specifically target innocent civilians and non-
combatants must be condemned clearly and unequivocally by all.
(United Nations 2004, §161 52)
Where I would differ from the panel is in my view that a normatively
credible legal definition of terrorism (still to be established) is
only a first step. What bin Laden's statements demonstrate is the
enormous challenge in developing and applying policy practices that
provide such a definition with force in reality. Likewise they are
too sanguine in their assessment of international humanitarian law,
which remains flawed both in its letter and especially its
implementation. Without a better system for protecting civilians in
conflict and in all enactments of strategic policy, we will remain
ever vulnerable to a terrorist violence legitimized by bin Laden's
appalling arguments that: 'the American people cannot be innocent of
all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us
whoever kills our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs'
(Osama bin Laden, and possibly others, 6 October 2002, cited in
Lawrence 2005, p. 165).
The end of terrorism studies?
Critical terrorism studies may signal the end of a particular kind
of traditionally state-focused and directed 'problem-solving'
terrorism studies - at least in terms of its ability to assume that
its categories and commitments are immune from challenge and
correspond to a stable picture of reality. But that, in my view,
should not be its only 'end'. It must also have a normative end. The
need for this 'end' arises out of the facts analysed above: that
terrorism poses a profound normative problem, and is both the
product and productive of norms. It is a need that arises out of the
tight interrelation of the historical, strategic, ideational,
normative, and affective processes that produce and reproduce
terrorism and, in turn, profoundly affect larger socio-political
processes - that is, the lives of individuals, communities, nations,
faiths, and cultures in an international society fissured by
injustice and war.
Emancipation
So what might be our normative end, and how should it be defined? I
am sympathetic to the thoughtful arguments of Matt McDonald
(forthcoming) that critical terrorism studies could have a 'research
agenda defined in terms of a concern with emancipation' . This has
much to recommend it, especially when it embodies the caution of
writers such as Ken Booth and Richard Wyn Jones that it is a process
(rather than an endpoint) 'better understood in terms of the
specificity of particular struggles and dynamics in world politics'
(cited in MacDonald, forthcoming) . Booth's (cosmopolitan) definition
of emancipation as 'a theory and practice of inventing humanity,
with a view to freeing people from contingent and structural
oppressions' is also appealing, especially when combined with Andrew
Linklater's interest in forms of dialogue and communicative action
that take the form of 'non-repressive deliberation' (both cited in
MacDonald, forthcoming) . These, McDonald rightly suggests,
are 'especially relevant to critical terrorism studies both
analytically and normatively' ; 'freeing up space for alternative
voices to be heard is central to the means through which political
violence - whether defined as terrorist or not - is least likely to
be pursued'.
McDonald focuses primarily on how the question of emancipation is
engaged in practices of terrorism and counter-terrorism, using
emancipation in particular as a normative standpoint from which to
judge them. In this way, it helps generate a critique of the
politics of definitions, both of terrorism and its responses, and of
the marginalization of particular voices and perspectives. It also
seeks 'immanent possibilities' for change in policy practice and
(implicitly) in modes of political struggle. Importantly, in
McDonald's vision there is a strong normative bias towards non-
violence. This reflects Jürgen Habermas's view that as social
relations are permeated by violence, both structural and overt, and
conflicts arise through 'distortion in communication, from
misunderstanding and incomprehension, from insincerity and
deception', a normative impetus towards communicative action is
crucial - one based importantly on 'the improvement of [actual]
living conditions, through a sensible relief from oppression and
fear' and the 'political taming of an unbounded capitalism'
(Borradori 2003, pp. 35-36). On this register, 'the critical power
to put a stop to violence, without reproducing it in circles of new
violence', may well 'dwell in the telos of mutual understanding' ,
but it is underpinned by real changes in the lives of real people.
This means, in my view, that any telos of mutual understanding
(which he argues can still work across cultures and experiences)
must be fixed in a critical telos of 'justice'. Dialogue would be
empty without change, without better examples.
Al-Qaeda, Islamism and cosmopolitanism
The 'global war on terror', the invasion of Iraq, and the 'Islamist'
forms of terrorism perpetrated by al-Qaeda specifically raise the
problem of violence and politics in a particularly complex and
sweeping way: in terms of the relation between violence, norms, and
grand schemes of political utopia which see the world in
instrumental terms as something to be 'made' and for which humans
are mere material for a larger ideal. This relation obviously
requires attention and critique, but it also raises questions about
to what extent a critical discourse on terrorism can or should
engage with it. To this question I would answer 'yes and no'.
In answering 'no', I feel that a narrower normative focus on
terrorism needs to be pursued, independent of the larger visions of
justice and order that violent acts or movements are seeking to
enact. In this, we can articulate a universal principle - at this
stage still an emerging norm - which states, as Kofi Annan and the
High Level Panel do, that the use of political violence against
civilians to instil fear and terror is a fundamental wrong and a
threat to humanity qua humanity. What Annan states, far more clearly
than the high level panel, is the crucial demand that counter-
terrorism and Western security policies in general also abide by the
norm. 'In our struggle against terrorism,' he stated, 'we must never
compromise human rights' (United Nations 2005, §94 27).
The normative challenge for critical terrorism studies in such a
context is to argue for and reinforce this norm, both in universal
terms and in the specific contexts in which terrorist violence is
seen as natural or necessary. But this is where it becomes necessary
to answer 'yes' to the earlier question. Normative architectures are
built less on United Nations resolutions or treaties, national laws,
or political philosophies - which are important to be sure - than on
a repetitive framework of thoughts and actions by numerous
individuals and institutions, which together create the fabric of a
new reality or at least the matrix for one. This framework is
fundamentally social in nature and local in construction, if we
understand locality in expansive and interconnected terms: as
intimately connected with larger regional and global processes of
diplomacy, warfare, economics, politics and media. The conceptions
of individual and social identity that are shaped by and productive
of norms are developed through experiences that are simultaneously
intimate and abstract, material and ideational, suturing the local
and global into a single space of experience.
This is to argue that any enterprise of normative innovation and
travel must be about more than General Assembly resolutions and
reports of eminent persons; it must be sensitive to both the local
contexts and struggles in which it must become embedded, and the
mediated (global) space of abstraction that forms a horizon of
events against which it will be compared and judged, a horizon where
its legitimacy will prosper or founder. In the case of the war on
terror, which is predominately focused on the threat posed by the al-
Qaeda network, such a space of abstraction is structured by a
profound normative and existential division between 'Islam' and
the 'West', one continually reproduced in both Western discourses of
purpose and identity, and in Islamic fundamentalist thought. The use
of violence can be detached from them in the cause of normative
progress or even moral philosophy, but it is much harder to achieve
in the immediate flow of events and lived experience. This is
because such grand abstractions are intimately connected with
violence - strategic and terrorist - as systems of justification,
motivation, purpose, and propaganda. This provides critical
terrorism studies with a two-sided agenda that includes both
challenge and opportunity.
On one side is a mode of self-reflexive critique directed at the
West. This work critiques the strategic languages used to justify
and argue for policy, the 'culture wars' and 'security politics'
pursued by neo-conservatives, the normative disaster of the resort
to torture, 'extraordinary renditions' and secret interrogations,
the exceptional politics of executive orders and detention camps,
the racist and Islamophobic attacks on multiculturalism and
traditions of secular tolerance, and the efforts to transform the
affective space of Western societies via the normalization of fear
and warfare as ways of being (Jackson 2005, Burke 2007c, Borderlands
e-journal various years). Deeper lines of critique then put some of
the foundational images of politics, security and existence that
underpin such politics into question (Agamben 1998, Butler 2004,
Burke 2007a).
On the other side (the side of the Other) is a challenge that must
see critical terrorism studies widened to take in other, comparative
forms of scholarship, along with scholarship from the
and Islamic world. Critical terrorism studies cannot be a Western
dialogue with itself. It must expand its space of dialogue and
concern to take in, engage and contest the highly developed forms of
thinking that - if not coextensive with terrorist violence - provide
it with legitimizing foundations and a world view of some
profundity. In the case of al-Qaeda and other movements inspired by
Sunni fundamentalism, this world view is provided by a particular
version of Islamist ideology represented by Sayyid Qutb and Abu al-
Ala Mawdudi. This, as Roxanne Euben (1999) has demonstrated, offers
simultaneously a sharp critique (and perverse mirror) of Western
rationalism and modernism. (My argument here is not meant to
stereotype Islamism, which, as a group of philosophies that link
Islam with politics, is a diverse body of thought that includes more
moderate and pluralist streams.) Here the war on terror is revealed
not as a simple instrumental struggle between 'forces' but an
ideational one with deep philosophical contours. The normative
challenge, in this light, is more complex than choices about targets
or modes of violence; it is a challenge posed by the linkage of
terrorism and violence with clashing visions of secularism, faith,
political community, nationhood and modernity.
This linkage, from the side of the Other, can be seen in bin
Laden's 'sermon' of February 2003, where familiar denunciations of
Western imperialism and US foreign policy were accompanied by
arguments that, after the 9/11 attacks:
the spirit of brotherhood in faith among Muslims was strengthened,
which can be considered a great step in the unification of the
Muslims under the word of God and establishing the rightly guided
caliphate with the permission of God.
He also praised the hijackers for 'taking the path of jihad'
to 'defend their religion and promote the causes of their umma more
than the governments and peoples of fifty countries in the Islamic
world have done'. We can easily condemn the moral sensibility that
could see the 9/11 atrocity as a legitimate form of (even violent)
struggle or jihad, along with the political naiveté which believes
that in this way it is possible to 'target the foundations' of US
power such that 'the whole edifice will totter and sway, and
relinquish its unjust leadership of the world' (Lawrence 2005, pp.
194-195). Yet underpinning the argument is a philosophy that offers
a profound challenge to Western forms of liberalism, government and
thought. Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian author of Ma'alim fi al-Tariq
(Signposts on the Road, or Milestones, 1964), condemns an
undifferentiated 'West', and the modern systems of thought that
underpin it, not merely for its imperialism and support for
oppressive Middle Eastern regimes, but for its moral corruption, its
consumerism, and its separation of Church and State; for its
assumption that men not God are sovereign, for its 'rejection of
Allah's sovereignty in favor of a philosophy and epistemology that
claims for humans the right to create values and to legislate rules
for collective behaviour' (Euben 1999, p. 57). In Euben's words:
[Qutb's philosophy] entails a rejection of the Western-inspired
measurement of civilization in terms of material, scientific, and
technological progress. The only civilised community, to Qutb, is
the moral one; real freedom is moral freedom, and true justice is
Islamic justice the authority of science produced by the
Enlightenment worldview has proven incapable of promoting real
progress, that is, moral progress (p. 58).
As Euben shows, Qutb's vision of a society ruled by Sharia and Islam
is deeply essentialist and repressive: a vision of an Islam that is
not subject to 'multiple interpretations' and is allied with an
injunction upon Muslims to wage an ideological and violent jihad (a
holy war) 'to remove the political, social, and economic obstacles
to the establishment of the Islamic community'. Qutb's critique of
the West is sometimes well observed and converges with elements of
critical theory, but is grossly overdetermined, morphing into a
denunciation of all forms of Western thought and non-Islamic state
constitution as jahiliyya, a darker and more unjust form of the
ignorance and hubris of early Islam (Euben 1999, pp. 75, 57).
This effaces the great diversity in modern political, social and
religious thought and the dynamically contested (rather than
unitary) nature of political being and power in many societies. It
creates a vast and dangerous gulf between the Islamic world and its
Other, the West, mirroring on a much larger scale the Schmittian
ontology of the nation-state in terms of the distinction between
friend and enemy (Schmitt 1996, p. 26). Likewise the idea that true
freedom comes with absolute submission of the individual to the
sovereignty of God (in the form of Sharia law) echoes what Isaiah
Berlin found most repressive in Western visions of the social
contract, where individuals lose themselves in the state (Berlin
1998, p. 234, Euben 1999). Qutb fails his own critique, exchanging
one form of hubris for another with similarly repressive potential.
No accident, then, that Euben (1999) comments that 'aspects of his
thought can be compared with fascist thinkers' (p. 126).
Yet this is not to endorse the critiques of US conservatives such as
Daniel Pipes and Francis Fukuyama who, while rightly warning of the
danger and intolerance inherent in radical Islam, use the
term 'Islamofascism' in a highly politicized and self-regarding way
to play down the immediate geopolitical context for al-Qaeda's
campaign and construct Islamism as the demonic Other to a liberal-
democratic West with superior values and civilisation. Worse, the
construct has been used to legitimize repressive and excessively
militaristic policies in the war on terror, which has only confirmed
in a stark and destructive way the basic premises of the Islamist
critique. (Exhibiting a profound normative deafness, in 2002
saying: 'Much as people would like to believe that ideas live or die
as a result inner moral rectitude, power matters a great deal';
Fukuyama 2002, p. 34.).
The policies of the
to new terrorist attacks, but also undermined the public moral
critique of Islamist terrorism and, more deeply, affirmed an image
of the West as a jahili civilisation and a threat to Islam. We may
complain that the moral and strategic picture is far more complex
than they portray it, but this will be virtually impossible to
convey given the binary prism through which Western acts will be
viewed. And self-regarding talk of the superior values of
secularism, representative democracy and free markets (especially
when they are accompanied by attacks on multiculturalism and basic
civil rights) will only make the situation worse. Euben perceptively
points out that Qutb's work demonstrates that there is 'a
transcultural problematic of modernity' which needs careful
analysis, but
accept that modernity might be criticizable. His own theory of the
inexorable advance of liberal American modernity and its dissolution
of local cultural differences beneath a single capitalist horizon is
exactly the target of Qutb's critique of the 'Crusader spirit'
that 'lives on in the seemingly inexorable march of Western
colonization and the cultural hostility it embodies and expresses'
(Euben 1999, pp. 18, 124).
I can only touch on the depth of the challenge here, but the
normative challenge cannot be dissociated from a series of deeper
failures in the liberal West: a failure to dissociate itself from
power-politics and imperialism (realist critiques such as those of
Mearsheimer and Walt (2007) and Walt (2005) are of limited value
here, given their continued investment in the former); a failure to
define and enact a secularism that genuinely respects and entrenches
faith pluralism, and cultivates a dialogue that might create an
enduring architecture of basic shared values; and a failure to build
a just and sustainable vision of cosmopolitan modernity amid
conflict, agonism and diversity.
This last task I regard as being among the most challenging and
important. Given the transnational vision of the Umma in radical
Islamist thought, along with its stance of utter hostility to the
West and non-Islamic forms of government, a non-exclusivistic and
tolerant image of the Umma must be found and connected to a common
global horizon of human existence and plurality. Even as it
transcends state boundaries, Qutb's fundamentalism fails this most
basic ethical test of an irreducibly interconnected world. Like its
preening liberal other,
status even as it seeks, with violence, to enact a deeply
exclusivist moral and political universe. In the face of this, I
venture that neither the institutional structures nor the
philosophical underpinnings of contemporary international society
offer enough answers.
There are some clues to follow, however. Connolly (2005) offers a
profound challenge to rethink visions of secular modernity and the
territorial state in ways that respect the presence of faith in
public life, in a context where many faiths (not just religious)
must coexist and cannot be mapped onto the state or territory as
such.
A basic challenge of ethico-political life in late modern
territorial states is how to negotiate honorable public settlements
in settings where independent partisans confess different
existential faiths and final sources of morality. When that is
acknowledged our attention turns to the task or forging a positive
ethos of engagement between multiple constituencies coexisting on
the same strip of territory [and] into cross-state citizen actions
designed to limit the evils that states do to each other (Connolly
2005, p. 34).
This admirable sensibility must spread further outwards, to a
universalism of concern for human rights and dignity and more
profound reform of global norms and institutions. Given the
transnational spatial existence of the Islamic Umma or the Jewish
Diaspora, and the moral disasters produced by attempts to map
versions of these faiths onto the state, is the exclusively state-
based organization of the United Nations system the most
appropriate? As valuable as the Kantian heritage and moral
philosophy is, might alternative sources of morality and law join
with it to shape and ground global norms? I would also argue that
such a (lets call it postcolonial) cosmopolitanism cannot be
portrayed in Kantian terms as a higher stage of enlightenment and
human development towards maturity. Not only does Immanuel Kant's
teleological philosophy of history deny the agency and sheer effort
required to bring such a cosmopolitan order about, it denies the
ongoing construction and political contestation necessary if it is
not to ossify and become a playground for powerful states. The
normative theory I am advancing here is profoundly materialist
because it insists on the power of examples, interpretations of
worldly actions that have normative impact. My cosmopolitanism too
is grounded and embodied, based not in a vision of European
enlightenment made universal, drawing all civilisations toward a
single horizon of modernity, but in the facts of human
interconnection and mutual vulnerability to nature, the cosmos and
each other.
To succeed, such a cosmopolitanism must be joined with a critique of
violence as a perverse form of instrumental action that so often
fails to link means and ends into an enduring and stable reality.
Contra Clausewitz, Schelling, or bin Laden, hurt is not a strategic
or political tool, and human beings will not tolerate being subjects
of violence and playthings of power.4 All hurt produces is an ever
widening system of disaster. I remain haunted by Achille Mbembe's
disturbing analysis of modern biopolitics and sovereignty as a form
of necropolitics, citing occupied Palestine as one example where the
space of existence has been transformed into a 'death-world' , a 'new
and unique form of social existence in which vast populations are
subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of
living dead'. It is easy then to imagine individuals choosing to
become suicide bombers (and ironically transforming themselves into
instruments of instrumentality in politics) when 'death in the
present is but a moment of vision - vision of the freedom not yet
come' (Mbembe 2003, pp. 39-40).5 Normative progress is supremely
difficult to advance under such conditions, and cosmopolitan visions
of justice and coexistence must seem like cruel and indulgent
dreams. Yet by now it must be clear that neither strategic nor
terrorist violence will provide security or liberation.
Hence, whether or not we can agree on a larger normative vision,
perhaps we can agree on violence. That is, that the desire to
eliminate specifically terrorist forms of violence ought to be the
core normative end of critical terrorism studies. This in turn
brings about the prospect of a further 'end': that of critical
terrorism studies itself, as its object of critique recedes from the
practice of politics, relegating the field to a branch of the
historical sciences. Better that than a terror industry invested in
the continuation of the very horrors that provide it with funding,
prestige and rationality. An honourable 'end' for critical terrorism
studies: to conceive and enable a normative transformation that
might one day see its own abolition.
Notes
1. This analysis is a hybrid of the positions Foucault developed
throughout works such as The Order of Things (1970), The Archaeology
of Knowledge (1972), Discipline and Punish (1977), and The History
of Sexuality Vol. 1 (1979) (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983).
2. The present definition, while independently arrived at, is
similar to that of the report of the UN Secretary-General' s High
Level Panel and adopted by Kofi Annan (Report of the High-level
Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change 2004, p. 52; United Nations
2005, §91 26).
3. Goodin (2006, pp. 1, 37) makes a similar argument that
the 'distinctive wrong' of terrorism is not so much killing and
destruction, but its 'intention to produce fear for socio-political
purposes'.
4. Schelling (1966, p. 2) writes: 'The power to hurt can be counted
among the most impressive attributes of military force it is
measured in the suffering it can cause and the victim's motivation
to avoid it'.
5. Mbembe's arguments are also taken up by Ahluwalia (2004).
References
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__._,_.___
Law and Terrorism: Final Project | |||
| Objective of Project: Complete your oral presentation or 10 page final paper. Use a bibliography and Include three sources. | |||
| Content and Development 190 Points Possible | Points Possible | ||
| The introduction provides sufficient background on the topic and previews major points. | 20 | | |
| The body discusses a resistance, “insurgent”, “terrorist” group. | 40 | ||
| Reviews the history, origins and leadership of the group. | 20 | ||
| Discusses the aims, policies, tactics, weapons and practices of the group. | 20 | ||
| Identifies who benefits and suffers because of the activities. | 20 | ||
| Identifies who supports the groups with money, weapons, training, supplies, etc. | 30 | ||
| Uses specific examples or situations to back up claims using at least three, reliable sources. | 10 | ||
| Sources used are cited within the body of the paper, the slides and in a final reference page or slide. | 10 | ||
| The paper is at least 10 pages. The presentation is 10-15 minutes. | 10 | ||
| Slides provide main points without an over abundance of script. | 10 | ||
| The conclusion is logical, flows from the body of the paper, and reviews the major points. | 20 | ||
| Readability and Style 30 Points Possible | Points Possible | ||
| Sentences are complete, clear and concise. Presentation is not read from text. | 10 | ||
| The presentation is logical and maintains a flow throughout the paper or presentation. | 5 | ||
| The tone is appropriate to the content and assignment. | 5 | ||
| Mechanics 30 Points Possible | Points Possible | ||
| Rules of grammar, usage and punctuation are followed. | 5 | ||
| The paper, includes the title page, reference page, tables, and appendixes. The presentation provides 10-20 well designed slides with a reference slide. | 5 | ||
| Citations of all original works within the body of the paper or slides are provided. | 5 | ||
| Spelling is correct. | 5 | ||
| Total Points | 250 | ||
| Comments and Final Grade | |||