Researching Terrorism, Peace and Conflict Studies

Ioannis Tellidis, Harmonie Toros

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317697893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Terrorismus

This book examines potential synergies between the fields of Terrorism Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies.

The volume presents theoretically- and empirically-informed contributions, which shed light on whether the two fields can inform each other on issues of mutual interest and importance. The book examines key themes including the conceptualisation(s) of peace and violence; the exceptionalisation of terrorist violence; the relationship between scholarship and political power; the dysfunctionality of the liberal peace and the opportunities offered by post-liberal peacebuilding frameworks; and the implications and challenges of cyber-terrorism and cyber-conflict. Furthermore, the book intends to be a launching pad for future debate on whether the recent 'critical' turn in terrorism studies can offer a pathway for peace studies to engage with the so far largely ignored question of power.

Consisting of not only key scholars but also practitioners and policy makers, the contributors present a number of case studies, including Colombia, Northern Ireland, the Basque Country, and Iraq, where they explore the relationships between terrorism and peace and conflict approaches. They critically analyse the statist approach inherent in both terrorism approaches and liberal peacebuilding frameworks; the role of the grassroots levels of society; the inefficiency of simplistic frameworks of understanding and implementation; and the chains of governance from international (and transnational) actors to national actors and finally from national to local actors.

This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism studies, peace and conflict studies, IR and security studies.

1
Researching terrorism, peace and conflict

An introduction

Ioannis Tellidis

Whenever the question ‘should we negotiate with terrorists?’ is asked, the answers it receives are often based on moral and ethical instinct. Why would someone negotiate with people who have no regard of human life, killing innocent civilians in their attempt to reach whatever their goal is? Negotiation implies giving them the attention they crave as well as legitimising them as actors, and their agendas. Yet, the cases of Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement, the negotiations between the Spanish government and Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, those between the Sinhalese government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the current negotiations between governments and armed groups in the Philippines and Colombia show that governments are more often engaged in negotiations than not. In fact, between 1968 and 2008 as Jones and Libicki (2008: 18–19) have shown, more terrorist groups ended because they entered politics and abandoned violence, than they did through policing and leadership decapitation. What is more, just like victory of terrorist organisations is a rare event, military confrontation has equally rarely succeeded in contributing to the groups’ ends.

The latter, however, is the knee-jerk reaction of every government faced with terrorism. From paramilitary clandestine groups to torture, rendition and secret courts, states choose to confront terrorist organisations often with the same indiscriminate and extra-judicial violence in order to protect the security of the state. In so doing, they undermine human security even further either by blocking efforts that seek a durable and sustainable peace, or by reinforcing the exclusionary normative systems on which most liberal states rest. With regards to the former, for example, proscription has been shown to be one such policy that not only undermines but also criminalises the work of peacebuilders and conflict resolution practitioners involved in engaging armed groups in a peace process (Haspeslagh 2013). With regards to the latter, the combination of liberal peacebuilding practices and orthodox understandings of terrorism reify the state as the referent object and neglect the root sources of conflict, the result of which is peace-as-state-security rather than peace-as-social-justice (Richmond and Tellidis 2012).

The aim of this edited volume is to investigate, theoretically and empirically, whether the two fields can inform each other on issues of mutual interest and importance, thus strengthening both research and praxis. Common themes that allow for an interconnection between the two fields are the conceptualisation(s) of peace and violence; the exceptionalisation of terrorist violence and its effect on the resolution or perpetuation of the conflict; the ontological and epistemological status of security; the understandings of asymmetry; the relationship between international, national and local actors in their contextual environments; the relationship between scholarship and political power; the dysfunctionality of the liberal peace and the opportunities offered by post-liberal (Richmond 2012) peacebuilding frameworks; and the implications and challenges of cyberterrorism and cyber-conflict. For instance, how can terrorism research benefit from Peace Studies frameworks and their insights on how (and when) to engage and negotiate with armed groups? Similarly, in what ways can Terrorism Studies and their insights on armed groups’ splintering help peace theory and praxis when it comes to engaging with said groups? To this end, this introductory chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book by clarifying the terminology and providing a brief overview of the relevant literatures. The first and second parts of the chapter explore the conceptualisations of terrorism and peace respectively, while the third part outlines the remaining structure of the book.

Separating terrorism from conflict

‘But isn’t terrorism part of conflict?’ This question by a student of mine several years ago seems to encapsulate the aim of this book. Although terrorism has been consistently identified as a method in the last forty years by scholars (Walter 1969; Leach 1977; Groom 1978; Laqueur 1986; Wilkinson and Stewart 1987; Schmid and Jongman 1988; Weinberg et al. 1992; Hoffman 1992; Malik 2000; Wilkinson 2001; Bjørgo 2005; Schmid 2011; Stampnitzky 2013) and policymakers (Brzezinski 2007), and despite the heightened multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research on the topic following 9/11, terrorism has turned into an autonomous discipline, despite contrary observations (Schorkopf 2004; Wilkinson in Silke 2004: 27). Crucial to this were the events of 11 September 2001, and the urgency of policymakers to understand the reasons and motivations behind the magnitude of such an attack, and combat future attempts. Yet, as Sageman (2014) points out, this was done in a manner that favoured sensationalist approaches – rather than rigorous academic research – as well as political motivations that advanced specific political agendas. The ongoing war on terror ‘stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue’ (Brzezinski 2007).

Such political attitudes had a severe effect on the relationship between scholars and policymakers. Much too often, researchers who sought to understand terrorists’ motives, ideologies and even grievances were accused of sympathising with terrorists (Zulaika and Douglass 1996; Silke 2004; Richardson 2006; Zulaika 2012; Stampnitzky 2013). As it was put to me personally in a conference in Spain a few years ago, I should be careful about my ‘attempts to defend terrorism’. In her seminal work tracing the emergence of terrorism expertise, Stampnitzky argues that in the wake of 9/11 the field is characterised by a politics of anti-knowledge, that is, ‘the outcome of the construction of both “terrorism” and “terrorists” as evil and irrational’ (2013: 189). The implications of this political discourse is that any attempt to understand something ‘evil’ would be seen as efforts to justify it or even sympathise with it; similarly, something ‘irrational’ cannot be explained or understood rationally (ibid.: 191). This may partly explain the reasons why the majority of research outputs continue to refuse to analyse and comprehend manifestations of terrorism within its concrete socio-political contexts (Leach 1977; Crenshaw 1995; della Porta 1995; Zulaika and Douglass 1996; Irvin 1999; Gunning 2009; Sluka 2009; Toros and Gunning 2009). Had they done so, such ontological and epistemological approaches would have facilitated terrorism’s analysis from a conflict-theory point of view (Richmond 2003) and would have, perhaps, limited the statist tendencies with which most traditional studies have approached the subject – and continue to do so.

Focusing on the state as the referent object that needs to be secured poses greater problems for an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon. For example, the readiness with which the label ‘terrorist’ has been used in the post-9/11 era by various administrations is indicative of the effort to prevent or marginalise debates about structural causes of conflict (Richmond and Franks 2009). Of equal importance is the fact that there exist many ‘terrorisms’ (Crenshaw 1992) – hence the need for contextualisation that should be inherent in every study on terrorism – as well as the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon discourse(s) and research on terrorism (Ranstorp 2007: 10). These are far more significant obstacles than the lack of, or the need for, a unanimous definition, which insinuates that other social phenomena are more easily defined (Toros and Tellidis 2013: 2). The ontology of the state and its role as the actor that calls the shots are perfectly encapsulated in Renner and Spencer’s study, in which they argue that although reconciliation is an accepted norm following instances of state oppression and state terror, ‘it has rarely been considered an option let alone a norm’ in conflicts involving sub-state terror (2012: 1). The emergence of Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) sought to rectify this skewed focus and re-address the role of the state both in its use of political violence as well as in the political labelling of violence and the production of ‘knowledge’ in Terrorism Studies (Jackson 2009). Although such criticality is evident in earlier anthropological (Leach 1977; Zulaika and Douglass 1996; Sluka 2009) and social movement studies (della Porta 1995; Irvin 1999; Gunning 2009) that ‘de-exceptionalise[d] terrorism by conceptualising it as part of a wider, evolving spectrum of movement tactics’ (Gunning 2009: 157), CTS has helped broaden and deepen the field’s assumptions and issues when it comes to research on terrorism (Toros and Gunning 2009). Moving away from Coxian problem-solving approaches is certainly beneficial for a renewed production of knowledge, and instrumental in re-situating terrorism within the field of Peace and Conflict Studies – although, as the next section will show, this latter group of theories also engaged methodologically and epistemologically in problem-solving approaches.

Peace after terrorism?

Ontologically, peace has always been conceived of either as the absence of war, or a utopian situation that is impossible to achieve. While realist theories point to the human conditions of selfishness and aggression that distil into state behaviour, the unattainability of peace lies also in the misconception that governability frameworks conceived in the West can be thought of as having universal applicability. These usually rest on liberal and neo-liberal pillars such as sovereignty (and therefore territorial security), governance (and therefore power-oriented) and the free market (and therefore unjust). This misconception leads to the epistemological fallacy that such frameworks can be applied to virtually all conflict and post-conflict settings through the creation of institutions and systems, which will then generate the necessary conditions for an ideal peace. However, as it has been noted repeatedly during the last two decades of research into peacebuilding, the liberal paradigm is prone to ignoring or even sidelining the contextual particularities of conflicts, because it is applied in a ‘one-size-fits-all’ fashion whereby policies are executed top-down and operate inside exclusionary normative frameworks (Lederach 1997; Bleiker 2000; Duffield 2001; Clark 2001; Paris 2004; Richmond 2007; Jabri 2007; Pugh et al. 2008; Mac Ginty 2011; Richmond 2012). As such, and because of their excessive focus on the security of the state through the imposition of power structures, peacebuilding processes fail to empower the grass roots and take full advantage of the role they can play in the transformation of conflict. What is more, this type of top-down, state-security-oriented politics tend to make the liberal peace quite dysfunctional and contradictory when it encounters negative responses and reactions from local populations (Mac Ginty 2011), which it frames as counter-productive rather than as inputs into processes of change and transformation (Kappler 2014).

In certain cases, rejection or resistance to these imposed peacebuilding processes will take place through violence. These are usually the cases that also make it to the news, under such headings as ‘terrorists’, ‘insurgents’, ‘revolutionaries’ and others. Rarely does one hear about those marginalised sections of society that have been caught in the middle of the violent power-plays exercised by the ‘top’ (nationals and internationals) and the ‘bottom’ (the local insurgents, ‘terrorists’, etc.). This is not because these segments – the ones that most need peace and in whose name, ironically, peace processes are initiated – are voiceless. Rather, as noted earlier, it is because the frameworks in which powerful international and national actors operate when it comes to peacebuilding, conceal the needs, wants and demands of these segments, even when they act in good faith (Lyotard 1988: xi).

Such skewed focus that tends to assume that human security can only be achieved through a secure state is not entirely inexplicable. The field of International Relations was always focused on security and the expectation of violence the term carries (Huysmans 1998), even though peace has been its main pre-occupation ever since its inception. Consider as example the United Nations, an institution that was born with the explicit purpose ‘to maintain international peace and security’ (United Nations 1945: 3): the absence of ‘peace’ from the name of one of its highest organs, the ‘Security Council’, is indicative of the mind-frame in which responding to war has become more prominent than (pro)actively fomenting peace. As Buzan put it, ‘[t]he concept of peace emphasises both the international system as a whole, and individuals as its ultimate building blocks, at the expense of states, and emphasises the dynamic of harmony at the expense of that of conflict’ (1984: 110). The fact that we never thought of, wrote or talked about peace in the same way as we have done about violence and war (Richmond 2008a; Dower 2009) may have aided analogous attitudes and behaviours. As Gittings (2012) has pointed out, our students will readily identify Thucydides and Hobbes as the forefathers of realist politics but are clueless about these writers’ preoccupations with peace. Similarly, although Erasmus was writing at the same time as Machiavelli, it is the latter’s writings that feature prominently in International Relations course syllabi.

Despite the fact that in the late 1960s and early 1970s scholars were calling for more critical stands in peace research that would not be ‘identical with those of existing institutions and […] the rich and powerful nations’ (Schmid 1968: 221), or ‘persons, groups and institutions perceived as powerful’ (Caroll 1972: 605), it was not until recently that a solid scholarly movement for the formation and establishment of a Critical Peace Research agenda has taken place (Jutila et al. 2008). The first step in researching ‘peace’ should be that it is yet another essentially contested concept that is part of various discourses, narratives and specific theories. As such, it is not much different from ‘terrorism’ and the urge to frame it as a problem whose solution must be imposed. Of particular significance to ‘terrorism’, as it is understood, framed and conceptualised by orthodox theories, is critical peace agenda’s aim to do away with the dichotomies imposed by the liberal-realist paradigm. This will allow for a re-envisioning of ‘peace as a cacophonic and cluttered terrain of political struggle, denoted by multi-layered and discontinuous sites of emergence (Shinko 2008: 490). This will be possible by unearthing the role that the subaltern and the everyday could have in peace processes. As such, it bridges earlier calls for research agendas that would focus on ‘the power and competence of the allegedly powerless’ (Reid and Yanarella 1976: 326) or, as Caroll (1972: 605) would have put it, to move away from the blinding light and into the unexplored darkness. It reaffirms its duty to go beyond solving the problem of war and violence and introduce more interdisciplinary understandings of the diverse concepts, perceptions and dimensions of peace. It places a much needed emphasis on pluralist ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies that ‘should be broadly representative of all actors at multiple levels, public and private, gendered and age, and of multiple identities’ (Richmond 2008b: 462).

It is easy to see why, when breaking away from traditionalist approaches...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Researching terrorism, peace and conflict: an introduction
• PART I Theoretical debates
• PART II Case studies
• Conclusion
• Index