Genealogies of Terrorism

Revolution, State Violence, Empire

Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231547178
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie politique

What is terrorism? What ought we to do about it? And why is it wrong? We think we have clear answers to these questions. But acts of violence, like U.S. drone strikes that indiscriminately kill civilians, and mass shootings that become terrorist attacks when suspects are identified as Muslim, suggest that definitions of terrorism are always contested. In Genealogies of Terrorism, Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson rejects attempts to define what terrorism is in favor of a historico-philosophical investigation into the conditions under which uses of this contested term become meaningful. The result is a powerful critique of the power relations that shape how we understand and theorize political violence.

Tracing discourses and practices of terrorism from the French Revolution to late imperial Russia, colonized Algeria, and the post-9/11 United States, Erlenbusch-Anderson examines what we do when we name something terrorism. She offers an important corrective to attempts to develop universal definitions that assure semantic consistency and provide normative certainty, showing that terrorism means many different things and serves a wide range of political purposes. In the tradition of Michel Foucault's genealogies, Erlenbusch-Anderson excavates the history of conceptual and practical uses of terrorism and maps the historically contingent political and material conditions that shape their emergence. She analyzes the power relations that make different modes of understanding terrorism possible and reveals their complicity in justifying the exercise of sovereign power in the name of defending the nation, class, or humanity against the terrorist enemy. Offering an engaged critique of terrorism and the mechanisms of social and political exclusion that it enables, Genealogies of Terrorism is an empirically grounded and philosophically rigorous critical history with important political implications.

1

THE TROUBLE WITH TERRORISM

DO WE KNOW WHAT WE SEE?

We seem to have a good sense of what terrorism is. We are pretty adept at discriminating between things that are terrorism and things that are not, and we generally know when the term applies and when it does not. Although scholars, lawyers, politicians, and laypeople are unable to agree on a definition of the term, and there are some hard cases in which it is less clear whether something is terrorism, more often than not, we are able to use the term without much difficulty. It seems that our intuitions about what is terrorism and who is a terrorist are so reliable that definitions are unnecessary.

Great Britain’s United Nations representative, Jeremy Greenstock, gave voice to this claim when he famously argued that “there is common ground amongst us all on what constitutes terrorism. What looks, smells and kills like terrorism is terrorism.”1 But it is not obvious that Greenstock is right.

Consider, for example, drone strikes. They certainly look, smell, and kill like terrorism when they are viewed from the perspective of their victims, but they are justified by their perpetrators as military operations intended to end, precisely, terrorism.2 Or take gun violence in the United States. Even though incidents of gun violence are usually described as mass shootings or rampage killings, the identity of the perpetrator gives rise to vastly different descriptions of identical forms of violence. An event in December 2015 in San Bernardino, California, for instance, was initially described as a mass shooting but quickly became an act of terrorism when the suspects were identified as an American citizen of Pakistani parentage and a Pakistani-born permanent resident who had pledged allegiance to Daesh on their Facebook accounts.3

These examples indicate that phenomenally identical actions are perceived rather differently depending on the identity of the perpetrator and the perspective from which these actions are described. They raise doubt about (1) the reliability of phenomenal qualities of certain actions—what they look, smell, and kill like—in determining whether something is terrorism; (2) the “we” whose intuitions are taken to be universally shared; and (3) the idea that the concept terrorism picks out a stable and readily identifiable thing in the world. How, then, ought we to proceed to figure out what terrorism is?

We can identify three general approaches to this question in the academic field of terrorism studies. First, we can explicate the implicit assumptions that underpin the dominant understanding of terrorism expressed, for instance, in Greenstock’s dictum. I call this the descriptive approach. On this view, terrorism is simply the set of actions, conducts, practices, individuals, and other entities to which the term extends, regardless of whether there is, or whether we are able to identify, a property or organizing principle that unites the members of the set we call terrorism. A more critical version of this view insists that attributions of terrorism are biased and that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter, as the saying goes. Consequently, we must provide a fuller survey of the conceptual landscape, attending to a range of dominant and subordinated meanings of the term terrorism. Terrorism, then, is the maximal class of things that have been, are, or could be identified as terrorism.4 Second, we may supplement such descriptive approaches with an attempt to situate terrorism within a taxonomy of political violence. Think of characterizations of terrorism as a form of insurgency as an example of this approach.5 Such a classificatory approach asks whether our vocabulary of terrorism refers to a more general type and provides criteria that distinguish terrorism from other types of political violence. Third, it is possible to stipulate a definition that meets certain desiderata determined by reference to a particular goal. I call this the normative approach. Tamar Meisels explicitly advocates this view as the basis for moral evaluations of terrorism. She notes, “If terminology is to contribute to ethical judgment, the definition itself ought to highlight the characteristic normative category in question.” Meisels further argues that because terrorism is a derogatory term, we must assume that the distinguishing features of terrorism “are bound to be at least objectionable if they are to bear any connection with ordinary speech.”6

Notice, though, that these approaches are only analytically distinct. In practice, there are significant overlaps. For example, much of the literature on terrorism appears to adopt a descriptive approach but actually builds normative judgment into description by virtue of the cases selected for consideration.7 To prevent such manipulative or partisan uses of the term, Anthony Richards advocates for a normative definition of terrorism for critical purposes and suggests an understanding of terrorism as “the use or threat of violence or force with the primary purpose of generating a psychological impact beyond the immediate victims.”8 But although Richards’s proposal is interesting in its own right as an ameliorative project,9 it nevertheless draws attention to a fundamental problem with definitional attempts to determine what terrorism is.10 This is the problem of incorrigible positions, which are unacknowledged suppositions that correlate with a particular epistemic standpoint or cultural system. In short, when we try to determine what terrorism is, our answers are inevitably shaped by unquestioned and implicit assumptions about what we already recognize as terrorism.

To avoid this circularity, this book elaborates a methodology for studying terrorism that is keenly aware of the limitations of our own forms of thought. This method is genealogy, or the study of the empirical—material or discursive—conditions of the emergence of terrorism. Rather than prioritizing or even universalizing contemporary modes of understanding terrorism, genealogy attends to the historically specific conditions under which terrorism emerges, as well as the contextually specific modes of understanding those phenomena we uncritically identify as terrorism. Drawing inspiration from the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault,11 among others, the genealogy developed in this book rests on the premise that an adequate and fruitful account of terrorism must begin with a consideration of the contexts within which terrorism is embedded and becomes meaningful.12

TERRORIST LANGUAGE GAMES

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein likened the process by which we come to understand the meaning of a concept to that of a spectator unfamiliar with the rules of chess trying to figure out what checkmate means by observing a game.13 The spectator, Wittgenstein argued, cannot work this out simply by looking at the move that puts the king in check. No matter how diligently she might study that one move, her observations will tell her little, if anything, about the meaning of checkmate because she knows nothing about the objective of the game and the different moves of the pieces permissible in pursuit of that objective. Knowledge of these things is necessary, however, to understand why the move that puts the king in checkmate amounts to winning the game. Because checkmate is made possible by a series of rules and moves that precede and lead up to the final move, knowing what checkmate means requires us to take account of the context of the game in its entirety. In the same way, Wittgenstein intimated, concepts can be understood only by considering the larger context in which they are used and acquire meaning.

Wittgenstein drew attention to the historicity and contextuality of concepts, to which we must attend if we want to avoid anachronism, an impoverished understanding of historical examples, ideological bias, mere exercises in lexicography, or further obfuscation of an already difficult concept. As Ian Hacking argues, “If one took seriously the project of philosophical analysis, one would require a history of the words in their sites in order to comprehend what the concept was.”14 The crucial methodological implication of these claims is that if we want to understand what terrorism is, we must first determine what the term means, how it functions in a given context, and how it is operationalized as an element in different discursive and nondiscursive practices.

As an illustration of what I have in mind, take the so-called sicarii, a commonly cited early example of terrorism. The sicarii were a religious sect that engaged in resistance against the Roman occupation of Palestine in the first century C.E. According to the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, the sicarii were robbers whose name derived from the weapon they carried, a small curved dagger called a sica. Josephus specifically referred to them as robbers (lēistai) and explained that the term sicarii was “the name for such robbers as had under their bosoms swords called Sicae.”15 Josephus’s precise description of the sicarii suggests that he understood them as a particular type of robbers who could be distinguished from other robbers by reference to their specific weapon. Indeed, Josephus described the sicarii as “another sort of robbers” who emerged in Jerusalem in the 50s C.E.16 Even if the methods used by the sicarii, who were masters of disguise and conducted public and symbolically charged attacks, resemble present-day terrorist methods, describing them as terrorists obscures how they were understood by their contemporaries. Moreover, it privileges our own categories over those used at the time—in my view, without good reason. After all, we do not call al-Qaeda a band of robbers either. What it means to be a robber or a terrorist is determined according to a set of contextually specific norms that give regularity to and thus determine the meaning of the words. Terms like terrorist or robber, in other words, do not refer to a natural kind that exists in the world independently of human thought and practice. Rather, their meaning is conventional and determined by their use within discursive formations.

A number of scholars have drawn attention to the significance of words in disputes about the meaning and interpretation of violent acts, or what they call the politics of naming.17 Michael Bhatia, for instance, argues that in the context of violent conflict, “names, words and discourse are viewed as objective representations of fact” when in fact they are victories in contestations over interpretation. Once a particular interpretation has been established through an act of naming, “the process by which the name was selected generally disappears and a series of normative associations, motives and characteristics are attached to the named subject.” For Bhatia, in other words, names conceal the interests of those doing the naming, as well as the particular perspective that is thereby presented as objective. By rendering objects or phenomena knowable and known in specific ways, names also make possible “certain forms of inquiry and engagement, while forbidding and excluding others.”18 The terrorism label, for instance, serves as a means to deny the legitimacy of some forms of violence while affirming the necessity of others. As a consequence, paying attention to who names, who is named, how names are assigned and contested, and which names stick opens up possibilities for mapping both the discursive terrain and the political landscape on which conflicts over meaning and interpretation take place. In short, names or labels serve as what Foucault calls “analyzers of power relations.”19

To insist that acts of naming something terrorism are impositions of power is not to say that there is no merit at all in conceptual clarity, descriptive or normative definitions of terrorism, or taxonomies of political violence. Rather, it is necessary to emphasize the importance of the complex web of social, political, legal, cultural, and historical practices within which distinctions between what is and what is not terrorism become possible and meaningful. Recall the example of the San Bernardino shooting. It is unhelpful to insist that because the incident fails to meet even some minimal conventionally accepted criteria of terrorism (such as intimidation or coercion of a civilian population or government), the proposition that it is an act of terrorism is false. What is important is that the shooting triggered a variety of sanctions, discourses, practices, beliefs, and judgments that suggest that it was terrorism in the relevant context. It was clear in public discourse that the shooting was an act of terrorism, and law enforcement opened a counterterrorism investigation. Even Daesh claimed that the shooters were “soldiers of the caliphate” acting on behalf of the organization.20 There is no good reason, in my opinion, to privilege particular definitions of terrorism over the understanding operative in social, political, legal, military, and other practices. In fact, if we really want to understand terrorism, we must attend to these practices and examine the role terrorism plays within them.

HOW TERRORISM WORKS: A CASE STUDY

Over the past fifteen years, a growing number of scholars have heeded this insight and have increasingly focused on how terrorism works rather than what it is. Specifically, the transformation of the global political landscape after 9/11 has resulted in a growing and multidisciplinary concern with real-world effects of appeals to terrorism.21 Here I examine the work of two prominent legal theorists, Leti Volpp and Muneer Ahmad, who are part of a larger attempt by critical scholars of race to draw our attention to the centrality of discourses of terrorism in the production of citizenship and national identity through the racialization of terrorism.22 Their contributions are particularly useful because of their focus on the function of terrorism as a mechanism for excluding particular subjects from the social body.

Ahmad’s main claim is that “the hate violence and racial profiling directed against Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians and the apparent African American and Latina/o support for the profiling of these communities provide an important example of how racial positions in the United States have been reordered by September 11, and how the citizenship status of all people of color has been further degraded.”23 He argues that 9/11 engendered a new mode of excluding certain communities from citizenship through the production of a new identity category, the “Muslim-looking person.” Ahmad explains that according to a logic of fungibility, particular phenotypic characterist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Trouble with Terrorism
• 2. The Emergence of Terrorism
• 3. State Terrorism Revisited
• 4. Terrorism and Colonialism
• 5. Reimagining Terrorism at the End of History
• 6. Toward a Critical Theory of Terrorism: Genealogy and Normativity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index