Critical Terrorism Studies at Ten

Contributions, Cases and Future Challenges

Richard Jackson, Harmonie Toros, Lee Jarvis, Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Richard Jackson, Harmonie Toros, Lee Jarvis, Charlotte Heath-Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138318083
• eBook ISBN: 9780429846922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Critical Terrorism Studies emerged around 2007, in the context of the rapidly intensifying War on Terror. It was in this era that "terrorism" became a "growth industry" which generated a huge amount of academic research as well as social and political activity. Yet a yawning gap developed between the actual material threat posed by terrorists, and the level of investment and activity devoted to responding to this threat. Similarly, the quality of terrorism research was noticeably weak and lacking in methodological rigour.

Critical Terrorism Studies set out to explore the exceptional treatment of political violence, to challenge the political manipulation of terrorism fears and increase in draconian anti-terrorism legislation, and to address some of the conceptual and methodological failings of terrorism research.

In the 10 years since the journal Critical Studies on Terrorism was launched, that context and mission remains as important as ever. This volume looks back on the achievements and failures of Critical Terrorism Studies in this period, as well as collecting state of the art research into terrorism discourse, queerness and the War on Terror, the Prevent Strategy, epistemology in terrorism studies, state repression, the ambiguous ends of militant campaigns, the epistemology of preventative counterterrorism, and the question of non-violent responses to terror.

The chapters originally published in a special issue in Critical Studies in Terrorism.

“9/11 is alive and well” or how critical terrorism studies has sustained the 9/11 narrative

Harmonie Toros

ABSTRACT

This article argues that despite engaging in a powerful critique of the construction of the attacks of 11 September 2001 (or “9/11”) as temporal break, critical terrorism scholars have sustained and reproduced this same construction of “9/11”. Through a systematic analysis of the research articles published in Critical Studies on Terrorism, this article illustrates how critical scholars have overall failed to extricate themselves from this dominant narrative, as they inhabit the same visual, emotional and professional landscape as those they critique. After examining how CTS has reproduced but also renegotiated this narrative, the article concludes with what Michel Foucault would describe as an “effective history” of the attacks – in this case, a personal narrative of how the attacks did not constitute a moment of personal rupture but nonetheless later became a backdrop to justify my scholarship and career. It ends with a renewal of Maya Zeyfuss’ call to forget “9/11”.

Introduction

… I slept through 9/11 …

“Pre-9/11”, “post 9/11”, “since 9/11”, “in the wake of 9/11”, “prior to 9/11”, “following 9/11”: No specific day has been quite as ubiquitous in the 21st-century political landscape, and Critical Studies on Terrorism has led the way over the past 10 years in offering a powerful critique of the politics behind this temporal construction. From Richard Jackson (2005) to Lee Jarvis (2008) to Holland and Jarvis (2014), many have in this journal and elsewhere engaged in a thorough investigation of the construction of “9/11” as a temporal marker – primarily one of rupture, but as Jarvis (2008, 246) argues, also one of temporal linearity and timelessness. As they have demonstrated, this construction serves to justify a violent counterterrorism response and delegitimise other possible responses such as negotiations and dialogue (Jackson 2005), creates “9/11” as a cause (of the war on terror) that itself is uncaused (Zeyfuss 2003), and silences or attempts to silence any alternative reading of the attacks. “9/11” exemplifies the observation made by Meir Sternberg (1990, 902) that “[t]he and-then form avoids you having to ask the ‘why?’ question.”

This article aims both to further this already rich literature and to challenge it. It aims to further it by drawing on historiographical research on the production of chronologies across the centuries and their political implications, particularly focusing on how chronologies have been used as an extension of hegemonic power – that is, by extending sovereignty over lands that adopt the hegemon’s chronology. If, as Rowlandson (2015, 20) argues, definitions are “really a debate about who owns the words”, then chronologies are really a debate about who owns time. By successfully spreading a “9/11” timeline or chronology on the world, the US administration then led by President George W. Bush and sustained by western political leaders since has effectively extended western sovereignty over global time.

In part two, the article goes further to examine how, despite CTS’ critique of the construction of “9/11” as a temporal marker, many CTS scholars have actually adopted this very same construction. Through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of every research article published by this journal since its inception in 2008 (totaling 219), this article will show how the CTS subfield has sustained and reproduced the narrative of “9/11” as the opening of a new era. I will argue that this has two origins. First, it reflects the fact that CTS scholars are part of the same visual, emotional and professional landscape as mainstream international relations (IR), security and terrorism scholars. They are thus vulnerable to the same perceptive dispositions that Pierre Bourdieu (1977) calls habitus. The article thus challenges the construction of CTS as “exceptional” or immune to mainstream habitus. Second, I will argue that while internalising this construction, CTS scholars renegotiated its understanding into a different temporal rupture from that put forward by the dominant “9/11” narrative. Indeed, rather than arguing that on “9/11” a relatively peaceful and orderly world was forever changed by this “new threat” called terrorism (particularly of the radical Islamic kind), CTS scholars collectively have constructed a narrative in which the “pre-9/11” world was to be sure violent but was progressively inching towards less violence. It has been replaced by a “post-9/11” world in which states have given up the pretense of progress and more openly embraced violent logics and practices. The section will conclude with why such a construction remains problematic.

The final section of this article will offer what Michel Foucault (1984, 89) calls an “effective history”, that is, a history that “shortens its vision to those things nearest to it – the body, nervous system, nutrition, digestion, and energies.” Through a personal history of “9/11” – from my lived experience in New York City on the day of the attacks to its construction as a temporal marker in my life – this final section aims to offer an illustration of how what was lived as a moment of continuity on a personal level was later constructed, through an internalisation of the dominant narrative, as a marker of temporal rupture. This final section aims to make me “the target of my words” (Inayatullah 2010, 2), but also offers a modest counter-narrative that may become a “kind of dissociating view that is capable of shattering the unity of man’s being through which it was thought that he could extend his sovereignty to the events of the past” (Foucault 1984, 87). In the conclusion, the article will renew Maja Zeyfuss’ (2003) appeal to forget “9/11”, arguing that it will make us better teachers and more coherent critical scholars.

“9/11” as temporal rupture and the extension of sovereign power over time

A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. (Aristotle 1902, 31)

As Holland and Jarvis (2014, 194–195) effectively argue, “9/11” came to be near universally adopted following a “sustained attempt” by the Bush administration soon after the attacks “to construct the date of 11 September 2001 as a marker of crisis and historical discontinuity.”¹ From George W. Bush’s assertion that “night fell on a different world” (quoted in Holland and Jarvis 2014, 194) to then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s characterisation of that day as “a day like no other we have ever experienced” (quoted in Jarvis 2008, 246), the administration successfully called upon the US public and beyond to mark the memory as a fundamental break not only in the life of the United States as a nation, or in international politics more broadly, but in their own lives. As noted by Maja Zeyfuss (2003, 514), when Bush told his public that “each of us will remember what happened that day”, what he was saying was “nothing as it was before” (ibid., 525). Thus, “[b]efore anyone really had time to think about what it all means, about what, if anything, we should do, September 11 had already been turned into a symbol, into a watershed” (ibid.). US administration officials, relayed by other political figures across the world, “inserted a politically driven narrative” into the “void of meaning” (Jackson 2005, 31) that immediately succeeded the attacks so that “9/11” would become “known as a horrible defining date in history” (Baker quoted in Jackson 2005, 33).

This had several functions. Importantly, and in line with Aristotle’s understanding of the functions of a beginning in a narrative, “9/11” was turned into “the root, the cause, the origin” (Zeyfuss 2003, 520) – a cause that crucially was uncaused. In this narrative,² any relationship between previous US policies and the attacks was eliminated, making “9/11” a simple act of evil whose perpetrators needed to be destroyed:

It was as if nothing had ever happened before … In other words, the events of September 11 are the ‘cause’ of its policies today. We may not, however, ask how we got there lest we be disrespectful of the dead. (Zeyfuss 2003, 520)

This construction allowed the US administration to delegitimise any questioning or even reference to the decades of violent US policy in the Middle East and elsewhere. They were irrelevant, as they had not caused the attacks, and mentioning them became an unpatriotic attempt to justify these callous acts (see also Jackson 2005).

Importantly, this watershed narrative was extremely effective in both legitimising the actions of states domestically and internationally, and in delegitimising dissenting voices. Jackson (2005) argues that the “war on terror” was written as the only natural and just response to the attacks: “[o]ne of the purposes of constructing a myth of exceptional grievance is to divest the nation of the moral responsibility for counter-violence” (ibid., 36). On the other hand, alternative non-violent responses were delegitimised. As George W. Bush (quoted in Toros 2012, 163) said in 2003, “the only way to deal with these people is to bring them to justice. You can’t talk to them, you can’t negotiate with them.” Thus, the “9/11” narrative as a moment of temporal rupture sustained policies of violent counter-terrorism the world over and undermined those working toward non-violent responses. Furthermore, this narrative not only dominated political circles but was also adopted by mainstream terrorism and security studies. To quote but a few, Hoffman (2006, 22), one of the most cited terrorism scholars, speaks of the “chain of events that began on 9/11”; Wilkinson (2011, 9), in his later edition of Terrorism vs Democracy: The Liberal State Response, writes that “the 9/11 suicide hijacking attacks … had a colossal effect not only on US foreign and security policy and public opinion. They had a major influence on international relations, the US and international economy and on the patterns of conflict in the Middle East.”

Many of the arguments on the political implications of the “9/11” narrative as a moment of temporal rupture have thus already been made. Here, however, I wish to argue that the overall effect of the “9/11” temporal narrative and of its near universal adoption was an extension of US hegemony over world time. To support this argument, it is useful to draw on historiographical work on how the establishment of eras and chronologies has historically been a means to extend sovereign power over other territories. Masayuki Sato’s (1991, 290) analysis of East Asian chronologies and the establishment of eras linked to new dynasties stresses how the adoption by other states of the new era name represented the extension of sovereign power:

It became normal practice in international relations that a country under the suzerainty of another country should use the era name of the suzerain country. This shows that an era name was a mirror reflecting the realities themselves, going beyond the sphere of symbol. (Sato 1991, 290)

In another example, the near universal adoption of the Christian Gregorian calendar with the fundamental rupture built around the birth of Jesus Christ can be seen as part of Christian and Western hegemonic extension (Sato 1991; Mazrui 2001). For Ali Mazrui (2001, 15), it is a sign that “an informal cultural empire is born, hegemony triumphant”:

Many countries in Africa and Asia have adopted wholesale the Western Christian calendar as their own. They celebrate their independence day according to the Christian calendar, and write their own history according to Gregorian years, using distinctions such as before or after Christ. Some Muslim countries even recognize Sunday as the day of rest instead of Friday. In some cultures, the entire Islamic historiography has been reperiodized according to the Christian calendar instead of the Hijjra.

Indeed, very few countries have not adopted the BC/AD or BCE/CE time frame, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, which can be seen as much as an insistence in maintaining their cultural and religious heritage as a rejection of Western hegemony over their time.

Similarly, one can argue that the establishment and spread of the “9/11” era – best represented by the common use of “pre-” and “post-9/11” – is a discursively hegemonic move that extends US sovereignty over time frames outside the United States. Thus, “9/11” was not only a turning point for the United States, but a global one. Examples of this can be found in government statements the world over. Manuel Valls, then French interior minister, noted in a key speech on the reform of the French intelligence services that they had to keep their focus on the terrorism threat, beginning a list of attacks that “remain in the collective memory” with the 11 September 2001 attacks,³ disregarding attacks by al Qaeda in Paris in 1996. The key UK counterterrorism CONTEST (2011, 15) strategy document concludes its Executive Summary by stating that “[i]nternational counter-terrorism work since 9/11 has made considerable progress in reducing the threats we face” – forgetting the decades of British counterterrorism work in Northern Ireland. From 2001 to 2006, 14 African countries passed counterterrorism legislation in what is seen as a “largely externally-driven” (Knudsen 2015) push by the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee and donor governments following “United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1373 calling on member states to become party to all relevant international conventions on terrorism and to enact the necessary domestic legislation to enforce these agreements” (Whitaker 2007, 1018). Even the prime minister of the small island state of Barbados, with an extremely low terrorism threat, spoke of the need to devise a growth strategy in the “post 9/11” world.⁴

Thus, I argue that the narrative of “9/11” as a moment of temporal rupture does more than legitimise violent counterterrorism policies and legislation, delegitimise non-violent responses such as negotiation and dialogue, and silence dissenting voices. It ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: 10 years of Critical Studies on Terrorism
• 1. “9/11 is alive and well” or how critical terrorism studies has sustained the 9/11 narrative
• 2. Interpretation, judgement and dialogue: a hermeneutical recollection of causal analysis in critical terrorism studies
• 3. “The terrorist”: the out-of-place and on-the-move “perverse homosexual” in international relations
• 4. Beyond binaries: analysing violent state actors in Critical Studies
• 5. “Academics for Peace” in Turkey: a case of criminalising dissent and critical thought via counterterrorism policy
• 6. The geography of pre-criminal space: epidemiological imaginations of radicalisation risk in the UK Prevent Strategy, 2007–2017
• 7. Prevention, knowledge, justice: Robert Nozick and counterterrorism
• 8. How terrorism ends – and does not end: the Basque case
• 9. CTS, counterterrorism and non-violence
• Index