Responding to Terrorism

Political, Philosophical and Legal Perspectives

Robert Imre, T. Brian Mooney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317064862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Terrorism and political violence as a field is growing and expanding. This volume provides a cross-disciplinary analysis - political, philosophical and legal - in a single text and will appeal to readers interested in studying this phenomenon from all perspectives. The volume covers the full spectrum of issues, including torture, terrorism causes and cures, legal issues, globalization and counter-terrorism. The authors bring their individual specialities to the fore in a concise and easy to follow format. Comprehensive and well informed, Responding to Terrorism will appeal to a variety of disciplines including sociology, politics, security studies, philosophy, international law and religious studies. The originality of the volume makes it a valuable addition to any college or university library and classroom.

Chapter 1
Terrorism: Causes and Cures

1.1 The Socio-politics of Terror: Poverty, Evil, Statecraft and Modernity

Rob Imre

In this part of the chapter I challenge the notion that we can discover simplistic cause and effect relationships between and among socio-political phenomenon. This means that the ‘vulgar social science’ approach is not a great deal of use in terms of attempting to understand the motivations of terrorists as individuals or as groups. I have done this by using four categories that are of interest to political theorists and social scientists. In the first section I analyze the idea of poverty and claim that terrorism might develop in areas of the world stricken by poverty, but there needs to be a number of other socio-political factors involved before ‘poor’ people are radicalised enough to resort to political and/or religious violence. I then analyze the concept of evil in our (post)modern age and claim that evil has no place in terrorist activity: neither in understanding nor in halting such political and/or religious violence since we are decades beyond the banalization of the idea. Thirdly, I also claim that one of the problems with liberal democracies is that they have lost the value of statecraft. Statecraft has been replaced by ‘spin’, cynical diplomacy, and has little to do with visionary solutions to some of the grave problems facing the globe. Finally, I argue that the modern nation-state and its relationship to politics from the end of the 1800s until today and probably into the near future will continue to foster and develop both religious and political terrorism. The homogeneous sets of categories social scientists sometimes use leave us with a kind of ‘groupism’ according to Rogers Brubaker (2004) in which the multi-layered identities of individuals are placed into groups and are thus claimed to operate with degrees of exclusionism. It is with this part of this chapter that I frame later more specific treatments of terrorism and it is thus that I claim that looking for systematic cause and effect might not be altogether enough to do away with the violence.

In this part, I examine the social and political context of the phenomenon of terrorism. My contribution to this chapter is concerned with treating terrorism as a dynamic and constantly shifting phenomenon that can be contextualized, that can be examined as a phenomenon with countervailing social forces, and as a political problem that we can situate in the midst of the politics of particular nation-states and (non-exclusive) groups within those nation-states. In doing so, it leads us to a number of analytical questions about terrorism including, but not limited to, the following set of problems. Can terrorism be grounded in a particular set of cause and effect relationships? If we examine political and sociological contexts, will we somehow end up with a series of causes that show specific linkages and then take us through to specific end-points? This is a broad topic and could lead to any number of things about terrorism. For example, one of the major issues is the so-called Islamic fundamentalist phenomenon.1 There are also political problems such as the failure of the United States and its major European allies to understand the implications of the Iranian Revolution and the politics leading up to the 1979 revolution. First, the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) aiding in the demise of the Iranian leader Mossadeq in 1953 and bringing back the ‘Shah’ and then looking the other way when the Shah begins to treat his people so poorly; and secondly the Carter administration being forced out of office largely due to the failure to gain the release of hostages held in Iran immediately following the revolution. The first example offers a kind of demonstration of the demise of statecraft thesis: placing short-term economic and strategic concerns above long-term strategies. The second example about Carter shows the change in the nature of terrorism and terrorist forces by offering a new kind of approach beyond the typical bomb-lobbing campaigns that dominated the landscape from the Russian anarchists of the turn of the 20th century to the IRA bombers in the post-World War II period. It makes hostage-taking and negotiation the way forward for terrorist organizations and it delivers the Reagan administration the reasons for secretly dealing in arms trading with right-wing groups in Latin America and other parts of the world.2 This is one of the indications of the change in terrorist tactics at this particular time.

However I should like to discuss causes and cures of terrorism as a socio-political phenomenon in broad terms in order to discover any potential links with the big causes and possible effects. As mentioned above I shall discuss the effects of poverty, the question of evil, address the demise of statecraft as a problem for recent governments, and examine the problem of the modern nation-state.

Poverty

This is a socio-political problem that has been with us throughout the ages, but in the modern period we see a different kind of character develop with poverty. What I mean by this is to say that poverty is not the result of regions of the world that are somehow disconnected or separated from the rest of the world. In fact, as we see modernity develop, we also see greater and greater connections with varieties of people from around the world. Poverty might be considered as a part of the emerging global social order in the post-Cold War world.3 We see multinational corporations with the capacity to spread their products everywhere, we see televisions with the capacity to spread their messages of prosperity and consumerism, and we also see the closing of national borders and the attempts to limit and demonize the movement of migrants. Poverty then inherits the liberal notion of individual responsibility in a kind of warped way in which liberal democracies now have the capacity to reinforce divisions among nation-states to such an extent that we can actually blame the poor and get away with it! In a kind of neo-Dickensian version of our understanding of poverty, globalization delivers the ultimate tautology for poverty. People are poor because they are poor.

What I mean by this is that if we are all operating within some version of a globalized liberal democratic/capitalist paradigm, then it becomes easy to claim that people living in the Global South are poor in terms of their gross incomes compared to the Global North, their lower wages buy more, and their lives are also less complicated. This is incorrect on at least three fronts. First, purchasing power parity indices tell us something else: the poor in the Global South are still quite badly off.4 Secondly, the ‘lives less complicated’ argument, or in more colloquial terms those living in the Global South are often referred to by tourists as being ‘poor but happy’, is clearly an argument about the powerless delivered by the powerful in the contemporary global world. And thirdly, being poor in the Global South, or anywhere else, is most often not a matter of choice. As such the only pathway out of this problem for a large number of the global population is through migration which is made increasingly more difficult in the post-Cold War period.

In today’s globalized context we are left with a situation in which people are poor, they know they are poor because the global media outlets tell them so, and they seek to change their circumstances and move in to non-poverty. This leads to all kinds of conflicts in which the struggle for power in nation-states in the Global South can be directly related to their attempts to climb out of poverty. But the question here is: does this directly cause terrorism? Do various groups, mired in grinding poverty, seek political violence that will overthrow a given political order? And will these various groups couple this protest with religion thus adding a spiritual dimension to their struggle and as a result complicating possible responses? Would we have the types of madrasses that we do, which are very different from similar South Asian institutions of pre-partition India, if this grinding poverty did not exist in South Asia and if various Arab groups from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, among others, were not exploiting this misery? Would we have the continual cycle of genocidal violence that exists around the world if we did not have the huge amount of arms shipments from the producers in the Global North to consumers in the Global South, who are trying to shore up their scarce resources against perceived local threats? And if the citizens and the denizens of those nation-states in the Global South were able to meet their basic needs of food, clean water, shelter, clothing, freedom from disease, freedom from oppression and so on, then would we have political problems with violence, terrorism, and religious terrorism/violence that we do today?

These linkages certainly do exist but this does not necessarily mean that there is a direct cause and effect relationship between poverty and the contemporary problem of terrorism. It does mean that it provides an important ideological justification for terrorism if terrorist groups can identify themselves as victims of the modern globalization process that is driven by wealthy Global North nation-states. This means, of course, that terrorists need not be living in poverty themselves, but need only identify with the victimization. Some of the most intractable conflicts in the contemporary world, and the modern period, have little to do with a situation in which groups of people are kept poor relative to their co-nationals or co-religionists. But if we look at this as a human security issue, we can see a somewhat different problem emerging (Thomas 2000). There is also an all too obvious ethical dimension to this problem that I am deliberately steering away from: the claim that there should be a normative challenge to getting rid of poverty. My examination here is somewhat different in that I am asking about direct links to political violence.

In treating this as a human security issue and examining a set of concerns that link poverty to a greater global security concern, human security has become one of the leading paradigms in political science. According to this view, there are a set number of types of ‘non-traditional’ security problems that are usually also transnational problems (Terriff et al. 2003). The typical sorts of problems are grouped into categories that involve the environment, access to education, health care, clean water, and a regular food supply. And most human security analysts agree that we need to ensure human security of all kinds. We have the means and the capacity to do so, and yet we do not. There is easily enough food on the planet in this globalized era, easily enough money around to cure major Global South diseases like malaria but we’d rather spend it on Viagra, and we’d rather accept the corporate argument that we need to patent seeds that can only be used in one growing season and need massive amounts of chemicals to support their growth because ‘the world needs cheaper food’. This is not the case. The world has plenty of food. We just don’t let everyone eat. We can argue about who gets which cars and who gets the big TV screens after everyone gets fed and has access to drinking water and the basic necessities of life. All of which is completely possible under current objective world conditions. Poverty continues to be the great breeding ground of terrorism and provides justification for some terrorist movements around the world but we still cannot make an objective link between the two. Most especially displaced groups living in refugee camps such as the Palestinians in Jordan, who were exiled again as the new king of Jordan pressed them out of that territory so the double scattering of peoples has moved already radicalized Palestinians to Lebanon, Syria and Iran, and eventually some significant numbers to participate in the violence in Iraq. Eliminating poverty, ensuring that human security at all levels exist – that is to say: we have clean water, proper sanitation, and indeed equal life-chances for everyone – will go a long way to eliminate specific terrorist threats around the globe. But this is not proof nor is it a necessary, nor a sufficient condition for the development of terrorism and terrorist groups. Poverty cannot guarantee radicalisation, nor must it be present in order to see radicalization occur.

There is another underlying problem here when we talk about poverty. There is an assumption that greater poverty equates with less political power. With the spread of globalization, the definition of power itself changes in a number of ways (Haugaard 2002). Competing ideas about the role of the nation-state in the increasingly transnational world are dealt with later on in this part of the chapter and here I am concerned with this notion of links between radicalizing people who are relatively poor to the point where they are ready to use violent means to change their circumstances. An interesting way to conceptualize this part of the poverty problem is to examine the political circumstances of Indigenous peoples around the world. For example, if we compare the Canadian context with New Zealand and Australia, we see that there are relatively higher levels of political protest in New Zealand from Maori groups, principally about land issues, and from specific First Nations peoples in Canada. Some groups in Canada, such as the Inuit in the Nunavut territory, have a version of self-government and as such no longer participate in protests against the government: they are the government and have the same status as any other provincial/territorial government in the federal system of Canada. Other First Nations/Indigenous groups in Canada do not enjoy the same level of autonomy and some have engaged in violent stand-offs with various levels of government in Canada and have taken their protests further than the Maori in New Zealand. The Mohawks at Kahnasatake, for example have blockaded territory, fired guns to warn police away from their territory, and have given demands to the provincial government. Other groups in Canada have done similar things in recent years in Caledonia, Ontario, Oka, Quebec, and other parts of the country.

By contrast, there are very few organized protests, little political rebellion and certainly no violent resistance that might be considered ‘terrorist’ coming from Indigenous/Aboriginal groups in two other nation-states that serve to illustrate this point. In Norway and in Australia, we see Indigenous groups who are at the opposite ends of the poverty scale in terms of basic social indicators used by sociologists as well as any political science category we might choose to employ. For example, education levels (as an end result), access to education at all levels (in terms of state provisions), health care as in institutional access, general health levels, formalized dispute settling mechanisms, self-government and autonomy, constitutionally guaranteed group rights, and equalized life chances. The list goes on. As a kind of summary indicator, Sami in Norway have similar life expectancy as the average Norwegian, and have a constitutional amendment in place to protect group rights and a ‘way of life’ for...