Theories of Terrorism

An Introduction

Daniela Pisoiu, Sandra Hain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781135974527
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This new textbook provides students with a multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological introduction to terrorism studies.

The book identifies the main theories proposed in the field of terrorism studies as they relate to several issues:

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• why and how individuals and organizations get involved in terrorism;

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• the definition and concept of terrorism;

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• state terrorism;

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• leaving terrorism behind;

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• counter-terrorism;

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• manifestations of terrorism in time and space.

Terrorism studies is a highly heterogeneous field with a broad range of theories and disciplines, marked by ample debates. Beyond individual contributions and unique perspectives, however, it is difficult for students and interested readers to have a broader and structured grasp of the theoretical landscape within and behind the study of terrorism. This textbook offers a valuable new teaching tool which aims to provide students with the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological toolbox necessary to understand and research terrorism.

This book will be essential reading for students of terrorism studies, political violence, and counter-terrorism, and is highly recommended for students of security studies, criminology, politics, and international relations.

1 The making of terrorism

Terrorism has become a very popular term, in spite of, or perhaps precisely because of its negative connotation. In some opinions, we live in the era of Islamist terrorism and most countries around the globe are currently having some type of contact with it. ‘What is terrorism?’ is an important and legitimate question and most books on the topic start off with a section on definitions. We consider it more useful to begin our journey through terrorism studies by discerning terrorism from other phenomena in the popular understanding and that of terrorists themselves. Following this, we identify ‘labeling’ as a central concept and mechanism underlying the ‘making’ of terrorism in popular and political discourse. We then trace it back to some foundational social science theories in the positivist and critical theory traditions, and then discuss the latter paradigms along their ontological, epistemological, and normative dimensions.

Most people associate terrorism with something bad. Particularly in our times, marked by the rise to prominence of the so-called Islamic State (IS) terrorist group and their long trail of death and atrocity, it would be quite difficult to think otherwise. In most countries and also at the level of international organizations such as the United Nations (UN), terrorism is a crime. In fact, under the influence of recent threat assessments, most Western countries have extended the definition of terrorism in their criminal codes to include actions which are associated with terrorism, without being terror attacks proper, such as training in terror camps. Typical actions which have been categorized as terrorism are otherwise, for example, bombings, kidnappings, hostage takings, assaults, etc. In the general understanding, the condition for these acts to be categorized as ‘terrorism’ is their political motive. In other words, a kidnapping for ransom would be a ‘regular’ crime, since it has been committed for the purpose of self-enrichment, whereas if the same kidnappers have political demands instead, this would be terrorism. Oftentimes this distinction can be blurred, however, by the fact that the activities of terror groups usually also include purely criminal acts. Robbing a bank or the aforementioned kidnapping can be carried out for material reasons and in order to ensure the survival or expansion of the group, whose ultimate purpose is nevertheless of a political nature. Furthermore, the activities of some groups such as the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) become so much entangled with organized crime that it is difficult to draw the line. In general, however, the rule of thumb is to say—as long as there is an ideology behind the crime, we are dealing with terrorism.

That said, it is apparent that media, politics, and also academia are often biased in their labeling of criminal acts with an ideological background as terrorism vs. something else, such as extremism or amok. In particular in relation to crimes motivated by right-wing extremist ideology, a certain ‘blindness in the right eye’ has been accused. Concretely, attacks motivated by Islamist ideology tend to be labeled as ‘terrorism,’ regardless how ideological the person was, or how close their connections to a terrorist group were. In contrast, attacks motivated by right-wing extremist ideology are rarely labeled as ‘terrorist,’ except when the number of victims is exceptionally high, or the attack is in another way ‘noteworthy.’ Such events also tend to capture less media and public attention. School shootings are another kind of violent criminal act which rarely receives the label of terrorism, although some of the perpetrators have an explicit political agenda. Leena Malkki (2014) has dealt at length with this issue and has outlined, among others, that there are parallels between terrorist and school shooting events, in terms of both empirical manifestation (see Box 1.1) and of the theoretical explanations offered, such as marginality and personal problems (see Further reading and Chapter 4 in this book).

Box 1.1 School shooters and terrorism

Malkki investigated in her study Political Elements in Post-Columbine School Shootings in Europe and North America (2014) common and prevalent political elements in school rampage shootings after the Columbine shootings in 1999, one of the most deadly school rampage shootings in US history that often served as a model for other perpetrators. She conducted a comparative case study with 28 school rampage shootings in Europe, Canada, and the US between 1999 and 2001. School rampage shootings are defined as acts that are “(at least partly) indiscriminate shootings perpetrated by former or current students of that school. They are ‘attacks on whole institutions – schools, teenage pecking orders, or communities’” (ibid: 186–187) and are intended to reach a wider audience and not only the immediate victims; it is a form of symbolic violence. This is a commonality they have with terrorism. Malkki found that none of the perpetrators were involved in political action before, or tried to join an organization with political objectives. Yet, in two cases the offenders had some correspondence with political organizations or people. In four cases, the perpetrators left behind communication including political elements as an explanation for the shootings. The main reasons for the offenders to conduct the shootings were that the school shooters mixed personal grievances (i.e. because of bullying, failure to integrate, and rejection) and political grievances (i.e. because of collective de-individualization, the system, corrupt and totalitarian regimes, tyrants and gangsters that create slaves, and the rule of idiocracy). Many of them called for a revolution and stated that they would hope that others might follow their example. One of them, Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who conducted the Jokela High School shootings in Finland in 2007, even explicitly stated that his act would be a mass murder and political terrorism.

Calling names

Ordinarily, terrorists are eager to differentiate themselves and their actions from regular criminals. Ulrike Meinhof, one of the leading members of the terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF), founded in the 1970s in West Germany, coined the phrase: “If you throw a stone, it’s a crime. If a thousand stones are thrown, that’s political. If you set fire to a car it’s a crime; if a hundred cars are set on fire that’s political” (cited in Aust 2008: 36). The phrase marked a turning moment in her biography and that of the group. She wrote this after the attempted assassination of the student leader Rudi Dutschke by a right-wing extremist and, in her and others’ interpretation at the time, at the instigation of an anti-student movement campaign in the Bild newspaper. The phrase marked the acceptance of the use of violence against the perceived authoritarian and ‘Nazi’ government. The group obviously did not see itself as terrorist; on the contrary, it was the ‘pig’ state which was guilty of aggression against its people and those of other nations—the RAF saw the German government at the time in an ‘imperialist’ alliance with the US.

The RAF is just an example of the ways in which terrorist groups label their enemies with terms usually derived from the animal kingdom. The term ‘pig society’ is, for example, typical for historical left-wing groups, such as the RAF. Ulrike Meinhof is quoted to have said:

As for the cops in this context, it is argued that they are naturally brutal because of their job, beating and shooting people is their job, repression is their job, but then again that’s only the uniform, only the job, and the man who wears the uniform and does the job may be a perfectly pleasant character at home … This is the problem, and of course we say the cops are swine, we say a man in uniform’s a pig, not a human being, so we must tackle him. I mean we mustn’t talk to him; it’s wrong to talk to these people at all, and of course there may be shooting.

(cited in Aust 2008: 11)

Contemporary jihadi groups also use the term ‘pig’ or ‘monkey’ to designate the ‘kafir’ (unbelievers). Terrorism scholars have interpreted this kind of euphemism as an attempt on the part of the terrorists to deny guilt by denying humanity to their victims. Bonnie Cordes (1987) undertook to examine instances ‘when terrorists do the talking’ and found that this denial strategy became necessary in a political context where terrorism was not the only avenue to express grievances. Concretely, this refers to the fact that terror groups that act within democratic states could theoretically express their disagreement and protest through legal means, such as demonstrations, in parliament, or through civil society campaigns. Instead, they opt for armed struggle as if these democratic options do not exist. In the process, they furthermore commit acts of violence against state institutions and citizens, something that becomes not only legally, but also morally problematic. In order to overcome this dilemma of consciousness, terrorists need to frame the state and in some cases also its people as ‘evil.’ Unlike criminals, who may accept the label ‘criminal,’ terrorists deny their appellative and generally come to see their violence in other terms to the rest of the population. Terrorist communiqués oftentimes label the opposing state as terrorist and criminal and themselves as freedom fighters or revolutionaries, and their actions as part of a revolutionary struggle. The audience of these messages of persuasion is not just external, but also internal—terrorists need to also convince themselves that they are doing the right thing. This kind of analysis needs to be of course contextualized in its own historical moment: the 1980s were (still) marked by the allure of left-wing terrorism in its ‘pure’ form in Germany, Italy or the US, or alongside the more underlying cause of national liberation in Ireland or the Middle East (see Chapter 12 for more historical detail). While these kinds of terrorism have not died out, at least in the popular perception and according to some analysts, it is religious terrorism that occupies the frontlines. In its contemporary form, religious terrorism is global and also targeting ‘foreign’ states and civilian populations more than state institutions. The mechanism of labeling remains the same, though, as jihadi terrorists presumably also need to dehumanize their victims as they leave mass graves and burned cities behind.

Almost 20 years after Cordes wrote her piece, a series of critical scholars have undertaken to perform a reverse analysis and show how the state can use dehumanizing rhetoric to justify actions which are not entirely within the spectrum of legality or morality for that matter. The pièce de resistance in these analyses has been Guantanamo Bay and the labels the American government came up with in order to justify the treatment of prisoners there. Richard Jackson (2005) engaged in an assiduous effort to uncover how the state, in this case the US, similarly produced negative enemy labeling within an overall narrative of a ‘just war.’ Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-Terrorism details the ways in which 9/11 was constructed as an act of war, in response to which the US counterterrorist campaign emerged as a war of self-defense, not unlike historical instances such as World War II. Jackson shows how, to this end, the US government made use of several rhetorical instruments such as: framing the military attack in Afghanistan as abiding to international law norms; the use of metaphors and mythologies around the ideas of justice, freedom, and liberty; invoking global support; formulations of winnability; and means of last resort or divine calling. Central to this construction of the just war narrative was the framing of a particular type of enemy, which involved attaching binary labels for the terrorists and the victims respectively, such as barbarism vs. civilization, or evil vs. good. Terrorists were furthermore dehumanized (e.g. parasites, scourge), portrayed as alien and filled with hatred, devious and mad. On the reverse, the American nation was depicted as freedom loving, courageous, innocent, and decent.

The theory behind

So far it would seem that terrorists and governments are essentially doing the same thing: attaching negative labels to the other party and seeing themselves as waging a just war. Cordes (1987) calls this ‘the war of labels,’ as state authorities and terrorists compete for the sympathy of the public. How might we think about this, and who is right? One criterion to consider might be the legitimacy of the cause—a task which is, however, in most cases not easy to handle. The legitimacy question becomes even more complicated in cases where the state is the perpetrator of violence, since, in principle, the state has legitimacy and furthermore detains the monopoly of violence. Another option, which has been mostly taken up by scholars dealing with the definition of terrorism, including state terrorism, is to consider the nature of the means, or more precisely the victims. In this reading, violence against civilians with the purpose of intimidating a broader audience is terrorism, whether perpetrated by the state or by non-state actors. This also solves the dilemma of state terrorism in that state legitimacy does not necessarily imply the legitimacy of the means it employs. Finally, critical scholars would argue it is a question of power and would often look at state actions as a manifestation of unchecked, hegemonic, self-serving power. This is typical of a broader phenomenon whereby the study of ‘terrorism’ and ‘counter-terrorism’ largely occurs in separation from one another.

In terrorism studies, the labeling made by terrorists has been studied with the application of concepts from social cognitive psychology by Albert Bandura (1998). Social cognitive psychology refers to the study of human behavior at the intersection of cognition (how people understand the world) and social interaction. Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement, as outlined in his chapter ‘Mechanisms of moral disengagement’ (1998), posits that, ordinarily, human conduct is regulated by moral standards (self-sanctions) which are adopted during socialization. A diff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• List of contributors
• List of acronyms
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The making of terrorism
• 2 Defining terrorism
• 3 Studying terrorism
• 4 Determining individual terrorism
• 5 Choosing individual terrorism
• 6 Relational individual terrorism
• 7 Determining organizational terrorism
• 8 Choosing organizational terrorism
• 9 Relational organizational terrorism
• 10 Individual disengagement, de-radicalization, and counter-radicalization
• 11 State terrorism
• 12 Terrorism in time and space
• 13 Counter-terrorism
• Index