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Introduction: Terrorism and peace and conflict studies: investigating the crossroad
Harmonie Torosa and Ioannis Tellidisb
aSchool of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, UK;
bCollege of International Studies, Kyung Hee University, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea
The articles in this special issue are drawn from papers presented at a conference titled Terrorism and Peace and Conflict Studies: Investigating the Crossroad. The conference was organised by the Conflict Analysis Research Centre at the University of Kent and the Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group of the British International Studies Association and was held at the University of Kent from 10 to 11 September 2012. The conference aimed to highlight and explore the empirical, methodological, ontological and epistemological points of interjection of the two fields Through the engagement of scholars, postgraduate students, national and international policy and civil society actors. The articles in this issue reflect those aims.
Introduction
In an era when virtually every academic institution offers undergraduate and postgraduate modules on terrorism studies and on peace and conflict studies, few have investigated how the two fields are related and how they may interact. Indeed, crucial issues remain largely unexplored. How can peace and conflict studies help us further our understanding of terrorism and, crucially, engage in conflicts marked by terrorist violence? Conversely, can terrorism studies inform peace studies by strengthening, for example, its understanding of asymmetric violence? How can terrorism and peace and conflict scholars come together to investigate key epistemological and ontological questions on terrorism and political violence – including root causes, intervention and engagement, how and when negotiations may occur and how a subsequent political process may emerge which is sufficiently inclusive but also maintains and contributes to acceptable standards and norms (local and international)? Eleven years after the September 11 attacks, the need for such a collaborative, sustained and rigorous analysis is more pressing than ever.
The aim of this special issue is to open this debate by offering theoretical and empirical contributions from both scholars and practitioners on how these two fields can inform each other with the aim of strengthening research and praxis. Three key areas appear particularly promising. The first emerges from the observation that terrorism continues overall to be understood not as a particular form of conflict but as an aberration that cannot be investigated using conflict analysis frames. As we will examine in this Introduction and throughout this special issue, this broad (but importantly not universal) refusal to engage with terrorism as conflict has considerable nefarious repercussions on scholarship and, more worryingly, on policymaking and on the lives of millions across the world. Second and closely related is the still-engrained policy and scholarly refusal to draw on conflict management, resolution or transformation frameworks to investigate responses to terrorist violence. This includes not only the rejection of negotiation and dialogue in contexts of terrorism but also the ignoring of important research in peacebuilding. We argue that addressing these two points would make an important contribution to increasing our understanding of terrorist violence and how it can be engaged with.
This is not a one-way street, however. Despite the fact that many peace and conflict scholars and critical terrorism scholars – many of whom were originally trained in peace and conflict studies – believe it is primarily terrorism scholarship that would benefit from cross-pollination, peace and conflict studies could also benefit from greater engagement with frameworks developed in terrorism studies, both traditional and critical. Many conflict resolution frameworks indeed suffer from assumptions of symmetry, assumptions that are effectively invalidated when confronted with cases of non-state terrorist violence. Peace and conflict studies has also tended to adopt an essentially problem-solving approach (in Horkheimer's or Cox's understanding of the term) primarily at the expense of a greater investigation of power inequalities both within conflicts and within conflict management/resolution/transformation responses. The recent turn in terrorism studies towards a more critical engagement with power and power disparities that can be often found at the heart of terrorist violence may offer an avenue for adding much-needed complexity to mainstream peace and conflict studies. Clearly, this Introduction cannot thoroughly address these three central themes. It aims, rather, to identify and offer preliminary insights into these points of intersection that seem most pressing today.
Terrorism as conflict
Terrorism studies has been famous for its tendency to exceptionalise its object of inquiry, resulting in a broad belief that terrorism, unlike other objects of social phenomenon, is particularly difficult to study. Thus, terrorism scholarship often focuses on its difficulty in establishing a commonly accepted definition – leaving us to (problematically) assume that other complex social phenomena are easily defined;1 its confusion with other forms of political violence, for example, insurrection and/or rebellion, which tends to produce inflated statistics (Thackrah 1989); or its conflation with concepts such as "atrocity", "terrorisation" and "moral condemnation", hindering attempts to understand the phenomenon and deal with it effectively (Malik 2000). Such an exceptionalisation has come hand in hand with what Breen Smyth (2008) calls an exoticising of terrorist violence, one in which scholars focus on the spectacular nature of the violence. Indeed, as Goodin (2006,3) points out, "the worst thing about mass-murdering terrorists, is that they are mass murderers, not that they are terrorists".
Most importantly, this has disassociated the study of terrorism from the study of conflict. Overall treated ahistorically, terrorism studies suffers from what Wyn Jones (1999, 22) has characterised as a "fetishization of parts", resulting in its separation from conflict theory, international relations (IR) theory and social and political theory more broadly (see Toros and Gunning 2009). The poor qualitative products of these studies have been highlighted by many an author (Crelinsten 1987; George 1991; Wieviorka 1995; Brannan, Esler, and Strindberg 2001; Silke 2004; Ranstorp 2006; Jackson 2007), but despite such critique and the 40-year-old wealth of academic findings that suggest that terrorism is a method (Walter 1969; Leach 1977; Groom 1978; Laqueiir 1986; Wilkinson and Stewart 1987), and as such its analysis is heavily dependent on a particular sociopolitical context (Leach 1977; Crenshaw 1995; della Porta 1995; Zulaika and Douglass 1996; Irvin 1999; Gunning 2009; Sluka 2009; Toros and Gunning 2009), terrorism studies overall sticks to its steadfast refusal to analyse and comprehend terrorism as a form of conflict (Richmond 2003). This intrinsically problem-solving approach has led scholarship to focus on how to end the violence principally of non-state terrorism without a thorough engagement with the social and political processes that created the conditions of possibility for such violence. As a result, most traditional studies have tended to adopt a statist approach in their analysis which adopts the state as the ultimate referent object to be secured from the dangerous terrorist enemy (see Booth 2007; Toros and Gunning 2009).
Re-embedding the study of terrorism into peace and conflict studies offers a potentially powerful means to counter this underlying statism. Whether adopting Burton's (1979) or Azar's (1990) human needs-based approach or drawing on conflict transformation frameworks such as those of Diana Francis (2002) or John Paul Lederach (1997), a peace and conflict approach forces scholars to engage in the "construction of a larger picture of the whole of which the initially contemplated part is just one component, and [seek] to understand the processes of change in which both parts and whole are involved" (Cox 1986,209). The conditions of the violence, surrounding the violence and changed by the violence are indeed at the heart of the peace and conflict approach which crucially aims at addressing not only the direct violence (the spectacular terrorist attack) but also the structural and cultural violence in which the former is embedded (see Galtung 1969). Thus, understanding terrorism as a form of conflict can have profound implications on its study and can help to overcome key pitfalls still undermining the field. Importantly, such a change in focus also has a central implication in terms of the potential responses to terrorism envisaged.
Responses to terrorism
The exceptionalisation and underlying statism of terrorism studies have led scholars and policymakers to exclude conflict management/resolution/transformation approaches from the list of possible responses to terrorism. This encompasses a whole slew of potential avenues for analysis and responses from investigating whether the conflicting parties have reached a mutually hurting stalemate (MHS) to setting up John Burton-style problem-solving workshops to supporting dialogical initiatives amongst and between divided communities. It would be impossible to engage with all such potential frameworks of analysis and responses and thus we will focus here on two that seem particularly important and that are addressed by several articles in this special issue (see the contributions by Haspeslagh and Large in particular): the potential for negotiation and dialogue in contexts of terrorist violence and the need for scholars and policymakers to draw on recent work in peacebuilding.
Indeed, it has been observed elsewhere that the reification of state security in much terrorism scholarship comes at the expense of communication and negotiation addressing actual or perceived grievances (Tellidis 2010; Toros 2012). As Turk (2004,280) has argued "efforts to understand terrorism have been incidental or secondary to efforts to control it". Combined with the perception that any negotiation with terrorist actors will ascribe them legitimacy, this risks provoking an escalation of terrorist violence and also reduces the opportunity of transforming the conflict dynamics (Toros 2008). The focus that peace and conflict studies places on negotiations and communication between conflictive parties contradicts both academic approaches that warn of the danger of such undertakings (Wardlaw 1989; Clutterback 1993; Neumann 2007) and the policy approach of non-negotiation with terrorists. Indeed, in this issue Sophie Haspeslagh examines how state policy has not only rejected (at least publicly) direct dialogue with non-state armed groups, but through proscription regimes is also hindering access to third parties attempting to further understand non-state armed groups, to alter their strategic calculations or to train them in conflict resolution. Furthermore, the political commitment to not negotiate with terrorists does not hold true as manifested by the cases of Northern Ireland, Colombia, Philippines, Spain and others. More importantly, it is arguably one of the very few approaches that holds the key to a more sustainable, self-sustained, inclusive and positive peace (Galtung and Jacobsen 2000).
Linked to this is the problematic peacebuilding model that is implicitly or explicitly adopted by scholars and policymakers engaging with terrorist violence. During the last two decades, the literature on the theory of peacebuilding has been steadily exploring the role that the grassroots levels of society can play in the building(s) of peace (Lederach 1997; Bleiker 2000; Clark 2001; Duffield 2001; Paris 2004; Jabri 2007; Pugh, Cooper, and Turner 2008; Richmond 2011). A number of instances have been identified where peacebuilding seems to contradict its own discourses and work outside and beyond the "everyday" and "local" (Richmond 2010; Viktorova Milne 2010) social strata it claims to empower, integrate and involve. Indeed, peacebuilding praxis seems to ignore or even sideline the contextual particularities of conflicts and is applied like an IKEA product (Mac Ginty 2008, 145), made from standardised components, whereby policies are executed top-down and operate inside exclusionary normative frameworks.
Particularly in cases where terrorist violence has been or is utilised, liberal peacebuilding seems to operate in tandem with frameworks and discourses of security – especially orthodox terrorism theories (Hocking 1984; Franks 2006) – that favour the supremacy of political liberalism, the dominance of neo-liberal ideologies, the promotion of national and institutional interests and seek to establish a liberal consensus before any negotiation even begins to take place (Richmond and Franks 2009). In other words, the liberal peace seems to be quite dysfunctional when it is resisted (Richmond 2010; Mac Ginty 2012), thus failing to become inclusionary and/or integrative (Newman, Paris, and Richmond 2010) because it imposes conditionalities (majoritarian politics, state-controlled security and a rule of law) that tend to limit civil society's reaction(s) and resistance.
The end result is often the opposite of these approaches' agenda: the reinforcement of the state's security response that provokes or causes an even greater resistance by non-state armed actors and their circles of support, which in turn leads to the undermining of institutional and national interests (Richmond and Tellidis 2012). What is more, political liberalism seems to be misinterpreted in order to reinvigorate the security agenda and thus lead to states that are only virtually liberal. Its misrepresentation is based on the attempts to generate a non-pluralist, monolithic way of political behaviour (Berlin 1969) instead of defending and engaging with difference, thus failing to understand the "other" dispassionately and blocking the potential of harmonious coexistence (Gray 2000, 25). In the case of ethnoterrorist conflicts, for example, there is little attempt to genuinely negotiate claims of/for secession and independence and aim for a compromise with the resisting actors (Tellidis 2011), even when such claims are made by moderate, non-violent groupings and/or platforms and through constitutionally and institutionally accepted means. Rather, the established practice – even by liberal democratic states such as the United Kingdom or Spain in their dealings with terrorism in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country, respectively – focuses instead on subverting, co-opting or suppressing said claims. As a result, the conditions of conflict are replicated and the achievement of security is distanced even further, as is, consequently, the establishment of an inclusionary peace.
Negotiations and peacebuilding are just two areas in which peace and conflict studies could potenti...
