Sacred Violence

Political Religion in a Secular Age

D. Jones, M. Rainsborough, Kenneth A. Loparo, M.L.R Smith

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137328076
• eBook ISBN: 9781137328069
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Sacred Violence and Religious Violence examines the place that ideology or political religion plays in legitimizing violence to bring about a purer world. In particular, the book examines Islamism and the western secular, liberal democratic responses to it.

1

History Restarted: Jihadist Terror and Liberal Democracy

Confusion and incoherence in the theory and practice of war currently haunts the Western liberal conscience: Who or what precisely is the enemy? How should war be prosecuted and legally addressed? And what might the answers to these questions entail for our future political and social organization? These are critical questions that arise from the long “War on Terror” prosecuted in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

A war against an abstraction like terror, ostensibly the political object of the current US administration and its coalition partners, would have disappointed the most important philosopher of modern war, Carl von Clausewitz. The political object, moreover, is not greatly clarified if the problem is rebadged as the “Long War” as it has been since 2004, although the epithet shift does at least intimate the enduring character of the new condition.

Since 2001, we can identify participants in the “coalition of the willing” against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates, pursuing a pre-emptive global strategy abroad. Yet this has been offset by the tolerance afforded to illiberal ideologues at home. In the UK, prior to 2005, a government and media propensity to present militant revolutionaries like Omar Bakri Mohammed and Abu Hamza al Masri as fantasists, rather than ideologists with a coherent vision of a globalized but illiberal world order and a strategy designed to achieve it, highlighted this contradiction. Groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al Muhajiroun, until the latter was banned in 2005, operated openly across the UK and by extension to the more tolerant states of Europe under the condition of what Omar Bakri understood to be a “covenant of security.”

The covenant of security that Bakri assumed he had negotiated with the UK Home Office meant that the radical opponents of liberal democracy were free to mobilize, plan, and recruit in the UK, provided they did not undertake attacks inside Britain. Here we may identify a worrying incoherence at the core of secular, cosmopolitan liberalism. From the perspective of Western governments, liberal, multicultural pluralism assumes that policies promoting diversity and the distinctiveness of cultural attachments would build an integrated yet diverse community, and speed the inexorable global movement to a democratically harmonic end of history, rather than engender its opposite: separatism and communalism. What this assumption fails to address, however, is that illiberal ideologies of an ethno-religious character do not play by the same tolerant and pluralist rules. This introduction explores the evolution of this misconception and its political implications for the liberal-democratic state.

On war

If, then, the long war is not against an abstraction but, as we shall show in Chapter 2, a distinctly modern ideological phenomenon that has evolved into its most dangerous form not in the Middle East, but in modern cosmopolitan cities at the cutting edge of the interconnected global economy, like London, Paris, Hamburg, Madrid, New York, Boston and Sydney, what does it mean in strategic terms for liberal governance? And what features of the post-Cold War economic and political order facilitate it? Moreover, how can developed liberal-democratic market states respond to this phenomenon without undermining the pluralist and secularist conditions of their own emergence?

Here it is perhaps worth attending to one of the more neglected sociologists of international relations in the twentieth century. The contemporary practice of international relations assumes that global order is essentially a sociological construct. Such a constructivist view in its post-Cold War manifestation further asserts the capacity of norms to shape global and state interests. In this way, it is somewhat idealistically overdetermined by the assumption that a predisposition to peace, not conflict, constitutes the international default position.

An earlier realist thinker on war and the sociology of international order, Raymond Aron, observed a more interesting structural configuration relating to the global organization of violence and its consequences. On the one hand, the high tech capacity existed to engineer the potential for nuclear destruction, requiring the organizational infrastructure of the modern state, its bureaucracy, and its science. On the other, co-existing with this technically sophisticated and highly engineered capacity for mutual superpower annihilation was a low-tech but highly motivated revolutionary potential, especially in former European colonies like Algeria or Vietnam, to wage guerrilla warfare over a long period against more advanced states that ultimately lacked the will to enforce their technological superiority.

What Aron identified, therefore, was the binary structure of modern warfare. This involved at the level of advanced technology a superpower balance of terror or, in the post-Cold War, the practice of high tempo, Net-centric warfare. Alongside this, an alternative, low-tech warfare proliferated at the periphery of the Cold War, continuing at a low level of intensity for decades. In this mode of conflict, the guerrilla fighter merged with the local peasantry, swimming like a fish in the sea of the wider population, as Mao explained in his theory of protracted warfare. This phenomenon privileged the will of the cadre, not technology.

This low-tech strategy of polymorphous violence mutated and evolved during the Cold War in the context of the ideological, but territorially limited, forms practiced by, amongst others, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Hezbollah in the Middle East, the Red Army Faction, and Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) and Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) in Europe (but one can note that these groups could combine for operations and training purposes in camps located in Southern Lebanon, Eastern Europe or North Africa). The ideology in its liberationist, usually Marxist, and nationalist-derived forms supporting this form of warfare sought to deploy limited terror (a graphic example being the siege of the 1972 Munich Olympics) with the principal aim of having many people watching on television, but not many dead.

Post-Cold War and the new terror

The new catastrophic terror that has come to shape the post-Cold War democratic state order is, to some extent, the price paid for the way the Cold War ended. The somewhat limited strategy of Cold War terrorism, which sought media attention but limited casualties, mutated into a transnational form facilitated by the end of the Cold War balance and the spread of low intensity ethno-religious conflicts in failing states and states of concern. The new interconnectedness brought about by the revolution in communications facilitated trade, population flows, economic growth, and anxiety. It also facilitated transnational crime, such as people, drug, and weapons smuggling, and the transnationalization of polymorphous violence organized via diaspora communities, greater interconnectivity, and the emerging “borderless world” that some commentators in the 1990s somewhat naively welcomed.

Prior to 2001, despite the evidence to the contrary provided by failing states like Somalia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia, and the fallout from the Asian financial crisis (1997), this period of zeit without geist was the highpoint of the argument for global, liberal, democratic convergence, and the end of history, where all isms had become wasms. Europe sans frontiers, along with the development of regional groupings like ASEAN’s (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) expanded Pacific community offered the first premonitory snuffling of a post-nation-state constellation, but at what price?

Initially, the new warfare scenario confined itself to states or regions “of concern” – Afghanistan, the Balkans, the Middle East – but circumstances and technology afforded the opportunity for the failed state world, fuelled by myths of ethno-religious purity, to hit back at the cosmopolitan world. Whilst an EU-style, post-national, managerialist bureaucracy sought to erase the potential for conflict via empathy, aid and discourse, the new terror without a signature or acknowledged source sought catastrophic impact to convey its non-negotiable and apocalyptic message.

As the strategy became more unpredictable and asymmetric over the first decade of the twenty-first century, it also became more protean. Al-Qaeda, for instance, represents the most significantly evolved proponent of this demassified, polymorphous, Internetted strategy. It operated increasingly as a franchised and de-territorialized arrangement found in states of concern, but with elements of its command and control situated in multicultural, cosmopolitan cities like London, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, New York, Paris or Sydney.

In fact, in its most interesting post-9/11 and post-Iraq war form, the congeniality of multicultural global cities for the support networks of transnational ethno-religious struggle, over time promoted a sui generis militancy in the diaspora, characterized by groups like al Muhajiroun (the Migrants), based in London from the mid-1990s, until the UK government curtailed their activities in the wake of the 7 July 2005 attack on the London underground. The tendency of much official, political, legal, academic and media commentary either to write these groups off as a minority of extremists that had nothing to do with Islam, or to offer their more articulate and relativist spokespersons grants, university appointments, or positions on commissions addressing diversity issues and ethnic and religious exclusion – in order to build bridges where none existed – merely enhanced their influence. Indeed, many academic commentators of a supposedly critical perspective discountenanced “the political religion,” to use Eric Voegelin’s useful term,¹ informing the actions of home-grown or fifth column adherents of jihad, in favour of second-order explanations that attributed “root causes” of violence to factors like alienation and social deprivation, in a wilful misreading of the nature of the ideology. In a similar spirit of wishfulness, common lawyers and their academic offshoots regularly lamented the extension of powers of detention and pre-emption extended to police and security agencies, despite the fact that such powers were subject to parliamentary oversight and review. Indeed, without the powers of detention and surveillance granted, for example, under the UK Terrorism Act 2006, and extensions to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 and the Australian Anti Terrorism Act 2006, fifth column jihadi attacks like those planned for Heathrow airport in 2006, on Melbourne by the Benbrika group in 2005, by the Birmingham (UK) terrorists in 2013, or by the Holsworthy barracks plotters in Sydney 2012 would not have been interdicted.²

In this evolution of jihadist practice, Al-Qaeda and its offshoots are not only influenced by a modern business theory of franchising, but also by the tactics formulated by groups equally opposed to pluralist, secular, liberal modernity. These groups range from cults like Aum Shinriyko and racial purist groups like Aryan Nation and their European neo-Nazi affiliates to the practice of alienated, lone wolves like the Unabomber or Anders Breivik. In fact, it was American Aryan Nation strategist Louis Beam who first identified the potential of a protean, leaderless resistance devising random acts of violence in the name of a liberation struggle.³ Random actors responding violently in the name of the organization force multiply the effect of the political religion with which they identify. These tactics, and Beam’s thinking, currently shape post-Abbottabad Al-Qaeda practice, as attacks in 2013 in Boston, South East London and Nairobi demonstrated.⁴

Beam based his strategy for liberating the American fatherland from decadent socialist pluralism on what he termed “the Phantom Cell,” an arrangement derived from the Correspondence Societies of the American Revolution. The strategy assumes that “the purpose of leaderless resistance is to defeat state tyranny, [in this] all members of phantom cells will react to objective events in the same way.”⁵ This approach, fed by access to the Internet and modern news media, makes previous modes of revolutionary organization, based on a Ford era pyramid structure of management, increasingly redundant.

This postmodern, leaderless strategy organizes itself via information networks, an intelligence revolution that the Internet made possible, and facilitates protean resistance via an informal structure, with operations carried out in the name of the ideology by actors who have only a virtual affiliation with the ideology or its leadership.⁶ This is how the “clean skins” problem arose in the case of the British 7/7 bombers or more recent home-grown cells like those in South East London or Boston in the United States. This is made possible by the still largely unsupervised activities of radical imams at mosques like Finsbury Park in London before 2005 or the community centre mosque in Plumstead, South London, where home-grown jihadist Michael Adebolajo, born in Lambeth, was recruited to jihad by radical cleric Usman Ali, to fight for “our Muslim land,” which was clearly not England.⁷ Similarly, in Lakemba in Sydney’s West, radical mosques recruit disaffected youth for jihad in Syria against the long-term security interests of the Australian state.

In this way, the latest globalization-friendly version of polymorphous violence has adapted parasitically to the character of post-Fordist economic organization, and the post-nation-state networked world order, nourishing itself on the structure it sets out to attack. Its post-state manifestations in London, Hamburg, Sydney or New York are therefore more, not less, effective than the locally or ethnically focused variety. The increased anomie characteristic of the post-national state container further enhances the strategic appeal of an emancipatory or apocalyptic fundamentalism. It is particularly attracted to post-national, global cities and especially cities like London and New York, whose diversity and multiculturalism it defines itself against, but whose tolerance it finds congenial for organizational purposes.

Plainly, the unpredictable character of these new de-territorialized strategies, promoted by those who, whatever their ideology, find the character and values of secular pluralism deeply suspect, presents a profound challenge to Western liberal democracy. Furthermore, this is a challenge which academic and media elites would prefer to dismiss rather than address, fearing the loss of even the promise of agreement that pluralism and tolerance likes to assume.

How, then, does the liberal-democratic state order – itself the secular product of modernity and enlightenment – respond to this postmodern and illiberal challenge? First, we need to examine the evolving socio-economic structure of the post-Cold War global order that makes transnational violence and the ideologies that support it both plausible and effective.

The networked state and the structure of the post-Cold War

Millennial capital and Neo-Medievalism

Philip Cerny has characterized the emerging politico-economic structure of the post-Cold War as “Neo-Medieval”: a condition distinguished by overlapping jurisdictions and cross-cutting allegiances where the transnational character of global exchanges undermines the traditional territoriality and allegiances of the nation-state, de-concentrating loyalty as it deracinates identities.⁸ New communicatory modes like the Internet and the speed of physical and virtual communication have altered the character of what Michael Oakeshott termed “civil association.” By civil association and the rule of law, Oakeshott understood a “non-instrumental” arrangement whose “purpose” was inherent and its rules authoritative by virtue of being recognized as such. Indeed, acceptance of its authority constitutes the only mutual bond that connects the members of such a civil association.⁹

At the same time, millennial capital, driven by the development since 1990 of wide, deep and increasingly global financial markets, has undermined state or regionally focused capitalism. The Fordist contract with the nati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  History Restarted: Jihadist Terror and Liberal Democracy
• 2  The Politics of Homeland Insecurity: The Cybercaliphate and the Unbearable Lightness of Being British
• 3  The Commentariat and Discourse Failure: Language and Atrocity in Cool Britannia
• 4  Counterinsurgency (COIN): The Post-9/11 Military Revolution and Its Consequences
• 5  Non-Western Terror and Counterinsurgency: The Case of Jemaah Islamiyah
• 6  Beyond Belief: Islamist Strategic Thinking and International Relations Theory
• 7  Political Fiction and Jihad: The Novel Response to 9/11
• 8  Conclusion: Terror, the Polis and Political Religion
• Notes
• Bibliography – Articles
• Bibliography – Books
• Index