the failed paradigm of ‘terrorism’
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The failed paradigm of ‘terrorism’Dominic Bryan a , Liam Kelly a & Sara Templer aa Institute of Irish Studies , Queen’s University , Belfast, NorthernIreland, BT7 1NF, UKPublished online: 17 Sep 2010.
To cite this article: Dominic Bryan , Liam Kelly & Sara Templer (2011) The failed paradigmof ‘terrorism’, Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, 3:2, 80-96, DOI:10.1080/19434472.2010.512151
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Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political AggressionVol. 3, No. 2, May 2011, 80–96
ISSN 1943-4472 print/ISSN 1943-4480 online© 2011 Society for Terrorism ResearchDOI: 10.1080/19434472.2010.512151http://www.informaworld.com
The failed paradigm of ‘terrorism’
Dominic Bryan*, Liam Kelly and Sara Templer
Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland BT7 1NF, UKTaylor and FrancisRIRT_A_512151.sgm10.1080/19434472.2010.512151Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression1943-4472 (print)/1943-4480 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & [email protected]
This paper argues that the paradigm of ‘terrorism’ needs to be abandoned by thoseacademics engaged in exploring political violence. The authors, through the prismof their various disciplinary backgrounds and their research experience inNorthern Ireland, argue that those engaged within Terrorism Studies must gofurther in their critique of the concept of ‘terrorism’. Taking fives steps into thefield of Terrorism Studies, this article argues that the term is indefinable; and thatsome of the common elements of a definition are unconvincing; explores thesignificant implications of using such a label; engages with the arguments ofRichard Jackson and other critical terrorism studies’ scholars; and, finally, drawsupon lessons learnt from the Northern Ireland case study.
Keywords: ‘terrorism’; definition; ‘labelling theory’; critical terrorism studies;Northern Ireland
Introduction
None of the authors of this essay have a background in the field of Terrorism Studies.One of us is a social anthropologist, another is a historian and the third comes fromthe field of Peace Studies. From our various disciplinary backgrounds we are allinvolved in conducting research on Northern Ireland, a place that has become synon-ymous with ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ organisations. Despite this, and despite the factthat our research explores various aspects of conflict and peace, none of us have everfelt it necessary or even useful to use the ‘t’ word. In fact, our first real engagementwith this question derived from discussions we had amongst ourselves and othercolleagues when Queen’s University, Belfast, set up a Masters Degree course entitled‘Violence, Terrorism and Security’. These dialogues, often heated, led us to look atmaterial that could broadly be described as Terrorism Studies to ascertain whether anadequate and workable definition of the term of ‘terrorism’ existed, and whether therewas any utility, both within and outside academia, in continuing to use it.
We have not conducted an exhaustive or systematic study of the literature andtheory surrounding the diverse movements and events generally described as ‘terror-ism’. Our experiences and observations of political violence within our respectivefields, however, persuade us that the paradigm of ‘terrorism’ is fundamentally flawed.We argue in this paper that ‘terrorism’ should be abandoned in academic usage as botha descriptive term and an empirical, analytical category. In doing so, we note that in2008, Gupta observed that the ‘number of books with “terrorism” in their titlepublished in the six and a half years since 2001 was more than ten times the totalnumber of publications for the past six decades’ (Gupta, 2008, p. 2). We suspect that
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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the relatively recent huge increase in research, publications and courses in this area isdriven by the international political context, including the so-called global ‘waragainst terrorism’, and the consequent economics of the academic market place. Webelieve that, at the very least, there is a need for more responsible academic engage-ment in relation to discussions and studies of violence and ‘terrorism’.
In this essay, we will elaborate on this view by taking five steps into the world ofTerrorism Studies. We will begin by referring to the huge range of definitions of‘terrorism’ that exist. Second, we will explore some of the key elements that arefrequently claimed to distinguish ‘terrorism’ as a category or type of violence. Third,we will explore some relevant theory concerning categorisation and labelling thatelucidates processes at work in the various attempts to pin down a definition of ‘terror-ism’. Fourth, we will then examine and respond to a number of arguments put forwardby Richard Jackson in an article published in this Special Edition. Finally, the essaywill turn to Northern Ireland which is, we will argue, a pertinent case study that raisesquestions about the medium- and long-term political and social impact of using theterm ‘terrorism’. The arguments we make are not new (see particularly Chomsky,1988; Herman & O’Sullivan, 1989) but we believe that as part of an ongoing debateit is important that they are restated in the present context.
Defining the indefinable
Many reputable books on ‘terrorism’ start with the same problem: how do you define‘terrorism’? Large numbers of definitions have been attempted by politicians, militaryadvisors, academics, political activists and policy-makers. This foundational task ofdefining what scholars are talking about when they embark on an empirical andanalytical project examining ‘terrorism’ is one that, of course, they have to grapplewith, but which they have ultimately failed to resolve. There are an extraordinarynumber of publications on ‘terrorism’, many of which go to considerable lengths tocritically engage with the definitional problem, but a brief consideration here of fourdefinitions given by reputable academics is illustrative of the lack of clarity.
In the first instance, our colleague Richard English, in his typically insightfulcontribution to the literature, begins with the problem ‘What is Terrorism?’ and over26 pages precisely traces out a range of previously given definitions. Although headmits that the ‘problem of competing definitions is not, of course, solved by addingyet another’ (English, 2009, p. 24), he goes on to produce a broad definition:
Terrorism involves heterogeneous violence used or threatened with a political aim; it caninvolve a variety of acts, of targets, and of actors; it possesses an important psychologicaldefinition, producing terror or fear among a directly threatened group and also a widerimplied audience in the hope of maximising political communication and achievement;it embodies the exerting and implementing of power, and the attempted redressing ofpower relations; it represents a subspecies of warfare, and as such it can form part of awider campaign of violent and non-violent attempts at political leverage.
Hoffman (2006) prefigures English’s definition in many ways; after considering arange of sources and definitions, he concludes that:
We may (…) attempt to define terrorism as the deliberate creation and exploitation offear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change. (…)Terrorism is specifically designed to have far-reaching psychological effects beyond the
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immediate victim(s) or object of the terrorist attack. It is meant to instil fear within, andthereby intimidate, a wider ‘target audience’ that might include a rival ethnic or religiousgroup, an entire country, a national government or political party, or public opinion ingeneral. Terrorism is designed to create power where there is none or to consolidatepower where there is very little. (pp. 40–41)
Crucially, and in contrast to English, Hoffman underpins this definition with theconviction that ‘we come to appreciate that terrorism is (…) perpetrated by a subna-tional group or nonstate entity’ (Hoffman, 2006, p. 40).
Similarly, following a consideration of possible definitions available, Gupta(2008) bases his analysis of the phenomenon on the US State Department’s under-standing of ‘terrorism’, that is, as ‘politically motivated violent attacks by non-stateactors’ (p. 10). He acknowledges, however, that this is one of the ‘broadest possible’interpretations, and notes that he is ‘mindful of its political implications and the corre-sponding sundry shortcomings’ (ibid.).
Finally, in this special issue, Jackson has adopted what he describes as ‘a revision-ary re-description’, one which uses a ‘minimal foundational’ ontological approach.This equates to the following ‘definitional anchorage’:
Terrorism is violence of its threat intended as a symbolically communicative act inwhich the direct victims of the action are instrumentalised as a means to creating apsychological effect of intimidation and fear in a target audience for a political objec-tive. (Jackson, 2011)
Note that whilst all these definitions are very broad they still differ from each otherin crucial respects. Hoffman and Gupta specify non-state actors within their definitionwhilst English and Jackson do not. There is no consensus around the intended effectsof the violence. Gupta includes all politically motivated violence by non-state actors,whereas Jackson works much harder to define the ‘symbolically communicativenature’ of the violence. English takes this approach further by distinguishing theviolence from that used in war. Hoffman is also concerned with the psychologicaleffects but wishes to define them as ‘far reaching’. Thus in spite of the breadth of thedescriptions they employ, even these four authors disagree in profound ways on whocan be said to perpetrate ‘terrorism’. As we will discuss, with such broad definitionsthey risk including an enormous range of violent acts.
These definitions are just the tip of the iceberg. A more complete range of descrip-tions put forward by various academics, and others, is startling and reflects the inher-ent lack of definitional certainty surrounding ‘terrorism’. The problem is that, evenwhile conscientious and critically engaged scholars, such as the authors cited above,admit that it is almost impossible and unsatisfactory to put forward a definition, theynevertheless feel the necessity to do so. The large number of unwieldy and unsatisfac-tory definitions suggests that the authors in this field, who feel the need to come upwith yet another one, already understand the inherent weakness of the paradigm.
Elements of a definition
The authors cited above, as well as others writing in this field, identify a number ofcommon elements to what is understood as ‘terrorism’. Prominent among these is that‘terrorism’ is defined as an act or threat, or both, of political violence. We do notdispute that what is often classed as ‘terrorism’ is ‘politically motivated violence’, but
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if this is the case why do we not simply call it that? Why is it that many within ‘ortho-dox terrorism studies’ define, or tacitly accept, that some acts of political violence are‘terrorism’ whereas others are not? Furthermore, does defining ‘terrorism’ as an act orthreat of political violence really distinguish the ‘terrorist’ act from other acts whichthose within ‘orthodox terrorism studies’ do not consider ‘terrorism’? Most acts oforganised violence have political aspects to them, most obviously acts of war. Weargue, therefore, that this attribute is not particularly distinguishing.
A second common element given to those who describe ‘terrorism’ is the emphasisthey place upon its highly symbolic and communicative nature. Jackson stresses that:‘it is communication to an audience which is the important element of terroristviolence, not necessarily publicity’ (Jackson, 2011). Yet, we would argue, all formsof violence have a communicative element to them and many are designed for abroader audience. Put simply, the symbolic nature of much of what is deemed ‘terror-ism’ is clear but it is not unique. For example, capital punishment is an act of violence(sanctioned by the state) which communicates something and intends to reach an audi-ence beyond the specific individual being punished.
A third defining element which is put forward to distinguish ‘terrorism’ is that itinvolves the targeting of ‘civilians’. Interestingly, whilst this is a common part ofpopular definitions, it does not appear in any of the definitions cited above (ibid.). Theproblem is: what do you define as the ‘civilian’ or the ‘non-combatant’? For example,a report entitled Patterns of Global Terrorism, authored by the US State Departmentafter admitting that ‘(N)o one definition of terrorism has gained universal acceptance’,uses the definition given in Title 22 of the United States Code, Section 265f(d) whichstates: ‘The term terrorism means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpet-uated against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agent,usually intended to influence an audience’ (US Department of State, 2004, p. xii). Sowhat is meant by non-combatant? The report goes on to state:
For purposes of this definition the term noncombatant is interpreted to include, in addi-tion to civilians, military personnel who at the time of the incident are unarmed and/ornot on duty. … We also consider as acts of terrorism attack on military installations oron armed military personnel when a state of hostilities does not exist at the site. (USDepartment of State, 2004, p. xii)
What this arm of the US State Department considers as a civilian target is particular.It is also revealing that it is the US Government establishes when a ‘state of hostilities’exists, and therefore who is legitimately perpetrating violence.
In addition, there is the problem of intentionality. Do acts of political violencedeliberately target civilians or, in military terms, are civilian casualties merelyunavoidable, if regrettable, collateral damage? Clearly such a difference is importantin understanding a specific act of violence. Some acts are clearly intended to onlytarget civilians, others are very likely to cause significant civilian casualties, whilst thedeath of civilians in other instances may be genuinely accidental or unintended.Bombing campaigns are good examples of acts of violence that have the potential tocause civilian casualties which may or may not be part of the strategy or purpose ofthe attack. For example, in the case of the dropping of the Atom bomb on Hiroshimain 1945, civilian casualties were without doubt an expected and intended part of theUS strategy. Indeed, it is surely the example, par excellence, of symbolically commu-nicative violence. On the other hand, while the Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombwhich detonated in Brighton in 1984 was also likely to cause civilian casualties, this
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was clearly not the central intention of the act. The device was intended to kill BritishPrime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet, who were gathered in Brighton fortheir Party’s Annual Conference.
A fourth qualification lies around the legality of the act. As with the problem ofdefining the citizen or non-combatant, the power to determine the definition of whatis a legal or non-legal act lies with certain actors and institutions. These are nearlyalways state or trans-national institutions. Significantly, legal definitions vary both ingeographical and temporal terms. The problem with this element of a definition washighlighted by the recent ‘crusade’ against ‘terrorism’ which has been consciouslydefined by the United States and its allies as the ‘war on terror’. If ‘terrorism’ isdistinct from war how can it, at the same time, be conceptualised within a war?Indeed, it is relevant to note that a former British Foreign Secretary has all butconceded that this understanding of ‘terrorism’ is now defunct.1
The fifth element of definition is the emphasis that ‘terrorist’ violence is thepreserve of the non-state actors or sub-national groups. Indeed, looking across the areaof Terrorism Studies, this is what most people want to study. There are, however,multiple problems with this approach and rationale. Why do we preserve the idea of‘terrorist’ acts for the non-state actors? How do we classify the numerous examples ofthe violence of non-state actors that are sponsored, openly or covertly, by the state?Most obviously: what about those non-state actors that become part of the state as aresult of constitutional processes? This is what lies at the heart of the politicised natureof the paradigm: the issue of who is allowed to define what ‘terrorism’ is, and howand why they do so. There are political and ideological reasons why the same actscarried out by non-state and state (or state-sponsored) organisations are conceptual-ised differently. This makes the term an extremely subjective one, and therefore prob-lematic as a useful analytical category. Of course, many scholars exploring ‘terrorism’recognise this problem. Jackson stresses that:
there is no deontological reason which precludes an actor – state or non-state – fromengaging in acts of terrorism as part of a broader political strategy. In research terms, tosuggest that when agents representing a state engage in the very same actions as non-state actors […] it automatically ceases to be terrorism is illogically and analyticallyunworkable. (Jackson, 2011)
However, despite the efforts of Jackson and others there remain, as he admits: ‘asurprising number of scholars’ who believe that ‘one of the defining features of‘terrorism’ is that it is a form of ‘illegitimate’ political violence practiced solely bynon-state actors’ (ibid.).
Finally, as Hoffman notes: ‘on one point, at least, everyone agrees: “Terrorism” isa pejorative term’ (Hoffman, 2006, p.23). It is this pejorative nature of the term whichis most alarming in relation to its continued use by academics. It is alarming because,as soon as the word is used, even with the objective of deconstructing the term, thepolitically loaded connotations that are brought to the fore render it useless in relationto understanding the act that is being explored. Indeed, the use of the term oftenobscures the meaning of that act rather than making it understandable.
These observations – that ‘terrorism’ is a subjective, pejorative and politicallyloaded term – are crucial to our argument against its use in academic and other circles.We acknowledge that our objections to using the category of ‘terrorism’ on thegrounds of unclear definition can be countered with theoretical and empirical argu-ments which point out that not all elements of a category necessarily have to share the
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same characteristics. However, we believe that such arguments are insufficient todefend the use of the term, because they do not take account of the pejorative qualityof the category in contemporary academic and media usage. To understand the processat work in these attempts to define ‘terrorism’, we turn in the following section to abrief consideration of some relevant sociological theory.
The importance of categories and the implications of labels
Of course most categories used in the social sciences are to an extent problematic.Defining the boundaries to a category is a fundamental part of the processes of under-standing the social world. Approaches such as fuzzy set theory (Lakoff, 1990) mightoffer a way of conceptualising of the category of ‘terrorism’. As Zadeh explains inthe foreword to Zimmerman (1991): ‘the theory of fuzzy sets is, basically, a theory ofgraded concepts – a theory in which everything is a matter of degree or, to put it figu-ratively, everything has elasticity’ (Zimmerman 1991, p. xv). However, it does notfollow that every category is equally elastic. We could for example note the problemsin anthropology as regards defining a category such as ‘ritual’ (see Goody 1977;Bryan 2000, pp. 17–18). Lots of types of social action could be described asritualised, so deciding what is and is not ritual action is a matter of some debate.Nevertheless, there would be a reasonably broad consensus within anthropology overa definition broad enough to allow for comparison and analysis. The category of‘terrorism’, as we have evidenced above, is a far more ‘elastic’ category, where theidentification of actions as ‘terrorism’ depends on a subjective judgement of thedegree to which those actions fit a particular interpretation of ‘terrorism’. To be blunt,one person’s terrorist is frequently seen by another as a freedom fighter, whereasmost people when they see a ritual, whatever the cultural context, recognise that it isa ritualised social action.
There is another reason ‘terrorism’ cannot and should not be treated as anotherelastic category. This is because, as discussed above, the term always carries politicaland pejorative inferences. This in turn means that, whereas it can be argued that thecategory is an elastic one that collects together a range of graded concepts or acts, bynaming them all ‘terrorism’ in the current context, there is a danger that moral judge-ments with particular attitudinal and security-related consequences can be justified inrespect of all of them. Furthermore, there is a possibility that expectations will belowered with regard to understanding, explaining and acting upon the specific mean-ing of specific acts. Moreover, the potential for alienating or indeed radicalising thepeople involved in carrying out the violence may increase. It seems that, in thecurrent context, it is not enough to condemn the violence as criminal; by categorisingthe diverse acts of violence as ‘terrorism’, we go a step further, labelling wholegroups of people.
It is, we would argue, more insightful to look at when the label of ‘terrorism’ isused. The dynamics at play in this process of attempting to define ‘terrorism’ havebeen understood in sociology and criminology for some time. Howard Becker in hislandmark work on the sociology of deviance provided the basis for what is nowknown as labelling theory:
Social groups create deviance by making rules whose infraction constitutes deviance,and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsider. Fromthis point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a
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consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’.(Becker, 1963, p. 9)
In other words, acts that are seen as deviant are so because a social group has definedthe particular act as deviant. The act of defining changes over time and particular socialcontexts. Needless to say this has a close relationship to the power structures within aparticular society. Those labelled as deviant are usually those lacking power. In addi-tion, the act of labelling can influence the behaviour of those being labelled. Once thegroup has been given a particular label defining them as deviant by the dominantpowers, they begin to adapt both behaviour and discourse to the new environment.
A classic British sociological study in the 1970s, Policing the crisis: Mugging, thestate and law and order, provides an interesting perspective on the dynamic at playhere (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts, 1978). The authors explore how thecategory of ‘mugging’ comes to be used within the political sphere to label youngblack youths in Britain. The notion of ‘mugging’ was imported from America by theBritish press in 1972 to create what Stanley Cohen has described in other works as amoral panic (Cohen, 1972). Those in political power argue that key values in societyare under attack and they mobilise popular support and other agencies to defend thosevalues. In Policing the crisis the researchers describe how British police were sooncollecting statistics on ‘mugging’ to satisfy demands of the press and politicians todeal with the impending crisis, which the press and some politicians directly linked toyoung black youths. The category of mugging is being created to define a broad rangeof violent and non-violent acts upon the person. Hall et al. do not suggest the acts ofviolence are invented, just as we do not argue that the acts defined as terrorism areinvented, but what they are interested in is how the label ‘mugger’ comes to be used.
It is difficult to think of a more apparent case of the category defining the act, notthe act defining the category, than ‘terrorism’. It is clear that groups are defined as‘terrorists’ and the acts of violence they commit therefore become terrorist acts. Take,for example, the attempted assassination of members of the British Conservative partyand the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by the IRA in Brighton in 1984,mentioned above. Like most acts of violence, this was undoubtedly terrifying to thosecaught up in it, and had horrific consequences for the victims, but to create terror wasnot the central purpose of the act; rather, it was a brazen assassination attempt proba-bly designed to reveal the power and capabilities of the IRA at the time. However, theact is labelled as ‘terrorism’ because the label is already borne by the proscribedorganisation the IRA, not because of the nature of the act itself. In other words,because the IRA is viewed as a ‘terrorist’ organisation, then a diverse range of violentacts committed by their members are all called acts of ‘terrorism’, even though theacts of violence might have very different aims. This is why definitions of ‘terrorism’invariably cover multiple areas: they have to, because the acts that are analysed ineach case are so diverse in nature. Normally, to understand such a range of phenomenawithin one analytical, empirical category is impossible. In trying to do so the meaningof the violence necessarily becomes hidden.
Let us make it clear that we are in no way making a relativist argument that all actsof violence have equal justification or validity, or that any or all of the events we aretalking about were justified. We do not believe that the Brighton bomb in 1984 wasjustified. To restate our argument: to understand the nature of the violent acts beingundertaken you must take seriously the intent behind the act and the meaning beinggiven to it.
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Critical terrorism studies and responsible academic engagement
In his article for this special issue, Richard Jackson makes a case for the need for amore introspective approach in the field of Terrorism Studies. In developing ‘CriticalTerrorism Studies’, he puts forward a succinct and informed ‘strategy for advancing a“persuasive definition” of terrorism’, in order to find a ‘convergence around a clearlydefined concept’ (Jackson, 2011). Whilst we agree with much of Jackson’s criticalapproach, we disagree with his ultimate conclusion that the concept of ‘terrorism’should continue to be used. We disagree because, as we have demonstrated above, theconcept is impossible to properly define; its supposedly distinguishing elements failto sufficiently differentiate acts of ‘terrorism’ from other episodes or acts of violence;and, finally, ‘terrorism’ is widely acknowledged to be both a pejorative and a politi-cally loaded term.
We are, to use Jackson’s phrase, ‘rejectionists’ when it comes to using the term‘terrorism’ (ibid.). We suggest that ‘terrorism’ should indeed be eschewed as ananalytical category and abandoned altogether in academic research, on the basis of aprinciple of responsible academic engagement. It is our view that an element ofresponsibility must come into play when individuals and organisations take steps tocritically engage with the concept, its use in academic texts and circles and the permu-tations of that use in political, security and social contexts. Let us look at some of thearguments Richard Jackson puts forward for retaining the term.
Jackson argues that the concept of ‘terrorism’ provides an umbrella field whereotherwise fragmented research efforts can converge and ‘cross-fertilise’. He makesthe argument adding that, without a central tent ‘much research on political violencewill remain fragmented’ (ibid.). He tries to achieve this by developing a ‘minimalistdefinition’ based upon the ‘observable regularities’ in human activity that can bedistinguished (ibid.). However, although he argues for the necessity of a centralconcept in order to bring together this range of researchers, we contend that usingthe term ‘terrorism’ is an inappropriate course of action. By Jackson’s own admis-sion, the word ‘terrorism’ is characterised by an ‘inherent ontological instability’(ibid.). It seems contradictory to argue, on the one hand, that a term is ontologicallyunsound, while on the other hand to suggest that it is a central concept which canbring stability and coherency to a divergent and potentially fragmented range ofscholars and subjects. In other words, how can you have a paradigm which bringstogether a range of different researchers when they have vastly different understand-ings or definitions of what their subject matter is? For example, for some researchersto potentially include acts of violence committed by the state whilst others excludethose acts creates a huge disparity in analysis. We suggest that it is impossible eventoday to say that all the different scholars of ‘terrorism’ focus their research andanalytical efforts on one and the same phenomenon, because each is obliged toborrow and mould approximate definitions on the basis of their particular researchagenda.
Jackson’s second line of reasoning for retaining the term is that ‘academia does notexist outside the power structures and associated dominant discourses of the day’(ibid.), and since the term ‘terrorism’ is currently so dominant within existing politicalstructures and the broader culture ‘responsible scholars cannot really afford toabandon it without risking marginalisation’ (ibid.). To abandon the word ‘terrorism’,Jackson argues, potentially leaves the arena to ‘ideologically-motivated policy-makersor to scholars who use it in propagandist or biased ways’ (ibid.). Instead, according to
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Jackson: ‘it must be engaged with, deconstructed and challenged, rather than aban-doned and left to less critical scholars’ (ibid.).
We acknowledge that Jackson’s emphasis is on the value of encouraging andcreating space for constructive critical engagement with notions of ‘terrorism’ in bothacademia and policy development. We maintain, however, that the strongest and mostchallenging political and social message that academics can articulate with regard tothis ill-defined, politically loaded and pejorative term is to exclude it from acceptedacademic discourse. In this scenario, ‘less critical scholars’ will be weeded out fromthe majority who would seek to rigorously unpack and define particular dynamics ofviolence in its own context, allowing for meaningful comparison, contrast and learn-ing between different experiences. By abandoning the term the possibility of engage-ment with scholars outside the field of Terrorism Studies, something Jackson hasmade it clear he is keen to encourage, is made easier.
One of the key elements of the engagement with policy-makers is the pressureupon academics to obtain research funding. It could be argued that, if academics donot use the language of the policy-makers, then we are unlikely to be funded to criti-cally engage with them. In response to these concerns, we argue that responsibleacademic engagement with violence that has social and policy out-workings shouldalways seek to enable policy-makers to better understand the dynamics which theyattempt to engage with. In other words, academics should not obfuscate or blurpolicy-makers’, politicians’ or military strategists’ views of the world by drawingpotentially false and dangerously misleading comparisons. Nor should academics, intheir eagerness to take advantage of sympathetic funding and political environments,risk creating the opportunity where powerful people can claim legitimacy from theirresearch or that they were misled, or can relinquish responsibility for policy andother choices made in response to situations of violence. While perhaps a less attrac-tive option for academics under huge pressure to meet regional publication stan-dards, we believe this must be the way forward if research and collaboration acrossborders on divisive issues are to be of long-term value to academic and othersectors.
We fully agree with the approach Jackson takes to the necessity of examining thesocially constructed, rhetorical nature of the term ‘terrorism’ (ibid.). Indeed, Jackson’sown contribution to this research area is considerable (Jackson, 2005). We argue herethat there is no reason why this valuable research cannot be undertaken whilst, at thesame time, arguing that the paradigm is a failed one. Zulaika and Douglass tellinglywrote before the events of 9/11 that they were ‘bothered by the referential invalidity,the rhetorical circularity that is all too characteristic of much that goes under the rubricof “terrorism”’ (1996, p. ix). They put forward the following research agenda: ‘It isthe reality-making power of the discourse itself that most concerns us – its capacity toblend the media’s sensational stories, old mythical stereotypes, and a burning sense ofmoral wrath’ (Zulaika and Douglass, 1996:ix).
It is important to examine in detail how the term ‘terrorism’ is deployed, particu-larly given the response of the State under the rubric of ‘counter-terrorism’ (Sluka,2002). As we have argued above, the response of the State is potentially more damag-ing than the acts of violence labelled as terrorism (see also Mueller, 2006). Thisresearch agenda can be undertaken without recourse to essentialising the term ‘terror-ism’. As Jackson acknowledges, ‘it can be argued that rigorous research on politicalviolence and social movements can be undertaken without employing the term at all’(Jackson, 2011).
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Abandoning the use of the term does not mean an end to engaging with the dynam-ics of violence and areas of study that Terrorism Studies has attempted, unsatisfacto-rily, to group together and to define. Deconstructing the use of this term is a vitalresearch project. A policy of ‘continued critical engagement’ can be adopted justas effectively by arguing that we should go further than Jackson and other CriticalTerrorism Studies advocates have gone to date, beginning with the assertion that theterm should be abandoned. We argue that a research agenda that examines politicallymotivated violence and that does not use the pejorative term of ‘terrorism’ is likely toinvite critical engagement from a broad base of diverse individuals and groups –indeed, as it already does across a range of disciplines, from history and politicalscience to social psychology, anthropology and other areas of study. Such broad-basedinterest in the area encourages policy-makers to realise the utility of this research andits applicability to particular areas of decision-making and policy development.
Finally, we agree with the spirit of Jackson’s fifth argument: that there is acompelling imperative to retain a term that de-legitimises particular kinds of politicalviolence which instrumentalises human suffering, frequently of non-combatants, andcauses widespread fear (ibid.). Nevertheless, as demonstrated in the previous section,we do not believe these supposed qualifiers of ‘terrorism’ to be genuinely distinctive.Moreover, given the political normative connotations widely agreed to be inherent inthe term, we suggest that even the humanitarian premise in Jackson’s argumentcannot be trusted, because there is always a danger, as he acknowledges (ibid.), thatthis very argument may be used in an instrumentalist fashion. In other words, it is anargument that can be applied selectively – for example, to justify reactions to inci-dents of violence that seek to bend long-accepted legislative standards, such asacceptable periods of detention without charge or trial or restricting freedom ofassembly. A very good example of this has been the utilisation of the Terrorism Act2000 in the UK, specifically section 44, to conduct more stop and search activities. Ina finding in 2010 the European Court of Human Rights unanimously found againstthe British Government in its utilisation of these powers to stop demonstrators fromproceeding to a protest outside a conference of arms dealers (see BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8453878.stm). Mueller, amongst others, has presented a highlypersuasive argument over the way the risk from ‘terrorism’ has been exaggerated bythe ‘terrorism industry’ to create a climate of fear within which the State has overre-acted to the detriment of its citizens (Mueller, 2006).
We suggest that maintaining the use of the term ‘terrorism’ for the reasons Jacksonargues here will only serve to further mythologise and demonise acts of violence andtheir perpetrators, and always from the position of the more powerful party. Indeed,ironically, it is precisely the tendency to label many diverse moments of violence asacts of ‘terrorism’ that appears to suggest that all these acts, regardless of context andmeaning, have moral equivalence. We believe that a more helpful way of acting in thespirit of Jackson’s argument would be to simply reassert that in all instances wherepolitical violence of any nature instrumentalises any human suffering, the legal stan-dard and social understanding is that such violence is illegal, and that therefore anyonecommitting such acts should be held fully accountable under the well-established rulesand laws.
Having addressed the arguments for retaining the use of the term, we will now turnto the case of Northern Ireland to consider the ways in which the use of the terms‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorists’ can have an impact in societies emerging from violentpolitical conflict.
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Lessons from Northern Ireland
The relevance of adhering to a principle of responsible academic engagement whenconducting and publishing research on violence is illustrated by studies of societies intransition following violent political and social conflict. We argue that various aspectsof social and political life in Northern Ireland post-1998 demonstrate that frequentand sustained use of the terms ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in the media and politicaldiscourse has important implications for the transition out of violent conflict. Thisincludes: the substance of political peace settlements; the extent to which negotiatedpeace settlements are deemed acceptable by different groups and communities on theground, and therefore the community-based work that must be done to follow up onor complement the high-level political settlement; and the processes of recuperationand healing which victims and survivors of the violent political conflict undergo,including the ways in which they seek to regain a sense of safety and value within theirimmediate communities and wider society.
In exploring these areas of concern, we make two broad points: first, that while theuse of the words ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ is by no means the only problematicelement of post-conflict engagement and attempts to normalise political and socialinteractions, it is a key factor which makes political solutions hard to find. Second, theuse of the term ‘terrorist’ makes the business of dealing with the past in a ‘new’ inclu-sive society particularly difficult, insofar as the term seems, for many people, to leavea permanent mark on former perpetrators of political violence.
The argument is informed by both desk and social research conducted in a numberof different contexts in Northern Ireland between 2007 and 2009. The desk researchhas taken into account not only academic analyses of the protracted conflict and‘peace process’, but also policy and legislation, while the social research has involvedinteractions with victims and survivors of the conflict, local politicians and formerpolitical prisoners.
By way of a brief summary of the conflict and the context of the peace process, itis helpful to understand that, while the majority of the population of Northern Irelandvoted for Unionist (pro the UK) and Nationalist (pro a united Ireland) political partieswhich eschewed violence, for long periods in the 1970s and 1980s organised politicalviolence appeared to be endemic. A number of Irish Republican groups, most notablythe IRA, conducted violent campaigns in Northern Ireland, the rest of Ireland andthe UK in support of a united Ireland (English, 2004). In turn, Loyalist groups, suchas the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association (UDA), respondedwith violence, ostensibly to ‘defend’ their communities and to maintain their place inthe Union. Over this period, the British state and its agencies engaged in counter-insur-gency measures that were often repressive in nature. In the aftermath of this violentconflict, the Good Friday Agreement (hereafter, ‘Agreement’, 1998) and subsequentSt Andrews Agreement [Northern Ireland (St Andrews Agreement) Act, 2006] wereeventually reached by the various parties in discussion. These Agreements constitutethe foundations for a largely peaceful political engagement in Northern Ireland.
As in all negotiated peace settlements, the Agreements in Northern Ireland arebuilt around compromises and on the principle of inclusivity, in order to pave the wayforward for a society that can embrace and live with differences of identity, cultureand aspiration – as opposed to rising up against them, or attempting to sabotage ordestroy them. In pragmatic terms, this is seen as a positive step: casualties are dramat-ically reduced, the material cost of violence diminishes, and opportunities for opening
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the economy and other resources up to more sympathetic and confident internationalpartnerships and investments grow. Normatively, too, it is widely agreed in Westerncultural terms that it is a ‘good’ thing to seek an end to violence, and to find ways forso-called deeply divided societies to live peaceably with – and perhaps even seek toreconcile – their differences (see Bloomfield, Huyse, & Barnes, 2003).
One of the most controversial issues in the peace process was the problem of whatwould happen to the large number of prisoners who had been jailed over the course ofthe conflict for scheduled, that is, ‘terrorist’, crimes. For the various loyalist andrepublican paramilitary groupings in Northern Ireland, the release of their memberswho were still in jail was a vital demand if they were to sign up to a peace deal. Notsurprisingly, the early release of prisoners held for politically motivated violent andillegal activities was a key element of the 1998 Agreement. It is debatable whetherprominent politicians such as Gerry Adams (president of Sinn Féin, the political wingof the IRA) or David Ervine (the late former leader of the Progressive Unionist Party,PUP, offering political advice to the UVF) could have supported the Agreement with-out the endorsement of the prisoners and their supporters. Furthermore, it can beargued that the contributions made by Sinn Féin and the PUP to the normalisation ofpolitical life between 1998–2009, together with the decommissioning of IRA andUVF weapons in 2005 and 2009, are proof positive that this aspect of the settlementwas not only necessary but has also reaped benefits for society.
A significant aspect of this process has been the fact that individuals who wereformerly associated with proscribed ‘terrorist’ organisations, including former prison-ers, now hold office at various levels of local and regional government. This wouldsuggest that the early release of people convicted of ‘terrorist’ offences as part of theAgreement involved at least a tacit acknowledgement that there was a degree of polit-ical validity and meaning in their actions. Whereas individuals such as Gerry Adamsmay have been heavily censored in regional media in the past precisely because theywere supposed ‘terrorists’, this concession acknowledged that so-called ‘terrorists’were jailed on the basis of specific actions they supported, carried out or were foundguilty of, and not because of who they were. It is also interesting to note that, in thearea of government and politics, the term ‘terrorist’ or ‘former terrorist’ is predomi-nantly associated in local usage with republicans and nationalists as opposed to anyunionist or loyalist individuals or groups. Furthermore, while individuals and organi-sations have been singled out in the past, and continue to be singled out, as being‘terrorists’ or involved in ‘terrorist activities’, there is no acknowledgement at govern-mental or other official levels of the influence that political and other leaders mayhave had upon those individuals, groups and activities by way of inflammatoryspeeches and statements over the years. Interviews with former combatants convictedof ‘terrorist’ offences have shown that, in many cases, they were motivated to take uparms on the basis of passionate speeches and invocations to ‘fight to the last drop ofblood’ (excerpt from interview: 24 November 2009) by supposedly committed consti-tutional politicians.
However, whilst the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has accepted that Sinn Féinis not now a ‘terrorist’ organisation but a political party and devolution of governancehas taken place, this decision has left many people on the ground feeling frustrated,bewildered and vulnerable. Many unionist victims, survivors and those bereaved as aresult of IRA atrocities feel that the DUP leader at the time, the Reverend Ian Paisley,‘sold out’ to the ‘despicable’, ‘terrorist’ enemy, betrayed his electorate and compro-mised the moral integrity of Unionism as a whole. It can be supposed from this that it
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has been very difficult for ordinary people to make that leap of imagination and faithfrom perceiving someone as a ‘terrorist’ to seeing them as a ‘former terrorist’ and nowa partner in a new dispensation and society.
The return of ex-prisoners – both loyalists and republicans – to society has notbeen without challenges. For example, there is the question of reintegration intocommunities, when legal restrictions on the employment opportunities available toformer political prisoners limit their possibilities of living a normal life. At the sametime, there are large numbers of victims and survivors of the conflict who also havepsycho-social, physical and justice-related needs emanating from their experiences ofthe violence (see Templer & Radford, 2007; Fay, Morrisey, & Smyth, 1999). Indeed,research has shown that attempting to draw boundaries between the needs and some-times the experiences expressed by former combatants and political prisoners andother victims is an artificial enterprise (see Beyers, 2007). The British and NorthernIreland administrations have responded in part to these challenges by making signifi-cant funds available for community development and reconciliation work, and supportfor victims and survivors in general. These funds have come not only from the Officeof the First Minister and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) at Stormont, but also fromthe European Union: the so-called ‘Peace’ funds.
The dynamics involved for groups accessing funding are a good indicator of thedivergent views on who is a legitimate claimant to those resources, and therefore whois a legitimate victim of the violence and suffering related to the conflict in and aboutNorthern Ireland. For us, while this debate surrounding a hierarchy of victimhood iscomplex and has many aspects (see Morrissey & Smyth, 2002), it has undoubtedly beenfuelled and exacerbated by the past and continued use of the terms ‘terrorist’ and ‘terror-ism’ in Northern Irish political and social life. While there is no statistical or qualitativeevidence to this effect, we suggest that that the frequent use of the terms ‘terrorist’ and‘terrorism’ has had the potential to impress upon large numbers of people in NorthernIreland the idea that all republican and loyalist violence was aimed at creating a spec-tacle of human suffering, thus disguising the meaning of what was taking place.
The debate around legitimate victimhood came into the foreground in January2009 at the public launch of a Northern Ireland Office consultation document on howto deal with the past in relation to the conflict (McAdam, 2009). One of the recom-mendations made in the document – that has subsequently been revoked by the BritishGovernment – was that ‘the nearest relative of someone who died as a result of theconflict in and about Northern Ireland, from January 1966, should receive a one-offex-gratia recognition payment of £12,000’ (Consultative Group on the Past forNorthern Ireland, 2009, p. 16). While some individuals and families were not averseto the idea of the recognition payment, others were scandalised; in their interpretationthe payment would effectively draw a ‘moral equivalence’ between ‘innocent victims’and ‘terrorists’. To make this point, campaigners who belong to funded groups thatdefine themselves as ‘innocent victims of terrorist violence’ stood outside the launchholding placards declaring ‘The wages of murder: £12,000’.
We must emphasise again that we are not moral relativists, and that by arguing forthe exclusion of the word ‘terrorist’ from academic and other discourses we do notsuggest that there is not, as Jackson puts it, a compelling normative imperative to de-legitimise any kind of violence that instrumentalises human suffering for the purposeof influencing an audience. However, we contend that controversy over a hierarchy ofvictimhood in these terms is proving to be unhelpful to the wider process of deliveringneeded services and creating a safer environment for all in Northern Ireland. It is our
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view that persistent recourse to the notion of the hierarchy of victimhood tends tofudge the issue of why the conflict occurred in the first place, and obscures criticalunderstanding of grievances, inequalities and vulnerabilities – on all sides – that havegiven rise to much of the emotion and violence of the conflict and its aftermath. Anapproach that could enable greater participation and collective benefit from politicaland socially restorative processes, is one which was recently articulated in an inter-view with a (non-combatant) victim of the ‘Troubles’:
I think that hierarchy is very important (…) because we quite clearly weren’t all victimsin the same way. (…) I think if government would come out and they were to say some-thing in terms of the definition of the victim – along the lines of, you know, not every-body was affected by the conflict in the same way; some were guilty, some wereinnocent. But the net result of all of that was destruction (…). So you’re actually namingthe elephant in the room, and you’re also answering the critics who say, how can youpossibly compare my son with this murderer? Because you’re naming it (…). But thenbeyond that to go on to say, when we’re looking at delivery of services or of help or carepackages (…), we’re not looking at what people did; we’re acknowledging that there wasright and wrong, but we’re looking at what’s been left behind. (Excerpt from interview:12 November 2009.)
We maintain therefore, that, as enshrined in international and local standards ofhuman rights, all destructive violence and taking of life is illegal and should be treatedas such. However, taking this information on board does not negate the need to inves-tigate and understand the circumstances, social, political and historical, that gave riseto violent action in the first place, and to work to demonstrate that those issues arebeing addressed.
It is impossible to address here the full complexity of the relationships betweenpoliticians and citizens that have been engaged in and affected by decades of conflictin Northern Ireland. However, by this brief exploration of current challenges faced bydecision-makers and ordinary citizens alike, we have aimed to highlight that this verycomplexity is evidence in itself that academics, strategists and observers of all kindsshould resist the temptation to use easy catch-all categories, such as ‘terrorism’, todescribe violent conflict.
Conclusion
In an intriguing and challenging book, The accidental Guerrilla: Fighting small warsin the midst of a big one, David Kilcullen (2009) has mapped some of the more complexelements of what has been called ‘the war against terrorism’. Amongst the many inter-esting case studies he explores is the ambush of some US forces in Afghanistan, withwhom he was working, by the Taliban. He describes how local farmers, not particularlysympathetic to the Taliban, joined in the attack on US soldiers. What fascinated himwas why they had taken part:
There is no evidence that the locals cooperated directly with the Taliban; indeed itseemed they had no direct political reason to get involved in the fight (several, ques-tioned afterwards, said they had no love for the Taliban and were generally welldisposed towards the Americans in the area). But, they said, how could they not joinin? Did we understand just how boring it was to be a teenager in a valley in centralAfghanistan? This was the most exciting thing that had happened in their valley foryears. It would have shamed them to stand by and wait it out, they said. (Kilcullen,2009, pp. 40–41)
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Kilcullen does use the category of ‘terrorist’ in his work, although he does not applyit to this event. This incident is revealing in that it suggests the complex motivationsin one discrete episode of violence. Only by understanding the meanings of theviolence can one begin to develop an adequate response. Kilcullen takes very seri-ously the local context and warns against conflating different types of violence in spiteof the apparent global nature of some of the campaigns. Drawing on anthropology heargues for ‘conflict ethnography’, ‘as an attempt to study a conflict in its own (“emic”)terms, and to internalise and interpret the physical, human, informational, and ideo-logical setting in which it takes place’ (p. 304).
Many of the writers on ‘terrorism’ accept that the motivations and meaningsbehind particular acts of violence, or threats of violence, are varied and complex. It isalso important to be aware that there are commonalities between strategies ofviolence in different contexts. Comparison between strategies and events is legiti-mate. What most researchers under the paradigm of Terrorism Studies want toresearch are the motivations behind the violent strategies of non-state actors. Webelieve such research to be legitimate. Jackson, in this publication, provides much ofthe basis for sensitive comparative study in the area. However, we differ from Jack-son, in that we believe if you want to take the meaning and context of that violenceseriously you have to stop labelling it with a pejorative term such as ‘terrorism’. Asdemonstrated above in the discussion on labelling, the category is a popular labellingdevice put on certain, but not all, groups in order to de-legitimise them; as such, it isnot a useful analytical category.
Responsible academic engagement demands that we avoid pejorative terms and donot pre-judge the acts of violence being studied. So many writers accept the inadequa-cies of the ‘terrorist’ paradigm yet keep on using it, apparently to satisfy popular senti-ment and powerful funders. This is the equivalent of knowing the world is round butmaintaining that it is flat. Needless to say, it is important to understand and decon-struct the discourses of ‘terrorism’, the mechanisms through which the labellingprocess takes place. However, to use it as an analytical category is a fundamentalmistake with grave political implications. We believe that these more criticallyengaged scholars must start to argue that it is time to stop using the ‘t word’, not onlybecause it is impossible to define but, more pertinently, because its highly politicisednature and the connotations it holds make it an unhelpful empirical and analytic cate-gory for understanding the diverse acts being studied. Furthermore, as demonstratedin the consideration of Northern Ireland above, the continued use of the paradigmproves a hindrance to genuinely engaging with the problem of political violence whichdominates the contemporary geo-political agenda.
AcknowledgementA number of arguments made in this article were originally presented at the 3rd Annual CICA-STR International Conference: ‘Political Violence and Collective Aggression: Considering thePast, Imagining the Future’, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, 2–5 September, 2009. Wegreatly appreciate the valuable comments we received from the Editors of this journal, inparticular those of Justin Sinclair, and the two reviewers. Special thanks are due to Dr RichardJackson for his willingness to provide a copy of the paper he gave at the above conference,entitled ‘Critical terrorism studies: an explanation, a defence and a way forward’. We are alsograteful for Dr Jackson’s generosity in letting us use the arguments he put forward in thatpresentation for our article. We fully recognise that the article he has submitted to this specialissue differs in a number of significant ways from this early paper, and we also recognise thatDr Jackson has addressed some of the issues we have raised. We also thank Dr Danielle
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Blaylock for assisting us in the preparation of this article, and Dr Craig Zelizer, AssociateDirector of the Conflict Resolution Programme, Georgetown University, who first provided uswith the opportunity to articulate these views.
Notes on contributorDominic Bryan is Director of the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, Belfast. LiamKelly and Sara Templer are current PhD candidates in the same Institute.
Note1. BBC News Website, ‘Miliband regrets “war on terror”’; http:///newsbbc.co.uk/1/hi/
uk_politics/7829946.stm (accessed 16 January 2009).
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