ABSTRACT
Introduction In this chapter and the next, the impact of ‘Islamic’ terrorism upon the West is explored. It is argued that the threat of terrorism has become inflated because of a combination of political and populace reactions, existing perceptions of risks and feelings of vulnerability and fear. Chapter 6 explores the potential consequences of these shifting emotions and restraints that are resulting in the reduction of freedoms in the name of freedom with only limited opposition. First, it is important to establish the extent to which risk has become an embedded concept within Western societies before determining how acts of terror, and the threat of attack, connect into these broader perceptions. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to identify and analyse how militant Islam and acts of ‘terrorism’, specifically in the West, have become understood under the rubric of risk. Further, it seeks to explore the relationship between risk and uncertainty and between risk, as a specifically negative event, and the generation of fear. As Manning (2006) identifies, risk lies somewhere between what is ‘factually known’ and what is ‘completely unknowable’ and so, as Frank Knight (1971) famously pointed out, it is as much a product of our ignorance as of our knowledge. Lying somewhere within this domain of uncertainty, risk needs to be understood not simply through the language of control but through the idiom of critique, dissidence and counter-accusation (Sparks 2001). Risk condenses a sense of an amorphous and abstract future and transforms it into something which must be accounted for in the present within systems of human decision-making. In fact, Luhmann (1993) suggests that modern society will only take danger seriously when it is couched in terms of risk. In this, the unknowability and relative uncertainty of risk generate possibilities for authorities and different social groups to advocate or contest the importance of possible future events and current social organization within specific relations of power.
