ABSTRACT
This process of ‘depoliticisation’ or what we would describe as a hegemonic eradication of politics is concretised by the organising concepts that are used to describe political violence. Sub-state political violence is no longer called political violence, but terrorism. And the political violence of the state is described by its fiercest critics using language which, though denunciatory, can obscure its political content. Labelling state political violence as ‘state terrorism’ of course has a useful condemnatory function in hoisting the Western liberal state with its own petard, so to speak, echoing the declamatory language used by states. Yet as an exercise in counter-hegemony, this labelling process also runs the risk, through its resort to the same scandalising language, of implying, at least semantically, that state terror is an exceptional, rather than a routine, condition. This is not merely a semantic point, for, as we have argued, the term ‘terrorism’ as a hegemonic device is powerful precisely because it is able to eradicate politics from sub-state political violence. We need to consider that this might also be the effect when we fix the term ‘terrorist’ onto terrorist states. Whatever semantic or lingustic strategy we deploy, however, to reintroduce politics into state and sub-state ‘terror’ amounts to an exercise in redefining the material basis for violence. If we are to understand adequately the origins and the motivations for political violence, and indeed if we are to appraise realistically the chance of its reduction, the imperative task for any genuine counter-terror strategy is to bring the political back into our analysis and response to ‘terrorism’. It seems undeniable that in order to ‘bring politics back in’ to the study of terrorism and indeed so-called counter-terrorism, we need to rethink our organising concepts. At the level of the state, this task has become both clearer and more muddy in recent years. The constant entreaty on the part of governments and their experts to think about security as apolitical has added to the muddiness as the language and practice of counter-terrorism have spread through domestic and foreign policy. This is perhaps most apparent in the key set of theoretical claims that stand behind the current ‘war on terror’: the ‘new terrorism’ thesis.
