ABSTRACT
This chapter provides security discourses that have given particular meanings to the idea of Africa, to the securitization of Africa, and to the contested ways in which the continent has been iterated into the post-9/11 global order. It traces and critiques historical and contemporary discourse on African security as well as approaches to terrorism differently understood as war, crime, and as ontologically evil. While there is no uniform approach to terrorism mapped in the book, its general approach is more in line with older critical approaches to terrorism. For North Americans, in particular, terrorism was no longer abstract or something that happened to distant strangers in foreign lands. The chapter reflects on the early signs of continuities and discontinuities in approaches to terrorism, extremism and political violence from the George W. Bush administration to the Barack Obama administration.
