ABSTRACT
Everyone can terrorize. Terrorism is a violent activity of non-state actors (which may or may not be authorized or sponsored by a state) but terror – and antiterror – is for everyone. Civil War General William T. Sherman’s words, by which he justified the scorched-earth policy of pillaging a great part of Georgia, ‘Fear is the beginning of wisdom’,3 stand as an epitome of a state-authorized use of terror as a tool of war.4 Just as terror is not exclusively non-state, so anti-terror is not exclusively statist. There has always existed armed groups taking it upon themselves to protect their community against ‘terrorist’ violence of either other armed groups or the state. Common to these observations is that the line between terror and anti-terror does not follow the state/non-state divide when one looks upon the actual violence perpetrated. It does only so when one looks upon the actors, having already presupposed and naturalized the divide. Throughout the book, we will explore indistinctions between legal and illegal violence but also the ways in which the state seeks to claim and police a distinction between its own violence and that of others. This is not to claim any moral equality or to expose the terrorist nature or inherent illegitimacy of the state but because, in order to understand violence and our relation to it, one needs to go further and below the statist narrative and because, since at least the beginning of the modern era and the emergence of political ideologies, all larger political violence has had the state as the center of their attention. All political groups gather either inside, if they are part of the political power, or in front of the parliament or city hall, if they are outside political power, and this also applies to violent groups with political motivations. They seek the attention of the state; they duplicate and mimic the state form; they adapt and change with the state: ‘In each era, terrorism derives its ideology in reaction to the raison d’être of the dominant constitutional order, at the same time negating and rejecting that form’s unique ideology but mimicking the form’s structural characteristics.’5
