ABSTRACT
This chapter takes as its starting point Max Weber’s claim that the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a particular territory characterizes the “ideal-typical” modern state. We claim that everything turns here on the problematic term “legitimacy.” Looking back to terrorist attacks already discussed – Glasgow, Thalys, for example – and to examples of state violence in the contemporary moment, we show the range of state violence that might be considered legitimate. Here we isolate the role of the state in protecting against not physical threats but threats to the people, insults. This slippage, we propose, makes terrorism and security a placeholder that allows a certain kind of discourse: terrorism targets symbols and “critical infrastructure” while states deem certain lives and infrastructure “critical”. Of course, the reach of the state is not far in many parts of the world, nor is it considered legitimate. The chapter turns ethnographically to Kenya, but we also expose fear over irrationality in politics elsewhere, showing how great effort is made to transpose terrorist violence into a familiar political idiom.
