ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses how national security discourse continues this project in the attempt to maintain definitional variations which serve state's mobilization of terrorism and statist power. It examines the central task of the state in its fixing of meanings that make terrorism a commodity of security. The implication for the state is that the modern use of terrorism has its foundations in statist functions and statist violence. Although the term terrorism was introduced into European vocabulary with the Reign of Terror, actual acts of violence date further back in history. As the state contextualizes terrorism, the world cannot help but be aware of terrorism as an intrinsic phenomenon in the current state of international relations. For the United States, the site of practice in which moral authority is enacted over terrorism has its basis in American exceptionalism, a concept that holds the United States to be the principle authority over, and grantors of, morality.
