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An Intellectual History of Terror

This book investigates terrorism and anti-terrorism as related and interacting

phenomena, undertaking a simultaneous reading of terrorist and statist ideolo-
gists in order to reconstruct the ‘deadly dialogue’ between them.
This work investigates an extensive array of violent phenomena and actors,
trying to broaden the scope and ambition of the history of terrorism studies. It
combines an extensive reading of state and terrorist discourse from various
sources with theorizing of modernity’s political, institutional and ideological
development, forms of violence, and its guiding images of self and other, order
and disorder. Chapters explore groups of actors (terrorists, pirates, partisans,
anarchists, Islamists, neo-Nazis, revolutionaries, soldiers, politicians, scholars) as
well as a broad empirical source material, and combine them into a narrative of
how our ideas and concepts of state, terrorism, order, disorder, territory, viol-
ence and others came about and influence the struggle between the modern
state and its challengers. The main focus is on how the state and its challengers
have conceptualized and legitimated themselves, defended their existence and,
most importantly, their violence. In doing so, the book situates terrorism
and anti-terrorism within modernity’s grander history of state, war, ideology and
violence.
This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies,
political violence, sociology, philosophy, and security studies/international rela-
tions in general.

Mikkel Thorup is Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and the

History of Ideas, University of Aarhus, Denmark.
Series: Critical terrorism studies
Series Editors: Richard Jackson, Marie Breen Smyth and
Jeroen Gunning
University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK

This book series will publish rigorous and innovative studies on all aspects of
terrorism, counter-terrorism and state terror. It seeks to advance a new genera-
tion of thinking on traditional subjects and investigate topics frequently over-
looked in orthodox accounts of terrorism. Books in this series will typically
adopt approaches informed by critical-normative theory, post-positivist method-
ologies and non-Western perspectives, as well as rigorous and reflective ortho-
dox terrorism studies.

Terrorism and the Politics of Contemporary State Terrorism

Response Theory and practice
London in a time of terror Edited by Richard Jackson, Eamon Murphy
Edited by Angharad Closs Stephens and and Scott Poynting
Nick Vaughan-Williams
State Violence and Genocide in
Critical Terrorism Studies Latin America
Framing a new research agenda The Cold War years
Edited by Richard Jackson, Edited by Marcia Esparza,
Marie Breen Smyth and Jeroen Gunning Henry R. Huttenbach and
Daniel Feierstein
The De-Radicalization of Jihadists
Transforming armed Islamist Discourses and Practices of Terrorism
movements Interrogating terror
Omar Ashour Edited by Bob Brecher, Mark Devenney and
Aaron Winter
State Terrorism and Neoliberalism
The North in the South An Intellectual History of Terror
Ruth Blakeley War, violence and the state
Mikkel Thorup
An Intellectual History of
Terror
War, violence and the state

Mikkel Thorup
First published 2010
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
© 2010 Mikkel Thorup
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN 0-203-84821-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-57995-3 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-203-84821-7 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-57995-7 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-84821-0 (ebk)
Contents

List of illustrations viii

Preface ix
1 Introduction: to terrorize and to theorize 1
The histories of violence and terrorism 2
Intellectual history of violence and terrorism 4
The scandal of violence 6
Modernity and terrorism 8
Plan of the book 11

PART I
Investigative signposts 13

2 Killing words: on justifying violence 15

For violence against violence 18
A conflict of pure reactions 22
War and legitimate targets 24
Pure actor 26
The perverse logic of counter-transgression 28
With history on your side 31
Violence? What violence? 34
Nonviolence as doctrinal imperative 37
3 The violently privileged: on the state 39
Contingency of the state 40
War – a duel of sovereignties 43
Territorial control and infrastructural power 46
Internal monopolization of violence 53
The state among violent friends 55
Order versus order or, the privilege of violence 56
4 Beyond the line: on frontierlands 58
Territorial forms 61
vi Contents
The frontierland 64
Violence beyond the sphere of reason 66
Orientalizing (part of ) the present 71

PART II
Archive of terrors 75

5 Terror as fright: the concept of terror before the French

Revolution 77
From the Bible to the Enlightenment 78
From the Enlightenment to the French Revolution 82
The different uses of terror up until the French Revolution 86
6 Terror as policy: the concept of terror during the French
Revolution 88
The French Revolution 1: Robespierre 89
The French Revolution 2: anti-Robespierre 94
Terror in counter-Enlightenment discourse 98
Terror, terrorism, terrorist 100
7 Terror as crime: the concept of terror after the French
Revolution 102
Nineteenth century: learning a concept 103
Red terror as Bolshevik order of the day 107
Twentieth century: terrorism as violence plus 111
‘Terrorism’ consolidated: after 1945 118
Conventional disputes: international law debates 122
Aberrations: ‘positive’ terror 127
Terror as terror: the return of fear and horror? 129

PART III
Pirates and terrorists 135

8 Pirates and barbarians: the Barbary ‘axis of piracy’ and

Western ‘anti-terror’ campaigns 137
The Barbary pirates 139
America and the Barbary corsairs 142
From sea blockade to semi-private warfare 145
Colonizing Algeria 147
From anti-terror to state terror 152
9 Enemy of humanity: the anti-piracy discourse in
present-day anti-terrorism 155
The state philosophical consensus on the pirate 158
 Contents vii
Use of the anti-piracy discourse before the present wave of terror 165
The anti-piracy discourse today 168
10 State pirates: warriors in the maritime frontierland 170
The legal pirate 173
Outlawing of privateering 181
Criminalization as reification 182
Re-opening of the frontierland and the new privateering 183

PART IV
States of terror, states of humanity 187

11 All talk and no security: the securitist critique of the liberal

democracy’s irresponsibility 189
The non-democratic defense of democracies 191
Militarized antipolitics: the military coup 192
Securitized antipolitics: American neo-conservatives 195
Moralized antipolitics: moral defense of the West 197
Ultrapolitics 200
12 The humanitarian sovereign: cosmopolitan warfare in the
new global frontierland 202
Beyond the nation state – and the return of power 206
Cosmopolitan discourses 207
The humanitarian sovereign 213
Sovereignty denied 217

Notes 220
Index 269
Illustrations

Figures
3.1 Sovereignty/reason of state 49
4.1 Conflictuality as seen from the state 71

Tables
2.1 Violence to end violence 19
2.2 Political and private violence 19
3.1 Violent actors 42
Preface

[T]he world that people like me are after is not a world in which people don’t
kill one another (we’re not that crazy!) but a world in which murder is not
legitimized.
(Albert Camus, November 1946)1

What Chairman Krushchev describes as wars of liberation and popular uprisings,

I prefer to describe as subversion and covert aggression.
(US Secretary of State Robert McNamara)2

Terror attacks. It attacks our bodies. It attacks our sense of security, both as indi-
viduals and as societies. The sudden exposure to our profound human vulnera-
bility activates both a sense of fear and horror, terror in its most basic and
original meaning, and a desire for action, resolution, re-establishment of an
ontological security; a security secure in and of itself.
This book is about what violence, war and terrorism are but mostly about
what they do to us and what we, as societies, do with and against them. I want to
offer some investigative resources to how violence, especially terrorism, devel-
ops in a strained but intense relation to the state and how we as societies, feeling
under attack, conceptualize and respond to these attacks. This is not a classical
book on the history of terrorism, starting with the Zealots and Assassins, then
jumping a couple of thousand years to the anarchists and a twentieth-century
succession of the usual suspect, ending up with religious terrorism and al
Qaeda. It is not that I take this kind of narrative to be wrong; I use the narra-
tives myself. It is just that I want to problematize the unspoken assumptions
guiding that kind of narrative, basically retelling the state’s story. And I want to
situate terrorism within a broader history of violence, rather than to single it out
as something separate from the rest of our killings of each other.
In this book, the state is written into the narrative in a hopefully more integ-
rative manner than often seen. Not to expose the state as the real terrorist or
anything of that kind or to morally equalize the state and its violent challengers,
but because the basic argument of my book is that the state form determines its
challengers. Not in a conscious or intentional way but the state form and self-
description describes and creates its own challengers both by having developed
into the hegemonic definitional center of descriptions and by being the over-
whelmingly most important obstacle and object of desire for violent challengers.
x Preface
The state, then, is the privileged descriptor and all-important center of atten-
tion. Changes in how the state organizes, describes and legitimates itself will
have profound consequences for how it conceptualizes challenges and how it
can be fought, both legitimatorily and violently.
This book comes out of my prior work into the intellectual history of political
theory, mainly the conceptualizations of modern economics and politics. It is,
therefore, not a historical narrative of events but an intellectual history of legitimi-
zations. The main focus is on how the state and its challengers have conceptual-
ized and legitimated themselves, defended their existence and, most
importantly, their violence. One should not read this book as a chronological
account of the history of terrorism but as chapters in the intellectual history of
violent ideas: How did the state convince its society to hand over to it all or most
means of violence? How do rebels and challengers – terrorists if one likes – try
to legitimate their actions? How come modernity is legitimatorily underpinned
by a doctrine of nonviolence while being, at the same time, the most murderous
of ages? And finally, how do some groups manage to legitimate their violence,
while others do not? What are the reasons and histories behind our ideas of a
distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence?

I was in London in July 2005, quietly sitting in a café, reading in the newspaper
about atrocities in faraway places when a bomb in the Underground exploded a
few hundred meters away. Four young radical Islamic suicide bombers had just
killed 52 people. In the hours after, everything was chaos. A terror attack? Is it
over? How many dead? This was fear and horror caused by the manifestation of
the unknown and the terrible. It was angst realized.
But very soon, on the very day itself, it gave way to a strange sense of calm,
relief even. This was the attack we had waited for. For months and years before,
politicians and police with then-Prime Minister Tony Blair at the lead had said
that it was not a question of if but when the attack would come. Anticipation
determines reaction and everyone had been primed to expect an escalating
death toll, in the hundreds at minimum. Now the awaited disaster had hap-
pened and ‘only’ 52 were killed. This strange and unspoken feeling of relief was
mixed with the more obvious and visible feelings of shock, sorrow and outrage.
It gave inner London a unique sense of calm, which was also displayed some
time later at a ceremony in Trafalgar Square. It was a feeling of defiant calm –
they shall not defeat us, we shall not lash out at minorities, we shall demonstrate
resilience and fellowship – but it was also the feeling of having survived, as indi-
vidual and Londoner, an anticipated attack.
Two weeks later, on 21 July, there was another attack. Luckily, this time a
failed one but it changed the mood of inner-city London. The attack not only
reactivated the latent fear from before the first attack but actually also activated
a strong feeling that the worst, the really catastrophic, was yet to come. The
anticipated attack had not yet come after all. Fear was suddenly increased and
very real. One could sense an undercurrent of anxiety, restlessness and even
paranoia setting in. The sound of a helicopter in the air or a police siren in the
street made everyone look around nervously. The body and mind was in alert
modus. The city was in stress. That is only a transient feeling. It has to give way
 Preface xi
to something else, something calmer, everyday life, but the threat of the cata-
strophic attack, which had not yet come, was once again present and this time
not only as a probability but as a real thing happening at any time. The ‘age of
terror’, in which we allegedly live, is also characterized by ‘the temporality of
waiting, waiting for the next attack, waiting for the spread of a virus, waiting for
the killing of terrorists, waiting . . . as a prolonged moment of suspension and
anxiety, of terror transformed into spectacle of terror’.3 Waiting produces
images of things to come. People in London responded to the perception of a
danger still unknown, as likely or unlikely as before, but now real as the not-yet-
but-soon-and-certain. Jacques Derrida tells us that there is:

traumatism with no possible work of mourning when the evil comes from
the possibility to come of the worst, from the repetition to come – though
worse. Traumatism is produced by the future, by the to come, by the threat of
the worst to come, rather than by an aggression that is ‘over and done with’.4

One has to cope with fear. The first reaction is paralysis, possibly numbness.
The unfathomable enormity of forces beyond one’s comprehension and control
immobilizes. One is struck by an overpowering sense of having lost the ability to
protect oneself and control one’s immediate environment, to master the essen-
tials of one’s life. But, again, this is only temporary; at least it requires a constant
making-itself-present of dangers like in a war zone or concentration camp to
completely numb one. If not, then normality and some basic sense of control,
mastery and comprehension returns, perhaps strained, perhaps more thin, but
one is reactivated as a sovereign subject. Think of the very human reaction of
George W. Bush when hearing that a second plane had hit the World Trade
Center, making it certain as a terror attack rather than an accident. He just sits
there paralyzed and numb with an empty face. Then compare that with shortly
afterwards when he emerges as the Commander-in-Chief, declaring war against
the attackers. From numbness to action, from ordinary person to sovereign
leader. The incomprehensible is named, determined, localized, making it a
target for attack, separating and compartmentalizing it, exorcising it by turning
it into something smaller, something comprehensible. Terror attacks but the
terrorized respond.
I made a micro-observation of this in London about a month or so after the
attacks when sitting in the Underground on the way home. In a crowded Under-
ground train everyone is following a code of civil inattention to others, making
a space for themselves. In comes a native Briton in his mid-forties or so, who sits
down next to a young Muslim girl holding a backpack in her lap. At first he
doesn’t pay attention to the girl. But then he turns his head just a little, looks
down at the bag then gently tilts his head and looks at the girl’s face, and then
at the bag again. Looking at him I believe I can recount his ‘terrorized’ emo-
tions: ‘Is there a bomb in the bag?’ I sense his increasing panic but, being a
good Brit, he doesn’t get up or say something. That would be both embarrass-
ing and looked upon as racist. So he just sits there, looking increasingly worried.
He is immobilized, trapped by both the confines of the train and his fear. As
soon as this fear sequence begins, he cannot stop it by reminding himself of
xii Preface
how miniscule the possibility of a bomb is. The possibility and the activated
sense of terror have its hold in him. He has entered fear. After a period of para-
lyzed fear, he enters the zone of action. He has to manage the fear, regain
control. He has to bring the object of his fear within the orbit of action. He
cannot leave the train or wrest the bag from the girl. His options are limited but
his need for action is absolute. So he scoops 10–15 centimeters away from the
girl. A completely meaningless action if the goal were to avoid the explosion
from a bomb, but enough to allow him to regain his senses, to cope with his
fear, to bring himself back to a rational line of thought and to convince himself
to the point of staying in the train that the possibility of her having a bomb is
too little to merit further action. Action, any action, reinstates a sense of
control.
This is (also) what terror and anti-terror look like; or at least this is what they
may look like given the fact that I may have projected my own fear, sense of
superiority as a rational, unbiased cosmopolitan or maybe just my lust for theo-
rizing in unusual places. Anyhow, this is also what I try to do in this book on a
macro-level: to look at how we as societies recognize, describe and act on
attacks. It is informed by, but not dependent upon, 9/11 because my argument
is that we shall look more on the attacked than on the attacker, more on the
state and its history than on the violent challengers in isolation, as is the tend-
ency today, greatly reinforced by the understandable and necessary wish to get
theory on level with realities. In that sense, theory is parallel to the reactions
described above. In a sometimes frantic attempt not to be accused of serving no
purpose, of having overlooked dangers, of having numbed citizens and politi-
cians, researchers tend to ignore much of what a look at history can teach us
about how threats materialize and take form and how we as societies play an
inadvertent role as co-creators.

Countless people deserve thanks for voluntarily or involuntarily having helped

my thinking along on these matters; from the sweet old lady I rented a room
from and who, on 12 September 2001, shocked me by saying, ‘Finally, the Amer-
icans tasted their own medicine’, helping me to reflect on questions of guilt,
responsibility and the tabooed pleasures of the all-powerful suddenly being
shown vulnerable like the rest of us; to the political science professor who tried
to lecture me on Islamism as totalitarianism and who demonstrated how polit-
ical servility and lack of historical insight leads to bad theorizing; to all the stu-
dents who have heard me talking endlessly about these and related issues and
who have engaged critically in understanding the history and present of viol-
ence; to my colleagues who have supported, criticized, questioned and added to
these investigations; to my institute for letting me do my ‘violence stuff ’ in rela-
tive peace, generously demonstrating that freedom and trust is the way to
manage academics; and not least to David C. Rapoport, who encouraged me to
submit a small manuscript on pirates only to receive this monstrosity of a book.

One last London story. One week after the bombings, I walked deep in my
thoughts along the Thames when I suddenly found myself in front of a hastily
built memorial for the victims. As I stood watching I noticed the man standing
 Preface xiii
beside me. It was the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, paying his personal respects
away from cameras and onlookers. Apparently presenting no threat in the eyes
of the security guards, who I only now saw, I took out a camera from my bag and
asked for a photo. Somewhat awed by the presence of ‘the state’, by the personi-
fication of the state magic, I failed to act. The second after the photo and his
departure, with the magic dispelled, I looked at the book I had spent my day
reading, Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, and damned myself for not
having asked Blair to sign it (would have been a great ironic gesture, I thought)
and for not having asked him about the legality or illegality of the Iraq war. This
book is among many other things a redress for failed critiques and unasked
questions.
1 Introduction
To terrorize and to theorize

. . . trying always, beyond the commotion and the most sincere compassion, to
appeal to questions.
( Jacques Derrida)1

Truth has no systematic evolutionary advantage over error.

( John Gray)2

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 anti-
terror – 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 distinc-
tion 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
2 Introduction
So, exploring the state is a privileged entrance point to understanding what
terrorism is and what terrorists do. The argument of this book is that state and
terrorist share the same cultural, structural and legitimatory environment and
that one has to write the history of terrorism as a dialectics or ‘dialogue’
between the state and its violent challengers.

The histories of violence and terrorism

The English Middle East expert Fred Halliday criticizes what he calls ‘immedia-
tist seduction’, that is the tendency to declare any major event novel, without
precedent and heralding a new era.6 In the same manner, Philip Jenkins, in his
book Images of Terror, uses the concept of ‘obligatory amnesia’7 to explain how
each major outburst of terror is described as a new situation meriting a new
(and always tougher) approach. A history-based approach to terrorism studies
can help avoid or subvert that narrative of novelty and help explore what
approaches have proven successful or not in the past.8 Even more importantly, a
history of terrorism, when not confining its subject matter to ‘the terrorists’, can
help to defamiliarize ourselves from the concepts and images that have natural-
ized a clear and distinct divide between legal and illegal violence, making one
form of violence (policing, war) seem natural and benign and another inher-
ently, necessarily and always malignant (rebellion, terror).
My approach is to view terrorism as one expression of violence among many
others, characterized not by a specific quality of the violence perpetrated, but
rather by the structural position of the perpetrator and to investigate the
ongoing interaction, the ‘hostile dialectics’ or ‘violent dialogue’ between state
and non-state violent actors.
The chapters do have a critical bias toward the state, focusing mainly on its
use and monopoly of both force and definition. This is done deliberately to
address an imbalance in the field of terrorism studies, focusing understandably
on the terrorists, rather than as any accusation of the state as the mastermind of
violence and misery in the world. Why is this reassurance necessary? Because a
strong tendency exists to proclaim a binary structure of loyalty, evidenced in
a response from Conor Cruise O’Brien, the Irish politician and academic, to a
suggestion in the Guardian that one should take the IRA’s political motivations
seriously:

When we are summoned to make an effort to understand them . . . it is a

way of deflecting indignation and preparing surrender – ‘know thine
enemy’ may be a first stage in giving in to him. . . . It is an invitation to acqui-
esce in legitimating terror.9

This book strongly disagrees with all the claims of this quote. Understanding is
neither a surrender nor an invitation to terror. It is not even a way to under-
mine moral clarity or adequate responses. Suggestions of that nature are
rampant in present-day public and academic debate. Contrary to that percep-
tion, critically examined throughout the book (especially Chapters 9 and 11), I
want to maintain that to debate and understand, even to question and criticize,
 Introduction 3
is to strengthen one’s moral center and to facilitate successful action. And, as
Joseba Zulaika and William Douglass, from whom I have the O’Brien quote,
state: ‘We know of no other field in which the call for tabooing knowledge in
the interest of moral indignation can be issued by a leading figure.’10 If the fol-
lowing chapters break any of those kinds of taboos or ignore bans on thought
and questions, then it has served its purpose.
This book is part of the expanding but still very small field of ‘history of ter-
rorism studies’ (around 1 percent of terrorism studies and most of that con-
cerned with events after 196011), but it is not solely a terror book. One of its
main purposes is to situate terrorism within the much broader phenomenon of
political violence, rather than single it out as a particular form needing an
approach and methodology all of its own. This is also what forces upon the
chapters a certain demoralization or equalization of state and non-state actors,
which are meant only analytically rather than also morally. The aim is, first, to
investigate the conditions, possibilities and restraints for any violent actor and,
second, to explore how the state/non-state divide came about and is enforced.
Most books in the field focus on either the terrorists or the state (the latter
either as anti-terror or state terror),12 while this book insists on reading them
together in a combination of state and terrorist narratives. Many history of ter-
rorism studies portray terrorism as something abstracted from the rest of soci-
ety’s processes; they do not include the history of political thought or make use
of any strong theory of modernity, leading sometimes to very ahistorical claims
of the universal and eternal existence of terrorism.13 Terror may be as old as
mankind itself but terrorism belongs exclusively to modern man. ‘The novelty’,
as Hobsbawm said about guerilla warfare but which also applies to terrorism, ‘is
not so much military.’ It is not the methods that make the basic difference. ‘The
novelty is political.’14 I aim to embed the history of terrorism within the broader
history and theory of violence and that also means within the modern concep-
tions of politics and legitimization.
The history of terrorism studies often tend to just observe what rebels and
terrorists write rather than ask and explore why it was thought and articulated
in this precise way, how it made sense to the actors themselves, how they con-
structed their claims of legitimate struggle. This book tries to differ by combin-
ing intellectual history and political philosophy with history and historical
sociology, exploring how the state, its categories, images and procedures
emerged and how violent challengers have always adapted, resisted and copied
that state history.15
No one needs telling how contentious the words ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’
are, and I use them not as descriptions of what the violent non-state actors are
but as what they are described as by their statist opponents. Unable to avoid
some statist prejudice in the designation, I want to avoid the pitfall of much
terrorism research of making do with a government definition or even making
analysis on the basis of state terrorism lists.16 Much literature, from a lack of
general consensus, ends up as Ariel Merari in The History of Terrorism, in which
he, after explaining the difficulty of the concept, says: ‘[F]rom a practical point
of view, the recent definition of the term by the U.S. Department of State is a
better anchor’ than one including its original usage as state violence and
4 Introduction
repression.17 So, I am not interested in what terrorism really is but in how we
perceive what terrorism is and how we react with that perception.

Intellectual history of violence and terrorism

This also means that this book is not predominantly a historical narrative of
events (though still empirically grounded) but, as far as I know, the first attempt
at an intellectual history of terror, or rather of our legitimizations and de-
legitimizations of political violence. I think it would be a fruitful addition to the
history of terrorism studies, which at times have concentrated on more than just
incidents and actors, namely political language and legitimizations, if the studies
also included questions as to why shifts and transformations in political lan-
guage and legitimizations occur. A grounding of such a study in the broader
transformations of political and social conditions could reveal insights into why
terrorist events manifest themselves in this precise form at that particular
moment and locale. Adding a deep understanding of political and social condi-
tionality will help the investigation into how actors, violent ones in this case,
perceive their actions, link up with ideas and legitimizations prevalent in society
at large, and (ab)use the assumptions and values of the society they’re
attacking.
One insight informing this study, though neither fully developed nor used
here, is that terrorist actors should be analyzed within the broader societal and
political transformations of which they are a part. Their actions may place them
outside society and morality but their motivations, ideas and methods are situ-
ated inside society and its forms of political life. The social and political con-
ditions structure what any actor can do, what appears reasonable and possible,
what can count as legitimate and what cannot, etc. Including this conditionality
in our studies could greatly facilitate an understanding of what may otherwise
appear incomprehensible, nihilistic and speechless.
A key argument of my approach is that we need to understand how political
language changes in order to understand what people are saying. Present
‘expressive politics’, as we, for instance, see it in the global anti-capitalist move-
ment, or the ‘single cause radicalism’ of ‘eco-terrorists’ and ‘abortion doctor
killers’, are often reduced to purely psychological self-posturing (if not pure
madness) by commentators and analysts. They should perhaps rather be ana-
lyzed in terms of changing essentials of politics from coherent ideologies to
value-based communities. In the same vein, radical Islamism and right-wing
extremism could be analyzed as different expressions of a ‘global rebellion’18
against secularism and post-nationalism, not as reactive or nostalgic responses
but as contemporary attempts to update their values to the fault lines of present-
day political language. Basically, I want to argue that we need to discount the
notion that political violence can be speechless. It is then us that cannot hear
rather than them who cannot speak.
Violence speaks. It speaks in the manifest form of hurting and screaming, but
it also speaks of its own righteousness. This, at least, is the case of political viol-
ence. In modernity, political violence has to speak. It has to legitimize itself and
this legitimization has a history. The intellectual history of terror and violence,
 Introduction 5
as I propose it here, is an investigation into the structural constraints of convinc-
ing arguments for legitimate violence. In trying to legitimate an action, one is
never completely detached from one’s surroundings, even when attacking those
surroundings. Using violence, one is often at a disadvantage legitimatorily and
one has to re-describe what is perhaps universally thought of as horrendous as
actually being benign and moral. This can only be done by drawing on already
established criteria of ‘the good’. One has to capitalize on the authority of avail-
able languages of legitimacy, appeal to sensibilities of one’s audience, speak
within the established parameters of categories of morality. The degrees of
freedom when trying to convince is determined by the language already there.
This is why Quentin Skinner says that all revolutionaries:

are obliged to march backwards into battle. To legitimise their conduct,

they are committed to showing that it can be described in such a way that
those who currently disapprove of it can be brought to see that they ought
to withhold their disapproval of it. To achieve this end, they have no option
but to show that at least some of the terms used by their ideological oppon-
ents to describe what they admire can be applied to include and thus to
legitimise their own seemingly questionable behaviour.19

The intellectual history approach of this book is informed by three great

masters of the art, sketching an intellectual history of violent ideas inspired by
Michel Foucault’s genealogical history, Quentin Skinner’s intellectual history and
Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual history, combined with a macro-historical con-
ceptual approach along the lines of the historical sociology school of people
like Michael Mann and Charles Tilly. Rather than elaborate on the methodo-
logical approaches of Foucault, Skinner and Koselleck and the differences
among them, I intend to ‘just’ use them while being ‘loyally disloyal’; that is,
to translate their methods and insights into my reading of events and
utterances.
While drawing on many important and brilliant scholarly works, I do try to
push their work in other directions than they oftentimes would do themselves. I
push history into theory making, historical sociology into discourse studies and
philosophy into history, trying to combine them into a structural-contextualist
approach that can combine a historical-structural frame with close readings of
actor texts and self-representations. This book combines a close reading of the
actors themselves with a historical-structural contextualization, investigating
how different historical and situational contexts structure possibilities, limita-
tions and expressions of both statist and terrorist violence.
This book is meant as one small contribution to ground our theory and
action in an awareness of how and why we ‘naturally’ (but this is actually highly
constructed) act in a set of already established patterns. I want to explore the
historical structuration of both state and other violent actors when they try to compre-
hend, convince and act; the Standard Operating Procedure of both terror and
anti-terror, their naturalized and automated images and responses, and how
they interact both with each other and with more profound historical
transformations.
6 Introduction
The scandal of violence
In his sociological masterwork The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias wrote about
the premodern view on violence:

Outbursts of cruelty did not exclude one from social life. They were not
outlawed. The pleasure in killing and torturing others was great, and it was
a socially permitted pleasure. To a certain extent, the social structure even
pushed its members in this direction, making it seem necessary and practi-
cally advantageous to behave in this way.20

Elias fails to recognize the warrior ethos as a legitimization of violence, just as

he does not differentiate between different social groups and their very differ-
ent ‘free’ use of violence, but he does highlight a very substantial difference
between the premodern and modern relation to violence. In premodern
Europe, violence was predominantly viewed as an integral part of everyday life.
It was more prevalent than now and it was considered an inescapable part of
life. No act, excepting the Second Coming, itself a very bloody event, could
change the constancy and presence of violence. Violence was there, it needed
no explanation. It was destiny, part of the human condition:

Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as

a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government,
genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as
routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences
of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as
the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major
form of conflict resolution – all were unexceptionable features of life for
most of human history. But today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West,
far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do
occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.21

In modernity, however, violence begins to become problematic, scandalous

even, because it goes from being considered a condition of life to a result of
institutions. Violence became unnecessary and barbaric. It went from being
beyond human control to a most human phenomenon. Voltaire expressed the
new feeling most prominently when he wrote that war ‘comes to us from the
imaginations of three or four hundred persons scattered over the surface of this
globe under the name of princes or ministers’.22 This naïve thought is not the
truth about the modern understanding of the causes of violence but there is a
definite shift from accepting violence as a given to resisting and changing it as a
product of man’s inadequate shaping of its environment.
The modern imperative is what Hans Joas aptly calls ‘the dream of a moder-
nity without violence’.23 When violence becomes a product of man, an acciden-
tal or non-necessary part of life, its continuance also becomes a scandal.
Violence is now becoming a quality not of man or nature as such but of the
social and its institutions. It comes within the reach of man to rid the world of
 Introduction 7
violence. Violence becomes an issue for man’s action. Its abolition becomes a
demand. One can no longer (as easily) refer to the violent nature of the world
as justification of one’s own violence. The violent narrative has to include a
promise to abolish, minimize or prevent violence. Violence now has to justify
itself as anti-violence.24
In his book The Rebel from 1951, Albert Camus starts by saying that there are
two kinds of crimes: the emotionally induced, ‘crimes of passion’, and the logi-
cally contemplated, ‘crimes of logic’. The difference between the two lies in
whether the crime is premeditated or not, and Camus remarks that we live in an
age of premeditation and perfect crime, an age that kills on purpose and never
lacks a justification for violence: ‘Our criminals are no longer helpless children
who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and they
have a perfect alibi: philosophy which can be used for any purpose – even for
transforming murderers into judges.’25 The perfect alibis are the material of this
book.
The development from premodernity to modernity does not necessarily
mean a reduction in violence. It only means that our relation to violence is
transformed from the resigned to the active; active both as the idea that viol-
ence can serve transformative political purposes and as the ruling doctrine that
less violence is both a possibility and a requirement of political action. Politics
now promises to address the existence and amount of violence. The basic polit-
ical problem in modernity is the existence and distribution of violence.
Its legitimization is significantly changed from transcendental categories in
God, man or nature beyond intentional control to a secular problem accessible
to human intervention. Their alibi is perfect, Camus writes, because violence
now has to serve nonviolence. His political project became to criticize these
alibis. Ours is to analyze them. Camus also highlights what has always been the
dilemma of any oppositional doctrine or movement. Any type of radical opposi-
tion will make itself guilty of committing violence while, on the other hand,
sheer passivity will allow the present violence and oppression to continue. This
seems to be the inescapable dilemma of any type of radical opposition, which
has also been exemplified in the ‘war on terror’. One of the main arguments
for the war in Iraq was to put an end to Saddam Hussein’s threats against the
region and the oppression of his own people, and thus to stop violence with
violence. Conversely, the opposition against the war in Iraq has had to face the
reverse moral dilemma, that not going to war would allow the brutality of the
existing dictatorship to continue unhindered.
The modern doctrine of anti-violence may be, in the formulation of it given
above, mostly or originally a Western conception but not only was it exported, it
also resonated with the great religious traditions both inside and outside
Europe. The Enlightenment idea of eternal peace borrowed heavily from Chris-
tian notions of paradise and other religions has also held up peace as the
premier collective goal of mankind. These traditions have merged into a univer-
sal anti-violence legitimization of violence, using specific cultural resources but
articulating the same basic idea. In his Zen at War, Brian Victoria shows how
Buddhism was used to legitimate the Japanese war effort, describing it as ‘the
subjugation of evils hostile to civilization, peace, and enlightenment’.26 At the
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