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Pluto Press - Suman Gupta

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141 pages

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An immense amount of media space has been devoted to the catastrophic terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. George Bush was quick to declare a 'war on terrorism' that may engulf many countries in addition to Afghanistan. But what does this say about Western perceptions of violence - what does 'war on terrorism' mean?

This book sharpens our understanding of what phrases such as 'international terrorism' and 'the war against terror' have come to mean since 9/11. Taking on the issues from a philosophical standpoint, Gupta observes that it has long been difficult to define what constitutes a 'terrorist act'. He explains how the events of last year have jolted even existing understandings in unexpected ways and, importantly, why this difficulty of definition persists.

Examining how acts of terrorism and counter-terrorist measures are portrayed in the Western media and the impact this has on public perception, this thoughtful and provocative account provides a refreshing counterpoint to the sensationalised and often oversimplified reporting in the mainstream media.
1. A New Kind of 'International Terrorism'

2. 'International Terrorism' as a Media Event

3. Terrorism as War/War Against Terrorism

4. 'War Against International Terrorism' in Abstractions

5. 'War Against International Terrorism' as Military Action

6. Happenings and Unthinkingness

Notes

Index

Sujets

Media Studies

Social Science

Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

Publié par	Pluto Press
Date de parution	01 juillet 2002
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781849641647
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,6250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Replication of Violence

Thoughts on International Terrorism after September 11th 2001

Suman Gupta

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 2002 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA

www.plutobooks.com

The right of Suman Gupta to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 1953 X hardback ISBN 0 7453 1952 1 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gupta, Suman, 1966– The replication of violence : thoughts on international terrorism after September 11th 2001 / Suman Gupta. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7453–1953–X (hardback) –– ISBN 0–7453–1952–1 (pbk) 1. Terrorism. 2. War on Terrorism, 2001– I. Title. HV6431 .G86 2002 303.6'25––dc21 20020037

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester Printed in the European Union by Antony Rowe, Chippenham, England

Contents

Preface

A New Kind of ‘International Terrorism’

‘International Terrorism’ as a Media Event

Terrorism as War and War Against Terrorism

‘War Against International Terrorism’ in Abstractions

‘War Against International Terrorism’ as Military Action

Postscript: Happenings and Unthinkingness

Notes Index

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100

125 133

To all unwitting victims of political terror

Preface

I had some initial qualms about writing this book. This wasn’t because I had doubts about my arguments (I know that arguments are always open to scepticism and debate). The qualms arose from the feeling that to be able to address any series of political events from a political-philosophical perspective I needed some distance from those events, some space from which to put them into relief. This seemed to be especially so for the events that I wished to address andin the context in which I wished to address them: those events which followed the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001. I also wondered whether this study would get muted by other sensational and informational, reflexive and polit-ically advocatory, books on 11 September with which readers would undoubtedly be bombarded in vast quantities. I have persisted with this study for several reasons. One, after the terrorist attacks of 11 September I felt I was being bombarded already by the enormous quantity of images, information, opinions, political rhetoric, etc. that was conveyed to me by the mass media. Moreover, I was clearly in danger of being sucked up by the continuous discus-sions and debates that were humming around me – in offices, canteens, seminar rooms, streets, everywhere. Writing this was a sort of engaged withdrawal from the overwhelming intensity of the response to the attacks of 11 September and their aftermath. Two, I also felt that those images and opinions and attitudes that the mass media was bringing before me were often irresponsible and unthinking. Indeed, I felt that the very surfeit of what the mass media presented to me, and to everyone around me, was both a manifesta-tion of this unthinkingness as well as being a manipulation of it. Undertaking this study appeared to be one way of resisting that. Three, I was curious to find out whether it is indeed possible to engage with the happening world, to address political events as they happen, from a political-philosophical perspective. I was interested in finding out why I felt it was necessary (and it is generally believed to be necessary) to be at some distance from the subject that political philosophy engages with – I have always suspected that this is a prejudice. This study therefore has several aspects (I will leave it to the reader to decide with what success, if any, these aspects have been

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presented). It is a thinking record of events that took place in the period of about three months following the terrorist attacks of 11 September. It is an attempt to think through some of the concerns that surfaced in the course of that period in terms of familiar political-philosophical ideas that exist already (to do with the media, war, democracy and fanaticism, the political state, etc.). It is an attempt at demonstrating how a political-philosophical engagement with events which are yet unfolding may be undertaken. It is therefore also a reflection on the current condition and conventions of political philosophy. These, at any rate, were the ambitions. This study is naturally determined by the context in which it was written and should be read accordingly. It was done in two phases: the first five chapters were written over the month of October 2001 and finished on 1 November, and the sixth was written in the second week of December 2001 finishing on 15 December. I was in Oxford while I was working on it, with access to mass media and news resources available in Britain and other Western European countries – and the United States. I should also clarify here that this study is not an attempt to find the causes or explanations for the terrorist attacks of 11 September. No historical material or social-cultural researches are examined for that end. I have not had access to media representations and dis-cussions and debates that must have appeared with equal intensity in countries in the Middle East and elsewhere. I have not attempted to speculate on perspectives that might have prevailed there, or anywhere else outside the United States and Western Europe. The observations and arguments in this study are confined to and con-ditional on the material to which I had access. I am grateful to my colleagues in the Literature Department of the Open University for leaving me enough time to pursue this study, and to Wolfson College Oxford for the award of a Charter Fellowship; on taking this up I was given resources and space which I have used to write this book. Thanks are also due to the centre for Research in Human Rights at the University of Surrey Roehampton for giving me access to the resources available there. I am indebted to Martin Jenkins, Joy Christian, and Xiao Cheng for making sug-gestions and discussing ideas which figure in it. I am grateful to Roger van Zwanenberg for supporting it and undertaking its publi-cation, and to Anthony Winder for his painstaking editing. Any mistakes that are found in the following are my responsibility.

A New Kind of ‘International Terrorism’

On 11 September 2001 two aeroplanes with passengers were hijacked by terrorists and crashed deliberately into the World Trade Center in New York. A similar attack was carried out on the Pentagon in Washington at roughly the same time. Between 4,000 and 6,000 people, including the terrorists, died. Amongst these were the people of some 30 nations. The news was televised around the world within a few hours of the devastation. An immense amount of space in the media has been and continues to be devoted to the most cata-strophic terrorist attack of this sort ever witnessed. Governments around the world expressed shock and regret at the tragic events, and denounced terrorism in all forms and everywhere with unpre-cedented solidarity. The United States had long harboured misgivings about the terrorist organisation, al-Quaeda, run by Osama bin Laden, who had been given refuge by the Taliban government in Afghanistan, and soon felt convinced that bin Laden was behind the terrorist attacks. The United States government, under the recently elected President George Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell, started moves towards putting together an extraordinary coalition of governments that would aid and abet America’s response to the attacks. Bush and leaders in Europe (especially Britain) were unanimous in their conviction that these terrorist attacks were a direct challenge to the ‘free’, democratic, ‘civilised’ world and ‘American values’. Almost all the significant countries of the world endorsed, at least in principle, the United States’s declaration of ‘war against international terrorism’. Though it wasn’t immediately clear what ‘war against international terrorism’ might entail in the long term, it was clear that in the first instance it would be an attempt to capture or kill bin Laden, get him ‘dead or alive’ as Bush put it. It also meant, as was made clear reasonably early, that the ‘war against international terrorism’ would be directed against those states that gave asylum to and sponsored terrorists, which instantly brought the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan into the firing line. Gradually it emerged that the remit of the war against terrorism could be

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extended to as many as 30 countries (obviously including Iraq) with alleged terrorist links, and against a wide range of organisations that could be regarded as terrorist. President Bush declared that other countries could be either ‘with us or with the terrorists’ in this ‘first war of the twenty-first century’, ‘a new kind of war’, a ‘crusade’ (all Bush’s terms). On 23 September a missive allegedly from bin Laden was sent to a satellite television station in Qatar, al-Jazeereh, stating that it was the duty of everyone who professed the Islamic faith to wage a holy war against the ‘American crusaders’. The consequences of these events will be all too familiar to those who read this. This book is an attempt to come to grips with certain aspects of the phenomenon of ‘international terrorism’ and the connotations of a ‘war against international terrorism’ from a political-philo-sophical perspective under the shadow of these events. There has been a prodigious number of political and sociological and philo-sophical and international-relations-based studies of ‘international terrorism’ since that phrase entered the media in the late nineteen-sixties. But the events described above have brought to consciousness – have jolted – the complacency of theories that pertain to, and the existing wisdom regarding, ‘international terrorism’ in unexpected ways. This book is not an attempt toexplain the momentous events of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath, but to sharpen at a broad political-philosophical level our under-standing of what the connotations of ‘international terrorism’ and of a ‘war against international terrorism’ are now – or have come to be since that date. The book is the result of the jolt to theoretical complacency, to extant philosophical understanding, that the above-described events have administered – and is, therefore, necessarily under their shadow. That however is too impressionistic a statement of the matter. A more precise approach to what this study attempts must first address the following question: what sort of jolt to philosophical under-standing, to theoretical complacency, has taken place? To answer this I need to ponder the above-described events and their aftermath in more detail, and perhaps occasionally to stray into the more general concerns of political philosophy that are bound to arise in the course of such pondering. A few initial responses to that question are, it seems to me, obvious and easily summarised at the outset of this study. Before giving these however there is a matter of academic convention that needs to be briefly addressed.

A New Kind of ‘International Terrorism’

It has become customary in studies of terrorism generally, and especially of the connotations of ‘international terrorism’ (as opposed, for instance, to ‘state terrorism’, ‘insurgent terrorism’, ‘local terrorism’ etc.), to acknowledge the difficulties of defining terrorism generally and particularly the attached terms. Most theoretical works that attempt to come to grips with these either take recourse to a provisional definition, or work their way through a range of inclusive definitions, after acknowledging the difficulty of finding an appropriate definition. Whatever provisional definition or range of definitions may be assumed, and there are many (often contra-dicting each other), there are two common denominators: that acts of terrorism involve violence against people and/or property, and that such acts are for a political purpose (where ‘political’ is given the broadest sense of anything impacting on a polity, and includes economic or religious or cultural motivations, agencies and outcomes). When extended to ‘international terrorism’ there is a third definitive denominator that comes into play: that the motives and/or agencies and/or effects of such acts cross the boundaries of nation states, and are not necessarily conducted (certainly seldom directly) at the behest of any recognised political state. It is evident however that the identification of these common denominators is not sufficient to provide sound enough grounds to be able to decide whether a particular act of political violence can be thought of as terrorist, and even if it can whether it can be clearly understood to be ‘international terrorisism’. There are questions of legitimacy and perspective involved which are far more complex; there are also questions of linguistic usage and convention involved (for example, the matter of distinctions from other kinds of political violence, such as civil conflict, communal riots, war or state repression) which intervene in unexpected ways. The kinds of definition which I have alluded to are ones that seek to find an unambiguous mode of expressingwhat an act of terrorism, and particularly ‘international terrorism’, is– in this study, given the well-known difficulties that this approach entails, I have decided not to follow the customary path of attempting or assuming a definition or range of definitions. Instead I provisionally accept that the common denominators mentioned above give a workable, but not definitive,senseof the kind of act that terrorism generally, and ‘international terrorism’ par-ticularly, alludes to. More importantly, I devote much of this study to trying to understand why this difficulty of definition exists. This involves the

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discussion of two theses that are central to the study and that will be clarified as I progress: one, that an unambiguous understanding of what an act of terrorism isis hindered by the seminal consideration of what an act of terrorism is perceived as being, i.e. the perception of the act in this case is more illuminating than the content of that act; and two, that the idea of terrorism consequently involves a range of professed and unwitting complicities which make the issues of purpose, agency and effect unclear. The arguments that I offer in this study as a whole are constructed around and demonstrate these theses. I focus on demonstrating and giving flesh to these theses in an ongoing fashion below, rather than trying to prove them in a systematic way. Coming back to the manner in which the events of 11 September have given a jolt to theoretical complacency, there are two obvious initial points that need to be taken into account. One, the context of the events. If recent Western media represen-tations of terrorism are considered (an important issue that I address in some detail very soon), it is evident that the phenomenon of terrorism has generally been presented as being primarily relevant to distant contexts which may be a matter of concern for Western countries – because of fear of contamination from outside, as affecting friendly or ideologically allied nations, or on humanitar-ian grounds – but seldom as being a matter for immediate anxiety. In a book aptly entitledCivil Society and Media in Global Crises: Rep-resenting Distant Violence(1996) (in which most of the major ‘crises’ of recent years are discussed, including the Gulf War and violent conflict in Kurdistan, Rwanda and Bosnia), Martin Shaw observes:

Fundamental to establishing and maintaining distance is difference of experience. The bottom line is that wars are things that happen to non-Western people, not to us. The responses of Westerners are essentially those of the unthreatened to the plight of the threatened. This needs qualifying, however, because war – for example the bombing of civilians – is very much within the historic experience of Western societies, including personal memories of many still alive. Moreover physical threats to others in distant regions may be felt as psychological threats to Western people and undermine their sense of security. [...] Distance, psychological and even geographical, is not therefore a straightforward question. Distance is complex and relative and is constantly established, undermined and renegotiated in our