Mikkel Thorup - An Intellectual History of Terror (Routledge 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 generation of thinking on traditional subjects and investigate topics frequently overlooked in orthodox accounts of terrorism. Books in this series will typically adopt approaches informed by critical-normative theory, post-positivist methodologies and non-Western perspectives, as well as rigorous and reflective orthodox terrorism studies.

Terrorism and the Politics of Response

London in a time of terror

Edited by Angharad Closs Stephens and Nick Vaughan-Williams

Critical Terrorism Studies

Framing a new research agenda

Edited by Richard Jackson, Marie Breen Smyth and Jeroen Gunning

The De-Radicalization of Jihadists

Transforming armed Islamist movements

Omar Ashour

State Terrorism and Neoliberalism

The North in the South

Ruth Blakeley

Contemporary State Terrorism

Theory and practice

Edited by Richard Jackson, Eamon Murphy and Scott Poynting

State Violence and Genocide in Latin America

The Cold War years

Edited by Marcia Esparza, Henry R. Huttenbach and Daniel Feierstein

Discourses and Practices of Terrorism

Interrogating terror

Edited by Bob Brecher, Mark Devenney and Aaron Winter

An Intellectual History of Terror

War, violence and the state

Mikkel Thorup

LONDON AND NEW YORK

[T]he world that people like me are after is not a world in which people dont kill one another (were not that crazy!) but a world in which murder is not legitimized.

(Albert Camus, November 1946)

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)

Terror attacks. It attacks our bodies. It attacks our sense of security, both as individuals and as societies. The sudden exposure to our profound human vulnerability 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, develops 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 narratives myself. It is just that I want to problematize the unspoken assumptions guiding that kind of narrative, basically retelling the states 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 integrative 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 overwhelmingly most important obstacle and object of desire for violent challengers. The state, then, is the privileged descriptor and all-important center of attention. 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.