Session 10: Globalism, Terrorism and Militarism

Session 10: Globalism, Terrorism and Militarism
Chair: Graeme Goldsworthy

Total War/Total Peace: Notes from Global Palestine
John Collins
Department of Global Studies, St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY, USA

No abstract is available

New Terrorism
Jamal Eddine Benhayoun
Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tetuan, Morocco

The incrimination of terrorism is a process in which we cannot engage passionately in total disregard of the scenes of political conflict and territorial struggle. In volatile regions such as Iraq, Israel, the West Bank, Afghanistan, Chechnya, etc. the notion of terrorism is often easily and coercively articulated and misused by governments and political establishments to describe or denounce exercises of conflict of political or military significance. Terrorism is most recognisable away from traditional battlegrounds and outside of contexts of political struggle. The United Nations must have a clear map and definition of such areas where a political solution is adequate enough to end killings, bombings, and violence. Unfortunately, the ambiguities of political conflict as related to specific locations are now seen to extend through the agency of ideology and political speeches in such a way as to provide political contexts for the practice of violence beyond the boundaries of traditional areas of conflict. In extended political contexts of ideological contestations, it is even easier to reinvent all-encompassing binarisms of antagonism, exclusion, and prejudice such as East and West, Islam and West, or even Arabs and Jews, and Arabs and Americans as we come to learn from Bin Laden’s speeches. It is, therefore, no surprise that terrorism makes it permissible to blow up restaurants, planes, trains, buses, and places of worship, and to justify such horrors in confused speeches in which ideology, politics, religion, nationalism, and history are transformed through rhetoric and passion into hortatory discourses of Jihad. George W. Bush’s “global war on terrorism” is evidence of the widening of contexts of terrorism beyond predictable boundaries and outside of demarcated areas of political and military conflict, but it is at the same time an example of how political administrations fail dramatically to cope with a global threat when they attempt to territorialize terrorism within the camp of the “uncivilised” non-Western world. Al-Qaida has transformed terrorism into a global phenomenon by translating it into a battle between Islam and the West, and George Bush has simply confirmed that new status of terrorism through his global measures of “prevention” and “intervention”, as exercised in both Afghanistan and Iraq, while insisting to view the world as split into two parts—the world of the civilised and that of the uncivilised.
Indeed, a new challenge today is partially to try to recuperate Islam and the Arab world from the prison-house of terretorialised and culturalised terrorism as defined and reinvented in Western countries. Therefore, “new terrorism” is not only about the globalisation of terror, but also and most importantly about its culturalisation through the agencies of political and military power as compounded with cultural hegemony and ideological bias. The world is compelled to evacuate the notion of terrorism from the arena of political practice to be able to recognise terrorism as terrorism—i.e., as systematic criminal practices executed against humanity at large and not as a cultural phenomenon peculiar to a particular culture or system of beliefs conceived and exercised against any one particular culture or nation. Terrorists pay little attention to such polarised designations as East and West, democratic and anti-democratic, Arabs and non-Arabs, Muslims and non-Muslims…. Once they choose to attack—their practice is always and permanently indiscriminate killing and massive destruction—as the cartography of territories impinged and plagued by terror make clear. The description of terrorism as the evil invention of the East against the civilised West is not only false but also a violent act of insisting on reading the world as a hostile battlefield within which cultures and civilisations can only clash but never merge or even coexist. The political and military attitudes toward terrorism, as invigorated and countenanced by military supremacy and technological sophistication, must be rehabilitated by the dominance of cultural discourses elaborated within the world of academia and NGO’s. Terrorism must be re-negotiated and incriminated in simple and apolitical terms and, hence, defined as it actually appears: blatantly aberrant, wrong, and evil from within our continuing and shared legacy of universal values.

Given that reflective understanding ( Edward Said’s term of art) is essential to any meaningful assessment of ante bellum motives for political violence, this paper considers (1) how difficult it is to achieve reflective understanding when there is a disconnect between the agents’ stated and underlying motives for such violence and (2) how crucial it is for philosophers, among others, to achieve reflective understanding, obstacles notwithstanding. As a case in point, the paper compares the publicly declared reasons for the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003 with reasons discussed internally months and even years before in government and think-tank documents. These two sources yield sharply different reasons (e.g., regime change to neutralize a WMD threat versus control of oil), thereby manifesting the exoteric/esoteric distinction to which certain Administration neo-conservatives subscribe. The philosophical origins of this distinction (Plato via Leo Strauss) can be countered up to a point by John Rawls’s reflective equilibrium. But Rawls’s failure to apply this method to a nation-state’s foreign affairs calls for other approaches, such as those of British moral philosopher Jonathan Glover and certain philosophers who are critiquing antiterrorism responses and their justifications.