War, Virtual War and Human Security - 2007 Programme Session 2

Session Three: There is Your Enemy……..
Chair: Elizabeth Moore

Bin Laden’s European War: Bosnia, Al Qa’ida and the rise of Global Jihad
John R. Schindler
Strategy & Policy Dept, U.S. Naval War College, Newport, RI, USA

No abstract is presently available.

Is the War on Terror Real? Should it be?
Avery Plaw
Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, Massachusetts, USA

On morning of September 12th, 2001, a little before noon, President Bush announced that “the deliberate and deadly attacks that were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror, they were acts of war.” With this declaration the President launched what he has termed a “global war on terrorism.” This war was to be as no other before it. As he went on to explain, “Our war on terror will be much broader than the battlefields and beachheads of the past. The war will be fought wherever terrorists hide, or run, or plan.”
But is this “War on Terror” a war in the sense of triggering the special humanitarian laws governing traditional warfare? Or is the “War on Terror” better understood, as Human Right Watch Director Kenneth Roth and others have suggested, as meant “metaphorically,” as “a mere hortatory device,” a “metaphor” similar to the “war” on drugs or Lyndon Johnson’s “war” on poverty. More importantly, should the struggle against contemporary terrorism seek to invoke the special law and morality connected traditionally with formal warfare between states? Doesn’t invoking the law of war offer the other side a credibility and legitimacy that criminal justice denies them? Doesn’t it play into the hands of terrorists who seek to invoke a ‘clash of civilizations’? Doesn’t invoking the law of war itself throw into doubt a whole series of Western practices from isolated detainment to the seizing of financial assets?
This essay examines the moral, ethical and strategic foundations of prosecuting a war on terror and concludes that while critics are right to argue that there is an enormous range of undoubted difficulties and disadvantages associated with defining the struggle against terrorism as a formal state of war, the United States and its allies nonetheless are wise to pursue this strategy. However, pursuing it seriously and consistently will involve a number of important change in the way in which the war on terror has been prosecuted, beginning with the treatment of prisoners and extending to the manner in which terrorists are hunted.

A Psycho-Social Perspective on Support for Terrorism in the Wake of Attacks
Kiran Sarma
Department of Psychology, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

This paper examines the psychology of support for terrorism in the wake of terrorist attacks. It is informed by research conducted on 'repressive terrorism' in Northern Ireland during which the Provisional IRA executed political opponents or outspoken critics but waged propaganda justifying these attacks prior to and in the wake of their enactment. The paper focuses on the psychological dynamics involved and argues that terrorists strive to promote psychological disengagement amongst supporters by enhancing the perceived moral legitimacy of the attack. On a conceptual level a critical 'point of psychological separation' (PPS) exists within a spectrum of increasingly immoral terrorist behaviour and beyond which the supporter will be unable to psychologically disengage. Beyond this PPS lies the point of 'backlash'. In the face of a particularly horrific incident, the supporter rejects the moral legitimacy of the terrorist campaign, withdraws support for the terrorists and accepts the need for State to act against them. The PPS and point of 'backlash' are in turn determined by a complex cluster of attitudinal determinants including the type of action involved, the propaganda waged by the terrorists, the actions of others in the theatre of conflict and set against a backdrop of prevailing experiences, attitudes and prejudices of supporter. The goal for the terrorist is to promote the ability of their supporters to morally disengage from their actions.