5th Global Conference
Session Eight (A) : Law, War and Terror
Chair: Robert Teigrob
The Role of Law in the Context of War and Peace
Irene Banias
Department of Political Science and International Relations, Bogazici University, Bebek-Istanbul, Turkey
No abstract is presently available
There is no such Thing as Political Terrorism
Bob Brecher
University of Brighton, United Kingdom
‘For us to live and die properly, things have to be named properly.’ - John Berger, Hold Everything Dear (London: Verso, 2007), 42.
Naming as ‘terrorism’ the actions of the various political organisations attempting to effect change through violence aimed at terrorising their targets, both directly and indirectly, and thus at causing them to bring pressure to bear on their political masters to change course, is at once to misdescribe the pursuit of specific political ends as the pursuit of terror for its own sake and to conceal the terroristic nature of actions not thus described. For ‘terrorism’ names no genuine ideology: as the typical characterisation of terrorists as agents of destruction whose only objective is destruction itself implicitly recognises, terrorism would be a matter of creating, inducing or spreading terror as an end in itself, rather than as a means to some other end. But that is not what any political terrorist group is trying to do, and thus not what just about any actually existing terrorist group – and certainly those against which the so-called war on terror is said to be fought – is trying to achieve. To talk of ‘terrorism’, then, elevates what is, at best, a practical and/or rhetorical tactic to a substantive position; effectively labels anyone who opposes the neo-liberal vision of a corporatist world; and enables the American administration and their allies to ensure that the public overlooks, that it literally does not see, what is clearly there to be seen - namely that its own actions in Afghanistan and Iraq are themselves acts of terror on a massive scale, and the latest in a long line of terrorist acts marking the pursuit of American foreign policy since 1945.
