Class war on terror: counterterrorism, accumulation, crisis (original) (raw)
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This chapter surveys key aspects of Anglo-saxon counterterrorism, and assesses their implications for the state-form. Specifically, it examines: (a) the legal definition of terrorism as a politically motivated crime, which defines all counterterrorism law and policy; (b) the reconfiguration of the rule of law into a novel law-form termed authoritarian legality; (c) the expansion of surveillance powers and the rise in prominence of the intelligence apparatus, leading to total intelligence; and (d) the platforms for popular involvement in counterterrorism, in which new citizen (and enemy) subjectivities are forged. These aspects of counterterrorism are unified in their primary consideration with popular politics; and are inscribed in a strategy of pre-emption. This shared orientation grants coherence to counterterrorism policy.
Editors Introduction: Neoliberalism and/as Terror
and International Relations Department and the Critical Studies on Terrorism journal. Papers presented at the conference aimed to extend research into the diverse linkages between neoliberalism and terrorism, including but extending beyond the contextualisation of pre-emptive counterterrorism technologies and privatised securities within relevant economic and ideological contexts. Thus, the conference sought also to stimulate research into the ways that neoliberalism could itself be understood as terrorism, askingamongst other questionswhether populations are themselves terrorised by neoliberal policy. The articles presented in this special issue reflect the conference aims in bringing together research on the neoliberalisation of counterterrorism and on the terror of neoliberalism.
The "War on Terror" and the Class War at Home
Review of Stephen Eric Bronner, Blood in the Sand: Imperial Fantasies, Right-Wing Ambitions & the Erosion of American Democracy. New Politics, Summer 2006, Vol. 11 Issue 1, pp. 153-155.
SEPTEMBER 11, SOCIAL CAPITAL AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF GLOBAL TERRORISM
This paper applies social capital theory as a tool for exploring the dynamics of terrorism and counterterrorism, and invokes symbolic interactionism and its epistemological adjuncts as paths to dealing with the dilemma surrounding the definition of terrorism. Social capital is relevant to the sustenance of terrorism and counterterrorism. The catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001 generated an unprecedented level of global social capital. But whether the latter was gainfully deployed especially by the United States, the victim of that attack, remains to be verified. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research in the emerging sociology of global terrorism.
Capitalism, Covert Action and State-Terrorism: Towards a Political Economy of the Deep State
In the name of fighting the post-9/11 “War on Terror” Western states have with increasing impunity bent, stretched and broken the rule of law on the pretext of defending national security: the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq; the politicisation and fabrication of intelligence on WMD; the routine use of torture in Iraqi prisons; the violation with impunity of the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war in Iraq, Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan; the arbitrary labelling of ordinary citizens as “terror suspects” without evidence, their kidnapping and human trafficking in the form of extraordinary rendition, their indefinite detention in inhumane conditions; Guantanamo Bay; military commissions run by military officers outside the jurisdiction of domestic and international law; the regular input of false information gleaned from torture into the production of “intelligence” to justify new counter-terror and surveillance operations; and so on. The persistence and proliferation of these crimes is prima facie evidence of an increasing criminalisation of Western state practices, consistent with mounting empirical and historical evidence that state military and intelligence practices intersect systematically and institutionally with a wide variety of extra-legal non-state actors, such as transnational corporations and lobbies, private mercenaries, terrorist networks, organised criminal syndicates, drugs and arms trafficking groups, and so on. Although analysis of the criminalisation of the state remains a marginal endeavour within political science and IR, the seminal work of Canadian political scientist Peter Dale Scott stands out for its focus on framing this phenomenon within a more systematic framework. This paper explores the implications of Scott’s concept of “deep politics” for understanding covert action and state-sponsored terrorism, through the lens of Carl Schmitt’s theories of the sovereign, as well as the Copenhagen and Paris schools of Security Studies. These different but converging theories of state securitisation will be critically reformulated against the insights of a political Marxist approach to understanding the evolution of modern state-sovereignty in the context of capitalist social-property relations. This leads to an exploration of the shifting parameters of political violence under capitalism, and the need under capitalist crisis to resort to novel forms of covert action. This illustrates how capitalism’s eminent compatibility with deep political and economic activities, and its co-optation of criminal economic networks, has through the post-war period increasingly elevated the power of a U.S.-dominated transnational capitalist class. Two major cases of international terrorism – Cold War communism and post-Cold War Islamist extremism – become explicable within this framework.