Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent US-lead war against terrorism, called up the international community aiming to legitimize military interventions and political regime changes. However, international system procedures allowed the adjustment and maintenance of terrorist organizations. Such is the case of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which rose up from the Iraqi institutional weakness —due to the 2003 American military intervention— and the Syrian civil war. The aforementioned requires a reappraisal of the political and military methods in the struggle against terrorism. This phenomenon has pushed on a series of shared beliefs by different societies which demand state resources —such as political and legal ones— intended to guarantee security. So, an “international social collectivity” is constituted. The article will study terrorism as a trigger of management of fear, the identification of threats, the pursuit and reach of security through international political and legal resources which, at the same time, gain legitimacy facing a world public opinion. Thereby, terrorism determines the existence and guides the behaviour of an international social collectivity which undeniably overtakes the modern state. The article will develop an analysis between International Law and constructivism in International Studies.

The paper argues that the principle that “the map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named”*, essential to any system of human communication, must be applied to terrorism as well. In between the terrorist act and its naming/writing there is a process of classification by which reality itself is transformed. Terrorism acts as a catalyst to confuse various semantic categories between the factual and the feigned, the real and the bluff, in basic performance frames such as “war,” “threat,” “play,” or “ritual.” The dialectics between terrorism and counterterrorism is plagued with such confusions between map and territory. The Thing itself of the events situated in the frame “this is war” and “this is play” are categorically different. The mutual denial and mutual constitution of such dialectics is at the center of the reality of terrorism. It is argued that a valid ontology and epistemology of terrorism must take into account the basic principle of the map/territory relations (for which a theory of play and fantasy might be as relevant as theories of war); furthermore, it must analyze the mythological aspects of the figure of the Terrorist. Far from comparing fantasy with the “non real”, for the psychoanalytic theory, fantasy represents a basic dimension of the subjective reality. The manipulation of the time axis (waiting for the future terror, the military theory of prevention) is another important key to the study of the ontology of terrorism. Eventually, there is also to be considered the edge between terrorism/counterterrorism the decisive reality simultaneously stigmatizes and constitutes both antagonistic surfaces.   * BATESON, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Nueva York, Ballantine Books, 1972.

Today’s framing of terrorism in the international system is part of our contemporary dreamworlds of mass consumption set against images of the American Dream. These dreamworlds provide the hegemonic discourses of a European universalist foreign policy that kills huge numbers of innocent non-combatants for political purposes, acts of terrorism, while denying that such acts constitute terrorism. The violence used is represented as a necessary and shared sacrifice for the American Dream, suggesting a unity, otherwise lacking, supposedly in “self-defense” against terrorism. In reality, what is being consumed are not actions against terrorism and aggressive war, but aggressive war and terrorism themselves masquerading as a defense of the imagined communities of the nation and “the West”. The focus of this article is especially on media and Hollywood films, including social media. The work draws on both world-systems analysis, international relations scholars, and theorists of culture, media and communication to analyze the uses of terrorism today. Simultaneously the article draws on critical theorists and public intellectuals, from Edward Said to Judith Butler to Pope Francis, to critique the binary Orientalist oppositions of today’s pan-European discourses on international terrorism, in ways that expose their complexities and realities, historically and currently.    

This article analyzes the emergence of the militarization of U.S. counterterrorism policy, showing that militarization as well as preemption as a doctrine of fighting terrorism originate in the mid-1980s – counter to the prevailing assumption that the current militaristic counterterrorist approach is both without precedent and largely the result of the 9/11 attacks. Following a radical shift in terrorism discourse in early 1987, the Reagan administration suddenly reverted to a law enforcement approach towards terrorism, which was retained by the George H.W. Bush and the first Clinton administration. The article further demonstrates that counterterrorism measures were strongly contingent to preceding and legitimizing discursive practices that produced knowledge, popular images and mythical narratives of terrorism, and were exploited as a power strategy by the U.S. government. I therefore suggest that the discursive practices that construct terrorism, and thereby structure the potential field of action for both policy makers and security services, and the non-discursive counterterrorism practices should be regarded as an analytical entity connected by a Foucauldian dispositif. ** N.d T. Se mantiene el término dispositif en francés porque así lo hace el autor.

The goal of this article is to reflect on what kind of political violence is defined as “terrorism” and what are the consequences of being defined that way. Considered that this designation carries an assumption of barbarism, irrationality, criminality and craziness, to define an act or an organization this way allows to carry out a depoliticization of this kind of violence and to erase the political content behind it. This process is carried out with “terrorism” because its political goals represent a threat to the “shape” of a society or to the international system and, in general terms, to the current hegemonic order. The theoretical lines draw in the first part of the article will eventually be applied to the case study of the Islamic State. Considering the political goals the organization wants to achieve —the creation of a state/caliphate through terror, the reconfiguration of the power relations, first in the area and secondly at the international level, and a different global order– it can be understood why this represents a threat to the international society of states that, in order to protect their legitimacy and their status quo need to describe it as “terrorist” and, consequently, hide and erase its political claims.

Foucault defines racism in the frame of the emergency of a new technology of power which he calls biopolitics, included in the liberal mode of exercising power. The French philosopher asks how a power, whose objective is to make life, can exert the sovereign power of death. The answer is racism, not considered as an ideology or a scientific doctrine, but as a mechanism constitutive of the exterminable subject. Foucauldian racism is linked with the emergence of nationalism and its necessity of homogenizing the territory, thus establishing equivalence between state and nation. In this context, it aims towards those constructed as a threat for such a constituted unity. Nowadays, terrorism is described as one of the major threats putting at risk humanity’s safety. Nonetheless, it is not about any terrorism, but about the one characterized as Islamic. This way, the paper aims at reflecting on the religious racism and its possible linkages with the construction of the Islamic terrorist as the major threat faced by the humanity. With that objective, it works on the concepts of racism, religious racism and terrorism, showing the bonds among them through the analysis of the media discourse surrounding the January 7 2015 events at the offices of the French weekly Charlie Hebdo.

Although today it may be considered a cliché, it is still surprising how, since the dramatic events of September 11, 2001, “terrorism” —or, rather, responses to terrorist acts locked under the concept of “fight against terrorism” - has become virtually central to all aspects of modern life. Domestically, at least in most Western countries, counter-terrorism measures have become a seemingly permanent and completely standardized part of, among other things, travel, banking, sporting events, security, policing, politics, law, charities, the media, entertainment, communications, religion, and education. In a relatively short period of time, it has also become common that, in some jurisdictions, elementary school teachers have to look for and report signs of “radicalization” in children. In fact, so many spheres of private and social life have become subject to counter-terrorism measures designed to control the risk of attacks, that some have defined this process as governance through terrorism.

There is a clear inequality in the challenges posed by climate change: while climate change has been produced by the richest and most powerful countries, the poor and the more vulnerable populations are the ones suffering the most serious risks and consequences. Such inequality is at the basis of the so called “climate debt”. This has sparked international action for establishing response mechanisms to the possible impacts of the changing climate system. This article is a critical analysis of climate debt and climate injustice, forged over more than twenty years of international climate negotiations. The goal is to show that climate change is not only a scientific or environmental issue, but also fundamentally a social issue, which affects human rights, gender equality and development. The article will describe how, in recent years, due to the inability or unwillingness of states to agree on solutions, civil society has become increasingly involved in the climate debate. It has done so through innovative solutions, always based on the defense of climate justice and human rights, for both present and future generations. The Urgenda case in the Netherlands and the cases brought to court by the organization Our Children Trust, in the United States, are just some representative cases of these demands by the civil society. Despite mentioning only briefly the concept of climate justice, the Paris Agreement, adopted in December 12, 2015, sets a point of no return in the defenselessness situation that over two decades has created a geopolitics of the disrespect for sovereignty over natural resources, both inside and across national boundaries. Therefore, movements for climate justice are of particular interest to provide a different perspective of climate negotiations, based ultimately on human rights, dignity and equality. The change in Paris portends some hope in achieving climate justice.