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How to do things with the word ‘terrorist’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2009

CHRISTOPHER J. FINLAY
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Abstract

Recently, some commentators have argued that the word ‘terrorist’ should be abandoned as it has become overloaded with undesirable ‘rhetorical’ connotations. This view is premised on the assumption that an adequate distinction may be drawn between principled, ‘logical’ usages and merely ‘rhetorical’ ones. This article argues that the use of the word ‘terrorist’ normally has a ‘rhetorical’ aspect and that theorists must therefore find ways to distinguish between principled and unprincipled rhetorical deployments. I distinguish three rhetorical possibilities for using the word ‘terrorist’: the first invokes interlocutors' established background commitments to moral and descriptive norms, seeking agreement on the application of the word to a particular case; the second seeks to innovate, challenging either moral norms, descriptive criteria or, less often, the illocutionary force of the term; the third resists innovation but deploys the term in metaphorical ways for moral-rhetorical emphasis. Based on this taxonomy, the article reviews both polemical and scholary debates about definition and then proposes pragmatic, rhetorical considerations for adjudicating between competing definitional arguments. Finally, I review the implications of these considerations for the contentious issue of whether or not the term ‘terrorist’ properly applies to states.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 751 - 774
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2009

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References

1 ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,’ in idem., trans. Ronald Speirs, Raymond Geuss (ed.), The Birth of Tragedy and other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 143.

2 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 31.

3 Ibid., p. 12.

4 Samuel Scheffler, ‘Is Terrorism Morally Distinctive?’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 14:1 (2006): 1–17, p. 1.

5 Ibid., p. 1. See also Virginia Held, How Terrorism is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 71, p. 77 and Judith Butler, Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), p. 4, p. 6.

6 He therefore seeks a ‘moral’ definition free from rhetoric. David Rodin, ‘Terrorism without intention’, Ethics, 114 (2004), pp. 752–71, pp. 752–3. Held writes in op. cit. p. 71 that ‘An examination of usage is particularly unhelpful in deciding what terrorism is…’ See also Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, revised edition (New York: University of Columbia Press, 2006), pp. 21–3.

7 Tomis Kapitan and Erich Schulte, ‘The Rhetoric of “Terrorism” and its Consequences’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 30:1 (2002), pp. 172–96, p. 172. For another critical approach to the politics of naming, see Michael V. Bhatia, ‘Fighting Words: Naming Terrorists, Bandits, Rebels and other Violence Actors’, Third World Quarterly, 26:1 (2005), pp. 5–22. See also Jeremy Waldron, ‘Terrorism and the Uses of Terror,’ Journal of Ethics, 8 (2004), pp. 5–35, p. 33: ‘defining “terrorism” is difficult, and except for legal purposes it is probably not an enterprise worth undertaking, at least not for its own sake. This is particularly so if a proposed definition is supposed to be answerable to ordinary language, because ordinary usage is of course permeated and distorted by the effects of the emotive or valueloading of the word.’ Scheffler and Waldron both sidestep the issue of definition, regarding it as more-or-less futile. On the ‘rhetorical’ nature of the discourses of both terrorism and counter-terrorism, see also Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, ‘The Terrorist Subject: Terrorism Studies and the Absent Subjectivity’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1:1 (2008), pp. 27–36, p. 29. On the visual reinforcement of discourses of terrorism and counter-terrorism, see Laura J. Shepherd, ‘Visualising Violence: Legitimacy and Authority in the “War on Terror”’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1:2 (2008), pp. 213–26.

8 See, for instance, Eugene Garver, ‘Rhetoric,’ in Edward Craig (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 307–8.

9 See Waldron, for instance, in ‘Terrorism and the Uses of Terror,’ p. 33.

10 In general, academics seeking an empirical understanding of the nature and causes of terrorism tend to try to bracket the moral connotations of ‘terrorism’ in order to achieve positive, dispassionate understanding. See, for example, Edward Newman, ‘Exploring the “Root Causes” of Terrorism,’ Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 29:8 (2006), pp. 749–72 and more generally in the work of Robert Pape, Mia Bloom, Louise Richardson, and Martha Crenshaw. I take the use of the term in these contexts to be derivative from paradigmatic uses which retain the moral connotations of the word.

11 On the illocutionary nature of speech acts, see J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words, 2nd ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 98–9. On the performative aspect of ethical statements, see pp. 2–3. See also, Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, I: Reason and the Ratioanalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), pp. 288–9.

12 On the ‘absolute’ nature of the condemnation implied by the word, see Adrian Guelke, ‘Great Whites, Paedophiles, and Terrorists: the Need for Critical Thinking in a New Age of Fear’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1:1 (2008), pp.17–25, p. 19. Political and moral theorists distinguish between treating ‘terrorist’ as wrong by definition (and therefore always unjustifiable) or only a prima facie wrong (which may be justified in some circumstances).

13 Hoffman writes that, ‘On one point, at least, everyone agrees: “Terrorism” is a pejorative term.’ Inside Terrorism, p. 23. To write a history of terrorism, therefore, is to participate in the rhetoric of naming and censuring that the word invokes. See also Walter Laqueur, No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (London & New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 232 and Matthew Noah Smith, ‘Terrorism, Shared Rules, and Trust’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 16:2 (2008), pp. 201–19.

14 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics I: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 182–4.

15 See Waldron, ‘Terrorism and the Uses of Terror’ on specifying what exactly ‘terrorize’ might mean. A political status definition would arise where the political norm stated that only entities possessing a certain kind of authority could legitimately use force on behalf of others; then those lacking this kind of legitimacy would be ‘terrorist’.

16 Stipulated by both Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Threat (London: John Murray, 2006), pp. 21–2 and Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, p. 40. Alison Jaggar notes, ‘The most significant shift in the usage of “terrorism” over the past two centuries [which] has been the move away from recognising states as possible agents of terrorism’ in ‘What is terrorism, why is it wrong, and could it ever be morally permissible?’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 36:2 (2005), pp. 202–17, p. 207. See also Guelke, ‘Great Whites, Paedophiles, and Terrorists’, p.19.

17 Among liberal normative theorists, see for instance, C. A. J. Coady, ‘Terrorism and Innocence’, Journal of Ethics, 8 (2004), pp. 37–58; Held, How Terrorism is Wrong, p. 77; Jaggar, ‘What is Terrorism?’ p. 208; Rodin, ‘Terrorism Without Intention,’ p. 755. For recent argument along these lines from the point of view of critical terrorism studies, see Michael Stohl, ‘Old Myths, New Fantasies, and the Enduring Realities of Terrorism’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1:1 (2008), pp. 5–16 and Ruth Blakeley, ‘Bringing the State Back into Terrorism Studies’, European Political Science, 6 (2007), pp. 228–35. Through the rhetoric of the ‘War on Terror’, the George W. Bush administration expanded the range of usage to help legitimate aggressive foreign policy towards some states. For a more scholarly example of expansions along these lines, see Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: the Wars for the Twenty-First Century (London: Allen Lane, 2008) which assimilates non-state terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction among states, and the impact of natural disaster under the heading of states of ‘terror,’ treating all as part of the same complex of threats.

18 Skinner, Visions of Politics I, p. 183.

19 For example, A. J. Coates, The Ethics of War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), ch. 5, passim. On the importance of political status, see also Janna Thompson, ‘Terrorism and the Right to Wage War’, in Tony Coady & Michael O'Keefe (eds), Terrorism and Justice: Moral Argument in a Threatened World (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002).

20 See Jenny Teichman, ‘How to Define Terrorism’, Philosophy, 64 (1989), pp. 505–17. She describes a similar question regarding state terror as ‘a not very interesting sorites question.’

21 This is a central concern of Matthew Levitt's study, Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). See also Newman, ‘Exploring “Root Causes”’, p. 768. Notice too, Arafat's description of ‘cultural and educational activities’ as part of the PLO's attempts to resist colonial destructiveness in the UN speech of 1974 in Arafat in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader, 6th ed. (New York: Penguin, 2001), p. 180.

22 Bhatia interprets the same phenomenon in different terms in ‘Fighting Words,’ p. 19. On the consequences of using the ‘terrorist’ label to obscure the more complex nature of organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah, see Stohl, ‘Old Myths’, p. 10.

23 Held, How Terrorism is Wrong, pp. 13, and 142.

24 See Bhatia, ‘Fighting Words,’ p. 8.

25 The classic articulation of this idea is Charles Leslie Stevenson, ‘Persuasive Definitions,’ Mind, XLVII (1938), pp. 331–50.

26 See n. 4.

27 Arafat in Laqueur and Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader, pp. 176–7 (my emphasis). On the tendency for these states to denounce all resistance – even when nonviolent – as ‘terrorist,’ see also Noam Chomsky, ‘International Terrorism: Image and Reality,’ in Alexander George (ed.), Western State Terrorism (London: Routledge, 1991). {http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112–02.htm} accessed on 30 September 2008.

28 Ibid., pp. 176–7 (emphasis added).

29 Alan Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works: understanding the threat, responding to the challenge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), especially pp. 4–9.

30 Ibid., p. 8.

31 Ibid., p. 4.

32 Ibid., p. 8. He names ‘self-defence against state-supported terrorism, genocide, or mass murder of innocent people’ as possible just causes.

33 Ibid., p. 9.

34 Ibid., p. 9.

35 See Bhatia, ‘Fighting Words’, p. 6 for complaints about expansionary use of the word by the US and Israel to include all liberation movements by Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i.

36 See Waldron, ‘Terrorism and the Uses of Terror,’ p. 24.

37 Jeff McMahan, ‘The Ethics of Killing in War’, Ethics, 114 (2004), pp. 693–733, p. 729; Robert Goodin, What's Wrong with Terrorism? (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), p. 6. One purpose of Goodin's book is to uproot this orthodoxy. See also Anthony Burke, ‘The End of Terrorism Studies’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1:1 (2008), pp. 37–49.

38 Goodin, What's Wrong with Terrorism? and Scheffler, ‘Is Terrorism Morally Distinctive?’

39 Goodin, What's Wrong with Terrorism? pp. 1–3.

40 Scheffler, ‘Is Terrorism Morally Distinctive’, passim.

41 Though note Scheffler's caution in leaving other possibilities for using the word open, ibid., pp. 5, 9, and 10.

42 Goodin argues that a permissive attitude towards the killing of soldiers and police arises from just war definitions of terrorism, in What's Wrong with Terrorism?, pp. 13–15.

43 Coates, The Ethics of War, ch. 5; Lionel McPherson, ‘Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?’ Ethics, 117 (2007), pp. 524–46; see also, Janna Thompson, ‘Terrorism and the Right to Wage War’, in Tony Coady and Michael O'Keefe (eds), Terrorism and Justice: Moral Argument in a Threatened World, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002. I develop links between the ‘orthodox’ definition of terrorism and the legitimacy of non-state armed groups in my ‘Legitimacy and Non-State Political Violence’, Journal of Political Philosophy, forthcoming.

44 Held, How Terrorism is Wrong, pp. 16–21, pp. 71–81. See also Robert Young, ‘Political Terrorism as a Weapon of the Politically Powerless’, in Igor Primoratz (ed.), Terrorism: the Philosophical Issues (New York: Palgrave, 2004) and McPherson, ‘Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?’ pp. 525–28. By contrast, see authors cited in notes 12 and 13.

45 The idea that a non-pejorative definition is required before serious attention can be given to the possibility of justifying the use of terrorism in some circumstances is rightly challenged in Rodin, ‘Terrorism Without Intention’, p. 753, Smith, ‘Terrorism, Shared Rules, and Trust’, p.201, and Tamar Meisels, The Trouble with Terror: Liberty, Security and the Response to Terrorism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 12–20. On the use of ‘inclusive’ definitional strategies to blur the moral or descriptive distinction between terrorism and other forms of political violence, see ibid., pp. 11 and 12.

46 See also McPherson, ‘Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?’ at pp. 528–34.

47 See also Rodin, ‘Terrorism without Intention,’ passim.

48 Carlos Marighela, ‘Handbook of Urban Guerrilla Warfare’, in idem. For the Liberation of Brazil, trans. John Butt and Rosemary Sheed (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 62. Another ironic deployment of the word appears in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 49.

49 Coady and Rodin exclude the use of fear as a definitional criterion, Primoratz and Meisels treat it as typical, though morally less significant than civilian targeting. See Rodin, ‘Terrorism Without Intention’, p. 761, Coady, ‘Defining Terroris’, in Igor Primoratz (ed.), Terrorism: the Philosophical Issues (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 6. Meisels treats the targeting of civilians or non-combatants as the morally distinctive feature of terrorism in The Trouble with Terror, pp. 20–1, but sees the use of fear as integral to terrorism as a tactic (at pp. 26–7). See also Igor Primoratz, ‘What is Terrorism?’ Journal of Applied Philosophy, 7:2 (1990), pp. 129–138 and id. Terrorism, p. xii.

50 Rodin, ‘Terrorism Without Intention’, p. 753.

51 Ibid., p. 752.

52 Ibid., p. 755.

53 Coady, ‘Terrorism and Innocence’, p. 40. Also, Coady, ‘The Morality of Terrorism’, Philosophy, 60 (1985), pp. 47–69 and Meisels, The Trouble with Terror, pp. 12 and 29.

54 Rodin, ‘Terrorism Without Intention’, pp. 762–71.

55 Carl Wellman, ‘On Terrorism Itself’, Journal of Value Inquiry, 13:4 (1979), pp. 250–8. Goodin resists this possibility, What's Wrong with Terrorism? pp. 100–8.

56 Goodin, What's Wrong with Terrorism? pp. 2 and pp. 179–80.

57 See Coady, ‘The Morality of Terrorism’, p. 51, for a similar point about convergence of definitions on common moral concerns.

58 For example, Ted Honderich, Terrorism for Humanity (London: Pluto Press, 2003), pp. 154–5.

59 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

60 Skinner, Visions of Politics I, pp. 176, 182, and 186.

61 As an example, see Skinner's, ‘Moral Principles and Social Change’, in Visions of Politics.

62 Laqueur, No End to War, p. 238.

63 On the relevance of Habermas's thought to rhetorical approaches towards language, see Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 299–303.

64 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalisation of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: Polity, 1995) and ‘An Alternative Way Out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative Versus Subject-Centred Reason’ in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1989). Adopting this approach is consistent with Richard Jackson's view that an adequately critical approach towards terrorism will recognise knowledge ‘as a social process constructed through language, discourse and inter-subjective practices.’ See Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics, and Counterterrorism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 246. On the relation between emancipation and opening up space for uncoerced critical dialogue on terrorism, see Matt McDonald, ‘Emancipation and Critical Terrorism Studies’, European Political Science, 6 (2007), pp. 252–9.

65 Austin, How to do things with words, ch. 3.

66 Habermas, Communicative Action, I, pp. 285–95. On the role of definitions within communicative action, see p. 286.

67 Richard Rorty, ‘Solidarity or Objectivity?’ in Lawrence Cahoone (ed.), From Modernism to Postmodernism: an Anthology, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 450.

68 Ibid., p. 450.

69 Ibid., p. 449.

70 Ibid., p. 448. See also Edward Said's preface to the 2003 edition of Orientalism, (London: Penguin, 2003), for a ‘humanist’ evocation of inter-cultural critical dialogue that bears comparison.

71 For a survery of the acceptance internationally of ‘human rights,’ ‘human dignity’ and cognate concepts as the basis for norms limiting the scope of permissible targeting, see International Red Cross, The People on War Report (Geneva, 2000), pp. 14–15. On non-combatant immunity, see Saul Smilansky, ‘Terrorism, Justification and Illusion’, Ethics, 114 (2004), pp. 790–805.

72 New York Times, 3 February 2002. He said that ‘no degree of oppression and no level of desperation can ever justify the killing of innocent civilians. I condemn terrorism, I condemn the killing of innocent civilians, whether they are Israeli, American or Palestinian.’

73 Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was quoted in 2001 as saying that ‘[t]he Geneva convention protects civilians in occupied territories not civilians who are in fact occupiers […] All of Israel, Tel Aviv included, is occupied Palestine. So we're not actually targeting civilians – that would go against Islam.’ From the St Petersburg Times on the 11 August, 2001, quoted in a ‘Letter to Hamas Spiritual Leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin,’ 6 August 2002, by Hanny Megally on behalf of Human Rights Watch: {http://www.hrw.org/press/2002/08/hamasltr080602.htm} accessed on the 19 March 2008. On Osama Bin Laden's (mis)use of familiar criteria to justify Al-Qaeda's terrorism, see Jeff McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 233–4.

74 On the usefulness of a Habermasian approach as a ‘guide to how beliefs and actions could be made accountable to others and how they could then be subjected to scrutiny and accepted or contested by participants engaged in dialogue’, see Thomas Diez and Jill Steans, ‘A Useful Dialogue? Habermas and International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 31 (2005), pp. 127–40.

75 See note 44.

76 I have Virginia Held's strategy particularly in mind here.

77 I leave aside for now the difficult question of whether terrorism in this sense could be excused or justified in any circumstances.

78 Jaggar, ‘What is terrorism?’ p. 205.

79 If a norm emerged in some contexts by which it was widely accepted that the term ‘terrorist’ applied to one's enemies, as an anonymous referee for the journal has suggested, then radically revisionary strategies and techniques would be entirely appropriate in response.

80 Held, How Terrorism is Wrong, p. 77. Stohl cites Richard Jackson's argument that ‘adopting a sceptical attitude toward state-centric understandings of terrorism’ is one of the ‘core commitments of critical terrorism studies’ and identifies the idea that ‘[p]olitical terrorism is exclusively the activity of non-governmental actors’ as one of ten pervasive contemporary myths about terrorism. Stohl, ‘Old Myths,’ p. 5. See also Blakeley, ‘Bringing the State Back into Terrorism Studies’.

81 Held, How Terrorism is Wrong, ch. 1.

82 Noam Chomsky, ‘International Terrorism’.

83 A feature of the rhetorical manoeuvres analysed by Bhatia, ‘Fighting Words’, passim. As he writes (p. 19), the ‘perception of the opponent [as terrorist] further buttresses an image of righteous action, obscuring the violent and less than pure elements of one's own action.’ I trust that the present article will contribute to the dialogue that Bhatia rightly seeks.

84 Though it might be that more acute violence by a state could justify more radical forms of action by resistance groups. Again, the question of justifying terrorism however defined is important and controversial but beyond the scope of the present article.

85 On resistance to state-centric discourses and naming by non-state organisations through various media, see Bhatia, ‘Fighting Words’, p. 11.

86 See Waldron, ‘Terrorism and the Uses of Terror’, p. 24, for argument against a simple ‘terrorist / freedom fighter’ dichotomy.

87 Scheffler, ‘Is Terrorism Morally Distinctive?’ p. 3.

88 Burke, ‘The End of Terrorism Studies’, pp. 41–2.

89 For a comprehensive view of the normative foundations and scope respectively of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression, see Larry May's trilogy: Crimes Against Humanity: a Normative Account (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); War Crimes and Just War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Aggression and Crimes Against Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

90 Notably, Arafat uses the term ‘war criminals’ in the speech quoted above (see n. 27) as a term even more forceful than ‘terrorist.’ On the unhelpful simplification of diverse forms of wrong into a single, catch-all category by the Bush administration, and on the need to differentiate see Scheffler, ‘Is Terrorism Morally Distinctive?’ pp. 10–11. On the growing displacement of ‘terrorism’ by the word ‘genocide’ during the 1990s to refer to larger-scale killing in the Balkans and Rwanda particularly, see Guelke, ‘Great Whites, Paedophiles, and Terrorists’, p. 18.