Contemporary State Terrorism: Theory and Practice.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Grewcock, Michael
• Date: 01 April 2010

Contemporary State Terrorism: Theory and Practice

Edited by Richard Jackson, Eamon Murphy and Scott Poynting

London: Routledge, 2010

Since the declaration of the 'war on terror', terrorism has largely been associated with Islamist political violence. This has consolidated a very one-sided political discourse, penetrating deep into academia and reinforced by the availability of research funding, which assumes terrorism can only be undertaken by nonstate actors. Moreover, at the institutional level, terrorism is increasingly viewed as an extreme form of transnational crime. Within this paradigm, the specifically political nature of terrorism is often lost as is a recognition that state actions routinely conducted in the name of 'counterterrorism' might be equally--if not more -violent and terrifying than the activities the state seeks to police and a source of motivation for those engaged in terrorist offences.

By contrast, this edited collection urges that state terrorism be understood as a central part of the terrorism phenomenon. The book starts with the proposition that 'state terrorism has been one of the greatest sources of human suffering and destruction of the past five centuries' (p. 1). It does not deny that other forms of terrorism exist but argues that

the few thousand deaths and injuries caused by 'terrorism from below' every year pales into insignificance besides the hundreds of thousands of people killed, kidnapped, 'disappeared', injured, tortured, raped, abused, intimidated, and threatened by state agents and their proxies in dozens of countries across the globe. (p. 1) The editors define state terrorism as:

[T]he intentional use or threat of violence by state agents or their proxies against individuals or groups who are victimized for the purpose of intimidating or frightening a broader audience. The direct victims of the violence are ... not the main targets but are instrumental to the primary goal of frightening the watching audience, who are intimidated through the communicative power of violence. The intended effects of the violence are the achievement of specific political or political-economic, as opposed to religious or criminal, goals. (p. 3) From the outset, the editors recognise that state terrorism is a highly contested political concept (which underpins the definitional disputes) and that they are confronting deeply rooted orthodoxies. In their introduction, they identify and seek to dispel five main objections...