THE MEANING OF TERRORISM AND THE PROSE OF PACIFICATION
The language used to define reality also shapes it. Consider the term terrorism. Critical terrorism scholars like Richard Jackson and Lee Jarvis show that labeling political opponents “terrorists” places them beyond politics and beyond understanding, creating a dichotomy between irrational, barbarous “terrorists” and virtuous, civilized states. Incidents labeled “terrorism” are also defined as exceptional acts outside the normal confines of war and beyond any historical or social context. Hence, the “War on Terror” became a timeless struggle between good and evil.18 This kind of rhetoric is not just limited to public proclamations of politicians. Lisa Stampnitzky finds that the expert conversation is “continually hybridized by the moral discourse of the public sphere, in which terrorism is conceived as a problem of evil and pathology.” Instead of a “rational” and “scientific” debate, “the language of evil creates ‘a black box’ around terrorism, which creates its own explanation: terrorists commit terrorism because they are evil.”19
This understanding shapes the response to terrorism. Evil cannot be reconciled. It must be defeated. After 9/11, George W. Bush proclaimed, “No nation can negotiate with terrorists.” A decade and a half earlier Ronald Reagan insisted, “America will never make concessions to terrorism.” In 2009, Susan Rice, the then national security advisor for the Obama administration, repeated the mantra, “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.”20 With diplomacy off the table, the United States has engaged in a boundless, borderless, ceaseless “War on Terror.” After nearly two decades, an untold number of military operations in at least seventy-six countries, and some $7.6 trillion spent on a global pacification project, a grim accounting of the costs shows an immense human toll: nearly a million dead from fighting and the related predations of war and over ten million more displaced in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, to say nothing of other affected regions.21 Importantly, this immense violence has not ended terrorism. Instead, foreign interventions have devastated Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, creating the conditions for intensified conflict and more terrorism. For the United States, this massive investment in security has led to loose monetary policy, and increased indebtedness. It has diverted resources from pressing social problems like health care and infrastructure, helping to create the conditions for the Great Recession. As economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes explain, “With more spending at home, and without the need for such low interest rates and such soft regulation to keep the economy going in its absence, the bubble would have been smaller, and the consequences of its breaking therefore less severe.”22 This situation created the political opportunity to direct economic anxieties toward refugees. The resulting dynamics are destabilizing both the United States and Europe, where the far-right, including its paramilitary fringe, is ascendant. Despite the failure of the “War on Terror,” security remains the solution to the problem of terrorism. Why?
Critical terrorism scholars would say it is because the discourse of the “War on Terror” supports “power.” Hence, the aforementioned studies by Jackson and Jarvis analyzed the contemporary political rhetoric to reveal how the language of the “War on Terror” is, in Jackson’s words, “a carefully constructed discourse . . . designed to achieve a number of key political goals.” By “denaturalizing” the discourse of the “War on Terror,” these scholars make a vital contribution. They show that the “War on Terror” is not “an objective or neutral reflection of reality.” However, these studies cannot explain why the “War on Terror” advances such “key political goals” like “normalis[ing] and legitimis[ing] the current counter-terrorism approach” or “disciplin[ing] domestic society by marginalising dissent or protest.” In short, they can show that the discourse of the “War on Terror” is “an exercise of power” but they cannot define what is specific about that “power.”23
Getting at the particularities of “power” requires a different approach. Much of “critical terrorism studies” takes the work of Michel Foucault as its methodological and theoretical point of departure.24 Foucault famously upended the study of “power,” which he reconceptualized not as a thing that could be wielded by individuals or institutions but as a diffuse effect of social relations. In this conception, power is a productive force that resides in discourses, practices, and forms of knowledge. Hence, in his influential work on the prison, asylum, and hospital, Foucault analyzed the discursive construction of criminality, madness, and disease.25 He argued these power apparatuses developed in tandem with systems of knowledge, creating “heterogeneous ensemble[s] consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions.” These dispositifs are unique assemblages of heterogonous elements. They cannot be reduced to or derived from material relationships.26
In his efforts to decenter the analysis of power, however, Foucault failed to give due weight to the historically produced differences in power among institutions and peoples. Nicos Poulantzas, the first Marxist to take Foucault seriously, noted that his “metaphysical and mystical” conception of power “dilutes and scatters power among innumerable microsituations.” Hence, Poulantzas concluded that, “for Foucault, the power relation never has any other basis than itself: it becomes a pure ‘situation’ in which power is always immanent.”27 As a theoretical intervention, the critique of security continues Poulantzas’s work and completes a Marxist recuperation of the poststructural theory of “power.” Hence, Neocleous, while working his way from Poulantzas to the critique of security, noted that Foucault’s great contribution—the focus “on the networks of administrative power mechanisms that operate in the ordering of capitalist society”—is lost to fuzzy theorization, where “the state is dissolved into power, in turn dissolved into the social.” As a result, Foucault—and, particularly, his poststructural followers who have canonized his work in an ever-proliferating number of academic subfields—are unable to see “the significant differences between different forms, modalities, institutions and exercises of power, most obviously the difference between the power of the state in relation to civil society and the relative power of individuals and groups within civil society.” This ill-defined, ahistorical theorization of “power” is evident in a “spurious materialism” that replaces legal subjects with “bodies,” reduces law and sovereignty to mere repression, and denies the “wider constitutive, regulative, and policing functions” of the state. Indeed, “not all legal subjects are human beings and therefore cannot be treated as ‘bodies.’”28 The approach often fails to acknowledge, let alone analyze, the stark power differentials between individual workers and the massive multinational corporations with which they sign employment contracts or—more germane to this study—the “drug pusher” and the police.
Returning to Poulantzas’s critique of Foucault centers analysis squarely on the materiality of power relations, as expressed in the historically specific relationships among capital, state, and class struggle. Here, it is important to note that Poulantzas’s work was more than “a first shot at a materialist appropriation of Foucault.”29 In many ways, Poulantzas anticipated Foucault on the relational and productive nature of power, and the relation between power and knowledge, among other points.30 However, where Foucault developed a suggestive but ultimately ambiguous theory of micropowers that lacked any clear connection to actually