Abstract
Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson’s Genealogies of Terrorism and Mathias Thaler’s Naming Violence explore dispositifs of violence that operate at the level of the international and that implicate states and nonstate actors—and how the delineation between them is drawn in the first place. I begin in this review essay by considering these two books on their own terms, first, and then from the perspective of the discipline that has long held this level of political analysis and these actors in its sights: international relations (IR). My purpose is to explore ways in which political theory and IR might better exchange with one another. I suggest two places where the objects of analysis and the methods of these two works of political theory afforded opportunities for engaging with IR’s understandings, respectively, of the state and of the dynamics of the international system, and of the prescriptive role of theorizing. The place of theory in relation to political action is a central concern of both authors, and they both turn to definitions to address it. I bring to bear the insights of a discipline that has long had to grapple with its proximity to, and the demands of, policymaking, and where the division of intellectual labor is structured around the tension between the tasks of “critiquing” and “problem-solving.” 1 Speaking from this tension, I question this turn to definitions-as-solutions.
Erlenbusch-Anderson’s Genealogies of Terrorism is an empirically rich, carefully contextualized and well-documented study of the different forms that terrorism has taken over time. Beginning in the French Revolution when the term “terrorism” was originally coined, the book circumscribes four historical sites where terrorism developed into the multifaceted phenomenon with which practitioners and scholars are currently grappling and which Erlenbusch-Anderson terms “synthetic terrorism.” These sites are the French Revolution (chapter 2), the Russian Revolution (chapter 3), the Algerian War of Independence (chapter 4), and the so-called, in the conventional U.S.-centric terminology, “post-9/11 War on Terror” (chapter 5). The author approaches each one as a distinct terrain where she traces the contours of the many faces of terrorism that together compose the one we recognize today. This exercise yields a typology of eight forms of terrorism that nicely complexifies rather than reduces. The book exemplifies contextual history at its best, in that it does not merely make sense of a concept by returning it to the times where it acquired its salience and textures, but also shows how it was mobilized to wreak distinct political effects: to discredit enemies, or instead to reassert political attitudes and identities that had been cast out by such strategies. Convincing also is the way it takes the past seriously as the factory for the making of the present. The book is less convincing in its efforts to shoehorn all of its materials into Foucault’s concepts; this seems all the more unwarranted given its apt use of the Foucauldian method of genealogy. There were many places in the empirical analysis where what the author reads as an expression of biopower could just as readily be accounted for on other terms. To take her first example (32–34), Robespierre’s measures to alleviate food scarcity strike me as a rather traditional concern of the ruler for the ruled; the redistributive policies adopted by the Roman Empire also come to mind. It is not clear to me that the state intervening in the market to reduce food prices against a backdrop of poor harvest really qualifies as the same level of intervention as measures designed to “make live” that work at the level population’s reproductive processes—the processes that biopower was meant to capture. As a result, Erlenbusch-Anderson does not always convincingly argue that biopower or discipline are operative in the contexts she examines, both because the recourse to them is often more suggestive than fully developed and because older modes of analysis of the material workings of power are not envisaged. 2
Terrorism is also the object of analysis of Mathias Thaler’s Naming Violence, along with two other forms of political violence: genocide and torture. His starting point is that the naming of violent acts and practices conditions how we respond to them—or fail to do so. Political theory is well-placed to explore this juncture between defining and doing. Thaler explores the ameliorative role that definitions, understood as the work of renaming, together with the imagination, can perform to help adjust our conceptual frames so that these forms of violence can no longer be missed or ignored. I call this approach, conjoining two of his own terms, “ameliorative nominalism.” He brings three analytical modes of engagement that have granted a central role to the imagination to bear upon these forms of violence: storytelling in construals of genocide (chapter 2), the use of hypothetical scenarios for torture (chapter 3), and the place of genealogy in conceptualizing terrorism (chapter 4). The role and responsibility of political theory, and what it can do in the face of violent practices, are central concerns of Thaler’s. He puts forward a “sober realism” that is poised midway between a moralism that passes judgment on practical affairs from the great heights of (in his terms) the proverbial armchair with scant concern for or knowledge of local circumstances, and a realism that shirks the possibility of adjudicating altogether. Thaler, then, conceives his undertaking as “an ameliorative project sustained by imaginative judgements” that is adjusted to the “dynamic reality of violence” (20, 157). His turn to the imagination is original and welcome, although I was left wondering if more might have been done by returning to Kant himself, rather than to Arendt’s narrowed version of him, given the primordial role Kant grants the imagination in the production of knowledge as such in the Critique of Pure Reason, where it is much more than a prop to judgment. I was less convinced by his recourse to definitions for reasons that will I elucidate in the review’s final section. I first explore an initial point of juncture between political theory and IR that is furnished by Thaler and Erlenbusch-Anderson’s topics: the state.
The State, Raison d’État, and Reasons for Engaging with IR
The state is the primary perpetrator of all the forms of political violence these two books parse—of terrorism, genocide, and torture. Both, I aim to show here, would have benefited from a more direct engagement with the discipline that has long focused upon the state and the distinct political system in which it was constituted: the international.
A merit of Erlenbusch-Anderson’s work is to place the state back at the center of the terrorism dispositif. She shows that terrorism first emerged as practice of the state and not of the nonstate actors that terrorism studies—which branched out of the most conventional part of IR, security studies—traditionally hold in its sights when it studies this “nontraditional threat,” as it terms it. With this claim, she shares the same aims as critical terrorism studies: articulating this alliance would only strengthen these aims. 3 The real import of Erlenbusch-Anderson’s attention to history, however, is that she shows how terrorism served to constitute the state in its postmonarchical, democratic form (where suffrage was not tied to class or property) in France and Russia. Further, she shows how terrorism functions as a boundary-producing practice, where the line separating out state from nonstate actors (here, terrorist groups), and thus the state’s “inside” from its “outside,” far from being fixed once and for all, is constantly being performatively redrawn by state security practices—a claim that has been at the heart of critical IR for three decades now. 4
The dynamics of the state’s constitution reveal a structural weakness in Erlenbusch-Anderson’s argumentation, however. Erlenbusch-Anderson contends that “synthetic terrorism,” the current dispositif centered upon the United States, is supported by an “imperial raison d’État” where countering terrorism and spreading democracy around the world become folded into one another (142–144). An “imperial raison d’État” is a historical contradiction in terms. Raison d’État was the distinctive political rationality that took shape coextensively with the state as it broke away from empire, not as a continuation of it under other guises. It was the reason of the state; it indexed the rise of a novel political form in the seventeenth century, the state. Raison d’État is a mode of rule characterized by a careful balance between an “external self-limitation” and an internal unlimitedness, as Michel Foucault, a great theorist of raison d’État, underlined. 5 By this, Foucault means that the source of this self-limitation is located outside the state, in the distinct political system that the state constituted as it emerged together with other states: the Westphalian or international system. This is IR’s defining object of analysis. The state, then, as both IR and Foucault have shown, is the polity that exists, not sui generis, like empire (or other types), but within a “plurality” of states —a system—that hems it in and sets hard limits on the actions it can and cannot pursue on the outside. 6 “The state only exists as states, in the plural.” 7 As a result, and contrary to the argument Erlenbusch-Anderson seeks to develop in relation to the United States, “raison d’État’ . . . accepts that every state has its interests and consequently has to defend them absolutely.” 8 Raison d’État works to establish “the plurality of states free from imperial absorption in such a way that an equilibrium can be established between them,” not to “retur[n] to a unifying position of a total and global empire at the end of time.” 9 Empire and raison d’État are thus different political logics, and the U.S.’s imperializing moves require another concept altogether to account for them. The point is not to be pedantic about which parts of Foucault to use, nor to stifle conceptual innovation. It is to draw attention to the slippages that occur in Erlenbusch-Anderson’s argumentation as a function of her overlooking the structuring effects of the international system that have long concerned IR theorists. 10
The state and the dynamics of its constitution also indicate a blind spot in Thaler’s work. In particular, I was surprised at the forms of political violence that remained unmentioned in a book that sets out to name them. Two that come to mind are, first, Pierre Bourdieu’s symbolic violence, which would seem to be a priori relevant to a project that is concerned with the violence of structures and the practical effects of language. This form of violence has been a concern of IR’s subfield of international political sociology. 11 Elided also, and second, is the role that violence plays in founding the state: what I have called, building on Walter Benjamin’s “law-making violence,” its “state-making” function. 12 Coming to terms with the productive, and not merely destructive, effects of violence no doubt complicates Thaler’s picture.
Moreover, insofar as Thaler’s project presumes the possibility of bracketing the state from violence, in order to focus on violence exclusively, it has the effect of holding the state as a given rather than as produced by the very practices under consideration. Not only does this presumption run directly counter to the constructionism Thaler otherwise invokes (16–18), but it also perpetuates the representations of the state as a fixed thing that harks to the most traditionalist, naturalist corners of IR, and that have served to uphold the violence-legitimizing discourses he and Erlenbusch-Anderson appraise. This reification has been the crucial problem with traditional terrorism studies; in casting the analytical focus upon nonstate actors (“terrorist groups”), traditional terrorism studies have also shifted it away from the perpetrator of the violence committed in the naming of combatting terrorism. In leaving the counterterrorist state unexamined, traditional terrorism studies have effectively helped to reproduce this state—representationally and practically—by developing its policy tools. 13 Thaler’s aims are of course critical, unlike terrorism studies. Still, I wonder how biting the critique can be if, like analyses of the problem-solving type (terrorism studies, in this case), it, too, leaves the state out of its frame?
The Old Specter of Relativism, or the Critical Productiveness of Contingency?
Both books read as though haunted by the specter of relativism. It is telling that neither author feels the need to explain its perils and that relativism means different things for each one. Relativism functions as one of those self-evident truths that can safely be assumed to be shared with the reader. It evokes the old anti-poststructuralist specter once waived around to scare students away from a purportedly morally bankrupt approach that eschews all fixed referents. But what if reckoning with unfixity furnished powerful means for furthering Erlenbusch-Anderson and Thaler’s own critical aims?
Let me begin by charting how the specter of relativism plays across both works. In Naming Violence, it makes its appearance in the context of Thaler’s engaging with Erlenbusch-Anderson’s work (in chapter 4). In this chapter, Thaler, like Erlenbusch-Anderson, musters the resources of genealogy toward a critique of terrorism. Thaler is thus in agreement with Erlenbusch-Anderson on the adequacy of the method (genealogy) for the object of analysis (terrorism). However, for Thaler (135), the weakness in Erlenbusch-Anderson’s analysis lies in her attempt to reconcile the possibility of circumscribing the “general features” of terrorism with that of apprehending it, per the terms of her method, as produced by the contingent “power structures” that she excavates. Thaler correctly, in my view, circumscribes the contradiction in Erlenbusch-Anderson’s design. Yet it only devolves into a contradiction as a function of her having fallen into what I call her and Thaler’s shared definitional trap. For Erlenbusch-Anderson (168) also ultimately tethers her fine excavatory work to the task of “redefining terrorism.” Like Thaler, she shies away from the implications of her genealogical mode of analysis. In her Genealogies of Terrorism, the specter of relativism lurks elsewhere—namely, in the pitfalls of an “empiricist analysis” (13). The point and the term are left hanging; joining the dots as best I can, knowing that I rather favor empirically minded inquiries like her own, I think the author means that an analysis that drowns in the weeds of facts cannot abstract enough to be able to define, as she wants to. Both authors, then, share the goal of defining the ills of the world in order to remedy them.
Both Erlenbusch-Anderson and Thaler, in rushing into their respective definitional traps, have missed the opportunity to mobilize contingency as a powerful instrument of critique—as the “weapon of relativity of thought,” as the classical IR realist E. H. Carr once called it. 14 To be clear, in actual fact, Erlenbusch-Anderson’s empirical chapters amply render the contingency, historicity, and constructedness of terrorism. They are suffused with contingency. Indeed, this is the virtue of empirical work. However, her work culminates in a redefinition in the final chapter. Thaler also nods to contingency (in a subheading, 138). He almost veers toward it when he (astutely) ploughs the difference between the givenness of nature and constructedness of the social (15–16). However, he does so in the course of deploying the rationale for his recourse to definitions—in the passage where he defines definitions. Thaler is concerned both with what concepts (“torture,” “genocide,” and “violence”) do, and how to make them render visible the violence they actually efface. Thaler sees definitions as a crucial instrument for orientating political practice toward ameliorative purposes. By asking “what the practical point of having a specific definition is and which goals it is supposed to serve,” for Thaler (23), we are in a position to dislodge concepts from their ossified interpretations and to ready them once more for capturing new forms of violence, which have sometimes been enabled by these very interpretations. In both projects, this turn to definitions as a solution, however, is, I suggest, what short-circuits the possibility of mobilizing contingency to its best effect.
Definitions fix. They stabilize; indeed, this is what they are meant to do. But so do dominant discourses. Insofar as both books are engaged in deconstructing global dominant discourses and ossified concepts, their authors already in effect work with contingency, as I have shown. 15 Given this, I wonder about the wisdom of critical strategies that, in resorting to definitions, mirror the very gesture of domination: to fix. Can the remedy that takes the same route as the ill really be one? 16 How can we be so sure that the definitions (re)set by the theorist are better than those in common usage?
Since Thaler explicitly engages this question, I articulate my reservations with regards to his project by comparing his “sober realism” with an IR realism that fully embraced contingency as a mode of critique. Carr’s profound rejection of any kind of moral idealism (or liberalism) was founded in his observations, as a policymaker (he was a member of the British delegation to the 1919 Paris conference that set Europe on the path to war in trying to repair it), that any “ameliorative” (in Thaler’s word) undertaking is inexorably tethered to the viewpoint of the ameliorator. Consequently, the only morally tenable position is one that eschews universality altogether, and this includes any standpoint that purports to be external to the situation or actors under consideration, including that of the theorist. Both Thaler and Erlenbusch-Anderson seem to conflate an epistemological positioning (embracing relativity) with a moral one (what they take “relativism” to index). For Carr, relativity is the only possible epistemological stance to embrace, in the face of the contingencies of history, of the fluctuating interests and the shifting forces that shape it. But it is also a deeply ethical stance, as Foucault’s scholarship has amply showed and in ways that Erlenbusch-Anderson draws out. It remains unclear to me why, at the last minute, she resorts to definitions.
The deeper problem, to venture a diagnosis, seems to stem from the excesses of disciplinary specialization. Thaler’s concern to step out of political theory to avoid the “the risk of [it] becoming overly self-referential and narrow minded” (41) is laudable. Only the public debate interpreted by (yet another) political theorist (James Tully) is not the only place to go. There is something to learn from the realism experimented with in a discipline that has constantly had to contend with the dangers of its proximity to policymaking and what it means to undertake critique in these circumstances. It is not clear to me how, for all its appeals to a democratically positioned mode of theorizing, Thaler’s ameliorative project avoids the problem of the theorist occupying the place of knowing better than those in need of being ameliorated—of being rid of their genocidal blindness, to use Thaler’s example. However persuasive this case may be, it does not evacuate the ethical problem of claiming an external stance from which to adjudicate. It is hard not to see this as just another kind of moralism. 17 The universalist referent looms large over Thaler’s project, pulling into its orbit even the most dedicated antiuniversalist poststructuralists, like Judith Butler or Maja Zehfuss.
My concern, to now enunciate it in relation to Erlenbusch-Anderson’s project and on her terms, is that, although she does go further than Thaler, she does not go far enough in espousing the critical virtues of “problematizing,” not simply as a possible alternative to “problem solving,” but explicitly and imperatively contra it (164). Perhaps it helps to sit in a discipline from which one constantly witnesses the very real toll that the “action-guiding” impulse, to borrow Thaler’s term, takes upon theorizing. A naive fetishization of the practical bend ignores the very real pressures of policymaker’s demands, which it is therefore sometimes also the theorist’s duty to resist. The scathing words to this effect of the otherwise rather conservative Hedley Bull are worth recalling here. 18 Problematizing is a dedicated project that requires that problem-solving be bracketed, since the latter is the source of the problem from a critical perspective; it is where meaning-fixing, itself generally the outcome of a discourse becoming dominant, unleashes the deployment of the discriminatory or negationist policies. Erlenbusch-Anderson ends her book with Fanon to illustrate the transformative potential of redefining terrorism. Fanon’s investment, it seems to me, was not in rescuing the term. It was instead in understanding how a political subject can be cornered into extreme action by a context that actively denies her any other mode of action or expression. The decolonizing subject, not the term, was where Fanon set his store.
My concern with the authors’ definitional strategies, then, is ethical, methodological, and political. The unfixity of meaning and of borders is a reality of how states and language function. Reckoning with them is a requirement of realism, to put it in Thaler’s terms. But they are also resources to be playfully mined against the fixedness of power, which surely is what ought to remain constantly in the eye of engaged critiques. However unsettling it may be, contingency also holds the promise of alternatives. This promise lies at the heart of both books.