Everyday terrorism

I Introduction

This paper argues that that the intimate and structural dynamics of terrorism experienced in the home not only reflect violence in the international arena, but have shared foundations and direct points of connection. Building on work in feminist political geography and international relations, both terrorisms are framed as intimate and structural, global and everyday, at once. Geographers’ preference has been for global terrorism as an object of study; our treatment of it as a phenomenon that is unrelated to intimate violence neatly reflects the disproportionate recognition and resourcing that the state gives to the least prevalent form of terrorism. This has negative consequences for both understanding and responding to the experiences of those who experience domestic violence.

The analysis here centres on the role of fear. Domestic violence does not only – or even mostly – consist of acts of physical violence, although these are often present. It includes psychological and emotional tactics including threats, isolation and undermining self-confidence. The severity of its impacts centre on the common operation of fear, terror and control (Dobash and Dobash, 1979; Stark, 2007). Domestic violence is a widespread and everyday phenomenon in higher and lower income countries alike, that appears to cut across boundaries of class, age, ethnicity and sexual orientation (McCue, 2008). A review of European studies suggests that around one in four women experiences domestic violence over their lifetime, and between 6 and 10% in any given year (Council of Europe, 2002). Men make up an estimated 10–30% of those who suffer domestic violence (Hester, 2009; Walby and Allen, 2004). ² Domestic violence is marked by its repeated and long-term nature, and is a social issue that has serious consequences for the physical and mental health of those who experience it, is a major cause of family breakup, affects patterns of housing and income, and has far-reaching implications for the well-being and the social and emotional development of children (Abrahams, 2010; Hester et al., 2006).

Yet domestic violence does not receive the levels of attention and resourcing that it merits. In the current context of austerity in western countries, services for people who have suffered domestic violence have seen brutal cuts. Here is a crime as close to home as it gets, but there is a persistent tendency to minimize its significance in comparison with more public forms of violence. This paradoxical distancing, partly explained by the spatialities of domestic violence (Pain, 1997; Warrington, 2001), is often reflected in personal as well as societal attitudes, and follows through to the presences and absences in geographical scholarship on violence. Since 2001, the war on/of terror has sparked an enormous literature on global terrorism and the politics of security, while domestic violence has been the focus of little more than 10 articles by geographers. As feminists have observed, phenomena and events that are commonly viewed as public, political, global and spectacular continue to have wider appeal as subjects of study than the private and apparently mundane (Katz, 1996; Marston et al., 2005; Pain, 2009; Rose, 1993; Sharp, 2007; Staeheli et al., 2004). Domestic violence is the elephant in the room. We know it is present, not just as something that happens in distant locations to distant others, but in many of our own lives; but perhaps it feels too large, awkward and close to home to lay bare, causing us to ask difficult questions about security, space, privilege and power.

Geographers’ burgeoning work on global terrorism, meanwhile, offers a field of sophisticated political and spatial analysis (for example, Closs Stephens and Vaughan-Williams, 2009; Elden, 2007; Flint, 2003; Gregory, 2004; Hannah, 2006). Terrorism is rare in most parts of the world, and especially the western countries that are the focus of much of this research; geographers’ emphasis has been on the impacts of the threat and fear of global terrorism on international relations and domestic governance, including the state terrorism that some western governments perpetrate or support as part of their response. There is relatively little empirical attention to the experiential, emotional and everyday dimensions of global terrorism (Pain, 2010; Rapin, 2009). Domestic violence is intimately bound, too, into national and global politics, and profoundly shaped by state and social responses.

The aim of this review is to connect and bring into dialogue theories and evidence about global terrorism and domestic violence, suggesting that this might enrich our understanding of both. The meta-project, following feminist geographers’ lead (for example, Dowler, 2012; Hyndman, 2003; Pain and Smith, 2008; Pratt, 2012; Pratt and Rosner, 2006; Staeheli et al., 2004), is to collapse the scaling of these different forms of violence, drawing together mainstream and feminist analyses of different terrorisms from across the social and political sciences. This is not to present a simplistic argument that they, or any forms of violence, are the same, but to argue for a remapping of the geographies of terrorism. The review is mainly confined to everyday and global terrorism as they are experienced in the West. It draws on some research on colonized and postcolonial settings, and this and anti-racist feminist analyses provide especial impetus for unsettling the distinction between international and interpersonal violence. Discourses of fear of both everyday and global terrorisms are characterized by their whiteness.

To delimit the task, the focus in this paper is on how emotions operate in these different forms of terrorism, particularly the politics of fear which have been described as central to both (Dobash and Dobash, 1979; Goodwin, 2006). The detailed workings of domestic violence as emotional warfare, and resistance to violence, are explored elsewhere (Pain, forthcoming; Pain and Scottish Women’s Aid, 2012). The next section expands the framing of domestic violence as everyday terrorism. The following section identifies a conceptual framework which positions both terrorisms within the everyday and wider social and political formations. The rest of the paper attends to four interrelated themes. First, it argues that the politics of both terrorisms operate across scales rather than being restricted to global or everyday securities. Second, it examines the politics, experience and role of fear in spatial entrapment, trauma, resistance to terrorism and survival. Third, it explores social responses to terrorism, and the importance of public recognition in survival and recovery. Finally, it focuses on the role of the state in counter-terrorism strategies, demonstrating once more the intimate connections between local and global securities.

II Framing domestic violence as everyday terrorism

Not every form of violence that is evil or reprehensible … constitutes terrorism. (Lutz, 2010: 37)

Asking these questions is a political as well as an intellectual exercise. Framing domestic violence as everyday terrorism draws attention to its horror and severity (Hammer, 2002). It muddies the boundaries between forms of violence that are usually framed as public, political and spectacular, and forms that are usually framed as private, apolitical and mundane. The terminology also highlights the marginalization of feminist theory from mainstream debates around terror (Sjoberg, 2009), and provides an opportunity to connect feminist scholarship on violence across family studies, psychiatry and psychotherapy, political studies and geography.

A handful of previous analyses have discussed both domestic violence and terrorism. First, in research in family studies over two decades, M.P. Johnson (1995, 2008) has used the terms ‘patriarchal terrorism’ and ‘intimate terrorism’ to distinguish severe controlling violence from other less serious ‘types’ of domestic violence. In so doing, he identifies that women are overwhelmingly more likely than men to suffer more serious abuse. However, while his threefold typology has been strategically useful in some parts of the women’s movement, it is problematic in its implication that incidents are not connected along a spectrum of violence; all forms of violence may be productive of both power and control (Anderson, 2008). Compelling recent arguments about coercive control in abuse (Stark, 2007) show it can lead to the same negative social and psychiatric outcomes even without physical violence being present. In this paper, domestic violence is understood to involve control executed through physical, psychological and/or emotional abuse, rather than one-off incidents of physical violence which may be more widely understood as ‘fights’ (Stark, 2007).

Second, the psychiatrist Judith Herman (1992, 1997), in her powerful account of trauma, draws together experiences of and recovery from war, terrorism, child and domestic abuse; she does not refer to domestic violence as terrorism, but draws close parallels in terms of experience and psychological responses (see section IV). Third, Phillips (2008) has eloquently demonstrated how the politics of the war on/of terror are intimately linked with those of domestic violence, in the Australian government’s failures regarding women’s domestic security. She cites the Australian Women’s Intra Network’s critique of the government for ignoring ‘domestic terrorism’. Fourth, Hammer’s (2002, 2003) radical feminist analysis recasts domestic violence as ‘family terrorism’, as a strategy to counter an anti-feminist backlash which has downplayed the commonness of domestic violence as a form of gendered power relations. Following Jones (1994), Hammer (2002) rejects the term ‘domestic violence’ as sounding like a tame, less severe form of violence that those affected are complicit in. As she argues, much of the language now commonly employed (‘conjugal violence’, ‘spouse abuse’,’ intimate partner violence’) is ideologically rooted, implying that both partners are responsible, neutralizing violence and denying its complexity. While Hammer uses the term ‘family terrorism’ for these reasons, and hooks (2000) uses ‘patriarchal violence’ to signify its causality, I use ‘everyday terrorism’ to flag the dynamics, severity and impacts of domestic violence.

Naming domestic abuse as terrorism applies to white and non-white perpetrators. While men of colour are more likely to be labelled violent in white western societies, in reality they, and women of colour, are at heightened risk from a range of violences. A significant literature, still often overlooked in policy and academic work, has highlighted the universalism and whiteness of mainstream theories of and responses to everyday terrorism, including parts of the anti-violence movement. Terroristic intimate violence is a specific and common pattern of abusive behaviour which cuts across class, ethnicity and sexual orientation. However, the context in which it occurs profoundly shapes its meaning and opportunities to respond to it. Terrorism within the home is a different experience in a political context of routine violence from the state or a colonizing power; and in the West women of colour are also at high risk of racist violence, particularly when leaving violent domestic relationships (Crenshaw, 1991; hooks, 2000; INCITE!, 2006; Sokoloff and Dupont, 2005). Accounts of fear in everyday terrorism and its consequences tend to overlook these differences, just as the common portrayal of fear in analysis of global terrorism is reflective of the condition of whiteness (Pain, 2009). Both need to be challenged. Indeed, the war on/of (global) terror operates through the deployment of ideas of sexuality and race (Bhattacharyya, 2008; Puar, 2007), particularly the racialization of terrorist bodies, while fear and other responses to terrorism in the West predominantly impact on Muslim and Arab communities (Pain, 2010).

III Conceptualizing the global and the everyday

Feminist political geographers have long insisted on rupturing global/local binaries (Dowler, 2012; Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Hyndman, 2001; Katz, 2004; Pratt and Rosner, 2006; Staeheli et al., 2004). These binaries underpin the distinction between global and everyday terrorisms, and the different levels of attention they receive. Pratt (2012) makes a related argument, in her sophisticated dismantling of scale in analysis of intimate and state violences experienced by Filipino migrant domestic workers in Canada. Here, to frame discussion of the relations between everyday and global terrorism, I draw on a previous framework for understanding geographies of fear as present in both global geopolitics and everyday life (Pain and Smith, 2008). Having argued that existing models for thinking about the geopolitics of fear conceive the geopolitical and the everyday as two distinct realms, fixed in a hierarchical relationship where global security practices and discourses drip down into the manifestation of local fear, we proposed a visual motif based on the double helix in the structure of DNA which removes any spatial hierarchy. This represents a feminist take on scale; two equivalent strands (geopolitics and everyday life) wind into a single structure and form the building blocks of every assemblage of fear. The two are bound together by numerous connectors, which are:

events, encounters, movements, dialogues, actions, affects and things: the materials that connect and conjoin geopolitics and everyday life. But these engagements are fragile … the breaks and discontinuities that occur – both randomly and in patterned ways – might represent the awkward, unfinished, disunited, conflicting nature of relations between the geopolitical and the everyday; but ultimately they are inter-reliant and complementary. (Pain and Smith, 2008: 7)

For the current analysis, this model recognizes that neither everyday nor global terrorism is more or less important than the other, neither exists solely at one scale and nor should they be analysed as such; instead, they are parts of the same broader structures that sometimes interweave, and there are both connections and disconnections between them. The analysis that follows focuses on four interconnecting themes, and includes national responses to each terrorism which mediate between the global and everyday.

IV Multiscalar politics and securities: remapping the rights and responsibilities of safety

First, not only are both forms of terrorism political, but these politics operate across scales rather than being restricted to global or everyday securities. The definition of global terrorism is contested and politicized, as it occurs across a wide range of political situations and goals, actors and places (Burke, 2009; Tilly, 2004). As Flint and Radil (2009) point out, many attempts to define terrorism reflect the power of those defining it, and their wish to delegitimize and stigmatize opponents. Nonetheless, fear is widely recognized as fundamental to terrorism:

The consequences of the violence are themselves merely a first step and form a stepping stone toward objectives that are more remote … Terrorism is violence used in order to create fear; but it is aimed at creating fear in order that the fear, in turn, will lead somebody else – not the terrorist – to embark on some quite different program of action that will accomplish whatever it is that the terrorist really desires. (Fromkin, 1975: 692–693)

Terrorism, then, is an attempt to impose or disrupt an order through violence and fear (Flint and Radil, 2009; Goodwin, 2006; Onuf, 2009). Global terrorism aims to have these effects within ‘macro-political geographic settings’ (Flint and Radil, 2009: 151), an upscaling which is especially pertinent to the fourth wave of terrorism (Rapoport, 2004) currently held to be dominating global security. Flint and Radil urge some caution here, as overly focusing on the recent war on/of terror risks losing sight of wider patterns in global conflict where broader political and economic processes, especially colonialism and postcolonial trends, are central to explaining global terrorism.

Equally, everyday terrorism is political, contested and understood by its capacity to instil fear through coercive control (Stark, 2007). If power and control are seen as involving varying and fluid configurations, entanglements and struggles (Sharp et al., 2000), then we can position terrorism as a relevant framing across scales and violent acts of insurgent groups, the state and family members. Earlier feminist analyses of everyday terrorism viewed it as innately political and as an exertion of power: ‘force and its threat is never a residual or secondary mode of influence, rather it is the structural underpinning of hierarchical relations’ (Hanmer, 1978: 229). Patriarchy was the first political and social system that was considered both to produce and be produced by everyday terrorism (Dobash and Dobash, 1979). It has since been recognized as intersected by racism, ethnocentrism, class privilege, heterosexism and ablism to produce diverse experiences of violence (Harne and Radford, 2008; hooks, 2000; Mama, 1996; Menjívar and Salcido 2002; Sokoloff and Dupont, 2005). For many feminist and anti-racist analysts, poverty and material conditions both produce and are intensified by everyday terrorism (Fine, 2012; Fine et al., 1998; Hammer, 2002; hooks, 2000; for a quantitative spatial analysis, see Di Bartolo, 2001), although as Sokoloff and Dupont (2005) note, class analysis is often the least developed in intersectional analyses. Everyday terrorism is also shaped by contexts of colonization and globalization and reinforces their most harmful effects (Hammer, 2002; hooks, 2000; INCITE!, 2006; cf. Flint and Radil, 2009).

Surprisingly few geographers have contributed to analysis of everyday terrorism by considering how place and scale intersect with these political structures. Brickell (2008) is one exception, linking intimate violence and national politics in her analysis of gender-based violence in Cambodia as it undergoes transition. Nayak (2005) also carefully draws place into her analysis of variations in violence against women between Indian states, implicating the political geographies of gender relations, especially movements to improve women’s status and an associated and antithetical ‘revivalist’ backlash which may underpin regional and neighbourhood differences.

The complex politics of both global and everyday terrorisms operate across scales. Although everyday terrorism is experienced within the home and family, feminist analysis upscales its causes and effects, as the above discussion makes clear. Also, as geographers have identified, global terrorism, securitization and militarization are inserted into the everyday through state activities, popular culture, material practices and counter-terrorism measures (Amoore, 2007; Dowler, 2012; Graham, 2010). Katz (2007: 350–351) describes how, in response to the war on/of terror, the security state ‘produces a sense of terror and fear in a drivelly and everyday way … the material social practices of banal terrorism work at all scales’. Global terrorism, then, may be extremely rare in the West, but has become part of our everyday lives and environments. However, its presence reflects highly delineated and politically motivated discourses of threat and risk, rather than our common experiences of violence itself. The far more familiar phenomenon of everyday terrorism is also spatially present, but less visibly: on bodies harmed by violence, in private homes where doors, furniture and possessions are marked by attacks, and in social withdrawal because of spatial entrapment (Warrington, 2001). The key difference here is that despite the commonness of everyday terrorism it tends to be hidden or excused: it is distanced despite its everywhereness, and marked by a lack of spatial fetishism. The terrorism that the state makes paradoxically banal is the one which is extremely rare. But, in common, representations of both terrorisms serve to ‘obscure and mystify the social, cultural and political-economic relations’ that underpin them (Katz, 2007: 352).

Further, the masculinist protection described by feminists as framing international security (Young, 2003) underpins political responses to both forms of terrorism. Security is understood as a set of practices aimed at avoiding current and anticipated future dangers, often involving control and sometimes violence itself. Scholars in feminist international relations and feminist political geography have questioned and remapped understanding of security, and whose rights and responsibilities are prioritized in academic analyses, state discourses and actions (Hunt and Rygiel, 2006; Hyndman, 2007; Staeheli and Nagel, 2008). To protect ‘economic, sovereign and political interests that have been defined by men through war, conflict and diplomacy for centuries’ (Phillips, 2008: 60), the protector state excludes discourses that challenge its power. Young (2003: 226–228) describes how, since 2001, a new security regime in the USA has enacted the logic ‘you subordinate your actions to our judgement of what is necessary, and we promise to keep you safe’, mirroring the patriarchal sexual contract (Pateman, 1988). Similarly, in everyday terrorism, abusers commonly position themselves as the more ethical partner (Jones, 2004) and as the protector of those they abuse (Hearn, 1996), and related critiques have been made of paternalistic state responses (Walklate, 2008).

Everyday violence is also fundamentally related to global security, both conceptually and experientially (Eistenstein, 2007; Hammer, 2003; Hoogensen and Rottem, 2004; Moser, 2001; Sjoberg, 2009) – for example, in the underpinning of militarism and state security by hypermasculinity that has also been held to explain failures to effectively tackle everyday terrorism (Hammer, 2003; hooks, 2000; INCITE!, 2006); in the drive to ‘rescue’ women from oppression overseas unasked, bypassing local women’s movements (Hyndman, 2003; Hunt and Rygiel, 2006; Young, 2003), also reflected in problematic criminal justice approaches to everyday terrorism in the West (Walklate, 2008); and in the erasure of other knowledges and voices in determining political responses to global and everyday terrorisms (Hyndman, 2003; INCITE!, 2006; Stanko, 2006; Sylvester, 1994; Walklate, 2008). Recent research has also highlighted the direct effect of living in a context of war and terrorist attacks on intimate violence, the associated dilemmas for international human rights responses (see P. Johnson, 2008; Sela-Shayovitz, 2010), the effects of military culture on everyday terrorism perpetrated by soldiers against their families, and how, in highly militarized societies such as Israel/Palestine, this everyday violence itself becomes militarized (Adelman, 2003). Writing about the USA, Jones (2013) makes a powerful case that the endemic societal practice of everyday terrorism directly informs the nature of international violence.

This co-dependence of everyday and global terrorisms disrupts, rescales and reorients geographies of violence. Feminist research is ‘acknowledging securities laterally, democratically, and in mutually influential and dynamic ways … [as] a multiplicity of securities flowing concurrently’ (Hoogensen and Rottem, 2004: 169), and to the question ‘whose securities matter most?’ we might add ‘whose terrorisms matter most?’.

V Fear and trauma: beyond entrapment

Fear is central to both global terrorism (Goodwin, 2006) and everyday terrorism (Dobash and Dobash, 1979). In literatures on global terrorism, fear and trauma are often mentioned, but their existence and effects are more often assumed than empirically documented: emotions are something of an absent presence (Pain, 2009, 2010). In contrast, research on everyday terrorism makes a much stronger case for the presence and political roles of fear and trauma; they are fundamental to the social structures of power and control that create and compound women’s vulnerability and insecurity (Brownmiller, 1975; Dobash and Dobash, 1992; Hanmer, 1978). Since this pioneering work, however, emotions have tended to be analysed in quite a singular way that has some limits conceptually and empirically. This section reviews research on fear and trauma in both forms of terrorism, identifying some limitations and gaps.

VI Survival and recovery: recognizing violence as a collective responsibility

‘Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims’ (Herman, 1997: 1). Making this direct link between individual and societal recovery from violence, Herman begins her account of the experience of trauma and the healing processes by which people survive and recover from violence. There are differences within and across both the medical profession and feminist movement on the course of these processes, particularly surrounding the importance and treatment of PTSD (Humphreys and Joseph, 2004). Nonetheless, the broad processes that Herman outlines may be found in many psychotherapeutic responses to those who are chronically traumatized from prolonged terror. She describes five stages of recovery: a healing relationship; safety (naming the problem and regaining control); remembrance and mourning (acknowledgement of trauma and loss); reconnection with ordinary life (developing a new self and creating a future); and commonality (making links with others to challenge the isolation of trauma). These stages may be seen as heuristic devices aimed at healing, as trauma and recovery are messy, non-linear and subject to different retellings (Bondi, 2013; Tamas, 2009, 2011).

Significantly, Herman identifies social contact and support as vital in recovery, whether through a psychotherapeutic relationship or everyday contact with friends, family and others. Research on everyday terrorism confirms that informal support is more likely to be drawn upon than formal services, and is crucial to surviving and leaving violent relationships (Barrett and St Pierre, 2011; Clark and Hamby, 2011; Stanko, 2006). Many people take a long time, even years, to disclose everyday terrorism to anyone, and those from ethnic minority backgrounds (Barrett and St Pierre, 2011; Humphreys and Joseph, 2004; Montalvo-Liendo, 2009) and men who are abused (Walby and Allan, 2004) are least likely to disclose. As a form of terrorism that society as a whole tends to minimize – indeed, which works through fear, shame and entrapment – visible and routine acknowledgement from the wider community and society plays a key role in healthy survival. It is also important in prevention, through deterring perpetrators, priming others to support people who are being abused, and especially in the lessons that children and young people learn and take forward, whether they have witnessed abuse or not (Barrett and St Pierre, 2011; Scottish Executive, 2003; Scottish Women’s Aid, 2010).

For those harmed by terrorism linked to global or national struggles, the experience of collective recognition often differs markedly. In the West, such violence is widely reported, recognized and memorialized, indeed publicity is one of the intentions behind this form of terrorism (Flint and Radil, 2009; Onuf, 2009; Richardson, 2006). Attacks on western cities since 2001 have been especially successful if judged on these terms, receiving unprecedented media coverage, and a whole range of formal and informal practices of memory-work instigated in response to the trauma which was felt (Clark et al., 2011; Edkins, 2007, 2008; Robins, 2003). As Edkins (2004) has argued, this trauma is already collective as well as individual, situated in the lived environments and social worlds in which terrorist attacks and their aftermath take place (see also Smelser, 2004). This collective recognition and expression of trauma is missing from the much wider pandemic of everyday terrorism.

This is not to say that collective recognition of global terrorism and the notion of social trauma is not problematic or disunited. Like the attacks they commemorate, practices of recognition and memorialization are diversely interpreted, contested and open to political manipulation. It is well documented in national conflicts that memory-work and commemoration are frequently used – often through spatial practices such as street-naming, marching and murals – to assert or challenge political authority, and, through collective emotional framing, to recast violent acts as political struggles (Brown, 2011; McDowell, 2012). After the 2005 London bombings, a number of accounts of nation and community were in circulation (Closs Stephens, 2007), while emotions following the attacks on New York in 2001 led to diverse reactions. There was an immediate rush to memorialization, both organic and planned (Edkins, 2003). Both grieving and memorialization have been co-opted for political purposes, especially to justify foreign military interventions (Simpson, 2006), but also in peace movements (for example, see www.notinourname.net). The emotions of individual survivors and the relatives of those killed have been prominently represented, though rarely alter state actions which are framed on their behalf:

Even after this happened and they started talking about retaliation, I’m more of a pacifist than ever. I’m a Republican – but what I saw that day, the devastation, I could not see us doing to other people. (James E. Dobson, paramedic, interviewed in Clark et al., 2011: 10–11)

VII Counter-terrorism: where are the wars on terror?

As Phillips (2008) has articulated in the context of Australian political responses to the war on/of terror, there have also been stark differences in political responses to global and everyday terrorism in the West over the last decade, and these responses are directly related through the politics of fear. Counter-terrorism, constituting efforts by the state to prevent and respond to terrorist violence and threats, now overshadows global terrorism itself. Foreign and domestic policy responses, frequently described as driven or justified by fear, have asserted the political authority of western states and privileged interests within them (Closs Stephens and Vaughan-Williams, 2009; Cowen and Gilbert, 2008; Gregory and Pred, 2007; Robin, 2004). The ‘new machismo’ of the post-2001 war on/of terror is drowning out previous progress on a more egalitarian notion of human security (Hudson, 2005). Some see that, ironically, aggressive securitization as a tactic gives global terrorists exactly what they seek. For Goodwin (2006: 165), the USA and Australia have in this way ‘traded shamelessly upon people’s fear of terrorism to win re-election’. As the flaws in western discourses and actions during the war on/of terror have become evident, so language and policies have shifted. The onus of responsibility for counter-(global)terrorism in the UK is now more dispersed, with an apparently benign but still racialized focus on working with the domestic communities deemed to be a threat, and public watchfulness becoming embedded in the everyday (Amoore, 2007, 2009; Briggs et al., 2006).

Where is the war on everyday terror? Understanding domestic violence as terrorism demands altered responses (Hammer, 2002). There have been significant shifts in the last four decades as the state has taken on responsibility (Walklate, 2008; Wilson, 1983). Many western countries have seen a similar pattern of everyday terrorism being raised and addressed by activists in the women’s movement during the 1970s and 1980s, followed by the development of policing and criminal justice measures and state-funded services for people suffering everyday terrorism (Dobash and Dobash, 1992). This shift can also be seen as a response to public fears, as victims of crime were repositioned as consumers. While these interventions have been symbolically important, and answered some longstanding feminist demands (see Wilson, 1983), state-led interventions have taken control away from social movements, community services and the wishes of service users (Phillips, 2008; Stanko, 2006; Walklate, 2008). There are questions over the effectiveness of criminal justice approaches, as attrition rates remain high and there are no signs of wider behavioural change (Walklate, 2008). The professionalization of anti-violence services has meant increased vulnerability to other forms of violence for women of colour (INCITE!, 2006). In addition, there are sharp geographical disparities in public and voluntary sector service provision and access (Brunell, 2005; Coy et al., 2011), and victims and survivors still counter the everyday terror they experience largely alone, or with informal support from families and friends.

Again, everyday securities are not only overshadowed by the attention that global crises receive, they are intimately connected to and shaped by them. This is the case, first, through the resourcing of the war on/of terror and other global security conflicts at the expense of safety from violence in the home (Phillips, 2008). Second, and simultaneously, western-sponsored conflict in other states such as Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan increases local rates of sexual and racist violence dramatically (Naber, 2006). Third, recent cuts to services for those experiencing everyday terrorism have been justified by global recession. Rollbacks on women’s safety are not only the product of financial leanness, but also a changing climate on gender politics or ‘war on women’ in the USA, where conservative politicians are targeting everyday terrorism legislation amid wider assaults on women’s reproductive and physical security (Doll, 2012; see also Phillips, 2008, on the Australian experience). The UK has recently seen cuts of 31% to refuges and vital services tackling everyday terrorism, and on a typical day 230 women seeking emergency refuge space are turned away (Baird, 2012). Concerns about the capacity of organizations to continue to offer crucial, sometimes life-saving, services are widespread within the sector (Scottish Women’s Aid, 2011; Women’s Aid, 2012), but the government has not acknowledged these sharply gendered impacts of austerity on security (Baird, 2012). As Fine (2012: 3) writes, in the US context, ‘the aggressive twinning of recession and slashing of the public programs has unleashed a muscular policy assault on women … the effects can be viewed globally, and also … locally’. Meanwhile, UK government spending of £3.5 billion on counter-terrorism and intelligence in 2010–2011 was an increase on the previous year. There is a long way to go before everyday terrorism is recognized as widespread, terroristic, deeply damaging to societies and deserving of the highest level of public attention. The same is true of empathetic responses to people suffering everyday terrorism in the West and elsewhere that are determined by their own needs and wishes.

VIII Conclusion: making connections, filling absences

The starting point of this paper was the inequitable imbalance in attention and resources that two forms of terrorism receive from wider society, the state, and researchers including geographers. It has explored the connections between everyday and global terrorism, identifying their shared basis as attempts to exert fear and control for political influence. Conceptualizing the relation between these terrorisms within Pain and Smith’s (2008) double helix, I have explored their similarities, discontinuities and direct connections, arguing that the politics of fear are entwined both across scales and across terrorisms.

Global terrorism does not always live up to its intent of instilling fear, and its achievement of political influence is very mixed. On the other hand, everyday terrorism, if assessed by the criteria widely used to define global terrorism, is very effective: it frequently invokes fear, it terrorizes its targets and those close to them, it exerts psychological control in a way that the terrorist intends, and it leads to securitization in the form of changes to its targets’ behaviour that are not necessarily successful in challenging violence. Most of all, its effects reflect the wider political configurations within which it is produced.

Recasting domestic violence as terrorism has implications for addressing both terrorisms, and for future research. As feminists have argued, the possibility of sustainable peace is enhanced by the recalibration of understanding violence across scales and sites as closely interrelated (Moser, 2001). Both terrorisms are constructed and have impacts in ways that are heavily mediated by relations of gender, race, class privilege and nationality. Policies to address either form of violence must therefore acknowledge these structural root causes, and prioritize the provision of culturally competent services (INCITE!, 2006; Sokoloff and Dupont, 2005). In future geographical research, there is ample scope for culturally specific, intersectional and place-based accounts of different terrorisms that build on the remapping here. More research is also needed on the connections between international and intimate violence: their relation in times and places of war and peace, their experience in different contexts, and further analysis of political discourse to expose the false separation of the two. This would usefully take forward recent feminist work that is asking not only how geopolitics shape the home and the intimate, but how these spheres shape geopolitics (Brickell, 2012; Jones, 2013; Pratt, 2012; Pratt and Rosner, 2006).

The separate literatures on how emotions are formed, experienced and used in global and everyday terrorisms are of mutual interest. Analyses of the invocation and use of emotions as a political strategy remind us that fear and its emotional complex are not by-products of conflict, but central to its workings. The increasingly nuanced analysis of the emotional dynamics of everyday terrorism, what it achieves, and how state interventions can change, ease or reinforce it, might be taken up in analysis of global terrorism. In the latter this is a substantial gap in understanding, and building theory empirically from the experiences of those involved would lead to richer and more insightful accounts. How, across private and public, do people actually experience, make sense of and resist terrorism? How do responses and securitization at one site relate to domestic or public security elsewhere? What is the role of emotions in survival and recovery, and how are they deployed in memorialization and counter-terrorism? And how, in the end, do emotions and behaviours that appear personal or political arise from the same social and political forms?

Emotions that cross scales and sites are also present in the political project of working against violence and fostering inclusive securities (see Pratt, 2012). Sylvester’s (1994) ‘empathetic cooperation’ is commonly invoked as an alternative to mainstream state responses to global conflict and terrorism, and suggested as an emotional basis for ethical global responses to conflict (Sjoberg, 2009). For example, Burke (2009) suggests the need for a new human right, freedom from fear, which would only be possible through a different kind of response to terrorism; here ‘empathetic cooperation’ might mean bridging difference through emotional identification, and concern for others’ security rather than just one’s own. Achieving this, as Eschle and Maiguashca (2009) suggest, is best tackled as a united political project between researchers and activists, if mainstream perspectives and the marginalization of feminist work are to be challenged.

As scholars we have had a role in the fetishizing and distancing of different forms of violence that comes with separating out terrorisms along a scaled system with its implied judgements of magnitude and importance. This itself is a spatial practice built on certain imaginaries, ironically clearest in the pattern of geographical work on violence (though also reflected in other disciplines – see McKie, 2006; Walby, 2013). Remapping and relating terrorisms contributes to wider collective recognition of, and responsibility for, everyday terrorism – it is, after all, far more common than global terrorism, and much more damaging to human life. Domestic violence is a strange absence in human geography. It is time to bring terrorism home.