Abstract
In this article we argue that terrorism should no longer be studied as a phenomenon completely exogenous to modern societies, but rather as endogenous, that is, as a part and product of symbiotic dynamics linking terrorism to particular “socio-state configurations.” This thesis leads us to propose a new research program focused on the central question of what governments do or don’t do to combat the terrorism(s) that strike human societies governed by these same public authorities. In other words, this article discusses “public anti-terrorism action” (PATA) and its variants. We conclude with a singular approach to the study of terrorism, a “state-centered” approach that departs from research focused solely on terrorist actors or groups that have emphasized the notion of “radicalization” or the narrow realities of official counter-terrorism or state terrorism.
Keywords
Introduction
This article 1 is the outcome of a research project begun in early 2016 in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attacks in France (Charlie Hebdo and Friday, November 13). 2 It will begin with a state-of-the-art review of the field of terrorism studies (TS). Without being able to embrace the vast amount of research carried out since the 1980s, with a notable acceleration since the 2001 attacks in New York, it will identify the main criticisms levelled at this field by recent meta-evaluations. In particular, the latter reveal a blind spot: the analysis of the State. While the action of the state is taken into account in analyses of reactive counter-terrorism strategies or the production of state terrorism, its participation in the genesis of terrorism is never really studied. This is our starting point and our theoretical break. We draw on two concepts that have been little used in TS research to date: that of twinship, coined by the political anthropologist Scott (2017, 2018), and that of socio-state configurations, inspired by the work of the sociologist Elias (2003). This theoretical choice will be supported and clarified empirically by the examination of two real socio-state configurations. Through this conceptual structuring, sociological analysis shifts its focus and changes its program: the aim is no longer to analyze terrorism as a phenomenon exogenous to the societies affected, but as a social process or dynamic endogenous to these societies. The political sociology of terrorism must therefore focus, we argue, on analyzing the entirety of the normal work of the state and the consequences of the latter’s (in)action in managing pockets of violence—pockets animated by social actors that we define as Hyper-violent subjectivities—that may have the effect of incubating terrorist projects against the state. We will distinguish three types of “public anti-terrorism action” (PATA) for modeling purposes, each accompanied by an exploratory empirical example.
An overview of TS research field to clarify our theoretical positioning
To begin, we note that there is abundant academic research on terrorism, both quantitative and qualitative (Kalyvas and Straus, 2020). This research field relies on impressive databases, starting with the most widely used, the Global terrorism database (GTD) created and administered by the University of Maryland (aggregating data on 180,000 terrorist attacks worldwide since 1970) or The RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents (RDWTI) (compilation of data between 1968 and 2009). The field of terrorism studies is also supported by at least three specialized academic journals: Terrorism and Political Violence, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and Critical Studies on Terrorism, as well as by renowned handbooks combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. Generally speaking, this research follows two directions: it seeks to explain the root causes of terrorism, or it attempts to measure its social effects. These two directions do little to inform each other. In the academic Anglosphere, most of the effort goes in the first direction, whereas in Europe, production is more oriented towards the second, with quantitative work being rare overall. Finally, in both cultural and academic areas, there is a small amount of research into counter-terrorism or state terrorism, often from a critical perspective, which, as we shall see, tends to characterize the state in an excessively reductionist and monolithic manner, due in part to a lack of empirical studies.
First limitation of terrorism studies: the terrorist actor approach
To inform the state of knowledge available in terrorism studies (TS), we have consulted recently published meta-evaluations. In this perspective, some authors have first endeavored to measure the methodological advances and the type of data mobilized by researchers. Their goal is to denominate recurring methodological problems, such as the absence or paucity of primary data in available surveys, and problems of comparability between the various strands of existing data. These problems have impeded the establishment of a standardized and coherent scientific field (Dory, 2020; Schuurman, 2020). Similarly, there is a tendency for TS, spurred on in particular by programs financed by Western governments, especially after the 2001 attacks in the US, to focus their attention on the actors, that is, terrorist groups.
We now have a number of sophisticated achievements from this perspective. However, the field remains an area of controversy and conflict, as demonstrated by Sèze and Clément (2021). In the U.S., they argue, the porosity of this field of research with government demand has inevitably led to a refocusing on issues that are considered to be the structural causes of violence, for example, poverty and religion. Another branch of the field focused on individual causes, such as psychological predispositions, in the hope of drawing up a standard profile of terrorists. Many researchers, however, felt that these analyses were superficial or unsuccessful, or even biased by the excuse of violence, its depoliticization through “psychiatrization,” the essentialization of religion, or the “pathologization” of commitment. According to these two authors and drawing on a number of recent studies, the search for the roots and profiles of terrorism has been progressively abandoned in favor of the search for the routes and pathways leading to militant violence. For explanatory purposes, Sèze and Clément identify three categories in Anglo-American research: individual, organizational, and structural. On the French side, addressing jihadist violence after the Mohamed Merah attacks of 2012 (in Toulouse, southern France) and the wave of attacks from 2015 to 2019, they highlight the distinguishing feature of French research as broken down into culturalist, minoritarian, and generational approaches. While complementing each other, the various approaches remain contradictory in certain crucial respects, due to different theoretical postulates and distinct professional positions in the academic, political, and media fields.
In line with these criticisms, we would argue that terrorism cannot be understood as a normal social phenomenon, due to its relative rarity. The researcher thus encounters a number of problems in identifying robust causal links based on significative statistical series. It is therefore unlikely that he will have the means to develop robust explanatory models. Access to available materials can be difficult and highly dependent on police and judicial sources that have already qualified the acts, and so impose themselves on the researcher. Similarly, the processing of snippets of material gleaned by chance cannot be properly controlled, especially when researchers confront the highly demanding protocols put in place to capture minute variations in socialization at the cost of a plunge into the psychological sociology of individuals. Indeed, to explain this form of violence, it would be necessary to break the illusion of the one-dimensionality of individual habitus in favor of a psychological sociology that, among other things, follows in the footsteps of Pierre Bourdieu’s episteme (Lahire, 1998, 2002). But this would require a high degree of empirical rigor, and the ability to grasp contextual and dispositional complexities in the diverse domains of practice of each actor, in order to identify possible stable patterns of action.
To understand why, in the same socialization space, some social actors turn to violence and others don’t, it would be necessary to contextualize behaviors and, therefore, set up a methodological device enabling the collection of a large mass of individual data. Such data is very delicate to obtain. This is de facto virtually impossible for individual terrorists, as the protocol is morally too costly, and what’s more, when it isn’t hijacked by predictive social science detection projects, or simply too early, as the actor hasn’t talked about his plan, or too late, in the case of suicidal actors, or those killed by law enforcement officers or driven underground for years.
A second limitation of terrorism studies: a reductive and monolithic characterization of the state as a singular and real entity
Meta-evaluations of the available literature in terrorism studies, or a perusal of the tables of contents of the main handbooks published, reveal a second weakness: the scarcity of works devoted to the relationship between the state and terrorism. Taking the Routledge Handbook of Terrorism and Counterterrorism as an example (Silke, 2019; Wieviorka, 1988), one can already observe that the two parts, Terrorism and Counterterrorism, are clearly separated. Moreover, the section devoted to counterterrorism focuses exclusively on reactive repressive strategies, with a proliferation of case studies unaccompanied by a general theoretical framework for thinking both phenomena together. It’s quite clear that most academic analyses of terrorism fail to address the variable of public actions as such, in all its fundamental complexity, a shortcoming already identified by Michel Wieviorka 30 years ago (1988). Of course, TS have integrated the question of anti- or counter-terrorism, but in a dissociated logic that we consider to be overly reductionist and “presentist” (i.e., a-historicist). These approaches propose an analysis along the following chain: a terrorist incubates and acts outside any socio-historical configuration. The state, under attack and threatened in its security, then reacts by attempting to neutralize the act and the actor(s), both physically and symbolically. Even the most sophisticated research thus focuses only on the most closed, security segment of the state, that is, police, judicial, or military organizations, concentrating solely on war tactics or selective discursive incapacitations (Combes and Fillieule, 2011; Liver, 2008).
To support this observation, we can refer to a recent synthesis of available knowledge on terrorism (Dory, 2020; Ocqueteau, 2019) which underlines the lack of real progress on the question of the state within terrorism studies. These authors and especially Dory highlight a major obstacle that the “critical terrorism studies”—a very dynamic branch of TS—are unable to overcome: a reification of the state that exaggerates its consistency and its unity (Dory, 2020: 136). The state is seen as a quasi-black box in a globalizing, homogenizing and suspicious way. In so doing, researchers do not attempt to analyze or understand the inner workings of the state, forgetting that it has many facets other than repression and criminal investigation. They also fail to take into account the interests and plans of groups and networks (economic, ethnic, regional, religious, etc.) which may act, or even, in certain configurations, control the state in whole or in part, and which, in order to achieve given objectives, have recourse to terrorism through various state institutions (army, police, justice system, media, and even various paramilitary and/or associative entities). The relationship between the state and terrorism merits a new analytical framework: starting from a detailed analysis of the distinction between state and government, and of the various workings and mechanisms of the latter, while not neglecting to explore—as far as possible—the structures of the “deep state” in democratic and post-democratic contexts, is also a prerequisite for the geopolitical analysis of terrorism, as it enables an effective grasp of shifting realities by including all the complexity of interactions between concrete actors (Dory, 2020: 137).
It should be noted, however, that a small number of recent studies have already taken this turn. We refer here to quite recent works on post-2001 US Federal state policy (Clément, 2023; Manning, 2004) or exploratory studies on public policies to combat radicalization in France, which have the merit of broadening the anti-terrorism issue by highlighting its investment in areas of public action that were hitherto foreign to it, and the shift in anti-terrorism doctrine (Domingo, 2023; Galonnier et al., 2022).
Methodology: a theoretical choice that dictates empirical choices
While following in the footsteps of these recent works, we introduce a theoretical construct aimed at amplifying the movement to integrate the state into terrorism studies. To this end, we proceed in three stages: firstly, endogenization of terrorism; secondly, recourse to two hitherto little-used concepts: that of twinship, coined by the anthropologist Scott (2017) and that of socio-state configurations, inspired by the work of sociologist Elias (2003). Thirdly, we illustrate and clarify this conceptual recourse by means of two short real-life case studies, which demonstrate the value of approaching terrorism as a social phenomenon endogenous to societies.
Objectivizing the “normal socio-exogenization” of terrorism to better disengage from it
There can be no terrorism without a state to undermine, transform or even destroy. Who in their right mind could deny this? And yet, as our survey of dedicated literature shows, the state is an astonishingly discreet parameter in the scientific equation of terrorism. Why this discrepancy? Answering this question requires a number of explanations.
We start by restating the obvious: a terrorist act is staggering in itself and is typically designed as such by its perpetrators. Its aim is to disrupt the social and political order in order to undermine the State as the principal guarantor of social and political order. A major disruption of the social and political order logically means exclusion from it. Thus, the terrorist act triggers a first socio-exogenization’ mechanism 3 of terrorism. And since the staggering nature of the terrorist act deactivates a large part of our reflexive capacities, this first mechanism is socially effective. But we need to go further to consider a second socio-exogenization mechanism: before the staggering impact of the terrorist act wears off, the government and its specialized counter-terrorism bureaucracies because they feel rightly targeted by the act, describe it as “barbaric.” This characterization is fraught with meaning for at least two reasons: it is “nationalistic” because it indicates that it is not the State that is targeted, but the nation and its way of life; it is activist because it is vindictive and is the very opposite of a call for collective reflection and inquiry. This second mechanism not only exacerbates the first, but also surreptitiously reframes the state in relation to terrorism: the state is no longer an indirect target, but rather the protector and avenger of the nation under attack.
Finally, there is a third mechanism to consider: any democratic state hit by terrorism accentuates the socio-exogenization already underway in the social body by triggering a dynamic of “public privatization” of the concrete—management of the terrorist problem. In addition to being removed from the social sphere by virtue of its barbarity, the terrorist problem cannot then become anything other than an affair of the State, and even then, an affair of a very limited administrative segment of the State—the specialized police, military and judicial organizations—and, within this already specialized segment, of a small fringe of civil servants and government officials, whose normal work we know virtually nothing about. Hence, the use of the oxymoron “public privatization.”
This threefold socio-exogenization goes so far as to remove from the collective consciousness of the citizenry a simple social fact so fundamental that it bears repeating: there is no such thing as terrorism without a state to undermine and destroy. This is why, in order to challenge this socio-exogenization, the first step is to provide an operational and “acceptable” definition of terrorism. Setting out this definition is simply a matter of re-explaining hic et nunc the common understanding buried under the pressure of the imperious guardians of the raison d’État, who represent only a small and very specific part of the great “human community” 4 that is the State. Without further ado, here is the definition we propose: Terrorism constitutes a social practice carried out by small social groups, manifested in rare concrete acts, and involves planning and executing the cold and spectacular use of hyper-violence against specific or non-specific citizens of a given state—in other words, the “civilians” 5 of that state. This practice primarily aims to undermine the claimed and supposedly monopolistic power of that state over its territory and the population living on it.
To anticipate and/or punish terrorist attacks, which are highly dangerous to social peace and paradoxically simple for terrorists to plan technically, modern states publicly claim the monopoly of anti-terrorist action. They entrust it to highly specialized bureaucracies that report only to the security part of the central government: state presidency, head of government, and departments/ministries of the interior, defense, and justice. What can be defined as “Official Public Anti-Terrorist Action” (official PATA) is therefore structured much more simply than most other sectors of public action, involving only a small number of public actors in its operations. In the fight against road accidents (about 3500 deaths/year in France in 2023), the state is not the only “owner” of the issue. Automobile manufacturers, insurers, victim advocacy associations, citizens against the proliferation of speed bumps in their municipalities, nephrologist surgeons complaining about a decrease in graft numbers due to a decrease in fatal accidents—all legitimately and sometimes effectively participate to road safety policy-making within various official and unofficial venues. The “road safety administration” is also very complex: it involves several levels of government, from the municipality to the European Commission (where, e.g., technical standards for road vehicles are defined), and several ministries and bodies of civil servants (police officers, engineers, judges, budget officials, firefighters, doctors, etc.).A comparison with French public road safety action (Ferret and Spenlehauer, 2009)
Because it is entrusted to a few designated public professionals who report their actions only to the highest political spheres in a very closed decision-making circuit, terrorism, even in advanced democracies, remains a very public issue that struggles to become a social problem. Consequently, the rest of the social body, including social scientists, tends not to question the social origins of terrorism.
Theoretical counter-proposal articulated around the concepts of twinship and socio-state configurations
We utilize the concept of twinship as constructed by paleo-political scientist James C. Scott in the seventh and final chapter of his book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017) 6 . James Scott examines, among other things, the relationships between barbarism and civilization at the time of the emergence of the first states around 10 thousand years ago. Scott highlights what he defines as osmotic twinship (people moving back and forth across the physical, natural, or artificial boundaries between these two worlds) and symbiotic twinship (exchange of services) between barbarians and civilized or state-governed populations (e.g., certain barbarians securing the transport of goods between two states in exchange for payment). Since those distant periods, time has passed, and states now constitute a well-established form of government, both geographically and demographically. Moreover, it is not entirely unreasonable to consider that the somewhat vague subcategory of “today’s democratic states” corresponds to a sincere and non-utopian civilizational project of “living well together,” whereas in the early states described by Scott, the high physical walls surrounding them served not only defensive functions but also retained a large part of their population, a significant percentage of which were slaves.
Nevertheless, we cannot ignore that there remain, in present times, in the interstices between states and even within the territories of democratic states, social spaces that are little governed or not at all governed, where “barbaric” projects can emerge and, for a small number of such projects, materialize in deadly ways (we are not only talking about terrorism). Furthermore, at first glance, of the two types of twinship proposed by James Scott, symbiotic and osmotic, between state and barbarism, only the latter seems to persist today. This is true if we use the term symbiosis in its common sense of “mutual benefit for both parties.” It is less true if we strip the term of its positive value and revert to its etymological meaning: terrorism emerges from the daily life of socio-state configurations or the interaction between socio-state configurations, feeds on them, and modifies them, sometimes in a strong and lasting way. The significant difference between the times recounted by James Scott and our own lies in the fact that nowadays, the barbaric worlds are very small—“barbaric microcosms”—trapped and embedded within socio-state orders (which absolutely does not mean that all today’s “barbaric microcosms” are potential terrorists). Applied to modern states, this concept of twinship allows us to posit that terrorism has a social historicity and, as such, is not exogenous but endogenous to socio-state configurations within which it erupts.
The notion of “socio-state configuration” is used in preference to that of the state to highlight three things. Firstly, regarding the “socio” suffix and following Max Weber’s definition, the state is a “community,” that is, embodied by real people whose behavior is explained not only by their working for the state but also by many other social characteristics beyond this sole belonging to the state. Secondly, regarding the noun configuration, the state is not monolithic: the state and its work are structured in a complex way, that is: (a) what happens in one part of a configuration may not mean anything about what happens in other parts and (b) this entanglement of structures structuring the state, although relatively stable, can evolve significantly over the long term. Thirdly and finally, one of the great advantages of the notion of “socio-state configuration” lies in the possibility of describing situations involving multiple states, which is systematically the case in matters of terrorism.
Having established this and adopting this approach, what do we see when considering this social historicity of terrorism? To answer this question, it is possible to highlight two specific empirical spaces to anchor the reflection in concrete terms: the events in Mecca in 1979 and Basque terrorism in Spain from the 1950s to the 2000s.
Two twinships and two socio-state configurations to illustrate and clarify the argument
We do not aim for a strict comparative analysis. The cases we present here (and we could have chosen others, such as Algeria and France in the 1950s–1960s, and Italy in the 1960s–1970s) pursue the following essential objective: to identify a fundamental invariant common to these different socio-state configurations, irreducibly singular in their historicity. This transhistorical invariant common to all socio-state configuration is the competence in physical hyper-violence of certain individual or small collective actors, a variable present in all terrorist projects. A state x, within a particular social configuration that must be described as clinically as possible, has not been able or willing to contain a terrorist project that arises from the transformation of a quasi-professional capability for violence into a properly terrorist project. This is an essential condition of possibility.
It is not to deny that the ideological variable (religion, ethno-nationalism, sectarianism, etc.) intervenes later in the process of moving to action. However, terrorism always arises from preexisting social violence that has engendered in some actors a particular expertise for physical violence, actors which we call quasi-professional hyper-violent subjectivities. Three examples can be given as a short preamble: (1) the terrorists of the Secret Armed Organization (OAS, created in February 1961 to defend the French colonial presence in Algeria) were military personnel who had been professionally trained by their military socialization to master and use hyper-violence; (2) Timothy McVeigh, the main perpetrator of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing; and (3) many French jihadist terrorists who perpetrated attacks in the 2000s had before gone through hard delinquent violence.
With this clarified, let us start with the simplest case due to the unity of time, place, and action that characterizes it: the episode of the takeover of the Grand Mosque of Mecca on November 20, 1979 (the first day of the year 1400 in the Muslim calendar). A first lesson can be drawn: a young state (Saudi Arabia) “succeeded” in unknowingly producing endogenous terrorism by favoring, through its policy, the acquisition of professional skills in radical violence by a small group of opponents. Historically, the takeover of the Grand Mosque of Mecca marks the bloody culmination of a political crescendo that began with a simple and old tribal frustration mutating into a status movement, to use the concept of sociologist Gusfield (1963). The charismatic leader of the attack, Juhayman al-Utaybi (1936–1980), a young retired corporal of the Saudi National Guard, came from one of the main Bedouin tribes of the central plateaus. These tribes had helped the Al Saud family in the 1920s to conquer and unify what is now the territory of Saudi Arabia. The feeling of frustration originated from the strategic divergence within the alliance at the time: the Bedouin tribes wanted to conquer and bring the Wahabism and isolationist ideology to the entire Arabian Peninsula, while King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud preferred to consolidate his new and already vast domain by finding a geopolitical modus-vivendi with the great and pressing Western powers, particularly Great Britain (under the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1917). 7
The formation around Juhayman al-Utaybi of a small political movement occurred at the turn of the 1960s with the blessing of the great religious authorities (ulemas) of Saudi Arabia, especially those holding the Islamic University of Medina, who provided him with the divine arguments for a political project against the ruling family and its pro-Western deviation. This movement did not take a terrorist turn until many years later, when it considered armed violence as the only effective way (Hegghammer and Lacroix, 2007). Despite the massive repression carried out by the Saudi state in the ranks and rear-ranks of the insurgents, this state started its re-Wahhabization, paradoxically reinforcing the political project of the insurgents themselves. 8 In the immediate aftermath of the event of November 20, 1979, that is, through the lens of a “presentist” approach of public anti-terrorism action, the official Saudi anti-terrorist action seems to be victorious. However, if we situate this event within the Saudi socio-state configuration and its historical thickness, it is the terrorist action led by Juhayman al-Otaybi that triumphed, as it profoundly transformed the socio-state configuration in which it took place according to its political design (re-Wahhabization).
The case of Basque ethno-nationalist terrorism also embodies the idea of the unavoidable social historicity of terrorism. The Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), the Basque terrorist organization, was created on July 31, 1959, and officially dissolved on May 2, 2018, after nearly 60 years of terrorist activity, with a significant impact on the historical trajectory of Spanish democracy. From 1968 onwards, according to official figures and ETA’s statements, this organization killed 829 people, caused hundreds of mutilations, committed dozens of kidnappings, and numerous extortions. This is also a slow, long, and complex configuration, particularly enlightening for understanding how terrorism cannot be understood without referring to the history of a state (Spain) that activates, stimulates, or even maintains its existence (symbiotic twinship). Let us clarify this in a few lines.
First, there has been a very dynamic ethno-linguistic nationalism in the Basque Country since the late 19th century. This nationalism is based on the defense of a singular culture, particularly a language whose complexity (it is not a Romance language) is the main ferment of these strong singularity claims. However, it should be noted that this nationalism gradually became terrorist only from the 1950s onwards. This historical lag shows that terrorism, understood as a mode of violent action, is by no means simultaneous with the defense of this identity. It began to be considered only with the arrival of General Franco and a national Catholic state that banned the Basque language in 1939, while it was almost monopolistic in very lively rural areas and was, by necessity, discreetly spoken in Basque Catholic educative network, itself quasi-monopolistic. Nevertheless, the Basque society, even repressed and reduced to idiomatic silence, did not yet support the terrorist action of what would become ETA and its policy of terror. So, what is the triggering factor of the Basque terrorism?
ETA was created in 1959 while the Algerian war had been raging for 5 years. This war wound up favoring the emergence of frontal terrorism between the non-terrorist Basque nationalism at its origin and a Spanish national Catholic state that did not intend to get bogged down in such an internal war for decades. A first element to consider: young Basque intellectuals took the initiative in founding an organization in 1959: ETA. They debated in assemblies about the legitimacy of using physical violence, but once the armed struggle (in the Marxist-Leninist language of the time) was decided, a significant question arose: how do we proceed? Recent historical works (Casals, 2020) show how the training in this hyper-violence was taken over by the Algerian FLN, 9 then by the Algerian state after independence in 1962. This support allowed the Etarras (members of the ETA terrorist organization) to acquire various skills: physical training (martial arts), military instruction, and other teachings such as weapons maintenance.
At the same time, at the heart of this same configuration, the Spanish state chose to host former French military officers already strongly socialized and trained in violence by the French State. Indeed, a year after the failure of the “week of barricades” (end of January 1960), while the French government clearly wanted to disengage from Algeria, the OAS 10 organization was created in Madrid in February 1961. This para-state terrorist organization was thus founded by French state men, military men in this case, who were then recruited by another state, Francoist, which was looking for skills, particularly in the fight against the emerging Basque insurgency.
These two forms of terrorism, Basque and Spanish state, thus appear largely as external resurgences of the French state—two antagonistic resurgences between which a symbiotic dynamic will come to be established over time. In the late 1970s, despite the exhaustion of Francoism, the democratic transition of Spain from 1978, the Basque Country’s access to the status of historical autonomy, the adoption of Basque as a so-called “co-official” language, and finally a certain fatigue of the ETA’s primary leaders, the ETA did not renounce terrorist violence. On the state side, in 1982, the Spanish socialist government of Felipe Gonzalez secretly agreed to the request of some high-ranking Spanish security forces to create illegal commandos, called GAL (Antiterrorist Liberation Groups). 11 They were to be run by high-ranking Spanish state officials, fully funded by state public funds and able to recruit criminals to operate in French territory without risking diplomatic incidents. From then on and until 1987, about 30 targeted assassinations were committed by these GAL on the French side, and nearly two hundred were committed by ETA on the Spanish side.
What does the examination of this historical dynamic, whose symbiotic nature must be emphasized, between ETA and the official anti-terrorist segment of the Spanish state teach us? It was not the Spanish official public anti-terrorist action that ended the so-called Basque terrorism, but the reset of the socio-state configuration in question. As a matter of fact, it is Spain’s entry into the European Union that prevented the deadly confrontation from continuing. Through its “Structural Funds” 12 and the opening of its economic space, Europe strongly helped both mortal enemies and thereby quickly reduced their symbiotic bellicosity. As well, the European socio-state configuration forced the Spanish state to fall in line with the rule of law—the GALs were arrested and put on trial—and called on the French state to cease its “sanctuary policy” towards ETA terrorists, and instead build strong police cooperation with the Spanish state.
From state/terrorism twinship to the proposal of studying public anti-terrorism action (broadly defined)
From these two cases, with their respective intensities and durations, we can draw three lessons that are in logical progression:
a. There exists a strong twinship between terrorism and the socio-state configuration it seeks to disrupt. In both cases, it is from a single socio-state configuration that the terrorism emerges, which will strike the states and their governed societies engaged in the configuration. Thus, we must stop instinctively approaching terrorism as exogenous and instead consider it endogenous, as a constitutive part of symbiotic dynamics linking it to particular socio-state configurations.
b. Even in old and solid democratic regimes, we can encounter socio-state configurations where the concerned state—even within itself—cannot regulate and control the illegitimate physical violence that may manifest itself within the state. On the one hand, a state, taken as a human community, can generate illegitimate violence even by its own agents. For example, police officers, as a professional group, can commit excesses of violence (during authorized demonstrations or routine police checks), or, in extreme configurations such as the tragic events in and around the Charonne metro station in Paris in February 1962, perpetrate an organized massacre out of revenge, in support of the OAS. On the other hand, a state can also occasionally allow the formation of “quasi-professional hyper-violent subjectivities” which (originating, e.g., from deep socialization into criminal violence in some disadvantaged urban neighborhoods) may connect to an anti-state, terrorist project.
c. The sociological task then involves modeling these partially and potentially failing socio-state configurations which are sources of terrorism as hyper-physical violence with a high political impact. This is where potential terrorism can be discretely nurtured before being catalyzed and labeled by carriers of radical counter-ideologies, and finally transformed into active terrorism. Indeed, within a socio-state configuration, an official public anti-terrorism action, enclosed in involved states, cannot completely contain and control small but intense pockets of illegitimate violence. It is what happens within these configurational flaws, whether the socio-state configuration is mainly mono-state (ETA/Francoist and democratic regime) or multi-state (ETA/Algerian State/French State/European Union, for example), that is able to explain the birth, development, and eventual end of terrorism. These lessons are particularly highlighted by a more recent and very close socio-state configuration that is equally pivotal and even traumatic for French society and state: the attacks carried out in 2012 by a young man named Mohamed Merah in the two southwestern French cities of Montauban and Toulouse. In March 2012, the 23-year-old Mohamed Merah committed a series of terrorist attacks in Montauban and Toulouse. On March 11, he shot a soldier in Toulouse, after arranging a meeting to buy the motorcycle the soldier had listed for sale online. A few days later, on March 15, in the neighboring city of Montauban, he killed two more soldiers and seriously injured a third. On March 19, he carried out a third attack, this time against the Jewish school Ozar Hatorah in northeastern Toulouse. Outside the school, he executed a rabbi who taught at the school, as well as two children accompanying him: they were 3 and 6 years old. He then entered the courtyard and shot a young girl (8 years old), at close range. He also shot a teenage boy (15 years old) who survived his injuries.Brief recap of the facts
The social trajectory of Mohamed Merah informs us of a simple fact: our societies, even modern ones equipped with strong welfare states hence not to be overwhelmed, can generate within them quasi-professional hyper-violent individuals or subjectivities. Merah’s skill in cold, that is, non-impulsive and mastered hyper-physical violence developed slowly, long before he superficially embraced religion and then followed a terrorist track. His life, from early childhood to his entry into delinquency during adolescence (Ferret and Khosrokhavar, 2022), was marked by episodes of violence in his family and the institutions where he was placed. He was abused by his mother and brothers; he went from placement to placement in specialized structures at the pace of school expulsions, culminating in this paroxysmal day at the age of 14 when he entered the family dining room, threatened his older brother with a firearm (which he had somehow procured), and shot the television while ordering his brother not to lay hands on him again. It is clear that this hyper-violent subjectivity was constructed long before his religious then terrorist socialization and was nourished by a chronic surrounding of social violence.
Implementing a state-centered approach to terrorism
We proposed to internalize terrorism to counter the systematic and “mystical” socio-exogenization it undergoes from both the terrorists and the states attacked by them. Then, by using the bi-conceptual lenses of “twinship” and “socio-state configurations” to examine two real cases of terrorism—the Mecca incident in 1979 and Basque terrorism—we refined our socio-endogenic model of terrorism by showing that it arises from the interaction between, on the one hand, Quasi-professional Hyper-violent Subjectivities secreted by socio-state configurations over the long term and, on the other hand, social carriers of radical and anti-state counter-ideologies. We used the case of Mohamed Merah to emphasize this: terrorism is not just a matter of radicalization; it also stems from the fact that, in a given socio-state configuration, a small number of people gradually acquire skills in cold hyper-physical violence, and some of these people then put these skills to use in terrorist projects, in ways that should not overlook the element of randomness.
All this suggests that official public anti-terrorism action is not the only possible focus for understanding the terrorist phenomenon. In the Merah case, the global imminence and exploitation of the only documentary capital of this official action (the state, its ultra-centralized and specialized intelligence services) were insufficient, firstly, to prevent the formation of this quasi-professional hyper-violent subjectivity, barely visible in its slow gestation. And secondly, to counter the terrorist project that would be born years later from this violent socialization. Yet, the identity of this purely state action persists and continues to guide collective representations. The state’s ability to limit our understanding to official public anti-terrorism action largely stems from the fact that terrorism undergoes a certain “public privatization” by the competent public services, which leads us, as the tree that hides the forest, to think of this action narrowly, focusing only on the most specialized and visible segments of the state. Official public anti-terrorism actions, even well-coordinated ones, can only be a strategy to prevent already fomented terrorist projects ready to act. They subject police organizations and their partners to high organizational tension and stress because the human and technological means to be implemented are considerable for an uncertain outcome, especially during periods of high attraction like the one between 2006 and 2015 by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Daesh 13 ). Understanding terrorism through the study of “public anti-terrorism actions” (PATA) thus requires adopting a broader conception, beyond official PATA. In addition to the latter, we propose two other types of public anti-terrorism actions for sociological scrutiny: “poly-vernacular” PATA and “involuntary” PATA.
A second definition of PATA: the poly-vernacular
In every given socio-state configuration, alongside the official public anti-terrorism action, there exists a much less structured domestic one, which is neither institutionalized nor professionalized as such, but is nonetheless voluntarily organized to try to counter terrorism either preventively or curatively. This type of public action is polycentric and poorly coordinated. It originates from a multitude of zones, from large and small relatively autonomous and non-coordinated social worlds of general public action.
Here is a French example. In the early 2010s, in the Paris region, a public housing office wanted to initiate the renovation of the basements of some of their buildings known to house clandestine Salafist mosques, one of which occasionally hosted particularly charismatic Islamist personalities. Contacted for approval, the mayor of the concerned municipality set two conditions: first, residents should be informed 2 weeks in advance so that the drug trade could have time to reorganize; second, the true reason for the renovation should not be mentioned, even though this reason is perfectly legal since the regulations on the use of building basements have clear restrictive provisions. Unofficially underpinning these renovations constitutes what can be named a theory of action or theory of change (Archibald, 2020; Chen, 1990) that is as vague as it is consensual for local public authorities. They believe that closing these politico-religious meeting places might possibly help reduce the dynamics of Islamist radicalization in certain areas and thus reduce the terrorist threat. However, although relatively organized from an intellectual and practical point of view, this action remains episodic. It stems from a sort of discreet local public prerogative that goes hand in hand with the low probability of being generalized with the label “good practice that others might eventually emulate.” Moreover, according to the organizers and their supporters (the mayor, some informed neighborhood associations, etc.), there is no objective proof that it either helped or hindered, or that it was counterproductive (as psychoanalytically, closing places of “verbalization of frustrations” could encourage “acting out”). In the end, organizers believe they neither have the time, expertise, nor desire to try to promote this action outside their local area. They have just undertaken it in their local heart and soul.
A third definition of PATA: the involuntary
Next it is useful to address another semantic expansion of public anti-terrorism action: the involuntary PATA. This involuntary response exists and could be particularly effective in cases of quasi-professional hyper-violent subjectivities in gestation. The entire range of public policies for social supervision (school, social work and judicial protection of youth, combating domestic violence and discrimination, mental health, housing, sports, culture…) are obviously not causally linked to the acts of terrorist individuals, their family, or their group of affiliation, etc The causal relationship between this broad array of social supervision policies and terrorism is necessarily vague because we are very far upstream of the terrorist will and intention. Despite this, it can be considered that all these public policies can involuntarily create unfavorable conditions for terrorism insofar as they work to channel and/or sublimate early antisocial behaviors.
With these two proposals for substantial expansion of what constitutes public anti-terrorism action made, it is clear that the question of articulation and coordination between these different forms of PATA arises. Indeed, working on the possibility of operationally coordinating the most official, the most “raison d’État-ist” public anti-terrorist action with the two other less organized forms could pave the way for transforming the highly public problem of terrorism into a social problem that can be debated in our advanced democratic societies. Due to space constraints, this avenue cannot be explored in depth in this article. However, it is possible to indicate here that it has empirical basis in a sample of material collected during one of our investigations in the United States in 2017.
At the interface between the three PATAs: official, poly-vernacular, and involuntary
In this country, after the September 11, 2001 attacks, major and minor reforms of domestic APAT were undertaken. 14 Prior to 9/11, American domestic counter-terrorism intelligence followed an institutional architecture dominated by a mid-sized federal entity, the FBI. After J. Edgar Hoover’passing in 1972, the FBI had to soften its traditional dominance 15 and accept the establishment, in a few highly exposed territories with significant local police forces (e.g., NYPD), of collaborative entities, at least in appearance, called Joint (counter-)Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF). 16 But the overall strategy remained simple and quite hegemonic: a national center connected to about 15 local antennas where FBI special agents led, according to their specific methods, the counter-terrorist work of large local police organizations. After 9/11, this very FBI-centered institutional, organizational, and professional architecture, without being dismantled, was transformed by “relativizing insertion” into a broader architecture at federal, state, county, and municipal levels. Indeed, in early 2003, a new and powerful department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), distinct from the Department of Justice to which the FBI belongs, was created. This major institutional innovation effectively ended the centrality of the FBI in the governance of American domestic terrorist affairs. For example, the FBI no longer defines the employment doctrine of agents of the JFK Airport division of the US Customs & Border Protection agency (60,000 agents), now under DHS jurisdiction. The latter, thanks to its significant resources, even created its own JTTFs at all levels of government, called Fusion Centers, which can sometimes overlap with those of the FBI.
Until the early 2010s, the new, expanded, multipolar architecture of American domestic PATA was characterized by DHS/FBI emulation, leading to a certain liberty-infringing fervor of Intelligence-led preventive anti-terrorism, with little regard for the principle of “reasonable suspicion standard” directly inspired by the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (Price, 2013). When our investigation was conducted in Spring (2017), this fervor had subsided, and the system had returned to a more respectful framework of individual freedoms and privacy protection, notably under the political and judicial pressure of major Muslim community associations. It was particularly interesting to listen to some local police officials openly criticize the FBI’s methods and recount the tensions these methodological differences could induce in the functioning of the concerned JTTF. Let’s take a stylized example. As part of their community policing’ work, officers of a large municipal police force detected a hypothetical terrorist project by a young local individual—it’s a case of vernacular PATA. This municipal police organization, due to its voluntary participation in the relevant field JTTF, must inform the FBI. The latter then proposes to take charge of the case by applying a technique it has mastered perfectly, namely, “entrapment” which consists of “helping almost to the end” the would-be terrorist in his project to determine if he is ready to act. 17 But the municipal police may refuse, and propose instead to continue, without FBI assistance, their investigation of the hypothetical young terrorist to determine whether his presumed terrorist project is merely circumstantial bluff and thus recoverable. These are two opposing philosophical conceptions of public anti-terrorism action and, more broadly, of “living well together” within the concerned JTTF, two conceptions that also fit into the ongoing tension in the United States between the principle of local democracy (self-government) and that of federal democracy. But it’s also the embryo of a transformation of the public problem of terrorism into a social problem.
Conclusion: terrorism studies facing a simple alternative
In conclusion of this article, we could say that for terrorism studies the alternative is quite simple.
First option: they remain attached to a phenomenological approach to terrorism that pays little attention to the symbiotic embedding of terrorism in singular socio-state configurations. This option is intellectually comfortable, but confines TS to searching for an elusive psychology of the terrorist actor or simply studying the reactive governmental and bureaucratic apparatus, namely, the official public anti-terrorism action (PATA), whether to justify or criticize. As we have shown, this is insufficient because, to use a common expression, when an individual or group of individual comes on the official public anti-terrorism action’s radars, “either it is too late, or it is already late.” And this criticism remains valid even if the official public anti-terrorism action has enriched its repertoire of action in recent years, in at least two directions. One can mention first the memorial and reparative policies implemented by Western states after September 11, 2001, in the Western world. For example, the French State organized highly publicized major criminal trials following jihadist attacks, particularly the one on Friday, November 13, 2015, in Paris. 18
Many recent studies have focused on these trials, and it is not inappropriate to question the relevance of these sequences, particularly judicial ones, in understanding the phenomenon of terrorism. We assert that in this post-terrorist sequence of Official PATA (investigation and public trial), the state, through its magistrates and specialized police, does not aim to elucidate the reasons for the attack since those who planned it are absent (dead or out of reach). The state seems rather to pursue two main objectives: (a) to remind of its cathartic function by giving the numerous victims and their lawyers extensive speaking time (this collective reparation operation allows at the same time the state to symbolically remind that it is the great producer of national cohesion) and (b) to punish as severely as possible those terrorists who were captured alive, as if they weren’t second-raters.
Still in the French context, official public anti-terrorism action has acquired new tools in designing and implementing special programs to combat religious proselytism and radicalization (Domingo, 2023). Recent studies focusing on de-radicalization policies, particularly in prisons, show that these experimental measures mainly manage and contain the carceral and post-carceral environments in a logic primarily of surveillance of the apparent disengagement from violence in the short term. And it is interesting to note that this new concept of radicalization paradoxically confirms the foundations of our state-centered model. Indeed, it is the State itself that invented and instilled this category of analysis in public policies, and created dedicated institutions and funding programs. Thus, this conceptual creation can be considered a form of state cunning confirming the strength of this dominant vision on the very understanding of terrorizing violence.
But terrorism studies can take another option: through an effort of reflexivity (Bouveresse, 2004), they could integrate our symbiotic approach into their axiomatics. Although this implies studying, in a democracy, the entirety of anti-terrorist public action, this second option—which is ours—then requires less monumental work than it seems. Indeed, to achieve it, the willing researcher can use the numerous tools developed by policy sciences, policy analysis, and other policy studies along with their usual major questions.
Firstly, it is important to describe how socio-state configurations define the terrorist problem according to the classic sequence name-blame-claim (Felstiner and Sarat, 1980). Our initial, empirically cross-sectional response passed through the analysis of two very articulated practical games: a discursive game, the socio-exogenization of the problem, and a game of concrete actions, the public privatization of the problem management by highly specialized, closed and small bureaucracies (Deflem, 2010). And we see that even in democracy, the problematization of terrorism proves to be quite undemocratic in reality, and i.e. already a problem. As the American inventor of policy sciences, Lasswell and Lerner (1951:15) wrote: “The policy sciences approach calls forth a very considerable clarification of the value goals involved in policy.” 19
Secondly, from the institutional, organizational, and professional points of view (Monjardet, 1996), one could sociologically and politically map the policy sub-system (McGee and Jones, 2019) of the public anti-terrorism action specific to each socio-state configuration. A beginning of a response was provided in this article: in each socio-state configuration the public anti-terrorism action (PATA) consists of three components: (1) the official PATA which, because it is very closed, compartmentalized, and hierarchical, thoroughly deserves the qualification of policy sub-system, (2) the poly-vernacular PATA which falls under this open variant of policy sub-system called “policy network,” although the term is somewhat strong because in this particular network the coordination is clearly non-hierarchical and not very intense, and finally (3) the involuntary PATA which resembles a nebula whose systemic character, very tenuous, very “loosely-coupled,” simply results from the fact that in any democracy public action operates within a constrained constitutional, institutional, budgetary, etc., framework. To conclude on this second question concerning the characterization of the PATA’s policy subsystem, the three components just mentioned are rarely or sporadically articulated, as we suggest through the American example focused on Joint Counter-Terrorism Task Forces functioning.
This brings us to the third and final major question of policy studies: can positive, ameliorative changes be made to public anti-terrorism action in a democracy by carrying through policy evaluations? This is a technical, classical question. How to evaluate the effectiveness of any segment of public anti-terrorism action? Among many other questions and focusing only on official public anti-terrorism action, we could collectively evaluate the impact of an administrative reform on the ability of an intelligence device to take into account a new threat. This was the case in France with the harsh restructuring of domestic intelligence conducted in 2008 20 which, as we begin to document, has led to a series of negative consequences both organizational, institutional, and professional. One could also evaluate other segments of PATA and provide comparative initial responses, as we have begun to do in several foreign configurations such as the USA, Israel, or Spain within the framework of our research since 2016.
From the empirical question: “what can be improved in public anti-terrorism actions?” we move to the very philosophical: “what do we collectively want to know?” And a paradox then arises: terrorism stuns and invades public space with its emotional and traumatic charge, it leads to an over-politicization that tends to transform into an identity clash fomented by polarizing enterprises. However, does the non-state social body, civil society, really want to know the profound reasons of those who attack it? And can they be considered other than barbarians? This is a fundamental Kantian question that deserves to be democratically posed lest we be condemned to indefinitely endure and manage the contradictions of a PATA reduced to the mere “presentist” official public anti-terrorism action under increasing pressure. This fundamentally public question reminds us of the verdict of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: “The misfortune of the sociologist is that, most of the time, the people who have the technical means to appropriate what he says have no desire to appropriate it, no interest in appropriating it, and indeed have powerful interests in rejecting it…” (Bourdieu, 1980: 41). In brief summary: do we, the people, want to make terrorism a societal problem rather than just a matter of Raison d’État?
Glossary
We prefer the term socio-state configuration over State to emphasize three things. Firstly, regarding the suffix “socio,” in line with Max Weber’s definition, the State is a “human community,” embodied by people whose behavior is explained not only by their belonging to the State but also by factors beyond that membership. Secondly, concerning the noun “configuration,” the State is not monolithic: it and its operations are structured in a complex manner, meaning that a) what happens in one part of a configuration may not reflect what happens in other parts, and b) this interweaving of structures that shape the State, although fairly stable, can evolve significantly over the long term. Thirdly, and finally, a significant advantage of the concept of socio-state configuration lies in its ability to describe situations involving multiple States, which is systematically the case in terrorism affairs.
There is a strong relationship between terrorism and socio-state configuration. In both cases, terrorism emerges solely from a socio-state configuration, striking states and “their” state-like societies engaged in the configuration. This is why we must cease viewing terrorism as an exogenous phenomenon and instead consider it as endogenous, as a constitutive part of symbiotic dynamics linking it to unique socio-state configurations.
Public Anti-Terrorist Action
This refers to conventional policies combating terrorism implemented by states and their specialized institutions such as the police with their domestic and foreign intelligence services, the judiciary, and the military.
In any given socio-state configuration, there exists a less structured domestic APAT that is neither institutionalized nor professionally formalized but is nevertheless voluntarily organized to attempt to curb terrorism either preventively or correctively. This type of public action is highly polycentric and poorly coordinated, stemming from a multitude of areas, large and small social worlds relatively autonomous and uncoordinated from the broader public action.
One can consider all these social, educational, etc., public policies as potentially creating unfavorable conditions for terrorism inadvertently, as they work to channel and/or sublimate early asocial behaviors.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This PATA research project entitled in French “Action publique anti-terroriste : organisation, conduite et réflexivité dans un pays exposé” (Anti-terrorist public action: organization, conduct and reflexivity in an exposed country) was selected and funded under the “Attentats recherche” call for projects launched at the end of 2015 by the CNRS INSHS for €25,000. This budget enabled us to carry out research missions to the USA (April 9-19, 2016), Israel (June 12-18, 2016) and Spain (several missions between 2016 and 2019. This work was also funded by the ANR SoV, FMSH, 2016-2020. A CNRS “delegation” (2021-22) to the LATTS laboratory (Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, Paris) enabled Jérôme Ferret to set up a 14-week in situ observation and listening program for the proceedings of this trial between September 2021 and June 2022.
