Terrorism: From analytical to moral framings

This section outlines the origins of terrorism discourse and the definitional debates that have long characterised the study of political violence since at least the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁰ We illustrate a discursive shift that moved terrorism discourse from being centred on an analytical or definitional issue to a moral issue. In tracing this movement, we follow lines of inquiry within CTS that view terrorism as a discourse and pursue Anders Bjørkheim’s suggestion that ‘the concepts of terrorism/terrorist are often employed uncritically – even within academic circles traditionally sensitive to the constitutive power of political language and the dangers of conceptual reification’.Footnote ¹¹ We also agree with Alexandra Homolar and Pablo Rodríguez-Merino, who contend that CTS scholars often reinforce traditional markers utilised to describe a violent event as terrorism.Footnote ¹²

However, we move beyond this to argue that more attention needs to be drawn towards the role of terrorism discourse in organising our ethical relationship to different forms of collective suffering. Either in traditional or critical schools, scholars of terrorism have paid insufficient attention to how terrorism functions as an aesthetic regime in ways that exceed the framing of violent acts and relates to the translation and formalisation of collective suffering. Without awareness of terrorism as an aesthetic signifier, critical scholars cannot properly capture the dissemination of vernacular uses of terrorism discourse nor understand how the concept of racialisation and coloniality end up affecting and seeping into policy responses to suffering.

While the period of terror following the French Revolution is often evoked as a starting point of the modern concept of terrorism,Footnote ¹³ more recent genealogies identify the 1970s as a turning point, when different acts of assassination, kidnapping, hijacking, and bank robberies were bundled together under the label terrorism.Footnote ¹⁴ There is a strong consensus, however, that the lack of a commonly accepted definition has been a fundamental problem of terrorism studies.Footnote ¹⁵ Most scholarly work on terrorism begins with a discussion of definitions, often settling on the use of one in particular.Footnote ¹⁶ Even the latest branch of terrorism studies, CTS, seeks to examine how certain definitions of terrorism are constructed via particular discursive mechanisms which produces a hierarchy of violent acts ranging from the legitimate to the illegitimate use of force.Footnote ¹⁷ The effort to define terror – to outline its distinct character and essential features as a specific kind of political violence – only intensified after 9/11.

In the 1980s, Schmid, Jongman, and Stohl famously found more than 100 different definitions of terrorism. It is often noted that the emphasis on fear or terror, which Wilkinson saw as etymologically essential, appeared in only about half.Footnote ¹⁸ They identified key lingering questions in the field, which were largely how to distinguish terrorism from other forms of violence, including guerrilla warfare and crime.Footnote ¹⁹ Importantly, these definitional debates in terrorism discourse sought to emphasise the existence of a referent: an object that exists (an act or set of acts of political violence), rather than one that is constructed. Given the widely assumed pre-existing status of this object, all that scholars and practitioners were left to do was to choose the proper definition to capture this very real, material referent of terrorism. In the aftermath of 9/11, the inability to anticipate and prevent the attack was largely attributed to an issue of inter-agency coordination, and one indicator of this was the lack of a central definition of terrorism. Indeed, having a good definition of terrorism has been widely connected in the scholarly community to effective international coordination and mobilisation of strategic response.Footnote ²⁰

With the war on terror at full steam, critical scholarship in the 2000s dared to ask a different question: what if this so-called conceptual fuzziness was the very point? Work within CTS has sought to emphasise a deeper dimension to definitional debates: the interconnected links between researchers and their object of study and politics of naming in the field; that, in a sense, ‘we all make terrorism what (we say) it is’.Footnote ²¹ Richard Jackson posed a similar point in his depiction of the ‘inherent ontological instability’ of the concept of terrorism.Footnote ²² Hülsse and Spencer demonstrated how the discursive construction of terrorism post-9/11 shifted over time in Germany: at first constituted as war, but shifting after 2004 to a framing of crime, with Al-Qaeda becoming a criminal organisation rather than a military one, feeding the narrative of terrorism as an internal threat and underlining the need for a judicial response.Footnote ²³ Lisa Stampnitzky painstakingly described the changes and transformations of a discourse that colonised the study of insurgent movements in the 1970s and was infused with a strong sense of anti-communism during the Reagan presidency.Footnote ²⁴ Ondrej Ditrych went as far back to the 1930s as the point where a shared discourse on international terrorism was delineated.Footnote ²⁵

All of these works shared what Zulaika defined as an understanding of terrorism which attributed to the concept the status of being the episteme of our times: the grid of intelligibility with which researchers, civil society actors, and policymakers understood, evaluated, and responded to political violence.Footnote ²⁶ In this sense, while terrorism discourse may itself draw on discourses of evil that pre-date and were co-opted by the war on terror, we are less concerned with parsing out the stories that specifically emerged under the auspices of the war on terror as separate from others, and rather with articulating the role that conceptual fuzziness plays in sustaining a particular view of the world at given moments in time.

CTS’ paramount contribution to the study of political violence can be summarised in two lessons. First, due to this fuzziness, terrorism becomes the symbolic repository of an imagined universal antagonist,Footnote ²⁷ ‘a virtually ubiquitous phenomenon, for which there is a shared responsibility in fighting’.Footnote ²⁸ This fighting, via mechanisms of counterterrorism, becomes envisioned as obligatory, with no other choice, connected with the idea that negotiation with terrorists is politically unfeasible.Footnote ²⁹ Harmonie Toros has demonstrated how the very application of the label of terrorism may be designed to forestall non-violent responses.Footnote ³⁰ This relates to the notion that within the war on terror discourse, domestic security problems become envisaged as international security problems ‘moved out of the realm of the strategic and “selfishly national” and relocated within the “higher grounds” of the morally good’.Footnote ³¹

Second, the term terrorism itself comes to acquire a significant moral power, a normative judgement that is invoked, even without it being said, and which affects our perceptions of what counts as violence proper.Footnote ³² This is connected with the justification for the need to focus on definitions. Ganor suggests that one of the key reasons why we need one streamlined definition of terrorism is normative: we need to be able to separate terrorism from other forms of violence in order to morally condemn it more harshly and undermine its legitimacy.Footnote ³³ Stampnitzky’s now classic genealogy of terrorism studies explains that during the long institutionalisation of the subfield, ‘the concept of terrorism became inherently associated with a moral judgment about the acts that we place in that category: terrorism is unacceptable violence’.Footnote ³⁴ This conception of terrorism as inherently immoral is relatively new in the historical context; prior to the 1970s,Footnote ³⁵ terrorism was treated as a more neutral tactic that was often adopted as a revolutionary strategy.Footnote ³⁶ In the 1970s, efforts to reconceptualise terrorism as a particularly evil form of violence, rather than a strategic form, centred on Israel’s Jonathan Institute, which sought to bring together world leaders to draw attention to the problem of terrorism.Footnote ³⁷

The identification of terrorism’s ontological instability is central. Like genocide, the term acquired power in its usage, to the extent that the definition no longer mattered; rather, the power was situated in the invocation of the concept itself, which also invoked its correlate meanings. Specifically, and here the comparison with genocide is apt, terrorism came to be mobilised not as an analytical concept to understand political violence, but as a device to order the world on ethical, moral, and legal grounds, useful precisely because of the distinctions it introduces.

But despite the gains of CTS, the hunt for the missing link between words and things, between terror and its appropriate referent, is far from over. As Bjørkheim notes, research on terrorism as a general feature tends to ‘treat it ontologically as a pre-given phenomenon’ even in the present day.Footnote ³⁸ What takes the place of the true referent, even among critical approaches, is the heuristic privilege afforded to the violent act itself. Traditional terrorism scholarship always adopted an actor-centric approach, hence the importance of defining who counts as a terrorist in the context of the definitional debates.Footnote ³⁹ Even within CTS, where there is widespread recognition of the socially constructed nature of the concept, the ultimate conclusion is still that terrorism is a tactic which needs to be understood in its historical or political context, but the violent act is still the focus.Footnote ⁴⁰ In other words, while CTS moves from the actor to the act in a discursive sense – emulating the evolution of perpetrator studies from the study of ‘violent individuals’ to the conditions of perpetration – debates still very much orbit the field’s traditional frames of reference.Footnote ⁴¹ The scrutiny of the mythography of terror still coexists uneasily with the belief that the truth at the heart of the tactic can be reached and understood with reference to the appropriate historical context or an excavation of the terrorist subjectivity.Footnote ⁴²

This traditional framing involves what we call the (il)legitimacy trap, more specifically the relationship between terrorism discourse and the condemnation of violence. Historically, the terrorism label has been claimed by authoritarian governments to delegitimise domestic dissent and justify violent campaigns of political persecution, such as in Cold War Argentina, in Syria against democratic protestors, particularly in the early days of the revolution, or in China against Uyghurs. This is feasible precisely because of the conceptual fuzziness of terrorism, because of the essential instability between the analytical and the moral that cannot be suppressed, and which surfaces within certain historical contexts and functions to order and reorder our perceptions of the world. It is this instability that the concept of the aesthetical captures. Within this, it is important to consider the politics of the field. Indeed, scholars have suggested that terrorism studies as a field may be intimately linked to a politics that justified counter-insurgency tactics – ‘counterinsurgency masquerading as political science’Footnote ⁴³ – with Jackson noting that most terrorism studies scholars were embedded in or deeply connected to state institutions.Footnote ⁴⁴ As a result, the scholarly focus, translated into the policy arena, has been on denunciation of terrorism rather than on comprehending it, which Jean‐Marc Sorel suggests is connected to the underdevelopment of terrorism as a concept.Footnote ⁴⁵

While uses of the term by authoritarians are often deemed unfortunate co-optations of an otherwise-scientific/neutral study of political violence, we argue that they are, in effect, central to the workings of the signifier terrorism as a means of making sense of collective suffering and ordering the world. When Bashar al-Assad of Syria refers to democratic protesters as terrorists, then, he is conjuring the moral power of a word (terrorism) to define particular types of violence as (il)legitimate. As Ford has noted, in British schoolbooks we see a fairly straightforward black-and-white discourse of ‘this violence good, that violence bad’ related to Al-Qaeda terrorism and Western intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan.Footnote ⁴⁶ Richards has similarly suggested that both ISIS and Western governments adopt exclusionary narratives of good and evil, with each depicting ‘the other as Evil by evoking interpretations of this concept tied to premodern superstition and irrationality’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Terrorism discourse draws on a sense that the violence at stake is illegitimate, on the language of evil, and on the figure of the monster. Marco Pinfari details a long history of representations of terrorists as ‘inhuman, unthinkable, and unmanageable’, mobilised both by counterterrorism discourse and by clandestine organisations themselves.Footnote ⁴⁸ He notes that ‘the nature of terrorism as a phenomenon based on the projection (or internalisation) of fear also contributes to making monster metaphors not just an incidental part of the political discourse but rather one of the fundamental, constitutive components of the way in which terrorism is presented and understood’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Pinfari also emphasises the connections between monstrosity and the theatrical, dramatic, and performative dynamics of terrorism.

But what does this dynamic look like? The following section focuses on terrorism discourse in the context of the war in Ukraine. Specifically, we argue that great power rivalry and proxy war, concepts well understood during the Cold War, have been refigured in the contemporary Ukrainian context using the language of terrorism. This demonstrates two key things: first, that terrorism as a discourse continues to be mobilised in powerful ways, even outside of the specific context of what is traditionally understood as terrorist violence, and second, that terrorism works at the level of aesthesis, reorganising the messy reality of death and suffering according to visible and legible terms.

Terror in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine that began with Russian incursions on Ukrainian territory in 2022 (with roots in the annexation of Crimea in 2014) has drawn much attention from scholars of international security, raising questions about the future of the liberal international order.Footnote ⁵⁰ Characterised as an inevitable return to rivalry or as ‘the return of the Cold War’, tensions in East–West relations centred on Ukraine seem to indicate the re-emergence of Cold War-era belief systems, not simply Cold War-era politics.Footnote ⁵¹ Yet as much as this case has inaugurated a revitalisation of great power rivalry discourse, news coverage and policy discussion of the case have framed it quite clearly using the language of terrorism.

This section seeks to make two main points. First, it assesses the depiction of the war in Ukraine using the framing of terrorism. How have scholars, journalists, and politicians used the framing of terrorism to describe this case? Specifically, how have great power dynamics been subsumed into this framing? Second, it outlines how, following the discussion in the previous section, the term terrorism works as an aesthetic signifier, blurring the boundaries between dispassionate analysis and moralising in the process of making sense and ordering the world. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière (see note 7), the term aesthetic here refers to the ways in which this signifier is used in the reorganisation of a regime of visibility of death and suffering via a conjoined moral, political, and juridical frame of good and evil. Because the signifier terrorism is structured and underpinned by an inherent ambiguity or fuzziness, as evident in the definitional debates, in seeking to pin down the concept, instead a moral veracity linked to the concept is posited and reinforced. We do not see the journalistic and political uses of the concept as misuses, that is, as corruptions of an otherwise-rational category, but rather as key to an understanding of terror’s aesthetic function and appeal.

As noted, the conflict in Ukraine has been quite thoroughly framed using the language of terrorism. Ukrainian President Zelensky has forcefully labelled Russia a terrorist state, noting in 2022 that ‘Russia must be isolated at all levels and held accountable in order to end its long-standing policy of terrorism in Ukraine and across the globe’.Footnote ⁵² Zelensky is not alone is his use of the signifier terrorism. In 2023, the European Parliament voted to label Russia a ‘state sponsor of terrorism,’ noting that Russia uses ‘means of terrorism’ to commit war crimes,Footnote ⁵³ itself an interesting determination because it frames Russia as both external to the terrorism (state sponsor) and agentic in its use of terrorism as a tactic of war (means of terrorism).Footnote ⁵⁴

This view seems to be in line with wider, vernacular understandings. For example, across the Atlantic, American-Polish journalist Anne Applebaum has also argued that Russia’s war in Ukraine has turned into terrorism, suggesting that it is different from most contemporary wars.Footnote ⁵⁵ Exceptionality, particularly with regards to enemy behaviour, is a hallmark of terrorism studies, often used to justify extralegal mechanisms of counterterrorism. This logic of exceptionality is underpinned by a particular normative power that functions in political ways. To return to the war in Ukraine, Applebaum argues that it is being fought in two ways: on a traditional front with combat over territory in eastern Ukraine, but also in various cities around the country that ‘looks less like war and more like multiple acts of terrorism’, referring primarily to Russian bombing campaigns that have become part of daily life in Ukraine. She uses the US criminal code definition of terrorism which frames it as ‘an intimidation campaign using violence’ to suggest that this maps onto Russia’s targeting of Ukrainian cities.

And here we return again to the definitional debates. Yet Applebaum is not seeking to debate the definition but rather to apply it to a contemporary case. It is the case she has selected that makes this interesting for our purposes here. She suggests that because Russia is not pursuing ‘traditional war aims’ during their attacks on urban civilian targets, it falls under the definition of terrorism. As she notes: ‘Russia, a legitimate, recognized world power – a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council – is directing constant, repetitive, visible terrorist violence against civilians, many of whom are nowhere near the fighting. The attacks are not errors or accidents.’ But why not stick to the legal definition of war crimes, which would fit Applebaum’s criteria? In this vein, the concept of terrorism is used to suggest that this non-traditional exceptional war-making is infused with significant moral implications, made clear in her notion that Russian attacks of this sort target human rights, international law, global institutions, and the very sense of shared humanity that underpins these systems, highlighting how extensively terrorism discourse has become embedded in moral notions of global order.

Even though the conflict is situated as a great power rivalry,Footnote ⁵⁶ the language of terrorism does not disappear into thin air; on the contrary, it comes to envelop it. The fact that the war in Ukraine is portrayed as such a classic example of realist great power politics, as Mearsheimer has argued, does not preclude its reliance on terrorism discourse as an epistemic grid of intelligibility through which this rivalry is read. Part of the reason for this is that terrorism discourse provides a background against which audiences can properly understand in familiar terms the references being made about and against Russia’s criminal act of aggression. How we understand this overwhelming war and the appalling suffering that ensued is filtered through terrorism discourse and thus must be reapplied to this episode of great power rivalry.

It is at this point that a critique of terrorism discourse might face the first problem caused by the (il)legitimacy trap, which we illustrate with reference to Mearsheimer’s polemic statements on the conflict. Mearsheimer, who does not identify as a CTS scholar, has himself also emphasised the public tendency to want to understand the Russian invasion of Ukraine in what he sees as primarily moral terms. He suggests that American belief systems, which structure Western understandings more broadly, centralise the US as a ‘noble country’ working for ‘the good of the international community’. He goes on to say that Americans frame the conflict in moral terms: ‘they’re the bad guys and we’re the good guys’.Footnote ⁵⁷ He has long argued – to the ire of many – that this framing results in a lack of acknowledgement of the role the West played in provoking Russian aggression by seeking to bring Ukraine into NATO and the European Union.Footnote ⁵⁸ However problematic Mearsheimer’s argument in this vein, he received personal attacks rather than oscholarly disagreement alone, perhaps due to a moral sense that his argument was untenable within the very dynamics of good and evil he references.

While great power politics has long been suffused with ideological values, in the notion that ‘we are the good guys’, harkening back to the values-based divisions of the Cold War, there is a new spin on this moral argument that draws on the legacies of the war on terror. One key reason for this may be that US moral hegemony rests heavily on claims of legitimacy underpinning the global fight against terrorism, which also positions good versus evil as in the classic George W. Bush’s formulation of ‘you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Here is where we start to see the commonalities between the invocation of the monster in the context of terrorism and in the Ukrainian case. As Puar and Rai note, the dominant media has focused on particular language related to Islamic militants, including ‘monster’, ‘shadowy evil’, and ‘diabolical’, which they suggest frames the terrorist actor as ‘the opposite of all that is just, human, and good. The terrorist-monster is pure evil and must be destroyed, according to this view.’Footnote ⁶⁰

It is not astonishing that a war that has caused so much suffering and produced so many scenes of death and stories of inhumanity is described via similar discursive tropes by European and anglophone commentators, let alone Ukrainians who are the direct victims and witnesses of this horror. All of this is conveyed in a direct and parsimonious way by the simple allusion to the words evil, monstrous, and terror. These signifiers, nestled as they are in the symbolic orbit of terrorism discourse, are at work, illuminating the overwhelmingly horrific reality of the front when journalist John Sweeney suggests that Vladimir Putin is a ‘fragile monster’,Footnote ⁶¹ when Henry Kissinger likens Putin to a character from Dostoevsky,Footnote ⁶² and when Zelensky, echoing Martin Niemöller, warns that ‘evil is still around today, and when evil comes after you, there will be no one to protect you’.Footnote ⁶³ More than serving specific political objectives,Footnote ⁶⁴ this framing, the invocation of ‘evil’ and ‘terrorism’ as proxies is part and parcel of the aesthetic ordering of the world; the way in which human beings make sense of what is ahead of them by mobilising vocabularies that lie behind.

The framing of the Ukraine case in the language of terror helps to illuminate and suggest a response to an observation within CTS with regards to the diffusion of counterterrorism dynamics beyond their original contexts. Mynster Christensen has noted that the unexpected nature of terrorist attacks has led to the development of precautionary measures that have proliferated even in states that have not experienced terrorist attacks. Counterterrorism measures have become standard policy, regardless of the actual existence of terrorism. Mynster Christensen suggests, through the example of Ghana, that states translate global norms for local contexts, operationalising pre-emptive measures in the context of local policing. She refers to this as ‘counterterrorism in the absence of terror’,Footnote ⁶⁵ emphasising the way counterterrorism has metastasised. Yet this is intimately connected to the diffusion of terrorism itself, not as a phenomenon, but as a discourse, initially deployed by state agencies before and after 9/11, and later taking on a life of its own.

To sum up, in the characterisation of Russia’s actions as terrorism, we can see the afterlives of terrorism discourse, instructing vernacular uses outside of the immediate context of non-state clandestine violence. We should note here that while we have focused on Ukraine, and the conflict there has perhaps had the effect of shifting global focus to the resurgence of great power rivalry, the legacy of terrorism discourse traced here is not unique to this case. Indeed, the flattening of terror and terrorism should be situated within the larger dynamics of violence, as we trace in the next section.

Terror and (in)visible suffering

This section takes the critique of terrorism discourse beyond the moralising condemnation of violence towards a larger dynamic associated with the political formalisation of human suffering, which we dub the management of monstrosity. To illustrate our point, we draw similarities between the characterisation of terror as unacceptable/illegitimate violence by CTS scholars and the works of political theorists on violence, in particular Claudian Card’s concept of atrocities and Vittorio Bufacchi’s etymology of violence. We argue that to better understand the political work being done by terrorism discourse, CTS scholars must qualify their understanding of ‘violence’ by breaking it down into smaller units, or its constitutive parts, namely the experience of suffering, which we see as a fundamental human experience. Our objective is to anchor a critique of terrorism discourse more solidly into different aesthetic regimes that control and restrict the ways in which human collectivities translate, organise, and silence different expressions of suffering.

If we are to agree with Stampnitzky and other CTS scholars that the essence of terrorism denotes unacceptable violence, then terrorism discourse, including the general debates that permeate the field of terrorism studies, must be situated in the greater category of knowledge claims about violence. If we do that, we quickly realise that the definitional problems that define the study of terrorism are not unique. The very first thing that scholars venturing into the overwhelming complexity of the ‘field’ of violence studies notice is that, much like terrorism, the adjective violent can be applied to a plethora of disparate phenomena, sometimes with no apparent links.Footnote ⁶⁶ Just like terrorism, violence works ‘like pornography, we know [it] when we see it’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Fortunately, tentative typologies of violence as a social phenomenon exist, and they can help us navigate this complexity. Bufacchi provides a helpful point of departure in unpacking what we mean by unacceptable violence beyond the dangerous cliché that what is unacceptable violence for some would somehow be divine justice for others.Footnote ⁶⁸ Bufacchi begins by tracing the etymological origins of the word in Latin: ‘violentia, meaning “vehemence”, a passionate and uncontrolled force’. He explains that contemporary uses of the term violence have associated the notion of passionate, uncontrolled force with a sense of violation – the trespassing of norms, values, bodies – which he contends comes ‘from the Latin violare, meaning “infringement”’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Interestingly, the senses of an uncontrollable (excessive) and unwelcome (violating) experience is also at play in political framings of violent events as terrorism.Footnote ⁷⁰

Though Bufacchi’s duo violentia–violare is imperfect – for example, it does not tell us anything about non-Western ways of making sense of suffering, as in the Maya Ixil concept of txitzi’n,Footnote ⁷¹ and it lacks the simplicity of the German Gewalt Footnote ⁷² – it does offer a semiological map; a way into the symbolic currency of a specific socio-politico-legal order which dictates what, in the universe of daily experiences, will effectively be seen as violent. And if that is the case, we contend that we must delve into what Kleinman and Kleinman defined as ‘the existential grounds of human experience’,Footnote ⁷³ the raw material of discourse on violence, as it were, our relationship to suffering.

Commonly seen as pertaining to the domain of individual or private life, suffering ‘is profoundly social in the sense that it helps constitute the social world’.Footnote ⁷⁴ In a psychoanalytical, Lacanian orientation, what we call here suffering, goes beyond different expressions of mental or physical pain – the injuries and trauma we could easily associate with terror – to incorporate the more fluid understandings of angst, anxiety,Footnote ⁷⁵ and a general discomfortFootnote ⁷⁶ that we are granted by the faculty of speech. As speaking beings, human beings are both blessed with the capacity to name themselves and their environment and burdened with an unnameable remanent, the things which cannot be easily put into words. Our understanding of suffering incorporates this ontological dimension, which Lacan illustrated with a play on words, comparing the word suffering with the French expression en souffrance, meaning pending or awaiting deliverance.Footnote ⁷⁷

CTS inaugurated in Politics and IR a research agenda long pursued by anthropologists and sociologists of taking seriously the connections between terror, violence, and language.Footnote ⁷⁸ Terrorism studies has long seen terror as deriving from the tradition of propaganda by deed and therefore as a communicative phenomenon.Footnote ⁷⁹ Similarly, different vernacular languages admit, colloquially, that violence speaks, or that one can speak through violence.Footnote ⁸⁰ We can think of violent acts as conveying messages of terror or the cries of resistance.Footnote ⁸¹ Or we can double down on this observation, as critical scholars have done, and argue that violence is always inscribed in a larger cultural text, mobilising certain tropes, the metaphors, metonymies, and gothic themes that infuse violent acts with meaning and a status.Footnote ⁸²

But if we are to conceptualise this problem in a way that does justice to the critical traditions in IR and CTS, we must turn closer attention to the effects of terrorism discourse in formalising/concealing human suffering. In fact, our call is not so much a ‘turn to suffering’ in terrorism studies as a return to the psychoanalytical foundations of the critique, which inspired the mythography of terror and narrative approaches to the study of violence in the discipline. The first step is to regard violence, to borrow a Lacanian formulation, as something that is structured like a language. We ought to take seriously the break this line enacted in relation to the age-old ‘problem of mimesis – of language as imitating or representing what it refers to’.Footnote ⁸³ This means accepting that political violence is to be situated at the level of the play of signifiers, ridding itself of any remnants of a mimetic or referentialist worldview or the wish for a minimalist ontology to finally suture words and things back together;Footnote ⁸⁴ but it also means that we must devote attention to the raw material of discourses on violence.

The second step is to unpacking the concept of violence in IR and CTS, seeing the senses of violentia and violare as the two conceptual poles that organise the inscription of suffering – which awaits deliverance in the aftermath – in the contemporary Western worldview as violence proper; the two central ideas that make up for the sense of unacceptable in shared imaginaries of terror, not only as unacceptable violence but beyond that, and most importantly from a critical perspective, as forms of suffering which are consensually recognised as unacceptable.

We should propose an uncompromising critique of terrorism studies (rather than a critical version of it) by emphasising that terror is a signifier with no correlative referent; that, paraphrasing Lacan, terror and terrorism are only signifiers meant to signify something for other signifiers – evil, irrational, madness, barbaric, justice, sacrifice – and that ‘their meanings derive from language itself’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Needless to say, this is not the same as arguing that there is nothing there, as if the kind of collective suffering and mass death that terrorism experts are all too keen to feed upon had no bearing in reality. We restrict ourselves to repeating the claim, because it needs repeating, until it is heard, that there is no Thing there, no coherent and unified object (the thing itself, be it terror as a tactic, be it an illegitimate act of violence) to which the signifiers orbiting terrorism discourse are intrinsically connected and therefore supposed to name. All that we have is the formless fluidity of (in)human suffering, awaiting a process of collective formalisation to become visible in the political sphere.

Simply put, terrorism is another word utilised in attempts at producing a political consensus on what kinds of suffering should be seen as utterly unacceptable. More than a type of clandestine activity, a rationale, an identity, or even just an empty signifier, as Zulaika and Douglass would have it, terrorism continues to operate as an aesthetic signifier, drawing consensual lines between the forms of suffering that matter and those that do not and therefore managing an unequal economy of visibility between these experiences.Footnote ⁸⁶ This is to say that the deployment of terrorism discourse should be situated – more than in any scholarly effort to make sense of clandestine or governmental efforts to rule through fear – in the ways in which suffering is translated, recognised, and written off in accordance with contemporary worldviews.

The fundamental difference is that, once conceptualised as an aesthetic signifier, terrorism becomes more than an empty or hollow term – in the sense intended by Laclau and Mouffe of something that stands in for a sense of emptiness and lack – and becomes a device or a supplement which guides us through the abundant and overwhelming reality of suffering. We are somewhat extending the example given by Mynster Christensen of forms of discourse on terror in the absence of terrorism to the paradigmatic view of how terrorism works not only at the intersection between reason, politics, and morality,Footnote ⁸⁷ but as an aesthetic concept grounding the possibility of these three dimensions.

Contrary to previous efforts we do not see in the vernacular uses of the language of terror – such as in attempts to explain Russia’s war in Ukraine – the corruption of an otherwise rational and scientific concept, but rather we emphasise the aesthetic principle at work in these usages. Seen in this light, terrorism is not an analytical category – arguably in the same way as other categories used to study political violence, such as insurgency, assassination, kidnapping, armed struggle – but a symbolic device that fundamentally reorganises a given aesthetic regime, assigning different degrees of visibility to human suffering via the apportioning of blame, immorality, and deviance to certain acts and actors.

To translate an experience of collective suffering as terror is to make its violent nature (the symbolic links to violentia–violare) apparent. This means not only revealing something that was once hidden, but in the sense that, once categorised as uncontrollable and unwelcome, this experience jumps out at our eyes as violence proper.Footnote ⁸⁸ The problem of violence – the status of the signifier violence in politics – is intimately connected to the question of visibilityFootnote ⁸⁹ and is therefore an inherently aesthetic problem, in a Rancièrian sense. Discourses of violence normally revolve around the two claims that violence is either in your face, as in more traditional approaches, or that it remains out of sight, in the less observable forms of structural violence as per the iceberg metaphor.Footnote ⁹⁰

It is here, in the interplay between the visible and the invisible that Richardson’s mention of pornography in a book on terrorism ceases to be an amusing jest and is instead a slip of tongue betraying a fundamental truth: terrorism is situated at the intersection between the proper and improper, the object of the gaze and the voyeur; it plays, in the study of politics, the same role that sexuality played in the emerging field of psychoanalysis: the site that expresses the incoherences and contradiction of a hypocritical political order and is therefore something always subject to co-optation by the police (which stands in here for the anti-egalitarian forces of reactionarism).Footnote ⁹¹ The difference is that while sexuality organises the realm of desire, terrorism discourse organises our relation to different forms of suffering. The particular ocular politics of terrorism and counterterrorism, with a perpetrator of violence who is often faceless and a (voyeuristic) system of violence to counter terrorism premised on being able to see all without the enemy seeing back, highlights the significance often attributed to making visible. It also underlines the taboo that governs things that should remain unseen, connected primarily to that which disrupts the integrity of the human body, yet which are at the same time spectacular forms of suffering. It is precisely this horrifying suffering that is deemed to be Real by virtue of its extreme obscenity.Footnote ⁹²

The use of the signifiers orbiting terrorism discourse produces a clarifying spark, illuminating reality by anchoring the fluidity of suffering to other signifiers such as uncontrollable (violentia) and unwelcome (violare), constituting thereby a sense of terror as wholly unacceptable suffering. To give a new twist to an old saying: underlying the assumption ‘that we know terrorism when we see it’ is the unspoken, Cartesian operation we know terrorism, therefore we see. Visibility, after all, is often considered a precondition for qualified political life, for mattering to and for counting as a member of a political community. This effect of shedding light onto something, of evidencing its allegedly pre-existing nature, its inherent truth, is what makes the discursive deployment of terror part of wider social processes of managing monstrosity: the attaching of suffering to an object-cause, the individuals and events whose criminalisation and repudiation demonstrates the kinds of suffering we cannot accept or live with, or, to paraphrase former British prime minister Boris Johnson, the suffering we cannot simply ‘take on the chin’.

Suffering can only be translated as violence if it is associated with an object, or set of objects, that works as its cause. This object then becomes the receptacle of characteristics associated with wanton suffering – suffering that is in excess of what is needed for the rational reproduction of a political community – which accords it an impassionate or excessive character. To be regarded as unwelcome, a discrete act or causal chain of violations must be identified. These objects are the many monsters that populate discourse on violence – the mad, evil, irrational, and sadistic perpetrators, the terrorists themselves – and which serve as points of anchorage for a discourse that, in attempting to reveal the nature of the world, lets in something fundamental about us. Hence our emphasis earlier on the significance of the policy and scholarly focus on the actor in the context of terrorism and its definitional debate.

The very word monsters, etymologically traced to the French verb montrer, meaning to show, to display, to exhibit, suggests the ‘beings or things to be shown’.Footnote ⁹³ To embark on the management of monstrosity is to make particular forms of suffering visible, not by bringing them into the light, though this is a necessary step, but above all by making them appear as violence or terror via an act of demonstration – the linking of this unnacceptable suffering to a cause/source. This act of demonstration, as the term implies, is an utterly political act because it implies either the reproduction or the reorganisation of regimes of visibility, ‘the discursive conditions that structure the field of appearance’, what can be shown and who can be seen, in a given political order.Footnote ⁹⁴ Therefore, because they point at the foundations of regimes of appearance and disappearance, visibility and obscurity, ‘monsters have something to show us about our world and ourselves’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Indeed, it is no coincidence that monstrosity has ‘come to organize the discourse on terrorism’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Avoiding the (il)legitimacy trap, or how not to sound like Mearsheimer

This paper argues that foregrounding the role of terrorism discourse in evidencing the visibility of suffering in a political community can provide an invaluable contribution to the narrative study of violence in IR and CTS. In part, we contend that such a turn to suffering would provide a way to avoid or escape what we see as the dangerous (il)legitimacy trap: the focus that terrorism discourse enforces on the question of whether violent acts are justified or legitimate or indeed can ever be justifiable or legitimised. We seek to clarify here a common misunderstanding, which even respectable critical scholars often inadvertently reproduce, that lies in conflating the mythography of terror with the individualisation of responsibility for violence acts and, further yet, the hypocritical production of scapegoats.Footnote ⁹⁷

As part of an aesthetic regime organising the visibility of suffering, terrorism discourse is inextricably related to the question of culpability and responsibility. The naming and taming of suffering involve a juridical-political aspect, the placing of blame, as it were, and this certainly requires a level of individualisation: suffering must be attached to a transgression, someone or something must be found guilty/responsible.Footnote ⁹⁸ Claudia Card’s theory of evil is illustrative of the problem at hand. Card seeks to define evil via resort to the template of mass atrocities which she conceptualises as intolerable harm, similarly to Stampnitzky’s notion of terrorism as unacceptable violence. Both have a strong focus on the element of culpability, on the perpetrators of harm and violence deemed to be intolerable or unacceptable.Footnote ⁹⁹

Above all, the problematic of culpability lies at the birth of modern individuality. What we are calling here aesthetic regimes often effect an individualisation of suffering, both in the sense that a good deal of suffering is relegated to the realm of individual, private life, and therefore depoliticised,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and in the sense that collective suffering, once politicised, is often blamed on individual causes. Complex and intricate structures of responsibility for suffering are rendered simplified by the search for a causal chain that aims to identify the origins of unacceptable ordeals in the acts and psychological state of individuals. In fact, many commentators place the social production of individuality as one of the central conjoined forms of veridiction/administration/conflict management in modern Western societies. Modern disciplinary societies of the 18th and 19th century highlight the way the institutionalisation of state power came hand in hand with the appearance of the individual in the historical scene. As a category that structured modern forms of (political) subjectivity, the individual represented the atomic (in the original sense of indivisible) unit of the social.Footnote ¹⁰¹ And indeed, we see this play out in the focus on the terrorist actor in the definitional discussion earlier in the paper.

The place of this unit in the workings of social control, the process of drawing the contours of, and stipulating responses to, transgressive behaviour, often framed as a monstrosity, cannot be overestimated. Indeed, Foucault refers to monsters as one of three elements linked to the definition of social abnormals.Footnote ¹⁰² Alan Norrie’s critique of the abstract individualism that structures Western legal thought, and particularly criminal law, is illustrative of the problem posed by the (il)legitimacy trap to CTS scholarship.Footnote ¹⁰³ According to Norrie, the vision of the individual supporting modern Western legal systems, always seen ‘in abstract terms as the intending, acting, voluntary subject’,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ fabricates a split between two different visions of justice: one legal and contained vision, focusing the attribution of culpability in the mapping of an actus reus (the objective harm) to the mens rea of the accused (the guilty mind); and another based on the social contextual motivations that could explain, if not excuse, the wrongdoer’s actions. In Norrie’s words, this split was a ‘historically engineered separation relating to the need to extricate individual legal (and moral) responsibility from social responsibility and arguments about what was socially just’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It is fair to say that the terrorism discourse, as part of a wider management of monstrosity in the West, has inherited this essential antinomy from Western legal reasoning.

Very often, the denunciation of terrorism discourse by CTS scholars focuses on the hypocritical production of hierarchies of legitimate and illegitimate violence. Though we have come a long way since the unsophisticated claims that one person’s terrorist was someone else’s freedom fighter, so abundant in the early days of the field, critiques of terrorism discourse can sometimes allude to the political responsibility of victimised societies for having produced the conditions of possibility for terrorism in the first place. The prime example is the emphasis put on the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, on the forms of colonialism and neocolonialism that pre-dated them; or we could add the more recent occupation of Palestine by the Israeli state in fuelling if not causing further terrorism. To be clear, none of this amounts to victim-blaming, but it can be misinterpreted as such, as it has been in the past.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

By countering the focus of traditional terrorism studies on culpability with an investigation of the context and historical motivations that could explain violence, CTS scholars risk locking themselves in a fruitless discussion regarding the legitimacy of violence. To keep within the confines of our case study, the Ukrainian war, the (il)legitimacy trap risks blurring the very important boundaries between the fundamental investigation of the conditions of perpetration of violent acts and the form of scapegoating we find at play in Mearsheimer’s exculpation of Russian military aggressiveness. It is perfectly possible, and indeed necessary, both to condemn Putin’s violence in Ukraine as the opposite of all that is just human and good and to refuse the co-optation of the debate in the terms dictated by terrorism discourse. All we need to do is refuse to debate the merits of the uses of violence or the conditions under which it becomes just. This debate fundamentally excludes the victims of violence who, having lost their lives, cannot possibly stand to gain anything from it. In the case of resistance movements, it risks treating someone’s existence as somehow a choice.

Instead, our intellectual effort should be channelled towards revealing the ways in which the adoption of the signifiers orbiting terrorism discourse forecloses the possibility of ethical engagement with other forms of suffering. This, we contend, provides a better platform to integrate recent concerns of CTS, such as the concepts of race, the relative neglect of far-right extremism, and the theme of coloniality, in the narrative studies of political violence.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ For example, a political community that wholeheartedly condemns the attempted murder or actual assassination of racialised individuals as illegitimate and unacceptable can perfectly well accept the immense suffering of racialised bodies as tolerable, and indeed even necessary.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Without dismissing the complexities of the historical racialisation of eastern Europeans, we simply need to compare the Western responses to Ukraine and Palestine to understand this point.

We write this paper as an invitation to look at the critique of terrorism discourse from a different angle. The problem of terrorism discourse lies not necessarily in the individualisation of guilt for violence in the figure of terrorists nor with the denunciation of terror as unacceptable violence. Perpetrators of horrendous acts must be held guilty if indeed guilty they are. As Herbert Marcuse felt compelled to remind the supporters of the Rote Armee Fraktion, murder is not a political weapon, but just another form of individualisation of the complex causes of human suffering in the figure of the slain victim.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It is true that terrorism discourse effects a form of symbolic enclosure:Footnote ¹¹⁰ the fending off of responsibility for violence and terror in an indivisible site denoted by a master signifier (a guilty individual, a nation, a religion, a people, a time period) meant to stand in for the universal antagonist of everything that is good and proper. And it is certainly true that this has deleterious effects on our understanding of the conditions of perpetration of violent acts or on the suffering caused by non-individualisable phenomena, such as the indiscriminate glorification of militarism, the mainstreaming of hate speech, or what Roger Griffin described, somewhat prophetically before 9/11, as the entrenchment of ethnocratic liberalism.Footnote ¹¹¹

But as this paper has sought to demonstrate, this isn’t the only or even perhaps the biggest problem. Terrorism discourse is one example of a wider aesthetic ordering of the world, one device whereby human beings attempt to tame and organise the untameable complexity of (in)human suffering in the present by mobilising vocabularies of the past.