To “Margaret”, who posted this comment somewhere else on the web, wondering if CTlab is part of the Obama Administration’s public outreach program: no, we’re not. We like to think the White House reads us, but other than that, we’re independent. CTlab’s only institutional connections are indirect, via the platforms it uses to be what it is, those that it links to for reference and reading purposes, and through its participants’ affiliations. We have a nominal connection to University College London. Thanks for the positive comments, though. We try.

[Note: Mike has just sent this in from the field, I post it on his behalf. -JMB].

Like I’ve been sayin’, over, and over, and over again…

Our friends over at the Danger Room report on the Pentagon’s move to shut down “Mullah FM,” a pirate radio station run by Mullah Fazlullah in Pakistan’s northwestern frontier.  Other pirate radio stations in the region are targets as well.  The Taleban there has used radio as a means of propagandising, terrorising, intimidating, and consolidating its control over the region.  

 

Radio has long been central to propaganda in conflict zones, but this new war on the airwaves…  much harder stretch to collapse this into domains virtual. Denial of sanctuary – pfffft.  This, just like attempts to control the internet/web, is resource conflict/interdiction. Is the plan to jam, but not nail the physical broadcast sites? Major point being missed here, even in the Danger Room piece, is that it’s a whole lot easier to zap a few radio broadcast sites than it is to identify and neutralize thousands of distributed web access points.

Lessons of Rwanda? Oh, wait, we don’t want to go down that route:  Commando Solo (or whatever’s being used now) is too expensive per hour, and it would be a violation of freedom of speech.

This has just come across our desk here at CTlab; the Conflict Research Society and Conflict Analysis Research Centre at the University of Kent in the UK will be hosting hosting a conference in September, entitled: “Conflict and Complexity, II: Theory, Evidence, and Practice.”

This conference builds on last September’s “Conflict and Complexity” conference.  The full Call for Papers and pertinent information on this year’s conference can be found here.  But please note, Call for Papers has been extended to 31 May 2009.

Back to our regular non-symposium blogging schedule… Not since Hoffman and Sageman went at it has terrorism studies seen a public bitch-slapping quite like this. OK, so it’s only been a year or so, but come to think of it, I haven’t read anything quite this harsh since Daniel Jonah Goldhagen tried to convince us all that Germans are just genocidal freaks. In the latest issue of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism,  David Martin Jones (University of Queensland) and M.L.R. Smith (King’s College London), write in “We’re All Terrorists Now: Critical – Or Hypocritical – Studies “On” Terrorism“, about the new school of “critical terrorism studies” based out of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth:

ABSTRACT: This article reviews the new journal Critical Studies on Terrorism. The fashionable approach that this journal adopts towards the contemporary phenomenon of terrorism maintains that a “critical” and “self-reflexive” approach to the study of terrorism reveals a variety of shortcomings in the discipline. These range from a distorting overidentification with the Western democratic state perspective on terrorism to a failure to empathize with the misunderstood, non-Western, “other.” This review examines whether the claims of the critical approach adds anything, other than pedantry and obscurity, to our understanding of the phenomenon. It concludes that it does not.

I was wondering when this might happen. The authors go on to describe the “congealed prose, obscure jargon, philosophical posturing, and concentrated anti-Western self-loathing that comprise the core of this journal’s first edition.” Ouch. The article’s behind a pay firewall, but here’s the conclusion:

In the looking glass world of critical terror studies the conventional analysis of terrorism is ontologically challenged, lacks self-reflexivity, and is policy oriented. By contrast, critical theory’s ethicist, yet relativist, and deconstructive gaze reveals that we are all terrorists now and must empathize with those sub-state actors who have recourse to violence for whatever motive. Despite their intolerable othering by media and governments, terrorists are really no different from us. In fact, there is terror as the weapon of the weak and the far worse economic and coercive terror of the liberal state. Terrorists therefore deserve empathy and they must be discursively engaged.

At the core of this understanding sits a radical pacifism and an idealism that requires not the status quo but communication and “human emancipation.” Until this radical postnational utopia arrives both force and the discourse of evil must be abandoned and instead therapy and un-coerced conversation must be practiced. In the popular ABC drama Boston Legal Judge Brown perennially referred to the vague, irrelevant, jargon-ridden statements of lawyers as “jibber jabber.” The Aberystwyth-based school of critical internationalist utopianism that increasingly dominates the study of international relations in Britain and Australia has refined a higher order incoherence that may be termed Aber jabber. The pages of the journal of Critical Studies on Terrorism are its natural home.

Jones, D., & Smith, M. (2009). We’re All Terrorists Now: Critical—or Hypocritical—Studies “on” Terrorism? Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 32 (4), 292-302 DOI: 10.1080/10576100902744128