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Beyond Belief Islamist Strategic Thinking and International Relations

TheoryDavid Martin Jonesa; M. L. R. Smithb

a School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, Queensland,Australia b Department of War Studies, King's College, University of London, London, UK

Online publication date: 09 March 2010

To cite this Article Jones, David Martin and Smith, M. L. R.(2010) 'Beyond Belief: Islamist Strategic Thinking andInternational Relations Theory', Terrorism and Political Violence, 22: 2, 242 — 266

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Beyond Belief: Islamist Strategic Thinkingand International Relations Theory

DAVID MARTIN JONES

School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia

M. L. R. SMITH

Department of War Studies, King’s College, University of London,

London, UK

The development of radical Islamist strategic thinking and the impact of post-modern, Western styles of thought upon the ideology that informs that strategyis often overlooked in conventional discussions of homegrown threats from jihadistmilitants. The propensity to discount the ideology informing both al-Qaeda and nominally non-violent Islamist movements with an analogous political philosophylike Hizb ut-Tahrir neglects the influence that critical Western modes of thoughtexercise upon their strategic thinking especially in the context of homegrown radi-calization. Drawing selectively on non-liberal tendencies in the Western ideological canon has, in fact, endowed Khilaafaism (caliphism) with both a distinctive theor-etical style and strategic practice. In particular, it derives intellectual sustenance

from a post-Marxist Frankfurt School of critical thinking that in combination withan ‘‘English’’ School of international relations idealism holds that epistemological claims are socially determined, subjective, and serve the interests of dominant powerrelations. This critical, normative, and constructivist approach to international relations seeks not only to explain the historical emergence of the global order,but also to transcend it. This transformative agenda bears comparison with radical Islamist critiques of Western ontology and is of interest to Islamism’s political and strategic thinking. In this regard, the relativist and critical approaches that havecome to dominate the academic social sciences since the 1990s not only reflect a lossof faith in Western values in a way that undermines the prospects for a liberal and

pluralist polity, but also, through a critical process facilitated by much international relations orthodoxy, promotes the strategic and ideological agenda of radical Islam.

It is this curious strategic and ideological evolution that this paper explores.

Keywords caliphism, critical terrorism studies, Hizb ut-Tahrir, internationalrelations, Islamism, strategy

Since the bombing attacks launched on the transport systems in Madrid in 2003 andLondon in 2005, and the discovery of similar plots between 2005 and 2007 in

Dr. David Martin Jones is an associate professor in the School of Political Science andInternational Studies, University of Queensland. Dr. M. L. R. Smith is a professor of Strategic

Theory, Department of War Studies, King’s College, University of London.Address correspondence to M. L. R. Smith, Department of War Studies, King’s College,

University of London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Terrorism and Political Violence, 22:242–266, 2010Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0954-6553 print=1556-1836 onlineDOI: 10.1080/09546550903472286

242



Toronto, New York, Sydney, Melbourne, Copenhagen, and Frankfurt, Westerngovernments increasingly recognize that homegrown Islamist radicalization represents aprofound threat to open, liberal, secular, Western societies. Peter Neumann, for exam-ple, argues that Europe has developed into the ‘‘nerve centre of global jihad,’’1 whilst

others have noted that every major attack launched under the auspices of al-Qaeda, evenbefore 9=11, has had some link to Europe.2 David Kilcullen contends that Europe isboth a site of conflict that jihadists exploit, and the source of intellectual capital thatincreasingly performs a ‘‘cadre function’’ for promoting both global and local jihadism.3

Having established the threat that this polymorphous phenomenon poses, ana-lysts subsequently emphasize the social practices of recruitment amongst deracinatedsecond generation migrants via informal networks that penetrate formerly moderateMuslim community organizations, university societies, or a more captive audience inWestern prisons. Curiously, it has also become orthodox amongst scholars to seeonly a limited connection between the radical ideology of Islamism and the practiceof jihadist subversion.4 After the publication of Robert Pape’s Dying to Win: The

Logic of Suicide Terrorism,5 a literature has emerged that considers the ideologythat motivates radical groups seeking to redefine the international and domesticorder, often by violent means, as merely a secondary concern. Scholars, followingPape, have come to identify a range of grievances that, in the case of homegrownradicalization, range from alienation from the broader community, socio-economicmarginalization, to resentment generated by the general conduct of Western foreignpolicy. In this context, a report by the New York Police Department’s intelligencedivision in 2007 identified four stages in the process of radicalization. The worryingproliferation of homegrown networks possessed a membership remarkable, thereport concluded, only for its ‘‘unremarkability.’’6

Indeed, David Kilcullen, a leading proponent of contemporary counter-insurgency thinking exemplifies the prevailing tendency to negate the relationshipbetween ideology and Islamist strategic practice.7 Kilcullen, for example, considersthe group Hizb ut-Tahrir, ‘‘a Europe based movement publishing in London,’’ tobe pursuing ‘‘a classic insurrectionist approach to gaining power initially throughsubversive means short of force.’’8 Nevertheless, he conspicuously dismisses theIslamist ideology informing the movement and others like them, maintaining insteadthat the ‘‘sociological characteristics of immigrant populations’’ represent the centralfactor ‘‘explaining contemporary threats rather than Islamic theology.’’9

This understanding holds, therefore, that in the practice of recruitment to infor-mal Islamist terror networks radical Islamic theology per se ‘‘has little functionalrelationship with violence.’’10 Interestingly, moreover, this evolving orthodoxyreceives support from a somewhat unexpected source that renders this mainstreamunderstanding academically plausible: namely, a radical and intellectually fashion-able critical international relations theory, which similarly rejects the notion thatIslamist ideology, or Muslim religion, plays a major role in either homegrownor Middle Eastern militancy. It further contends that terrorist resistance is theinevitable consequence of a post-Cold War, state-based, and U.S.-imposed ‘‘violentpeace.’’ How, we might wonder, has this critical understanding of internationalrelations that inhabits what Mark Lilla terms ‘‘the foggy archipelago’’ of cutting-edge social science11 come to reinforce an emerging policy and media consensus

concerning the phenomenon of homegrown radicalization?This study argues that the role of ideology in the theory and strategic practice of

Islamic radicalism should not be underestimated. In this exercise, the paper explores

Islamist Strategic Thinking and International Relations Theory 243



an understanding of the role of ideology in the development of Islamist terrorismand the recourse to asymmetric violence intimated in recent studies by EkatarinaStepanova of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Stephen Ulphof the Jamestown Foundation and Rohan Gunaratna of the Centre for Terrorism

and International Violence Research at Nanyang Technological University, Singa-pore. Contra Pape (whose work is cited positively by Hizb ut-Tahrir)12 and Kilcullen,Gunaratna’s counter-radicalization work with former al-Qaeda and JemaahIslamiah members demonstrates that ‘‘ideology . . . is the key driver of politicallymotivated violence.’’13 Similarly, Ulph considers ‘‘ideological justification . . . acrucial element’’ in the recourse to jihad.14 Meanwhile, Stepanova contends thatin the conduct of asymmetric warfare apparently weak non-state actors possessunderestimated yet ‘‘genuine advantages and strengths.’’ More precisely, the crucialadvantage that ‘‘anti-state, armed actors, especially those that systematically employterrorist means, have at their disposal is the very high power of mobilization andindoctrination that their radical, extremist ideologies have in certain segments of society.’’15 Significantly, Stepanova finds that in contemporary Islamist radicaliza-tion practice ‘‘hybrid, organizational structures of anti-system non-state actors,which increasingly deploy network features, the role of radical ideology as the glueholding together informally connected cells’’ assumes growing importance.16 In thisevolving milieu, ‘‘quasi-religious Islamist ideology has emerged as the replacementfor the secular radical socio-revolutionary ideas of the past as the main justificationof the type of modern terrorism that goes beyond localized contexts.’’17

These works notwithstanding, the prevailing scholarly and policy consensus lar-gely discounts the ideological glue informing the transnational appeal of Khilaafaism

(caliphism) promulgated by both al-Qaeda and nominally non-violent Islamist move-

ments like Hizb ut-Tahrir.18

This has led, we shall argue, to a misunderstanding of thecharacter of these movements. We further suggest that an academically fashionablecritical, Western, ideological mutation has played both an interesting yet understu-died role in influencing Islamist thinking and its strategic practice, particularlyin diasporic, cosmopolitan settings and has sought to undermine the capacity of government agencies—notably in Britain and Australia—to respond proactively tothe asymmetric threat that homegrown jihadism presents. An examination of theintellectual antecedents of Islamism’s leading Western think-tank, Hizb ut-Tahrir,reveals, as we shall show, its growing dependence upon a mode of critical inquirywidely practiced in European and Australian university social science departmentsfor its conduct of ideological warfare against the modern liberal-democratic state.

The intellectual current that prevails in contemporary British and Australiansocial science, particularly in the field of international relations theory, deconstructsliberal self-understanding, and promotes histrionic empathy with a purportedlymisunderstood ‘‘other’’ that ultimately provides ideological legitimacy to a jihadiststyle of thought and practice. Consequently, critical theory has, we shall demon-strate, the consequence of affording ideological legitimacy to homegrown jihadism’sstrategic ambitions. It thereby distorts an understanding of Islamist ideologyand subverts a coherent policy response to counter-radicalization strategies.

The Curious Evolution of British Islamism

As the homegrown threat evolved during the 1990s, an Islamist ideology, calibratedto the anxieties of second generation Muslims confronted by the conflicting demands

244 D. M. Jones and M. L. R. Smith



of a modern secular lifestyle and a traditional family structure, played an importantrole in recruitment and radicalization. The ideology of Islamism thus assumeda particularly Western style of thought and strategic practice in order to solve aspecifically modern, urban, dilemma of diasporic anomie. Central to the current

articulation and promotion of an Islamist ideology is the London-based ‘‘Party of Liberation,’’ Hizb ut-Tahrir.19 Although deriving its inspiration from the judicialsystem of the Muslim judge Taqiuddin al-Nabhani and the Islamic liberationstruggle in Jordan and Palestine in the 1950s,20 it was the radical cleric Omar BakriMohammed who effectively re-formed the party in London in the 1990s to promotean Islamist Internationale.21 The movement seeks:

to resume the way of life and to convey the Islamic da’wah [call to theTruth] to the world. This objective means bringing the Muslims backto living an Islamic way of life in Dar al-Islam [realm of Islam=sphereof faith] and in an Islamic society such that all of life’s affairs are admi-nistered according to the Shari’ah [Islamic law] rules, and the viewpointin it is the halal [that which is lawful and permitted in Islam] and theharam [that which is unlawful and not permitted in Islam] underthe shade of the Islamic States, which is the Khilafah [Caliphate] state.22

Recruiting high quality graduates from London universities, Hizb ut-Tahrir quicklyestablished itself as the new and excitingly alternative, cool Britannic, radical voice.As former member, Mohammed ‘‘Ed’’ Husain, explains in his autobiographicalaccount, The Islamist, Hizb ut-Tahrir exploited any issue that might demonstratethe decadence of the secular ‘‘kuffar’’ West and the moral superiority of the alterna-

tive presented by what Hizb ut-Tahrir terms an ‘‘Islamic system’’ in order to consoli-date a sense of Muslim outrage and separatism.23 Indeed, a central Hizb ut-Tahrirtext, The Method to Re-establish the Khilafah, required ‘‘continuing to call the peopleto the faith not through force but intellectual discourse.’’24 This in turn demanded‘‘intellectual and political struggle – adopting the interests of society and highlightingthe [corruption of] the [democratic] system’’ whilst illustrating the ‘‘virtue of theIslamic alternative.’’25

The multicultural policies promoted by successive British governments togetherwith the politically correct nature of British university politics enabled the party toevolve its ideology and elaborate its Manichean distinction between Islamismand secularism in a persuasive manner that recruited educated middle-class BritishMuslims to its cause.26 As Husain explains, Hizb ut-Tahrir made ‘‘full use of Britishpluralism’’27 to develop ‘‘our radical stance of confrontation with the West, estab-lishment of an Islamic state, and commitment to ideological warfare. Long beforethe War on Terror the Hizb openly declared ideological war.’’28 He continued:

In the multicultural Britain of the 1980s and 1990s we were free to practiseour religion and develop our culture as we wanted. Our teachers left usalone, so long as we didn’t engage in public expressions of homophobiaor intimidation of non-Muslims. But Britishness and the British values of democracy had no meaning for us. Like me, most of the students at college

had no real bond with mainstream Britain. Yes, we attended a Britisheducational institution in London, but there was nothing particularlyBritish about it. It might as well have been Cairo or Karachi.29




This essentially post-Cold War creation, which over the best part of two decadesproduced a cohort of tertiary educated British Islamists, also actively exported itsideology. Hizb ut-Tahrir currently has more than 40 branches, including franchisesin Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta, and produces radical material of a high

quality in various languages for global consumption. Officially non-violent, as anumber of former adherents including Husain, Maajid Nawaz, Shiraz Maher, andHassan Butt maintain, Hizb-ut-Tahrir provided the ideological glue uniting theBritish ‘‘jihadi network.’’ Although such testimonies must sometimes be read witha degree of scepticism, nevertheless reading these first-hand accounts in conjunctionwith evidence from the official reports Hizb-ut-Tahrir posts on its website, it ispossible to identify the influences and concepts that inform this quasi-ideology orpolitical religion.30

Deconstructing Caliphism

Hizb ut-Tahrir’s strategy seeks to build a post-modern caliphate that transcends thedecadent secular state whether in Britain, in Indonesia (where the party organized aconference to rebuild the caliphate in August 2007), or in Australia. It shares thispolitical vision with al-Qaeda. Since its dissolution by Ataturk in 1924, thoseMuslims who have dreamed of a reformed and purified umma have also envisagedits achievement through a religiously inspired Caliph reviving the pure politicalreligious doctrine first promulgated by Mohammad and his rightly guided ancestorsthe salif al saleh. The subsequent corruption of this perfect order resulted in theeventual dissolution and deracination of the Muslim world. In order to reconstituteit, Muslim societies had to be stripped of their customary, secular nationalist

and Western accretions. In their place, sharia discipline would govern the reformedconstitution. The Muslim brother and martyr to the ‘‘pharaohnic’’ post-colonialregime of Colonel Nasser in Egypt, Sayyid Qutb, in a number of seminal writings,outlined the details of the khilaafah ideal.31 Qutb’s brother, Mohammed, taughtthe young Osama bin Laden in Saudi Arabia, and Sayyid Qutb’s views shaped thethinking of Ayman al-Zahwahiri in Cairo after his execution in 1966. Consequently,al-Qaeda and its affiliates both in London and elsewhere consider the restitution of the caliphate central to their ideological mission.

Hence, we find bin Laden in an interview with al Jazeera in 2001, observing that‘‘our concern is that our umma . . . unites under the Word of the Book of God orHis Prophet and that this nation should establish the righteous caliphate of ourumma, which has been prophesied by our Prophet

. . .

that the righteous caliph willreturn.’’32 In an earlier 1996 interview with Australian Muslim activists, bin Ladenspecifically identified the Taliban regime in Kabul as the basis for this revived caliph-ate, where ‘‘the people are amongst the most protective of the religion approved byGod, and the keenest to fulfil his laws, and establish an Islamic state.’’33 Likewise,bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri in a letter to the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq,Abu Masub al-Zarqawi, in July 2005, contended, ‘‘that our intended goal in this ageis the establishment of a caliphate.’’ He further observed that ‘‘the second stage’’ of the Islamist struggle requires the building of ‘‘an Islamic authority or amirate,then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate—over as much

territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq.’’34

The goal of the caliphate inevitably permeated the worldview of UK based jihadist preachers and was promulgated to their followers at radical mosques like




Finsbury Park in North London after 1993. Prominent Finsbury Park ‘‘sheikhs’’ likeAbu Hamza and Abdullah Faisal dismissed secular, liberal democracy as un-Islamic.For Abu Hamza ‘‘democracy is shirk [idolatry]. Shirk in legislation. Shirk in lies.Shirk in everything.’’ Abdullah Faisal promoted a similar teaching.35 Meanwhile,

exiled Jordanian cleric, Abu Qatada al-Filistini, who issued fatwas from Londonon behalf of the Algerian Groupe Islamique Arme (GIA) and maintained close con-tacts with al-Qaeda, prior to his arrest in 2002, pronounced that ‘‘the only way tohave a khilafa is through jihad.’’36 This understanding influenced a generation of homegrown British jihadists. Thus an al-Qaeda training manual found by policein Manchester in 1998, and subsequently submitted in evidence to District Courtof Massachusetts in the case of the United States versus Richard Colvin Reid, theshoe bomber, in July 2003, observed that jihadist violence ‘‘is my contributiontoward paving the road that leads to Majestic Allah and establishes a caliphateaccording to the prophecy.’’37

Significantly, the Jordanian cleric, Omar Bakri Mohammed, who effectivelyre-founded Hizb ut-Tahrir in London after he moved there in 1987, broke with thatorganization in 1997 over ‘‘the methodology’’ for instantiating the caliphate. Aprominent advocate of jihad and ‘‘Supreme Judge of the Sharia Court of the UnitedKingdom’’ until 2004, Omar Bakri, who founded al-Muhajiroun (the Migrants) inLondon in 1997, disagreed with Hizb’s official view that sought to establish ‘‘theKhilafah only in a specific Muslim country.’’ By contrast, al-Muhajiroun ‘‘engagein the divine method to establish the Khilafah wherever they have members.’’38

Al-Muhajiroun also believed in combining da’wa (the call to Islam) with jihad,whereas theoretically non-violent Hizb ut-Tahrir did not believe that ‘‘jihad couldbe waged by agents not affiliated to the Islamic state.’’39

Despite the differences over methodology, both al-Qaeda linked clerics and Hizbut-Tahrir evidently share the caliphist ideal. Hizb strategically promotes itsanti-liberal and anti-pluralist vision through a global network of websites, chat rooms,and videos. At the core of the Hizb ‘‘system,’’ as with al-Qaeda’s, sits the promotion of the Khilaafah or caliphate, a seventh century Muslim ideal that would, if suitablyadapted for contemporary consumption, restore the moral and political authorityof Islam.40 As recent Hizb ut-Tahrir publications comprehensively elaborate, thecaliphate, unlike a liberal democracy, constitutes the regime most appropriate foran integrated Islamic lifestyle and the antidote to the current political and economicuncertainty in the Middle East, South Asia, and wherever else the ummah is troubled.41

The caliphate, in Hizb’s account, represents ‘‘a political system’’ derived‘‘from the ideology of Islam’’ that transcends ethnic and religious differences. Itsrealization would ‘‘usher in a new era of stability for the Muslim world.’’42 ThePalestinian jurist Taqiuddin al-Nabhani identified the key features of a constitutionfor an Islamic state that Hizb ut-Tahrir promulgates.43 Nevertheless, Western ideasand constitutional assumptions evidently influenced this Islamist system. A socialcontract, bayah, determines the relationship between the caliph and the people orummah while a judiciary monitors the interpretation of the law.44 Thus, the caliphatewould promote both ‘‘the rule of law, and accountability by [sic] the people throughan independent judiciary.’’45 The law, however, is not common law, but Koraniclaw, and religious scholars, and their judicious interpretation of the Koran and

haddith, preside over the Islamic system’s judiciary.Obviously, despite the surface influence of Western constitutionalism, the

Islamist system vigorously opposes the promotion of secular, liberal democracy,




and is intent on promoting ‘‘Islamic values’’ instead. What is perhaps more curious isthat this system also draws selectively from non-liberal ideas in the Western philo-sophical canon.46 Hizb ut-Tahrir derives much of its current ideological momentumfrom understandings of a neo-Marxist critical perspective combined with a deeply

illiberal and relativist strain in contemporary Western political thought. In theUnited Kingdom, for example, Islamist organizations initially followed anddeveloped the consciousness raising tactics pioneered by militant groups, mostnotably the Socialist Workers Party. As Husain points out, ‘‘we borrowed, as wedid much else, from radical socialists.’’47

Significantly, Ed Husain charts his gradual disillusionment with the IslamicParty of Liberation’s politics through the progressive realization that Nabhani’steachings ‘‘were not innovatory but wholly derived from European thought,’’notably that of Hegel and Rousseau. For disillusioned Islamists, like Husainand Maher, the provenance of much nineteenth and twentieth century reformistIslamic thought demonstrated that Islamist ideology deceived when it claimed‘‘it was ‘pure in thought’, and not influenced by the kufr.’’48 Indeed, Nabhani’sstrategy for reviving the caliphate owed little to Islamic teaching but more tothe Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci, who demonstrated how the masses mightbe ideologically mobilized through the subversion or ‘‘capture’’ of a society’s cul-tural and educational institutions. ‘‘It was not sufficient to propagate new ideas,’’Husain noted, ‘‘but old ideas had to be ‘destroyed’ and supplanted by new ones.’’He continued: ‘‘And that was exactly what I was taught in my halaqah, and whatI tried to execute on the streets of London. Nabhani shrewdly linked Gramsci’sconcepts to the life of the Prophet Mohammed, and in Muslim ears this foundgreater acceptance.’’49

Similarly, Caliphism’s critique of the liberal democratic state and theperceived injustices its foreign policy in Bosnia, Afghanistan, or Iraq committedupon the Muslim world draws intellectual sustenance from the international ideal-ism and critical thinking of a post-Gramscian Frankfurt School that prevailsin many European university departments of political science and internationalstudies. Critical theory developed, from both Gramsci and the Frankfurt School,the epistemological claim that all knowledge is socially determined, and serves theinterests of dominant systems of power in the international system. Consequently,this critical understanding holds that the international order is a self-servingconstruct of the United States and its allies. As one recent work in this genreargues, al-Qaeda style violence is either the ‘‘construction’’ of, or a reaction to,Western ‘‘elite power.’’ From this perspective, at the end of the Cold War,the United States consciously set out to impose a ‘‘violent peace’’ through a‘‘westernised world system.’’50

Such critical thinking has assumed the status of orthodoxy in many European,Asian, North American, and Australian departments of politics and internationalrelations. Scholars inculcated in this style of thought regularly declare that ‘‘terroris not only a phenomenon produced by politics, but is also a consequence of econ-omic structures.’’ It is the inevitable consequence of the ‘‘global capitalist system.’’51

The solution requires ‘‘a system of sustainable security,’’ ‘‘based . . . on justiceand emancipation.’’52 The details of this new, emancipatory ‘‘sustainable security’’

system remain opaque, but beyond the promotion of an ill-defined global justice,it will inter alia require the abandonment of market economics and the ills itallegedly engenders.




Interestingly, al-Qaeda and its European and Southeast Asian franchisesincreasingly concur with this critical diagnosis. Osama bin Laden’s broadcast tothe world on 7 September 2007 stated that:

as you liberated yourselves before from the slavery of monks, kings, andfeudalism, you should liberate yourselves from the deception, shacklesand attrition of the capitalist system . . . The capitalist system seeks toturn the entire world into a fiefdom of the major corporations underthe label of ‘‘globalization’’ in order to protect democracy . . . the reelingof many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxesand real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes; and the abjectpoverty and tragic hunger in Africa: all this is but one side of the grimface of this global system.53

It is only perhaps when bin Laden insists on the ‘‘infallible methodology of Allah,the most High,’’ which requires ‘‘total obedience’’ to the ‘‘orders and prohibitionsof Allah Alone in all aspects of life’’ that critical international relations theoryand al-Qaeda might part company about the ultimate telos of global justice. Whatthe broadcast does illustrate, however, is how the notion of overturning and ethicallytransforming the global capitalist order has, by a well established process of ideologi-cal adaptation, come to permeate contemporary Islamist rhetoric and its strategicanalysis of world politics.

In other words, both bin Laden and the Hizb ut-Tahrir propagandists whowrote recent publications available on its well maintained UK website like Iraq: A

New Way Forward and Radicalisation, Extremism and Islamism: Realities and Myths

in the War on Terror have imbibed their current theory and practice, in part, from anidealist, state-transcending international theory, most notably the ‘‘English’’ Schoolof critical international relations. This ethical approach to international relationsseeks not only to explain the historical emergence of the global order, but also— as two of its leading proponents, Andrew Linklater and Hidemi Suganami,explain—transform it into ‘‘a solidarist world’’ informed by ‘‘global ethics.’’54 Letus first examine the evolution of this mode of inquiry before assessing its strategicutility for contemporary Islamist thought and practice.

Caliphism and the English School of Critical International Relations Theory

The English School is the name given to an amorphous interpretative frameworkthat draws inspiration from a series of international relations texts written between1938 and 1979. Its conception of international relations has been abstracted from theoften very different accounts offered by E. H. Carr, Herbert Butterfield, MartinWight, C. W. Manning, and Hedley Bull (who was in fact Australian). In the early1980s, this group of scholars was subsumed under the rubric of an ‘‘English’’ Schoolof thought. This School, it was maintained, emphasized the historical interpretationof international relations and identified the lineaments of an international societythat contrasted with notions of anarchy that pervaded more conventional, andlargely American, ‘‘realist’’ and ‘‘neo-realist’’ accounts of the international system.55

It was, however, in the immediate post-Cold War era during the 1990s, when theembryonic new world order afforded the possibility of transforming internationalsociety, that the English School received renewed scholarly attention.56 In particular,




globalization and the desultory congeries of non-state actors and supranational insti-tutions like the European Union, multinational corporations, and non-governmentalpressure groups that rose to prominence in its wake, challenged conventional, realistaccounts of state power and the structural function of an international system. The

emerging dispensation also posed new ‘‘economic, social and ecological questions’’which included ‘‘pollution, human rights, drugs and terrorism’’ that the state-centricCold War order, it seemed, inadequately answered. As David Held and AnthonyMcGrew maintained, these questions reflected an ‘‘increasing number of transnationalpolicy issues which cut across territorial jurisdictions and existing political alignments,and which require international cooperation for their effective resolution.’’57

In this post-Cold War context, Andrew Linklater performed the hermeneuticfunction of re-describing the intellectual legacy of the English School and applyingit to a critical understanding of international politics. Yet, Linklater, whose workthroughout the 1980s elaborated an idealist and emancipatory international rela-tions theory, derived his inspiration not from the putative founders of the EnglishSchool, but from the German, Frankfurt School associated with the critical radicaldemocratic thinking of Jurgen Habermas. The fact that, as Roger Epp explains,Habermas had ‘‘identified the English School insightfully with a practical-hermeneutic knowledge interest in the international order’’ facilitated Linklater’senterprise.58 Consequently, enthusiasm for the exciting possibilities afforded bythe new critical mode of interpreting the otherwise theoretically limited field of international behaviour, blossomed. By 2001, Barry Buzan viewed the EnglishSchool an ‘‘underexploited resource’’ and considered the time ‘‘ripe to apply itshistoricist, constructivist, and methodologically pluralist approach to IR.’’59

The English School’s supposed sensitivity to the role that norms played in the

international system further increased its cachet for post-Cold War scholarship.English School normativism fortuitously coincided with a growing predilection inAmerican international relations theory for constructivist and sociological accountsof the international order. The radical transformative possibilities that these devel-opments presented enabled the English School—or, more precisely, its criticallyre-described progeny—to contrast their new thinking with an apparently outmoded,positivist, Cold War, American, and neo-realist approach, to international order.60

As Buzan further asserted: ‘‘The English School is not just another paradigm tothrow into the tedious game of competing IR theories. It is, instead, an opportunityto step outside that game and cultivate a more holistic, integrated approach to thestudy of international relations.’’61

Stepping outside the game of international relations offered seductive theoreticalpossibilities. In particular, the more idealistically inclined increasingly contrastedpluralist with solidarist accounts of the world.62 The pluralist understanding of international relations, which in fact reflected classical writing in the English Schooltradition, maintained that a mature anarchy regulated international society. Fromthis perspective, the primary actor in that society was, and remained, the state.63

Pluralism also recognized that power politics constrained relations in the societyof states, and as Martin Wight averred, diplomacy, alliances, and war remainedthe permanent institutions of international order. This pluralist, nay classical realist,outlook evinced by the original English School writers, therefore, was sceptical

about the possibility for progressive change in that order.64

By contrast, the new solidarist approach advanced by the re-describedEnglish School of the 1990s, as Dale Copeland observed, emphasized ‘‘the more




revolutionary or Kantian end of the spectrum.’’ From this perspective, actors in theinternational system ‘‘do more than simply acknowledge sovereign co-existence:they also share a sense of global values and human rights.’’ Solidarists additionallyaccentuate the role of non-state actors in international society, and emphasize the

pursuit of global justice based on a ‘‘shared global morality, even at some cost tothe interstate order.’’65 While forms of solidarism could, and indeed did, legitimizeneo-liberal interventionist policies to uphold humanitarian norms,66 it was theopportunity for the radical critique of the existing order and the possibility fornormative transformation of the system itself that increasingly cast its idealist,post-Kantian pall over departments of international relations from Europe toAustralasia.

The intellectual genealogy of this idealistic solidarism is, then, somewhatcurious. For, as we have seen, it is not entirely clear how it derives from the pluralistthinking that permeated the classic texts of the English School. It seems, however,that those like Ken Booth, Robert Cox, and Andrew Linklater67 who detected inthe English School its ‘‘practical-hermeneutic knowledge interest in the internationalorder’’ created the otherwise unlikely link between the conservative, classicallyrealist, minded first generation of English School thinkers and the global emancipa-tionism68 that a subsequent generation of scholars considered a universalideal underpinning progressive international studies,69 and which represented‘‘both empirically and theoretically the soundest response’’ to war, injustice, andunreason.70

The neo-Kantian and neo-Marxist inspired critical thinking of Jurgen Habermasformed, as we have suggested, the improbable bridge between the scepticism of Bull and Wight and the new global solidarism of Linklater and Booth. In a series

of books, essays, and interviews, Habermas promulgated what he considered aradical democratic, post-national constellation, of which the European Union wasthe harbinger, announcing the possibility of global justice founded upon un-coercedcommunication between the global North and South. Captivated by the possibilityof cosmopolitan justice, critical European international theorizing embarkedupon an idealist and radically pacifist adventure that evinced increasing hostilityto the ‘‘hegemonic’’ discourse of Western realism. Critical English School theoryargued that this hegemony merely entrenched and legitimated existing powerinequalities in the international system. It thereby perpetuated a ‘‘global economicsystem that consigns millions to the generally silenced terror that is synonymouswith the hunger and disease and hopelessness of abject poverty.’’71 Resentmenttowards the post-Cold War imperium exercised by the American hyperpowerreinforced this increasingly critical agenda. After the September 2001 attacks byIslamist militants on the United States and the initiation of the ‘‘war on terror’’ itwas a short, but radically deconstructive, step for analysts to represent al-Qaedaas an essentially hybrid form of struggle by a weak, oppressed, and oxymoronic‘‘global south’’ against the hegemonic West. In this context, as Tarak Barkawiand Mark Laffey explain, ‘‘Al-Qaeda is not a state nor a great power’’ but a ‘‘trans-national network and more importantly an idea around which resistance is organisedglobally and locally.’’72

Radical solidarism combined with a species of post-Marxist critical unmasking

revealed Western capitalism and the market state as the real cause of global crisis.From this perspective, a U.S. imposed ‘‘violent peace’’ had created an ‘‘axis of disagreement’’ between the West and the Rest. The self-appointed task of critical




international relations theory, therefore, is to expose this conflict and supply itsradical, emancipatory, and transformative antidote.73 Taraq Barkawi, for example,perceives that ‘‘the root causes of the current situation lie in the working out of long-term histories of western expansionism and their dynamic interaction with

the Islamic world.’’74

In this understanding, a generic West is solely responsiblefor both the creation of the Islamist threat and its baleful consequences. Fromthis perspective, the centuries of Western colonialism’s ‘‘violent, rapacious anddominating’’ oppression results in the inevitable retaliation of the more militantmembers of the ‘‘global South.’’75

Whilst all critical theorists share this diagnosis of the root cause of internationalterrorism, they evidently disagree about the extent and seriousness of the threatposed by radical Islamism and the means necessary to ameliorate it. Barkawi andLaffey, for instance, consider that the globally oppressed respond violently to theWestern threat and that as long as inequality prevails in the international systemso the West will experience asymmetric attacks. Thus the ‘‘ability of the Southernresistance movement to inflict wounding strikes on the home territory of a leadingmetropolitan power is nearly unprecedented . . . . The ‘natives’ have struck backand are likely to continue doing so.’’76

By contrast, other more conspiratorially minded critical theorists maintain thatinternational Islamist terror presents no real threat to the West. Instead, they claimthat a state manipulated politics of fear has legitimated a ‘‘war on terrorism.’’ Thisfear in turn has provoked Western democracies to suspend civil liberties at homeand embark upon damaging foreign policy adventures.77 From this standpoint awidespread terrorist threat is a delusion.78 Consequently:

The current ‘‘war on terrorism’’ is a multi-billion dollar exercise toprotect the United States from a danger that, excluding the September11, 2001 attacks has killed less Americans per year over the past threedecades than bee stings and lightning strikes. Even in 2001, America’sworst year of terrorist deaths, the casualties from terrorism were stillvastly outnumbered by deaths from auto-related accidents, gun crimes,alcohol and tobacco related illnesses, suicides and a large number of diseases like influenza, cancer, and heart disease.79

Disagreement in the ranks of critical theory over the nature of the threat furtherengenders confusion over the policy required to address it. Most critical theoristsmaintain, following Linklater and Booth, that given the choice the oppressed globalmajority would elect to live in a world of justice, freedom, and equality. Emanci-pation, from this critical perspective, entails ‘‘escape from scarcity, liberation fromignorance and lies, and freedom from political tyranny and exploitation.’’80 Criti-cally informed policy, therefore, would unshackle ‘‘people from those constraintsthat stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do.’’81 Critical theory,it seems, knows intuitively what people want, namely, emancipation from themanacles of global capitalism.82

However, for an even more critical critical minority, this emancipationist ethicmerely conceals another form of Western domination, indeed, a Eurocentricity that

‘‘regards the weak and the powerless as marginal or derivative elements of worldpolitics . . . at best the site of liberal good intentions or at worst a potential sourceof threats.’’83 As Barkawi and Laffey contend: ‘‘For liberal and some critical




approaches to security studies, the weak are of interest but primarily as bearers of rights and objectives of emancipation, that is, for their normative value in westernpolitical theoretic terms.’’84

The Influence of Orientalism

These epistemological differences notwithstanding, critical emancipationists, radicaltheorists of ‘‘Southern resistance,’’ English School ethicists, and Hizb ut-Tahrirideologues, all agree nonetheless that terrorism is the inevitable consequence of Western exploitation and domination. To reinforce this claim, both criticaltheorists and Islamist ideologists draw extensively from post-colonial discoursetheory in general and Edward Said’s critical exploration of Western Orientalism

in particular. Said’s analysis permits the critical theorist to reject the thesis thatthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed in Muslim societies the ‘‘returnof Islam’’ in a new ideological guise. Scholars who advance this hypothesis have,critical theorists maintain, committed the fallacy of orientalizing the non-Westernother.85 Richard Jackson, following Said, thus considers Orientalism a ‘‘system of knowledge based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between theorient and the occident in which the orient is constructed largely as a negativeinversion of Western culture.’’ It ‘‘employs a series of biological and culturalgeneralizations and racial and religious prejudices, including depictions of ‘Arab’cultures as irrational, violent, backward, anti-Western, savage and the like.’’86

Analogously, Barkawi and Laffey assert that Western identity requires an imagin-ary non-Western ‘‘other,’’ thus facilitating the definition of the West through aseries of contrasts regarding rationality and development ‘‘in which the non-West

is generally found lacking.’’87

This means that the ‘‘Western person only exists as acontrast to with the ‘Oriental Other.’ ’’88

Moreover, as ‘‘globalization has come to be seen as the late-modern, sociologicalterm for the ‘civilizing process’ . . . terrorism – as a form of barbarism – can be seen asa challenge to international order and the civilizing process of globalization.’’89

Consciously, or unconsciously, Orientalism informs the West’s perception of theIslamist. As a result, Barkawi claims, somewhat contradictorily, that Orientalismrepresents the reality of resistance arising from the ‘‘global South’’ against the‘‘Western have-lots,’’90 while at the same time, it also constructs imaginary ‘‘imperialand neo-imperial battlefields.’’91 Meanwhile, Jackson considers Western identityconstructed in opposition to the ‘‘libidinous, irrational, violent, and dangerous’’barbarity of the ‘‘Eastern world.’’ Rather incoherently, however, Jackson condemnsthe ‘‘civilizing processes’’ that inhere in ideas of global justice and emancipation thathe advocates as the emancipatory solution to global conflict.92

Critical theorists rarely bother to address problems of logic or incoherence intheir analysis of the sources of Islamist violence. Primarily, this is because criticaltheory is not interested in Islamist violence. Its main purpose instead is to exposethe questionable Western democratic response to such violence. In this context,Orientalism serves the useful function of de-emphasizing the role of quasi-religiousideology in the motivation of contemporary jihadists. Accordingly, criticalinternational theory reinforces the view that ‘‘religion is a secondary factor next to

political grievances and nationalism – that the religious language of terrorists isinstrumental and culturally idiomatic rather than causative.’’93 Instead of ideologythe real cause of terror may be found closer to hand, in the structures of Western




oppression. Therefore, ‘‘Islamist discourse, although often expressed in religiousterms’’ may be conveniently re-described as ‘‘a form of secular or nationalist protestat external and internal domination and forms of exclusion.’’94

Delivering itself from the otherwise pressing need to explain the political religion

that informs contemporary Islamism, via the device of Orientalism, criticaltheory instead focuses upon its real object of concern, namely, the Western liberaldemocratic state and the oppressive order it sustains. Significantly, critical theoristsderive comfort from the fact that Islamism’s principal theorist, Sayyid Qutb, was‘‘influenced in particular by Marxism-Leninism, taking the concept of the revol-utionary vanguard and the idea that the world could be re-made through an actof will.’’ Qutb’s implicit Leninism permits the critical theorist to present jihadismin more acceptable academic garb, as merely a variation upon Western revolutionaryself-understanding. Consequently, Islamism now becomes ‘‘a universal ideology of emancipation in modern conditions’’ representing ‘‘a distinctive combination of Islamic and enlightenment thinking.’’95 Indeed, reinterpreting Qutb as a criticaltheorist avant la lettre further facilitates the deconstruction of Western forms of ‘‘external and internal domination and forms of exclusion.’’96

Critical theorists further consider that the Western state ‘‘discourse and practiceof counter-terrorism’’ determines forms of exclusion and domination, thereby dele-gitimizing dissent and narrowing ‘‘the discursive space for political debate.’’97 Incombination with counter-terrorism laws at home, Western foreign policy makes‘‘international terrorism worse through entrenching cycles of violence andcounter-violence; that just as has already occurred [sic] in Israel, Chechnya,Kashmir, Colombia, Iraq, Algeria, Spain, and other places, it is making the worldless secure, more violent and more unjust.’’98 American foreign policy maintains this

external form of domination. Unsurprisingly, Hizb ut-Tahrir endorses and followsthis critical analysis of the West’s war on terror. Hizb ut-Tahrir reports maintain that‘‘the West’s foreign policy has illustrated not just the unacceptable face of Westernimperialism but the true face of Western states with the indomitable pursuit of prof-its, raw materials and cheap labour.’’99

Following the analysis and the academic argot of the prevailing critical dispen-sation, Hizb ut-Tahrir considers the war on terror ‘‘a narrative’’ told by Westerngovernments.100 Islamist terrorism is consequently a distorted Western ‘‘construct,’’that The Party of Liberation’s various reports ‘‘deconstructs.’’101 Similarly, parallel-ing critical theory’s ‘‘discursive turn’’ this Islamist perspective also finds that theWest’s ‘‘orientalist discourse’’ regarding the Caliphate a device for alienating Muslimpolitical thought.102 Orientalism, therefore, and its ideological cousin, colonialism,constitute the roots of Muslim oppression and the source of the Islamist resistancethat has evolved in dialectical opposition to it since the nineteenth century.

Moreover, not only does Hizb ut-Tahrir’s analysis reflect contemporary criticalinternational relations theory, it also shares critical theory’s policy prescriptions tocounter U.S. imperialism. Hence, Iraq: A New Way Forward contends that stabilityin the Middle East requires the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. and allied forcesfrom the Gulf region.103 This would facilitate the rebuilding of the Caliphate andenable the Muslim world, funded by the Gulf’s oil resources, to determine its owndestiny. Such a model would, of course, reject the false Western ideal of liberal

democratic universalism and the destabilizing economics of the free market. Anal-ogously, both Islamists and critical theorists consider the solution to the Palestinequestion requires the transformation of the Middle East. For Islamists it would




necessarily entail the dissolution of the ‘‘illegal’’ Zionist state of Israel and its incor-poration into the new Caliphate. Under the regime of the Caliph, Jews, Sunnis andShias, Kurds, Lebanese, Persians, and Arabs would all transcend their false ethnic orreligious consciousness and achieve true emancipation through Islam’s universal and

undoubtedly transformative ethic.104

This appreciation of Muslim discontent and the foreign policy necessary toredress it correlates almost exactly with the analysis and transformational agendaof critical international relations theory.105 Immediate withdrawal from Westerninterventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and a greater awareness of the Muslim‘‘other,’’ it is argued, will dilute Islamist rage whether homegrown or externally gen-erated. For Tarak Barkawi this requires us to ‘‘empathize’’ with the practitioners of radical Islamist violence. It should be ‘‘accepted that suicide bombers are fighters fora cause.’’ They represent a ‘‘response to historic injustice’’ and therefore must be‘‘granted full and unqualified humanity.’’106 Meanwhile, Jackson informs us thatIslamist parties, when permitted ‘‘mainstream political influence,’’ often follow‘‘moderate and pragmatic directions.’’107 Presumably, he has in mind parties likeHamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon. In this empathetic vein he furthercontends that ‘‘Jihadist texts reveal a nuanced political analysis of the situation inthe Middle East.’’ These nuances include a modest agenda encompassing ‘‘supportfor the establishment of a Palestinian state; the end of US military occupation of the Arabian peninsula and its material support for Israel; the overthrow of corruptand oppressive western-backed Arab regimes; the support of insurgencies inKashmir, Chechnya, the Philippines and elsewhere; and the expulsion of westernforces from Iraq and Afghanistan.’’108

Given their agreement upon the strategic goals of Islamist militancy, it is not

entirely surprising to discover that a Hizb ut-Tahrir report such as Radicalisation,Extremism and Islamism reads like an essay in critical international relationscomplete with methodological framework and appropriate footnotes.109 In fact,one would not be entirely surprised to learn that it began life as a thesis in a depart-ment of International Relations at a British university. What, we might wonder, arethe ideological implications of this critical approach that legitimates Islamist thoughtand practice and which increasingly imposes its emancipatory grip upon the studyof international relations on Western university campuses?

Critical Terror Studies and al-Qaeda’s Strategic Thinking

Central to the evolving relationship between critical thought and a radical empathywith Islamist strategy are new international journals like Critical Studies on Terror-

ism. The journal’s rationale is to ‘‘foster a more self-reflective, critical approach tothe study of terrorism, that accommodates those who study ‘terrorism,’’’ but rejectthe (perceived) ‘‘ontological, epistemological, and ideological commitments of exist-ing terrorism studies.’’110 More precisely, the extension of critical thinking to thestudy of terrorism provides ‘‘a forum where research from a constructivist, post-structuralist, feminist, critical, normative or other alternative theoretical approachescan be presented.’’111

We can further derive a view of what critical engagement with Islamist terror

entails from a number of university or research funded projects, conferences, and journal articles in recent years. For example, Australia’s leading forum for inter-national relations, the Oceanic International Studies Conference (OICS), devoted




four panels in 2006 to critical international theories while other panels consideredtopics like ‘‘Transnational Identities, Voices of the Other.’’112 Its precursor, 2004conference included offerings such as ‘‘Myth: ‘Islamists Under the Bed’ – theHoward Government and the Politics of Paranoia.’’113

Critical international theory panels also feature prominently at the annual con-ference of the British International Studies Association (BISA). The 2007 conferenceentertained several panels on the theme and featured papers on ‘‘Border Imaginariesand the War on Terror,’’ ‘‘Critical Approaches to ‘Islamic Terrorism,’ ’’ and‘‘Constructing Intervention in the War on Terrorism.’’114 In 2006, both BISA andthe government funding body, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC),co-sponsored a conference entitled, ‘‘Is it Time for a Critical Terrorism Studies?’’ atthe University of Manchester.115 The question was purely rhetorical. The conferenceorganizers quickly concluded that indeed it was time. The proceedings of the confer-ence subsequently formed the first edition of the journal Critical Studies on Terror-

ism that appeared in April 2008. Elsewhere, a brief encounter with AdelaideUniversity’s e-journal Borderlands introduces the unwary reader to titles like ‘‘TerrorAustralis: Security, Terror and the ‘War on Terror’ Discourse’’116 or ‘‘Regimes of Terror: Contesting the War on Terror,’’ an edited collection from a colloquium orga-nized by Macquarie University, Sydney, in December 2005, which ‘‘brought togetheractivists, artists, academics, and lawyers working on the links between racism,colonialism and terrorism.’’117 Opening a few of these articles reveals that criticalterrorism studies requires no research into the history, ideology, or strategic thinkingof transnational non-state actors like al-Qaeda or its regional affiliates. Instead,critical engagement is a euphemism for an assault on the Australian, British, andU.S. government responses to terrorism, which the de rigueur critical perspective

pronounces a ‘‘disturbing’’ new international phenomenon.118

The ‘‘disturbing’’politics of terrorism further requires democratic politicians to ‘‘pose as the peoplewho will protect us from our fears and regulate the world accordingly.’’ Criticaltheory reveals that the pose serves as a mask for the erosion of civil liberties.119

What permeates the critical method, therefore, is not the threat or the appropri-ate level of response to it, but the authoritarianism of the purportedly liberaldemocratic state. Katrina Lee Koo of the Australian National University informsus accordingly that ‘‘the ease with which the US War on terror discourse hasbeen assimilated into the discourse and practice of Australia’s security reflects theenduring commitments that both have to notions of statism, permanent threat andinsecurity and the acceptance of violence against those who may threaten us.’’120

The war on terror, she maintains, merely ‘‘reinforced an unethical practice of security.’’121 Analogously, Jackson avers that ‘‘current counterterrorism discoursefunctions ideologically to maintain a liberal international order in which the USand EU retain a dominant position.’’ He continues: ‘‘That is, in addition todelegitimizing all forms of nonstate, counterhegemonic violence, the language of counterterrorism also functions to set the parameters of debate and restrict the arrayof policy options to a narrow band of possibilities that do not fundamentallychallenge existing international and national power structures.’’122

In a similar vein, Anthony Burke, Associate Professor at the AustralianDefence Force Academy, in an essay in Social Identities, that also doubles as a

chapter in his oddly titled book Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War againstthe Other (2006), explores the relationship between ‘‘Freedom’s Freedom:American Enlightenment and Permanent War.’’123 Burke maintains, somewhat




obscurely, that an ‘‘onto-technology of freedom through US history, the Cold Warand the War on Terror, and considering its functional mirroring by the Islamistthreat . . . ’’ exposes ‘‘the multiple dangers posed by the aggressive assertion of asimultaneously instrumental and universalizing image of historical action and

inevitability that rejects any restriction of its powers and any responsibility fortheir effect.’’124 In the Carnegie Council’s journal Ethics and International Affairs,Burke further reveals that the real target of his critical assault is the modern liberaldemocratic state and its ‘‘violent and exclusivist’’ understanding of sovereignty thatlingers ‘‘like a latent illness in the very depths of modern cosmopolitanism.’’125

Predictably, perhaps, Burke concludes that terrorism is the fault of the U.S. andits allies, and the recourse to military force to contain violent Islamism is bothunethical and unnecessary.

Overall, state discourses of national security merely reinforce a process of ‘‘othering’’ Islamist difference. Here critical thinking adapts a Marxist understand-ing of alienation in order to present the bourgeois democratic state as engaged ina process of marginalizing minorities. The exclusion of the Other thus representscritical theory’s key, or, more precisely, its only, analytic tool. It purportedlydemonstrates that the modern state ‘‘ultimately secures sovereignty, physically andexistentially, through violence against and alienation from the Other.’’126 Or asKatrina Lee Koo tautologically contends, ‘‘this powerful process of widespread orblanket Othering in order to shore up, protect and defend who we are, has led toour lack of empathetic or ethical compassion for our Other.’’127

The ‘‘rhetoric of freedom’’ and the democratic ‘‘way of life’’ it upholds, Burke,and others of this critical disposition, argue, ‘‘inflames’’ the Muslim community. Thecritically informed antidote to this rage requires us, ‘‘if we are to grapple with the

new terrorism’’ to engage in a force-free ‘‘dialogue with the other.’’128

This Haber-masian pursuit of intersubjective communication would result in new, ‘‘uncoerced’’norms that would ethically transform the conduct of global politics.

Central to the strategic understanding of critical terror studies, therefore, is arelativist understanding of both the democratic state and the non-state actor’srecourse to violence. Both state and non-state actors from this perspective are terror-ists. Indeed, the modern state is the greater terrorist because it possesses the greatercapacity for violence. The idealist solution that emerges, albeit obscurely, from thisanalysis requires the replacement of the modern democratic state by a newpost-national constellation of international norms. In other words, critical terror stu-dies requires not an understanding of international relations per se but the ethicaltransformation of those relations.

Asserting this radical interpretation of the world reveals the critical research project’s ideological agenda. Its commitment to transformative ethics means that its aca-demic purpose is not to promote methodological pluralism but to achieve ideologicalhegemony.129 Jackson admits that criticism requires ‘‘a continuous articulation andre-articulation’’130 of current discourses through ‘‘subversive forms of knowl-edge’’131 that render quite accepted understandings ‘‘open to de-stabilization andcounter-hegemonic struggle.’’132 Moreover, it is this preference for revolutionarytransformation that critical theory shares with the violent utopian dreamers thatinspire al-Qaeda as well as officially non-violent proponents of khilaffahism like

Hizb ut-Tahrir. How, we might finally consider, has this undoubtedly critical under-standing evolved and what does its ideological influence over university internationalrelations departments mean for the secular, liberal capacity to inquire into




assumptions about the ideology of Islamism, its recourse to terrorism, and thestrategies required to address it?

What We’ve Got Here . . . Is a Failure to Communicate

Here it is necessary to evaluate the general direction of research in political scienceand international studies since the 1990s, most notably in the United Kingdom,where this critical approach first took hold and, which via the latest manifestationof the cultural cringe, has now colonized international studies in Australia. AsUniversity of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer observed in his 2004 E. H.Carr lecture at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, utopian idealism nowdominates international relations scholarship in Britain. As with their Australianepigone, Mearsheimer argued, the British idealists believe in the possibility of radically rejecting reality in order to promote their ideological ‘‘imperative tochange the world.’’133

Even before 9=11, international relations theorists of this idealist provenanceevinced a predisposition to read events through a critical English School lens thatunmasked the false consciousness of liberal democracy to reveal the instrumentalrationalism that drove it. It further sought to demonstrate that Western foreignpolicy discursively created threats through what David Campbell termed ‘‘practicesof differentiation and modes of exclusion.’’134 From this perspective, a ‘‘discourse of danger’’ in the 1990s manufactured putative threats to the international system inorder to maintain existing power relations. In that curious Zeit without Geist

between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center, criticaltheory came together with a constructivist international relations methodology to

disclose the structural and normative imbalances in the international order. Thisstructure and its subsequent globalization, it was asserted, served Western statedominance while systematically impoverishing, oppressing, and excluding disenfran-chised, non-Western populations.135

From this critical perspective, the dissolution of Cold War verities hadprompted an insecure ‘‘West’’ to search for an alternative monolithic threat toreplace that of the former Soviet Union.136 An amorphous ‘‘terrorism’’ linked toa global Islamist Internationale neatly filled the vacancy. Even in the mid-1990s,critical international relations theory termed the Western stance ‘‘Islamophobia,’’which it was claimed had improperly cast Muslims as ‘‘incomprehensible,irrational, extremist’’ and ‘‘threatening.’’137 For contemporary critical terrorismtheorists this characterization reinforces their belief that ‘‘Islamic terrorism’’functions as a ‘‘construct’’ to maintain national identity and marginalizes an alien,non-Western ‘‘other.’’

Moreover, ‘‘given the extent to which the discourse has penetrated the politicsand culture of Western societies, it can hardly be doubted that ‘Islamic terrorism’now functions as a negative ideograph.’’138 For Jackson, ‘‘dangers are those facetsof social life interpreted as threats,’’ adding that ‘‘dangers do not exist objectively,independent of perception.’’139 Concern, fear, or anxiety is, therefore, a domesticconstruct, a product of racism140 and ‘‘phobic narratives.’’141 According to BrianMassumi, the ‘‘enemy is not ‘out there,’’’ instead, ‘‘ ‘we are it.’’’142

From the critical idealist perspective, then, there are no material threats in theinternational system, only negative discourses. Consequently, rather than acceptthe fact that violent militants inspired by an Islamist ideology launched the 9=11




attacks, critical thinking instead moved its discursive goalposts. Critical theoristssubsequently maintained that Western governments exaggerated the new threat inorder to ‘‘narrow the discursive space for political debate’’ and curtail civil libertiesat home.143 Western democracies, critical theorists contend, conjured up the spectre

of Islam and catastrophic terror attacks to persuade the gullible masses to accept anextension of state powers under the rubric of counter-terror policy. In this under-standing, the ‘‘political’’ process ‘‘functions for constructing fear and moral panic,’’‘‘provoking and allaying anxiety to maintain quiescence . . . [and] distracting the pub-lic from more complex and pressing social ills.’’144 Via this process of denial, Islamistterror dissolves and liberal democracy emerges as the real threat to global peace. ‘‘Inshort,’’ Jackson warns somewhat mysteriously, ‘‘the danger is that the ‘war on terror-ism’ becomes a ‘war of terrorism.’’’145

The student of international relations inculcated in this critical orthodoxy mayperhaps pause to wonder whether the authorities are ‘‘de-legitimizing dissent’’ allthat efficiently given the proliferation of government grants, books, and journalsdevoted to arguing against the politics of fear, exposing government security initia-tives, and asserting the need for more critically informed terrorism studies.146 Thisseems especially curious given that the current structure of rewards for academicresearch excellence and preferment have over the last decade installed criticaltheory as social science canon. In the United Kingdom, as Mearsheimer notes, ithas created a ‘‘realist-free zone,’’147 a point that applies also to leading inter-national relations schools in Australia. Research conducted by the respectedTeaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) Project published by theInstitute of the Theory and Practice of International Relations at the College of William and Mary bears out Mearsheimer’s contention, demonstrating that realist

orientated scholarship in Britain and Australia has become a distinctly minorityavocation.148

Furthermore, the extent to which critical theory empathizes with Islamism’s‘‘moderate and pragmatic’’ goals indicates a shared illiberal and revolutionary trans-formative outlook. Thus, Anthony Burke informs us that ‘‘violence in Palestine’’cannot be resolved without ‘‘the call to ethics and the love of the Other.’’ 149 ForBurke, the solution to the West’s ‘‘perverse perseverance of sovereignty’’ is both‘‘deconstructive and re-productive,’’ a line that could easily have appeared in a Hizbut-Tahrir report. Yet as a number of former Islamists have observed: ‘‘By blamingthe government for our actions . . . [commentators] did our propaganda work forus. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination fromthe real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.’’150

In the face of evidence from both former radicals and scholars like EkaterinaStepanova who take an interest in the social and political motives informing con-temporary political violence, one might assume that Western governments wouldbe attuned to the inherent dangers of fuelling Islamist propaganda and recruitmentto jihadism.151 This, however, is not the case. Somewhat myopically, universitycouncils welcome the new funding opportunities that the ‘‘cutting edge’’ criticalterror studies agenda supposedly affords and which government agencies, likethe UK’s Department of Education Skills and Training and the AustralianResearch Council, supports with large grants. Taxpayers fund critical evaluations

of the ‘‘the politics and ethics of force’’ or ‘‘ethical and conceptual approachesto counter-terrorism.’’152 It is not entirely clear what value this adds to our under-standing of the phenomenon, but the conclusion is already known. As Ruth




Blakeley of the University of Kent explains, ‘‘the northern democracies have beenresponsible for widespread terrorism.’’153 In the strange, foggy archipelago thatcritical international ethicist thinking inhabits the present system of states is thereal problem and demands the transformation of the world as we know it. There-

fore, it is not surprising to learn that the policy advice to resist and transform iswarmly endorsed not only by Hizb ut-Tahrir but by most modern revolutionarygroups that view sacrifice and transformation as necessary stages on the road toutopia.

Conclusion

Leo Strauss presciently observed that ‘‘the crisis of the West consists in theWest having become uncertain of its purpose. The West was once certain of itspurpose – of a purpose in which all men could be united and hence it had a clear

vision of its future. . .

We do no longer have that certainty and that clarity. Someamong us even despair of the future, and this despair explains many forms of Western degradation.’’154 A society accustomed to understanding itself in terms of a liberal, universal, and progressive purpose cannot lose faith in that purpose with-out becoming utterly bewildered.

The relativist and critical approaches that have come to dominate the academicsocial sciences since the 1990s reflect the bewilderment that has become more appar-ent since 9=11, and the evident failure of history to end with the triumph of reasonand democracy. Moreover, by attempting to identify histrionically with the suppos-edly marginalized Islamist ‘‘other,’’ critical theory and the contemporary, so-called,English School affords crucial ideological support to those who violently oppose

Western understandings of liberalism, secularism, and pluralism. Indeed, by rejectingthe very idea of having enemies, critical thought reinforces the bewildering loss of purpose in the democratic state-based international order.

The global jihadism that confronts Western liberal democracies in the shape of al-Qaeda and its affiliates is, above all, a war of perception and propaganda. In otherwords, it is a war of will and ideology. Significantly, both critical terror and moremainstream counter-insurgency studies deny this, preferring instead to addresssecond order concerns. The prevailing academic illiberalism, as we have shown,forms the intellectual mise en sce ne to jihadism’s ideological critique of the inter-national order. Through its corrosive relativism it also undermines the West’s own

political democratic self-understanding. Although the details of the ethically trans-formed, sustainable security world remain obscure, we do know that it will be neitherliberal nor democratic. At a minimum it will see the end of capitalism and free mar-kets; the promotion, by violence if necessary, of post-national formations; the trans-formation of the Middle East; an end to the state of Israel; and a commitment toredistributive policies both globally and locally combined with enhanced andenforced multicultural sensitivity towards the oppressed non-Western ‘‘other.’’

Ultimately, the argument and style that characterizes the more sophisticated jihadist texts reflect the deconstructive thinking in critical international relationstheory and its offspring, critical terror studies. By a curious and little explored irony,state subsidized Western university departments dreamed up the ideology that

informs jihadism. It finds its way into the reports of the jihadist equivalent of think-tanks and to the latest strategic thinking of al-Qaeda.




Notes

1. Peter R. Neumann, ‘‘Europe’s Jihadist Dilemma,’’ Survival 48, no. 2 (2006), 71.2. Lorenzo Vidino, Al-Qaeda in Europe (Amhurst, NY: Prometheus, 2005), 368.3. See David Kilcullen, ‘‘Subversion and Counter Subversion in the Campaign against

Terrorism in Europe,’’ Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30, no. 8 (2006), 653.4. The use of the term Islamism in this article refers to the radical belief that Islam is

not merely a faith but a system of political thought that can regulate all aspects of society inaccordance with Islamic principles. It does not inherently connote a belief in violent extremismand is not to be conflated with Islam as a revealed religion.

5. Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

6. Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Batt, Radicalization in the West: The Home GrownThreat (New York: New York City Police Department 2007), 5.

7. David Kilcullen, a former Australian army colonel and a PhD graduate of theUniversity of New South Wales, is today probably the most influential terrorism andinsurgency analyst in Washington. His work, for instance, his advocacy of ‘‘Disaggregation’’as the basis of a global counterinsurgency strategy, has informed the evolution of much U.S.counter-terrorism strategy in recent years. See for example, David J. Kilcullen, ‘‘CounteringGlobal Insurgency,’’ Journal of Strategic Studies 28, no. 4 (Aug. 2005), 597–617.

8. Kilcullen (see note 3 above), 658.9. Ibid., 649.

10. Ibid., 652.11. Mark Lilla, ‘‘A New, Political Saint Paul,’’ New York Review of Books 55, no. 16,

23 October 2008.12. See Radicalization, Extremism and Islamism: Realities and Myths in the War on

Terror: A Report by Hizb-ut- Tahrir, Britain (London: al-Khilafah, 2007), 14.13. Rohan Gunaratna, ‘‘Ideology in Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism Lessons from

combating al-Qaeda and Al Jemaah al Islamiyah in Southeast Asia,’’ in Abdul Halim binKader, ed., Fighting Terrorism: The Singapore Perspective (Singapore: Taman Bacaan,

2007), 95.14. Stephen Ulph, Al Qaeda’s Enemy Within, available at: (http://bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/programmmes/analysis/transcripts/07_08-08.txt).

15. Ekaterina Stepanova, Terrorism in Asymmetrical Conflict: Ideological and Structural Aspects, SIPRI Research Report 23 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 20.

16. Ibid., 25.17. Ibid., 66. Stepanova also makes the point that while jihadist activists may not be

recognized intellectuals or in the case of religious terrorists advanced theologians ‘‘does notmean that theologians are not ideologically driven,’’ 25.

18. Khilaffah is the term that Hizb ut-Tahrir uses in its various works advocating theirpreferred outcome for the political organization of the Muslim world. Khilaffaism is perhapsthe most appropriate coinage to express the ideology. The alternative is the anglicized term‘‘caliphism’’ which we also use in this article.

19. Olivier Roy, ‘‘Euro-Islam: The Jihad Within,’’ The National Interest 71 (Spring2003), 67.

20. Taqiuddin Nabhani, The System of Islam Nidham al-Islam (London: al-Khilafah,2002); Thought al-Tafkeer (London: al-Khilafah, 2004); Islamic Personality al-Shaksiyyahal-Islamiyyah (London: al-Khilafah, 2005).

21. Melanie Phillips, Londonistan (New York: Encounter, 2006), 14–17.22. See (http://www.hizb-ut-tahrir.org/english/english.html) accessed 22 Aug. 2005.23. Ed Husain, The Islamist (London: Penguin, 2007), 83–110.24. Hizb ut-Tahrir, The Method to Re-establish the Khilifah (London: Al-Khilifah,

2000), 1.25. Ibid., 105–106.26. For a survey see Anthony Glees and Chris Pope, When Students Turn to Terror:

Terrorist and Extremist Activity on British University Campuses (London: Social AffairsUnit, 2005).

27. Husain (see note 23 above), 108.




28. Ibid., 102.29. Ibid., 73.30. Hassan Butt, ‘‘My Plea to Fellow Muslims: You Must Renounce Terror,’’ The

Observer, 1 July 2007. See also Shiraz Maher, ‘‘How I Escaped Islamism,’’ Sunday Times,12 Aug. 2007; Maajid Nawaz and Dawud Masieh, In and Out of Islamism (London: Quilliam

Foundation, 2008). Butt’s testimony concerning the jihadi network is unreliable. See VikramDodd, ‘‘Al-Qaida Fantasist Tells Court: I’m a Professional Liar,’’ The Guardian, 9 Feb. 2009.Nevertheless, despite his propensity to lie for money, Butt was the spokesman for Omar BakriMohammed’s al Mujahiroun in the 1990s, and as Manchester Police acknowledge, had links toa number of convicted terrorists. Muslim radicals have also questioned the role that bothHusain and Nawaz played in Hizb ut-Tahrir. The attempt to traduce the reputation of formerbrothers is a familiar feature of radical sectarian politics. Moreover, the aspersions cast uponHusain and Nawaz’s credentials also reflects the fact that their think-tank the QuilliamFoundation is prominently engaged in counter radicalization strategies. Nawaz was in factgaoled in Egypt in 2001 for his membership of Hizb.

31. For Qutb after the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate no country had replacedTurkey as the Islamic world’s centre. To bring about a new caliphate governed by God’slaw there must be a revival in one Muslim country, enabling it to attain that status. Signifi-cantly, after the Taliban took Kabul in 1996 and established an Islamic state governed bysharia law, in the view of bin Laden and others, Afghanistan became the strongest candidatefor the core of the new caliphate. See ‘‘Interview with Nida’ul Islam’’ in Bruce Lawrence, ed.,Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden (London: Verso, 2005), 42.

32. Ibid., 121.33. Ibid., 41–42.34. Ayman al-Zawahiri letter to Musab al-Zakarwi, 9 July 2005, available at: (http://

www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/report/2005/zawahiri-zarqawi-letter_9jul2005.htm).35. Abu Hamza quoted in James Brandon, Virtual Caliphate: Islamic Extremists and

their Websites (London: Centre for Social Cohesion, 2008), 3. Abdullah Faisal also describeddemocracy as shirk, 6.

36. Cited in ibid., 14.

37. Al-Qaeda Training Manual, 9. The full text is available from the U.S. Department of Justice at: (http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/trainingmanual.htm).

38. Mahan Abedin, ‘‘Al Muhajiroun in the UK an Interview with Sheikh Omar BakriMohammed,’’ Spotlight on Terror 2 no. 5, 22 March 2004, at: (http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=290), accessed 29 September 2009.

39. Ibid. However, former leading Hizb ut-Tahrir member Maajid Nawaz stated in aBBC Newsnight interview on 13 September 2007 that the organization ‘‘secretly believes thatthe killing of millions’’ to ‘‘expand the caliphate would be justified.’’ The interview is availableat: (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2007/09).

40. For example, nearly all Hizb ut-Tahrir texts make some form of reference to theKhalifah as the ultimate source of salvation. See for instance some of the organization’s pressstatements such as: ‘‘Only the return of the Khilafah will silence those who attack Islam,’’ 4April 2008 (http://www.hizb.org.uk/hizb/press-centre/press-release/only-the-return-of-the-

khilafah-will-silence-those-who-attack-islam.html); ‘‘Hizb ut-Tahrir Calls For Replacing theIsraeli Apartheid State with Khilafah,’’ 19 May 2008; (http://www.hizb.org.uk/hizb/press-centre/press-release/hundreds-attend-palestine-meeting-marking-60-years-of-occupation-and-oppression.html), accessed 1 June 2008.

41. Hizb ut-Tahrir, Iraq: A New Way Forward at <www.hizb.org.uk> accessed 7 Nov.2007. See also Radicalism, Extremism and Islamism (note 12 above), ch. 3 which explores thecaliphatic system, 20ff.

42. Iraq: A New Way Forward (see note 41 above), 50–55.43. See Taqiuddin al-Nabhani, The System of Islam (London: al-Khilafah, 2002). This is

a Hizb ut-Tahrir translation of al-Nabhani’s system written in Jordan in the 1950s.44. Radicalism, Extremism and Islamism (see note 12 above), 20–21.45. Iraq: A New Way Forward (see note 41 above), 52.

46. The similarity between Islamist thinking and Western styles of illiberal thought wasa point initially observed and developed by Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York:Norton, 2003), esp. 53–153.




74. Taraq Barkawi, ‘‘On the Pedagogy of ‘Small Wars,‘’’ International Affairs 80,no. 1 (Jan. 2004), 28.

75. Ibid., 27.76. Barkawi and Laffey (see note 72 above), 330.77. Richard Jackson, ‘‘Language, Policy and the Construction of a Torture Culture in

the War on Terrorism,’’ Review of International Studies 33, no. 3 (2007), 353–371.78. Michael Stohl, ‘‘Old Myths, New Fantasies and the Enduring Realities of Terror-

ism,’’ Critical Studies on Terrorism 1, no. 1 (April 2008), 11–12.79. Richard Jackson, ‘‘Genealogy, Ideology and Counter-Terrorism: Writing Wars on

Terrorism from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush Jr,’’ Studies in Language and Capitalism1 (2006), 172.

80. Booth (see note 51 above), 77.81. Ken Booth (see note 70 above), 539.82. Marie Breen-Smyth, Jeroen Gunning, Richard Jackson, George Kassimeris, and

Piers Robinson, ‘‘Critical Terrorism Studies – An Introduction,’’ Critical Studies on Terrorism1, no. 1 (April 2008), 2.

83. Barkawi and Laffey (see note 72 above), 332.84. Ibid., 333.85. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978); Edward Said, Covering Islam:

How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (London:Vintage, 1981).

86. Richard Jackson, ‘‘Constructing Enemies: ‘Islamic Terrorism’, in Political andAcademic Discourse,’’ Government and Opposition 42, no. 3 (2007), 399.

87. Barkawi and Laffey (see note 72 above), 336–347.88. Richard Jackson, ‘‘Security, Democracy and the Rhetoric of Counter-Terrorism,’’

Democracy and Security 1, no. 2 (2005), 152.89. Ibid., 152.90. Barkawi and Laffey (see note 72 above), 347.91. Barkawi (see note 74 above), 33.92. Jackson (see note 88 above), 152.

93. Richard Jackson, ‘‘An Analysis of EU Counterterrorism Discourse Post-September11,’’ Cambridge Review of International Affairs 20, no. 2 (June 2007), 243.

94. Ibid., 243.95. Barkawi and Laffey (see note 72 above), 347. See also Anthony Burke, ‘‘The End of

Terrorism Studies,’’ Critical Studies on Terrorism 1, no. 1 (2008), 45 which also cites Qutbpositively, arguing that his ‘‘critique of the West’’ is ‘‘sometimes well observed and convergeswith elements of critical theory.’’

96. See Fred Halliday, Two Hours that Shook the World – September 11, 2001: Causesand Consequences (London: Saqi, 2002).

97. Jackson (see note 88 above), 166.98. Ibid., 166.99. Hizb ut-Tahrir, Radicalization, Extremism and Islamism (see note 12 above), 9.

100. Ibid., 5.

101. Ibid., 7.102. Ibid., 23–25.103. It should be noted here the Hizb ut-Tahrir’s objectives are not confined merely to the

Middle East but like the Islamist project in general, its agenda is global not regional.104. Hizb ut-Tahrir, Iraq: A New Way Forward (see note 41 above), 150–155.105. See Jeroen Gunning, ‘‘A Case for Critical Terrorism Studies?’’ Government and

Opposition 2, no. 3 (2007), 363–393.106. Barkawi (see note 74 above), 29.107. Richard Jackson, ‘‘Responses,’’ International Affairs 83, no. 1 (2007), 174.108. Ibid., 174–175.109. Hizb ut-Tahrir (see note 12 above), 1–36.110. Breen-Smith, Gunning, Jackson, Kassimeris, and Robinson (see note 82 above), 2.

111. Routledge journal proposal for Critical Studies on Terrorism, 2006.112. Oceanic Conference on International Studies Conference, University of Melbourne,5–7 July 2006 (http://www.politics.unimelb.edu.au/ocis/draft.pdf), accessed 2 June 2008.




113. Oceanic Conference on International Studies Conference, Australian NationalUniversity, 14–16 July 2004 (http://rspas.anu.edu.au/ir/Oceanic/OCIS%20Final%20Program.pdf), accessed 4 June 2008.

114. British International Studies Association Annual Conference, University of Cambridge, 17–19 Dec. 2007 (http:// www.bisa.ac.uk/2007/index.htm), accessed 4 June 2008.

115. ‘‘Is it Time for Critical Terrorism Studies,’’ University of Manchester, 27–28 Oct.2006, co-sponsored by the British International Studies Working Group on Critical Studieson Terrorism, The Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Contemporary Political Viol-ence, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, the Economic and Social Research Council andthe University of Manchester.

116. Katrina Lee Koo, ‘‘Terror Australis: Security, Terror and the ‘War on Terror’Discourse,’’ Borderlands 4, no. 1 (2005).

117. Goldie Osurie, ‘‘Regimes of Terror: Contesting the War on Terror,’’ Borderlands 5,no. 6 (2006).

118. Koo (see note 116 above), para. 11.119. Bill Durodie, ‘‘Fear and Terror in a Post Colonial Age,’’ Government and Opposition

42, no. 2 (2007), 442.120. Koo (see note 116 above), para. 33.121. Ibid., para. 31.122. Jackson (see note 93 above), 244.123. Anthony Burke, ‘‘Freedom’s Freedom: American Enlightenment and Permanent

War,’’ Social Identities 11, no. 4 (2005), 315.124. Ibid., 315.125. Anthony Burke, ‘‘Against the New Internationalism,’’ Ethics and International

Affairs 19, no. 4 (2005), 74.126. Anthony Burke, ‘‘Reply to Jean Bethke Elshstein: For a Cautious Utopianism,’’

Ethics and International Affairs 19, no. 4 (2005), 98.127. Koo (see note 116 above), para. 31.128. Burke (see note 125 above), 74.129. Interestingly, critical terrorism studies theorists speak endlessly not of plurality

or tolerance but of ‘‘self-reflexivity’’ by which they mean ‘‘reflecting’’ exclusively upon theiniquities of the construction of Western knowledge discourses and Western policies. Forexample, in the first edition of the journal Critical Studies on Terrorism, the two and a half page introduction manages to use the phrase five times. See Breen-Smyth, Gunning, Jackson,Kassimeris and Robinson (note 82 above), 1–3. The phrase crops up regularly in othercontributions to the journal. See Burke (note 95 above), 38 and 44; Booth (note 51 above),71. Elsewhere, Gunning (note 105 above) employs the phrase eight times (370, 379, 382,389, 392, 392, 393).

130. Jackson (see note 86 above), 396.131. Ibid., 425.132. Ibid., 395. See also Jackson (note 88 above), 165; Jackson (note 77 above), 371.133. John J. Mearsheimer, ‘‘E. H. Carr vs. Idealism: The Battle Rages On,’’ International

Relations 19, no. 2 (2005), 145. Here Mearsheimer is quoting from Tim Dunne and Nicholas J.

Wheeler, ‘‘ ‘We the Peoples’: Contending Discourses of Security in Human Rights Theory andPractice,’’ International Relations 18, no. 1 (2004), 9.

134. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 68.

135. Ibid., 68.136. See Azzam Karim, ‘‘Islamisms, Globalisation, Religion and Power,’’ in Ronaldo

Munck and Purnaka de Silva, eds., Postmodern Insurgencies: Political Violence, IdentityFormation and Peacemaking in Comparative Perspective (London: Macmillan, 2000), 217.

137. John Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1995), 231.

138. Jackson (see note 86 above), 420.139. Jackson, (see note 88 above), 157. Of course, this is a spurious contention as quite

evidently there are dangers which are not independent of interpretation. A child playing inthe middle of a busy road is objectively in a dangerous situation. The child faces a highprobability of being struck by a vehicle irrespective of one’s perception of the level of danger.




140. Meghan Morris, ‘‘White Panic or Mad Max and the Sublime,’’ in ChenKuan-Hsing, ed., Trajectories: Inter-Asian Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), 246.

141. See David Campbell, The Social Basis of Australian and New Zealand Security Policy(Canberra: Pacific Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1989),26.

142. Cited in Simon Philpott, ‘‘Fear of the Dark: Indonesia and the Australian NationalImagination,’’ Australian Journal of International Affairs 55, no. 3 (2001), 376.

143. Jackson (see note 88 above), 166.144. Ibid., 157.145. Ibid., 166.146. It is noteworthy that the ‘‘myth’’ of the suppression of ‘‘dissenting’’ critical

viewpoints (when in fact they are more than well represented in both the media and academy)is purveyed to sustain and legitimize the critical voice. For example, Jackson argues: ‘‘Already,conservatives have attacked anti-globalization protestors, academics, postmodernists, liberals,pro-choice activists, environmentalists, and gay liberationists as being aligned to terrorismand its inherent evil.’’ However, he cites no examples, and refers only to the work of DavidCampbell—a critical theorist himself—as the source of authority as justification for this claim(David Campbell, ‘‘Time is Broken: The Return of the Past in the Response to September 11,’’Theory and Event 5, no. 4 (2002)). Nor does he appear to see the irony of denouncing othersfor supposedly de-legitimizing opposing views, while trying to do exactly the same to thosewho oppose his position. It suggests two things: 1) that ‘‘conservative’’ criticism (or indeedany form of criticism) of the critical voice is for some reason invalid 2) that the notion of the attempted ‘‘de-legitimization of dissent’’ is a conspiracy that is wholly manufactured, ormore worryingly, actually believed by critical theorists. Jackson (see note 88 above), 166.

147. Mearsheimer (see note 133 above), 144.148. Richard Jordan, Danial Maliniak, Amy Oaks, Susan Peterson, and Michael Tierney,

One Discipline or Many? TRIP Survey of International Relations Faculties in Ten Countries(Willamsburg, VA: Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) Project publishedby the Institute of the Theory and Practice of International Relations, February 2009). Forexample Q.26 (pp. 31–32) indicates only 8 percent of UK and 16 percent of Australian

international relations scholars approached their subject from a realist perspective.149. Anthony Burke, ‘‘The Perverse Perseverance of Sovereignty,’’ Borderlands 1, no. 2

(2002), para. 64.150. Butt (see note 30 above).151. Stepanova (see note 15 above), 60–72.152. The title of Australian Research Council grants DPO558402 and DP0559707.153. Ruth Blakeley paper at BISA 2006, subsequently published as Ruth Blakely,

‘‘Bringing the State Back into Terrorism Studies,’’ European Political Science 6, no. 9(2007), 228–235. See also Ruth Blakeley, ‘‘The Elephant in the Room: A Response to JohnHorgan and Michael J. Boyle,’’ Critical Studies on Terrorism 1, no. 2 (2008), 153–154.

154. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), 11.


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