Terror and History brings together historians and leading scholars from around the world to examine, document, and reflect on the political and historical category of terror. Breaking with the traditional format of academic journals, the issue delivers short, sharp pieces of political and personal analysis rather than footnoted, monographic articles. Ranging from Guatemala to Palestine, interrogating notions of homeland, and unpacking the myths of the Irish Republican Army, the Red Army Faction, and Sendero Luminoso, the contributors to Terror and History revise our notions of terror and terrorism. The issue also includes a critique of the new war movies like Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbor, and Black Hawk Down. In an interview, Mike Davis discusses his book-in-progress Heroes from Hell, delving into the revolutionary terror that gripped most of Europe after the French Revolution.

Contributors. Joel Beinin, Lisa Brock, Horace Campbell, Duane J. Corpis, Belinda Davis, Allen Feldman, Ian Christopher Fletcher, Van Gosse, Joy James, J. Angus Johnston, Amy Kaplan, Thomas Miller Klubock, R. J. Lambrose, Jesse Lemisch, Deborah Levenson, Walter Benn Michaels, Donnacha Ó Beacháin, Deborah Poole, Vijay Prashad, David Prochaska, Gerardo Rénique, Cedric J. Robinson, Nikhil Pal Singh, Stephanie J. Smith, Akinyele O. Umoja, Verónica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, Jon Wiener, Marilyn B. Young, Joseba Zulaika

Today's global politics demands a new look at the concept of territory. From so-called deterritorialized terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda to U.S.-led overthrows of existing regimes in the Middle East, the relationship between territory and sovereignty is under siege. Unfolding an updated understanding of the concept of territory, Stuart Elden shows how the contemporary "war on terror" is part of a widespread challenge to the connection between the state and its territory.

Although the importance of territory has been disputed under globalization, territorial relations have not come to an abrupt end. Rather, Elden argues, the territory/sovereignty relation is being reconfigured. Traditional geopolitical analysis is transformed into a critical device for interrogating hegemonic geopolitics after the Cold War, and is employed in the service of reconsidering discourses of danger that include "failed states," disconnection, and terrorist networks.

Looking anew at the "war on terror"; the development and application of U.S. policy; the construction and demonization of rogue states; events in Lebanon, Somalia, and Pakistan; and the wars continuing in Afghanistan and Iraq, Terror and Territory demonstrates how a critical geographical analysis, informed by political theory and history, can offer an urgently needed perspective on world events.

One of the defining issues of our age, terrorism frequently makes headlines as governments, private businesses, and ordinary citizens find themselves at risk or under attack. But what is the nature of this threat, and what can be done about it?

Terrorism and Counterterrorism Studies examines the essence of terrorism as an instrument to achieve certain goals and explores our difficulties in defining the very concept itself. The volume also provides an overview of current (counter)terrorism studies and discusses policy implications. The resulting recommendations will be valuable for limiting terrorism’s impact and reducing the threat to global peace, security, and stability.

The legacy of Italy's experience of political violence and terrorism in the anni di piombo ("years of lead," c. 1969-83) continues to exercise the Italian imagination to an extraordinary degree. Cinema has played a particularly prominent role in articulating the ongoing impact of the anni di piombo and in defining the ways in which Italians remember and work through the atrocities and traumas of those years. Terrorism, Italian Style brings together some of the most important scholars contributing to the study of cinematic representations of the anni di piombo. Drawing on a comparative approach and a broad range of critical perspectives (including genre theory, family and gender issues, trauma theory and ethics), the book addresses an extensive range of films produced between the 1970s and the present and articulates their significance and relevance to contemporary Italian society and culture.

A landmark sociological examination of terrorism prosecution in United States courts
 

Rather than functioning as a final arbiter of justice, U.S. domestic courts are increasingly seen as counterterrorism tools that can incapacitate terrorists, maintain national security operations domestically, and produce certain narratives of conflict. Terrorism on Trial examines the contemporary role that these courts play in the global war on terror and their use as a weapon of war: hunting, criminalizing, and punishing entire communities in the name of national security. 

 

Nicole Nguyen advocates for a rethinking of popular understandings of political violence and its root causes, encouraging readers to consider anti-imperial abolitionist alternatives to the criminalization, prosecution, and incarceration of individuals marked as real or perceived terrorists. She exposes how dominant academic discourses, geographical imaginations, and social processes have shaped terrorism prosecutions, as well as how our fundamental misunderstanding of terrorism has led to punitive responses that do little to address the true sources of violence, such as military interventions, colonial occupations, and tyrannical regimes. Nguyen also explores how these criminal proceedings bear on the lives of defendants and families, seeking to understand how legal processes unevenly criminalize and disempower communities of color.

 

A retheorization of terrorism as political violence, Terrorism on Trial invites readers to carefully consider the role of power and politics in the making of armed resistance, addressing the root causes of political violence, with a goal of building toward a less violent and more liberatory world.

The general consensus among philosophers is that the use of torture is never justified. In Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture, Fritz Allhoff demonstrates the weakness of the case against torture; while allowing that torture constitutes a moral wrong, he nevertheless argues that, in exceptional cases, it represents the lesser of two evils.

 

Allhoff does not take this position lightly. He begins by examining the way terrorism challenges traditional norms, discussing the morality of various practices of torture, and critically exploring the infamous ticking time-bomb scenario. After carefully considering these issues from a purely philosophical perspective, he turns to the empirical ramifications of his arguments, addressing criticisms of torture and analyzing the impact its adoption could have on democracy, institutional structures, and foreign policy. The crucial questions of how to justly authorize torture and how to set limits on its use make up the final section of this timely, provocative, and carefully argued book.

Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition

Ten years on, Jasbir K. Puar’s pathbreaking Terrorist Assemblages remains one of the most influential queer theory texts and continues to reverberate across multiple political landscapes, activist projects, and scholarly pursuits. Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, shifting queers from their construction as figures of death to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity. This tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends, however, on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by what Puar calls homonationalism—a fusing of homosexuality to U.S. pro-war, pro-imperialist agendas. 

As a concept and tool of biopolitical management, homonationalism is here to stay. Puar’s incisive analyses of feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, the decriminalization of sodomy in the wake of the Patriot Act, and the profiling of Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers are not instances of a particular historical moment; rather, they are reflective of the dynamics saturating power, sexuality, race, and politics today. 

This Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition features a new foreword by Tavia Nyong’o and a postscript by Puar entitled “Homonationalism in Trump Times.” Nyong’o and Puar recontextualize the book in light of the current political moment while reposing its original questions to illuminate how Puar’s interventions are even more vital and necessary than ever.

In this pathbreaking work, Jasbir K. Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. These incorporations have shifted many queers from their construction as figures of death (via the AIDS epidemic) to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity (gay marriage and reproductive kinship). Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. These “homonationalisms” are deployed to distinguish upright “properly hetero,” and now “properly homo,” U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes—especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs—who are cordoned off for detention and deportation.

Puar combines transnational feminist and queer theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian philosophy, and technoscience criticism, and draws from an extraordinary range of sources, including governmental texts, legal decisions, films, television, ethnographic data, queer media, and activist organizing materials and manifestos. Looking at various cultural events and phenomena, she highlights troublesome links between terrorism and sexuality: in feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, in the triumphal responses to the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision repealing anti-sodomy laws, in the measures Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers take to avoid being profiled as terrorists, and in what Puar argues is a growing Islamophobia within global queer organizing.

How did the most powerful nation on earth come to embrace terror as the organizing principle of its security policy? In The Theater of Operations, Joseph Masco locates the origins of the present-day U.S. counterterrorism apparatus in the Cold War's "balance of terror." He shows how, after the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. global War on Terror mobilized a wide range of affective, conceptual, and institutional resources established during the Cold War to enable a new planetary theater of operations. Tracing how specific aspects of emotional management, existential danger, state secrecy, and threat awareness have evolved as core aspects of the American social contract, Masco draws on archival, media, and ethnographic resources to offer a new portrait of American national security culture. Undemocratic and unrelenting, this counterterror state prioritizes speculative practices over facts, and ignores everyday forms of violence across climate, capital, and health in an unprecedented effort to anticipate and eliminate terror threats—real, imagined, and emergent.
 

In the course of a few years, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—more commonly known as ISIS—has become classified as the most dangerous terrorist organization in the world. It is the subject of intense Western scrutiny, demonized by all, and shrouded in numerous myths and narratives.
 
Against these established narratives, Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou now presents his new theory of ISIS. Tracing the genealogy of ISIS and documenting its evolution in Iraq and Syria, he argues that ISIS has actually transcended Osama Bin Laden’s original scheme of Al Qaeda, mutating into a unprecedented hybrid between postcolonial violence, postmodernity, and postglobalization. A Theory of ISIS offers an original take on the militant group. Mohamedou explains the proliferation of terrorist attacks on the West and deepens our understanding of the group's impact on the very nature of contemporary political violence.