Joseba Zulaika

Basque Violence: Metaphor And Sacrament

The author examines the complexity and humanity of perhaps one of the most agonizing of contemporary problems - that of terroist violence. He offers a contextualized account of the endemic conflict engaging Basque villagers both as protagonists and as spectators.

On the Interpretation of Terrorist Violence: ETA and the Basque Political Process

Political violence, labeled loosely as “terrorism,” is a seemingly ubiquitous factor in twentieth-century world politics. Coping with it has become a major preoccupation of governments and is the object of considerable international cooperation among them. The purpose of this paper is to examine the case of ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna or Basque Country and Freedom) within the Basque nationalist movement in order to underscore several of the conceptual weaknesses in the literature on terrorism while also suggesting avenues for future research.

Drones, witches and other flying objects: the force of fantasy in US counterterrorism

A key concern for critical terrorism studies is the extent to which counterterrorism contributes to the promotion and perpetuation of terrorism. When dealing with either the events leading to 9/11 or the current anti-Muslim movements in Europe, we owe serious attention to the self-generating process by which terrorism and counterterrorism operate as an edge that simultaneously and constitutively links and separates both aspects of the phenomenon. The 9/11 Commission Report established that the events could probably have been prevented; there were after all 50–60 officers who knew two of the future attackers were living in the United States. What requires analysis are the blind spots in counterterrorist thinking that lead to such failures and ultimately to the self-fulfilling nature of the war on terror. This article will examine the conceptual similarities between witchcraft societies and the counterterrorist thought and policies put in practice by various US administrations – having to do with the perversions of temporality, the logic of taboo, non-hypothetical knowledge, secret information, the passion for ‘expert’ ignorance, mystical causation and dual sovereignty. The need for an epistemic shift that will take into account the constitutive nature of discourse and the political subjectivities of the actors will be advocated.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecies of Counterterrorism

In the 1980s Brian Jenkins, the doyen of terrorism experts, predicted that “we could see a doubling of terrorism by the end of the decade.”1 As it happened, during the four years from 1989 to 1992, terrorism did not cause a single fatality in the United States. The more remarkable fact was, however, that during those four years with no single terrorism case, American libraries catalogued, according to the OCLC WorldCat Database, 1322 new book titles under the rubric “terrorism” and 121 under “terrorist.” The obvious question at the time was: How could a discursive machine provide the ammunition necessary to sustain an entire industry based on a phenomenon that was both the ultimate threat to civilization and statistically almost absent? What amount of self-fulfilling prophecy was required for the real thing to make its appearance in the United States? Let us not forget that, regarding terrorism, those blissful 1980s—can anyone remember one single terrorist event in the United States during the entire decade?—were also the years in which the Reagan administration labeled terrorism its major international problem. At times, over 80 percent of Americans regarded terrorism as an “extreme” danger. In April of 1986, a national survey showed that terrorism was “the number one concern” for Americans.2 Nobody remembers who they were, but statistics say that during the period from 1980 to 1985, acts of terrorism killed seventeen people in the United States. These fewer than three terrorist fatalities a year proved, of course, far more threatening to national security than the 25,000 “ordinary” murders occurring annually during the same years. Now one

The terror/counterterror edge: when non-terror becomes a terrorism problem and real terror cannot be detected by counterterrorism

On the basis of cases such as the recent ban on the building of minarets in Switzerland or the prohibition on wearing a burka in France and the Netherlands, and the passage of terrorism legislation in various European countries in which there has never been a terrorism problem, as well as the recent history of counterterrorism in the United States, this paper examines how non-terror can become a terrorism problem and non-risk ideologically risky, while at the same time the real threats go undetected. The international prominence gained by Spanish Prime Minister Jose María Aznar when the George W. Bush administration declared a worldwide ‘War on Terror’ shows the political capital attached to terrorist risk. Countries may act as if afflicted by a case of ‘terrorism envy’ when non-risk may be perceived as political irrelevance. This paper argues that the dynamics of terrorism/counterterrorism should be seen in the cultural context of taboo while displaying the qualities of the Lacanian edge: a self-generating process that simultaneously links and separates them in a ‘non-relationship’ that is constitutive of the entire phenomenon.

Terror, totem, and taboo: Reporting on a report

Should we analytically constitute or dissolve the category of terrorism? The Basque case is adduced to illustrate the dynamics of constructing and deconstructing a reified notion of terrorism. Two approaches are confronted: the legal‐technical work of a committee of terrorism experts and the ethnographic work of an anthropologist. The experts’ position that social science should be subservient to police and intelligence counter‐insurgency is questioned. The intellectual history of cultural anthropology is invoked for advancing a critique of current theories of terrorism; in particular, the resurgence of psychological fallacies and unicausal arguments in explanations of terrorism is reexamined. It is argued that ritual situations are typically not governed by intrinsic or instrumental means‐ends connections and that the search for positive causes may not be the best strategy for studying contexts of behavior, such as terrorism, in which the element of chance plays a key role. Anthropologists have learned a...

Drones and fantasy in US counterterrorism

How does US Counterterrorism know that the hundreds of people killed by drones and justified as “signature” strikes (based on their pattern of life), of whom not even the names were known, are in fact actual or potential terrorists? It knows essentially by an act of fantasy. Fantasy is not understood here as equivalent to the “not-real” in some form of representational realism, but rather as constitutive of the very real. The paper examines the ways in which the fantasy surrounding the figure of “the terrorist” becomes a major component of any explanation why the president and the American public can have such a cavalier attitude toward targeted killings.

How terrorism ends – and does not end: the Basque case

ABSTRACT This article examines the end of ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna “Euskadi and Freedom”) in the light of the literature on “how terrorism ends”. Was it the result of police repression, defeat, negotiation, elimination, tactical success? Was it the result of military failure but not defeat? What role did the rebellion of its own social base play? Was it, in the end, a case of political transformation? The discourse of “unilateralism” developed by the Basque Nationalist Left is examined. The role of international actors and the so-called “virtual diplomacy” is situated in the context of the State and the global order. But did ETA really end? Four years after ETA declared its unconditional ceasefire, and after the international media considered it finished, the Spanish government does not think so. In conclusion, the article considers the lessons that derive from the Basque case regarding the issues of how terrorist groups end.

Paradoxes of religion and terrorism

Bruce Lincoln (ed.). Religion, Rebellion, Revolution: An Interdisciplinary & Cross‐Cultural Collection of Essays. New York: St. Martins Press, 1985. Pp.311.

Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism

35. ISBN 0–312–67061–3 Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Pp.238, illus. ISBN 0–19–505757–0