Scholarly study of political terrorism largely began in the early 1970s

UNDERSTANDING

THE

NEWDAY

INFAMY

MARK J. MILLER, Professor

Comparative Politics, European Politics, Migration Studies

University of Delaware

Statement prepared for the University of Delaware Forum

"Respect and Understand"

September 19, 2001

Scholarly study of political terrorism largely began in the early 1970s.To be sure, the phenomenon of political terrorism predated the 1970s.Terrorism, for instance, played a key role in the war in Algeria which began in 1954.The focus of early scholarship on political terrorism was very much upon left-wingrevolutionaries and regionalist terrorism in WesternEurope, theIRA and Basque ETA, and upon Palestinian guerillas.Nevertheless, terrorism already was understood to be a global phenomenon and a not entirely novel but increasingly significant form of warfare and conflict.

A scholarly consensus on how to define terrorism has never emerged, nor has one in the global community.I define it as political violence targeted at civilian populations to achieve political goals.Individuals, organizations and governments can engage in political terrorism but the major focus in scholarly writing has been upon revolutionary terrorism.The analogy drawn between the events of September 11, 2001 and Pearl Harbor is understandable but, in major respects, flawed.The Japanese attack in 1941 targeted the US military and initiated a vast but mainly conventional war between alliancesof national states.The violence perpetuated on September 11^th was terrorism because it was targeted at civilians.It too constituted an act of war, but the nature of war and conflict now is very different from that of World War II.The vast majority of conflicts in the post-Cold War period occur within states, not between states.And the protagonist which perpetuated the attack may not constitute a state, but rather a spatially dispersed movement or network of persons of diverse national backgrounds sharing grievances against the United States.The world has changed enormously since World War II, and it is important to understand how these changes have increased our vulnerability to acts of political terrorism.

Islamic fundamentalism was not a central concern of the first wave of scholarship about political terrorism.Religious fundamentalism, of course, is not a monopoly of the world's one billion plus Muslims.All traditional religions have been challenged by political modernity.Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim fundamentalists share a longing for theocracy; government based upon religious precepts and laws.Islamic fundamentalism can be traced back to the 19^th century resistance in the Sudan to the British.Muslims must renew themselves and purge themselves of corrupting influences to recapture a glorified past.The Muslim Brotherhood emerged in British-dominated Egypt in the 1920s.It would be subsequently repressed by Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s.The 1967 war, however, marked a turning point.The sheer magnitude of the Arab defeat discredited leaders like Nasser and was soon followed by a re-emergence of Islamic fundamentalism stoked by numerous grievances against the West and the US in particular.Part of the upwelling of grievances had to do with US involvement in Arab-Israeli conflict, the 1973 war and the decades-long strife in Lebanon.But processes of globalization also were at work.Resentment grew against the enormous socio-economic disparities in the region and around the world.Vast migrations uprooted millions of Muslims, and thrust them typically into more developed and prosperous states, not only in the Persian Gulf area but in Europe and North America as well.

Three pivotal events occurred in the late 1970s.(1) The US-brokered Camp David Accords brought Egypt-Israeli peace that was widely viewed as illegitimate.A short while later, Egyptian fundamentalists would kill the Egyptian leader, Sadat, and threaten to bring down his successor.(2) The Islamic revolution in Iran established an Islamic republic.(3)In neighboring Afghanistan, a succession of coups and mutinies was followed by Soviet invasion and civil war.The US funneled arms and other assistance to the Islamic resistance.The strife in Afghanistan, which continues to this day, was very complex involving ideological, ethnic, and regional factors.Thousands of Arab volunteers flocked to Afghanistan to fight the Communists while millions of Afghans fled to nearby Iran and Pakistan.One of the Arab volunteers was Osama Bin Laden, the wealthy son of a construction magnate from Saudi Arabia.Circa 1990, he created a movement called in Arabic, The Base, and which was very critical of the Arab monarchies, such as that in Saudi Arabia.Bin Laden denounced Arab participation in the alliance led by the US in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and held the stationing of US and other western troops in Saudi Arabia to be a desecration.

By the 1980s, then, research on Islamic fundamentalism had begun in earnest, and Islamic fundamentalist violence became an important concern in studies of terrorism.I think most scholars would concur that Islamic fundamentalists constitute a minority within the world of Islam, but are a growing force.Most Islamic fundamentalists are not prone to political violence and there is enormous diversity amongst them.Nevertheless, political terrorism perpetuated by Islamic fundamentalists has affected many predominately Islamic societies, but also Western societies with burgeoning populations of Muslims.

The eclipse of the Soviet Union profoundly affected the strife in Afghanistan.By the mid-1990s, the Taliban militia, which had its origins amongst Afghani refugees in Pakistan and which was strongly supported by elements within the Pakistani government and military, took control of much of Afghanistan.Bin Laden and his followers were key allies of the Taliban and have benefited from a degree of protection and autonomy in Taliban-controlled areas of the war-ravaged country.

Since the Gulf War, Bin Laden has been linked to a string of terrorist acts including the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.In 1997, he supported the issuance of a fatwa or religious decree calling upon Muslims to engage in holy war against Jews and Crusaders. This was akin to a declaration of war.His network of allies and supporters is global in scope, although Afghanistan appears to be the locus of his movement.

Most Muslims reject Bin Laden's ideas and activities.Bin Laden is perceived as a threat by many governments in the Middle East.However, constructing a broad coalition to support military action against Bin Laden and the Taliban will not be easy in part because of the depth of grievances felt.Scholarly assessments of counter-terrorism frequently warn against politically counter-productive results, especially if innocent civilians become "collateral damage".

Debates over how to respond to terrorism usually pit those who favor military responses against those who advocate addressing the socio-economic and political "causes" of political terrorism.This debate will be revisited in coming weeks and months.What transpires then will likely be epochal in nature.

Study of terrorism was quite marginal in international studies back in the 1970s.Today understanding terrorism appears central to understanding the world in which we live, a world being transformed by globalization processes, including migration, that, in some ways, increase vulnerability and insecurity.Among the most insecure and vulnerable are recent international migrants who themselves often become targets of violence.The scope of study of terrorism needs to be widened further.Inevitably, as a result of the violence of last week, understanding the nexus between migration and terrorism will assume a central place in security studies in the age of global governance.

Understanding the background to the events of last week requires appreciation of the vast complexity of the world in which we live.

On perhaps the most abstract level, we need to understand that national states are having a difficult time adjusting to new realities and vulnerability in a more interwoven world.Our unpreparedness arises in part because we tend to think of security in outmoded ways.Solutions to security threats increasingly require cooperation with foreign governments and coordination through webs of international institutions, the stuff of global governance. In other words, the response to the violence of last week must differ profoundly from the way in which the US responded to Pearl Harbor.Much as I admire what the US did during World War II, its evocation in today's transformed circumstances serves little purpose.It seems to me to be much more important to grasp that what appear to be far-away problems and issues can result in terrible security problems in powerful and wealthy democracies like the United States.

The interconnectedness of the world today, particularly migration processes, can result in a spatial dislocation of conflict and war to the very heart of the transatlantic zone of democracy and peace.This is what happened on September 11, 2001 that new, but very different, day of infamy.