Since 2003 - and publicly since 2006 - the government has been running a programme designed to reduce the danger of terrorism by preventing 'radicalisation': PREVENT.
There's an obvious problem in the basic approach of PREVENT: there's a difference between becoming a 'radical' and becoming a terrorist, and only one of these is something that the government should be trying to stop. If the government wants to stop people becoming terrorists (which would be a legitimate policy aim), what they need to stop is that specific step in the process of 'radicalisation' which takes people into actual terrorist involvement. This step is, of course, fiendishly difficult to identify, and takes different forms for different people; the entire broad process of 'radicalisation' (meaning 'becoming more radical') is much easier to combat. The problem is that if you make it a government priority to prevent people becoming more radical, you're committing the government to opposing certain political views, whether the people holding them are violent or not.
The government essentially has two impossible options: one target which is too small to hit and takes too many different forms to define consistently, and one which it can hit but shouldn't. Attacking an entire sub-culture with 'radical' views is a bad idea, ethically speaking - a democratic government shouldn't be in the business of banning certain forms of politics. It's also bad tactics. Say you've identified 500 people with more or less jihadist views, including 10 who are actually planning a terrorist action and 40 active sympathisers. In that scenario, putting the 450 people under intensive surveillance is at best a waste of resources; at worst, it will cause enough alienation to turn some of those people into active sympathisers, making the original problem worse.
The problem with PREVENT is fairly easy to state. Unfortunately, it's not a superficial problem that dissolves when looked at more closely, or a theoretical problem which has been resolved in practice; it's a real and unresolved problem, which has dogged PREVENT from the outset. The problem was summed up in the first published document on PREVENT, which defined 'radicalisation' as "The processes whereby certain experiences and events in a person’s life cause them to become radicalised, to the extent of turning to violence to resolve perceived grievances". Although 'radicalisation' literally means 'becoming radicalised', it's also defined as "becom[ing] radicalised to the extent of turning to violence".
Things didn't get much better in the second iteration of PREVENT, announced in 2009. Now what was at issue wasn't 'radicalisation' (always an under-defined term) but 'violent extremism'. The assumption was that it was possible to draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable forms of radicalism, the unacceptable kinds being inherently (and recognisably) 'violent' in themselves. Since this is in fact impossible, there was widespread suspicion of PREVENT in this period, precisely on the grounds that the fear of 'violent extremism' was having a chilling effect on free speech. In the same period, ironically, some PREVENT-funded projects were focusing - or attempting to focus - on the specific stage in the process of radicalisation which leads into violent activism. This necessarily meant that some official funding was going to people with radical - and in some cases quite unpleasant - views: if you want to stop radicals turning into terrorists, the people you want to work with are the radicals.
The Coalition government announced a third version of PREVENT in 2011, responding to two different sets of concerns. On one hand, the 'violent extremism' narrative was abandoned; a definite line was drawn between radical views, on one hand, and support for terrorism on the other. On the other hand, earlier versions of PREVENT were heavily criticised for channelling public money to (non-violent) extremists, and connections were drawn between 'extremist ideologies' and support for terrorism. In other words, we rapidly went back to square one: the idea of opposing terrorism while tolerating radicalism effectively disappeared, with Prime Ministerial statements to the effect that PREVENT should oppose extremism in all forms, violent or not.
Throughout the brief history of PREVENT, two things have been constant: the aim (influencing people not to become terrorists) and the means (an attack on radical ideas). The greatest irony of this tangled and unedifying story is how little it corresponds to what we know about desistance from crime. If you want to help career criminals to go straight, the research suggests that the best thing to do is help them to think they're going straight of their own accord and with their heads held high. The last thing you do is tell them that their entire view of society is wrong and demand that they repent, adopting the opposite of their existing views: the government is not a racket, the police are not bent, shoplifting is not a victimless crime, cannabis is not harmless... And yet this, according to the PREVENT approach, is how you get terrorists and terrorist sympathisers to 'go straight'.
Are terrorists that different from ordinary criminals? Is PREVENT really poorly designed? Or is the goal of PREVENT something other than preventing people becoming terrorists?
Thursday 6 March 2014
Monday 3 March 2014
Week 7: Counter-terrorist law and policing
Did September 11th change the world - has there been a major change
in the way governments have responded to terrorism. The answer is
"yes and no" - there was a big change in British governments'
approaches to counter-terrorism, but it didn't happen in September 2001.
The big change was what happened in May 1997, when Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister. Under Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990) there was a whole series of terrorist attacks in Britain, including the assassination of a number of senior political figures (and personal friends of the Prime Minister) and an attempted assassination of the PM herself. On one occasion while John Major was PM (1990-97), the IRA managed to bombard 10 Downing St while Cabinet was in session (nobody was hurt). What didn't happen between 1979 and 1997 was the introduction of any significant new counter-terrorist measures. When Thatcher became PM, the main counter-terrorist Act was the Prevention of Terrorism Act, passed (under Labour) in 1974. Thatcher's and Major's governments made some minor additions to the PTA, but they didn't feel the need to pass a counter-terrorist Act of their own, or to respond to each attack by bringing in a new law.
In 1997 Blair became Prime Minister. In 1998 the IRA signed a peace deal - the Good Friday Agreement - which effectively ended the main threat of terrorism at that time. Over the next ten years, Blair's government passed
Why is there such a big difference between the records of the Conservative governments of 1979-97 and the Labour governments of 1997-2010? There are a number of different ways of looking at it, but I think a key difference is that the Blair government used the precautionary principle when thinking about terrorism. The usual way to think about security risks is to quantify the severity of the danger and the probability of it happening, and multiply the two together. Something that only has a 1% chance of happening, but which will cause £10,000 worth of damage if it does, has a projected cost of 1% x £10,000 = £100; as such, it has exactly the same importance as something which will only cause £200 worth of damage but has a 50% chance of happening. The same calculations can be done using projected deaths, if you're feeling macabre.
Using the precautionary principle in this context means taking terrorism very seriously indeed - seriously enough, perhaps, to think in terms of emergency. And in an emergency drastic measures can be taken...
Changing gear a bit, here are a few questions about the shooting of Jean-Charles de Menezes in July 2005.
What if they'd got the right man?
The operation which led to the shooting of de Menezes was a horrific example of poor communication and lack of co-ordination. The initial failure to identify de Menezes was compounded by failures of leadership and organisation, culminating in the public execution of an innocent man. Public opinion was outraged, and counter-terrorist policing has never been quite so aggressive since. But what if the man the police followed to Stockwell Underground had been Hussain Osman - perhaps Hussain Osman on the run, unarmed, without any explosive, posing no danger to anyone? Would the police have faced any kind of prosecution, or even criticism?
Shouldn't somebody have said he wasn't the right man?
On the face of it, this seems to be a very straightforward failing: nobody (up to and including Cressida Dick) was willing to step up and say, "I don't think this is our man, everybody stand down". The trouble is that nobody knew that de Menezes wasn't the right man. Members of the surveillance team expressed doubts, but nobody was prepared to say that they were absolutely certain. Back in the operations room, Cressida Dick heard the reports that people were doubtful, but she wasn't prepared to convert that doubt into certainty either. The underlying problem was that the stakes were too high - see above re: 'precautionary principle'. If there was any realistic possibility that de Menezes was one of the bombers from the day before, and that he was planning another explosion, the police couldn't take the risk of letting him go. But they could only establish that he wasn't Hussain by stopping and questioning him - and they weren't about to do this, because this was a Kratos operation.
Or was it?
Apparently a Kratos codeword was never given, so strictly speaking this wasn't a Kratos operation. However, what happened when the firearms unit got to the tube station suggests very strongly that they, at least, were thinking in terms of a Kratos operation: in other words, intelligence tells you who the suspect is, and you neutralise the suspect without trying to make an arrest (since if you try and arrest a suicide bomber he's likely to blow himself up, taking you with him).
Whether Kratos was officially invoked or not, the de Menezes shooting demonstrates the awful contradiction at the heart of Kratos and similar policies. On one hand, suicide bombers can't realistically be arrested, so identifying somebody as a suicide bomber is essentially a death sentence (something which suicide bombers, by definition, can't really complain about). On the other, suicide bombers can do a great deal of harm, so even the smallest suspicion that somebody is a suicide bomber should make the police take action. But what can that action be? Arresting the suspect or even talking to him or her is a risk that the police can't afford to take, if they're dealing with an actual suicide bomber - but they can't always know for certain whether they are. In effect, Kratos means that the police are committed to using lethal force with imperfect information. Sooner or later it was bound to go horribly wrong. Perhaps we were lucky that it was 'sooner'.
There's one more unanswered question:
What was actually going on when de Menezes was shot?
We don't know what was going through the minds of the main participants, and it's quite hard to reconstruct. If "Ivor" thought that de Menezes was a suicide bomber, why did he sit so close to him - and why, in particular, did he drag him back onto the seat and hold him down? Wouldn't that be insanely dangerous? But if he didn't think de Menezes was a suicide bomber, why did he point him out to the armed officers (instead of, perhaps, shaking his head) - and why did he then, essentially, hold de Menezes down to be executed? The questions for the armed officers are similar: if they didn't think de Menezes was a suicide bomber, why did they shoot him repeatedly in the head? And if they did think he was a suicide bomber, why on earth did they get so close? A related question has to do with policy and training. Presumably what they did on the tube train wasn't something the firearms officers thought up themselves on the spur of the moment; presumably they were following procedure. Does police procedure for dealing with suicide bombers involve executing the suspect at point-blank range?
The big change was what happened in May 1997, when Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister. Under Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990) there was a whole series of terrorist attacks in Britain, including the assassination of a number of senior political figures (and personal friends of the Prime Minister) and an attempted assassination of the PM herself. On one occasion while John Major was PM (1990-97), the IRA managed to bombard 10 Downing St while Cabinet was in session (nobody was hurt). What didn't happen between 1979 and 1997 was the introduction of any significant new counter-terrorist measures. When Thatcher became PM, the main counter-terrorist Act was the Prevention of Terrorism Act, passed (under Labour) in 1974. Thatcher's and Major's governments made some minor additions to the PTA, but they didn't feel the need to pass a counter-terrorist Act of their own, or to respond to each attack by bringing in a new law.
In 1997 Blair became Prime Minister. In 1998 the IRA signed a peace deal - the Good Friday Agreement - which effectively ended the main threat of terrorism at that time. Over the next ten years, Blair's government passed
- the Criminal Justice, Terrorism and Conspiracy Act 1998 (in response to the Omagh bombing carried out by a dissident Irish republican group)
- the Terrorism Act 2000
- the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (ATCSA) (in response to 11/9/2001)
- the Terrorism Act 2005 (in response to ATCSA being found illegal)
- the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2006 (in response to 7/7/2005)
- the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 (in response to the Glasgow Airport attack of 30/6/2007)
Why is there such a big difference between the records of the Conservative governments of 1979-97 and the Labour governments of 1997-2010? There are a number of different ways of looking at it, but I think a key difference is that the Blair government used the precautionary principle when thinking about terrorism. The usual way to think about security risks is to quantify the severity of the danger and the probability of it happening, and multiply the two together. Something that only has a 1% chance of happening, but which will cause £10,000 worth of damage if it does, has a projected cost of 1% x £10,000 = £100; as such, it has exactly the same importance as something which will only cause £200 worth of damage but has a 50% chance of happening. The same calculations can be done using projected deaths, if you're feeling macabre.
Using the precautionary principle in this context means taking terrorism very seriously indeed - seriously enough, perhaps, to think in terms of emergency. And in an emergency drastic measures can be taken...
Awake, arise, you drowsy sleeper
Awake, arise, it’s almost day.
No time to lie, no time to slumber,
No time to dream your life away.It was a gorgeous summer's morning
It was a gorgeous summer's day.
His cotton jacket was all he carried
As he walked out to face the day...
Changing gear a bit, here are a few questions about the shooting of Jean-Charles de Menezes in July 2005.
What if they'd got the right man?
The operation which led to the shooting of de Menezes was a horrific example of poor communication and lack of co-ordination. The initial failure to identify de Menezes was compounded by failures of leadership and organisation, culminating in the public execution of an innocent man. Public opinion was outraged, and counter-terrorist policing has never been quite so aggressive since. But what if the man the police followed to Stockwell Underground had been Hussain Osman - perhaps Hussain Osman on the run, unarmed, without any explosive, posing no danger to anyone? Would the police have faced any kind of prosecution, or even criticism?
Shouldn't somebody have said he wasn't the right man?
On the face of it, this seems to be a very straightforward failing: nobody (up to and including Cressida Dick) was willing to step up and say, "I don't think this is our man, everybody stand down". The trouble is that nobody knew that de Menezes wasn't the right man. Members of the surveillance team expressed doubts, but nobody was prepared to say that they were absolutely certain. Back in the operations room, Cressida Dick heard the reports that people were doubtful, but she wasn't prepared to convert that doubt into certainty either. The underlying problem was that the stakes were too high - see above re: 'precautionary principle'. If there was any realistic possibility that de Menezes was one of the bombers from the day before, and that he was planning another explosion, the police couldn't take the risk of letting him go. But they could only establish that he wasn't Hussain by stopping and questioning him - and they weren't about to do this, because this was a Kratos operation.
Or was it?
Apparently a Kratos codeword was never given, so strictly speaking this wasn't a Kratos operation. However, what happened when the firearms unit got to the tube station suggests very strongly that they, at least, were thinking in terms of a Kratos operation: in other words, intelligence tells you who the suspect is, and you neutralise the suspect without trying to make an arrest (since if you try and arrest a suicide bomber he's likely to blow himself up, taking you with him).
Whether Kratos was officially invoked or not, the de Menezes shooting demonstrates the awful contradiction at the heart of Kratos and similar policies. On one hand, suicide bombers can't realistically be arrested, so identifying somebody as a suicide bomber is essentially a death sentence (something which suicide bombers, by definition, can't really complain about). On the other, suicide bombers can do a great deal of harm, so even the smallest suspicion that somebody is a suicide bomber should make the police take action. But what can that action be? Arresting the suspect or even talking to him or her is a risk that the police can't afford to take, if they're dealing with an actual suicide bomber - but they can't always know for certain whether they are. In effect, Kratos means that the police are committed to using lethal force with imperfect information. Sooner or later it was bound to go horribly wrong. Perhaps we were lucky that it was 'sooner'.
There's one more unanswered question:
What was actually going on when de Menezes was shot?
We don't know what was going through the minds of the main participants, and it's quite hard to reconstruct. If "Ivor" thought that de Menezes was a suicide bomber, why did he sit so close to him - and why, in particular, did he drag him back onto the seat and hold him down? Wouldn't that be insanely dangerous? But if he didn't think de Menezes was a suicide bomber, why did he point him out to the armed officers (instead of, perhaps, shaking his head) - and why did he then, essentially, hold de Menezes down to be executed? The questions for the armed officers are similar: if they didn't think de Menezes was a suicide bomber, why did they shoot him repeatedly in the head? And if they did think he was a suicide bomber, why on earth did they get so close? A related question has to do with policy and training. Presumably what they did on the tube train wasn't something the firearms officers thought up themselves on the spur of the moment; presumably they were following procedure. Does police procedure for dealing with suicide bombers involve executing the suspect at point-blank range?
It was a gorgeous summer's morning
It was a gorgeous summer's day.
His cotton jacket was all he carried
As he walked out to face the day.
Jean-Charles de Menezes, 1/7/1978 - 22/7/2005
Wednesday 12 February 2014
Weeks 4 and 5: The War on Terror; defining 'terrorism'
Although there have been military operations in several different parts
of the world, the 'War on Terror' label was applied primarily to US and
British operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The counter-terrorist
justification for the invasion of Iraq was always weak; all it really amounted to was
an additional reason why Saddam Hussein should not be permitted to
develop weapons of mass destruction, i.e. in case they became even more
dangerous by falling into the hands of terrorists. When the US/British
invasion had established that Saddam Hussein's arsenal of chemical and
biological weapons had indeed been destroyed (confirming the UN
inspection team's reports), it was argued instead that the invasion gave
Britain the opportunity to defeat jihadists in Iraq instead of waiting
for them to come to Britain. Whether the people of Iraq would think this
was a good trade-off is another question. The invasion certainly hasn't brought a just and enduring peace to Iraq. According to UN figures, "7,818 civilians and 1,050 security forces died in violent attacks across Iraq in
2013 - making last year the bloodiest in Iraq since 2008".
The rationale for invading Afghanistan was a lot more straightforward: the Taliban were in power and they were harbouring Osama bin Laden, so the only way to get bin Laden was to overthrow the Taliban and set up a new, more legitimate government instead. There was no possibility of negotiating with the Taliban - say, for example, getting them to hand bin Laden over - because this would mean, well, negotiating with the Taliban. It's certainly true that leaving the Taliban in power would have had very bad results, and that the degree of democracy and political freedom the Afghan people currently enjoy is a big improvement on the situation in 2001. Whether the democratic and egalitarian reforms brought about by the occupying forces are permanent - whether the Taliban's exclusion from power is permanent, even - is another question. A decade-long war which has killed 3,000 US and allied troops and somewhere around 20,000 Afghan civilians may turn out not to have been the best way to flush out bin Laden or to encourage reform in the Afghan government.
It may also turn out to have been illegal. In international law, it is almost impossible to justify an aggressive war, particularly one which - like the invasion of Iraq - was explicitly embarked on to achieve political goals (the disarmament and/or removal from power of Saddam Hussein). There are provisions in international law for a legal invasion: the "Caroline" argument justifying anticipatory self-defence dates back to 1837. More recently, it has been argued that the UN Security Council should approve of invasions carried out to prevent large-scale loss of life, under the "responsibility to protect" doctrine (formulated in 2005) - although the decision in R2P cases rests with the UN Security Council.
It is not impossible to make arguments like these cover Afghanistan or Iraq, but it is very difficult. There were UN resolutions calling on Iraq to disarm; however, most people did not see those resolutions as justifying war, let alone a war carried out by a self-selected alliance of nations without the approval of the UN Security Council. The legality of the two wars - in terms of whether it was legal to declare war (ius ad bellum) - is highly suspect. And, as we know, the legality of the wars in terms of how they have been conducted (ius in bello) is also very questionable; at best, the wars have been scarred by numerous war crimes, from Abu Ghraib to the most recent drone strikes. At worst, the aggressor nations have been guilty of state crimes.
But what is state crime? The International State Crime Initiative defines it as "organisational deviance" leading to "human rights violations": in other words, "organisational deviance" (collective wrongdoing), within a government organisation, which leads to people being harmed. State crime is conduct which breaches human rights and which, wrongly, has organisational backing from within a government (an individual soldier going rogue can't commit state crime).
"Deviance" is a key word here. Deviance is a process, not a state: an organisation becomes deviant by deviating, going morally off course. It's not unknown for a government to be led by somebody who openly flouts the law, laughs at international agreements on human rights and generally acts like Dr Evil; it's not unknown, but it is very, very unusual. When business executives commit crimes they usually reach the point of breaking the law through many small steps - turning a blind eye, making excuses, blaming the competition - and governments are no different. When government ministers commit state crimes, they usually believe that they have to commit them. Or that it's OK this once. Or that the end justifies the means. Or that another government would do it if they didn't...
In business, a tightly-regulated company is an environment where a culture of wrongdoing is unlikely to develop. An unregulated company, running on personal relationships and word-of-mouth instructions, is a 'permissive environment' for organisational deviance. It's the same with governments: some of them are permissive environments for organisational deviance, some aren't. A government which acts on the basis that the head of government is above the law; or that there's a war on (when there isn't); or that terrorism represents a pressing emergency threatening the very life of the nation itself... any government like that is a very permissive environment for organisational deviance and state crime.
Can we talk of state terrorism? Some would say not: terrorism is by definition the tactic of a non-state group. Others (myself included) would prefer to avoid the word 'terrorism' altogether, and talk about 'organised political violence' by non-state groups and 'human rights abuses' by the state. But if we are going to use the word 'terrorism', should the actions of state organisations be excluded?
Changing the subject slightly, there's a big problem with the generally-accepted academic definitions of 'terrorism'. There's a consensus right across the literature: terrorism means indiscriminate attacks on civilians and 'symbolic' targets, carried out with the aim of inducing terror and changing political behaviour - by intimidating the general public and/or by influencing the government. Some terrorist groups certainly fit the bill some of the time: Al-Qaida is only the most obvious example. But there wasn't very much that was 'terrorist' (according to the textbook definition) about the activities of the Red Brigades in Italy or the Provisional IRA in Ireland or the Palestine Liberation Organisation. "Armed struggle" groups don't bomb newspaper offices or murder police officers or assassinate their opponents because they want to terrorise the general public, or even because they want to intimidate journalists and police officers and politicians; they do it because they believe they're fighting a war and those targets represent their enemies.
If the textbook definition of 'terrorism' doesn't describe actual flesh-and-blood terrorists, what does it describe? In political discourse, the word 'terror' goes back to the French Revolution. The first 'Terror' was an eleven-month clampdown on political opponents, involving mass executions of enemies of the regime; between September 1793 and the following July, tens of thousands died on the guillotine. Subsequently the word 'terror' was widely used to describe indiscriminate killing by governments, particularly in the aftermath of an attempted revolution - the Hungarian "White Terror" of 1919-21 is only one example. When the development of military aircraft permitted it, "terror bombing" was carried out in World War II (Dresden, Hamburg), during the Spanish Civil War (Guernica) and in Britain's colonies (Mesopotamia, a.k.a. Iraq). There's no textbook definition for "terror bombing" - or "state terror" - but when you look at the textbook criteria for terrorism (indiscriminate attacks on civilians and 'symbolic' targets, carried out with the aim of inducing terror and changing political behaviour) both Dresden and Guernica seem to fit quite well.
To sum up: governments are much more likely to use terror tactics than most people who are called 'terrorists'. State terror is a state crime (in war it's a war crime), and as such it can only happen on the basis of 'organisational deviance' - a phrase which here means 'a government collectively thinking that it's above the law'. And counter-terrorism - which often brings with it concepts of 'emergency' and 'exceptional situations' - makes a fertile breeding ground for organisational deviance in government.
The rationale for invading Afghanistan was a lot more straightforward: the Taliban were in power and they were harbouring Osama bin Laden, so the only way to get bin Laden was to overthrow the Taliban and set up a new, more legitimate government instead. There was no possibility of negotiating with the Taliban - say, for example, getting them to hand bin Laden over - because this would mean, well, negotiating with the Taliban. It's certainly true that leaving the Taliban in power would have had very bad results, and that the degree of democracy and political freedom the Afghan people currently enjoy is a big improvement on the situation in 2001. Whether the democratic and egalitarian reforms brought about by the occupying forces are permanent - whether the Taliban's exclusion from power is permanent, even - is another question. A decade-long war which has killed 3,000 US and allied troops and somewhere around 20,000 Afghan civilians may turn out not to have been the best way to flush out bin Laden or to encourage reform in the Afghan government.
It may also turn out to have been illegal. In international law, it is almost impossible to justify an aggressive war, particularly one which - like the invasion of Iraq - was explicitly embarked on to achieve political goals (the disarmament and/or removal from power of Saddam Hussein). There are provisions in international law for a legal invasion: the "Caroline" argument justifying anticipatory self-defence dates back to 1837. More recently, it has been argued that the UN Security Council should approve of invasions carried out to prevent large-scale loss of life, under the "responsibility to protect" doctrine (formulated in 2005) - although the decision in R2P cases rests with the UN Security Council.
It is not impossible to make arguments like these cover Afghanistan or Iraq, but it is very difficult. There were UN resolutions calling on Iraq to disarm; however, most people did not see those resolutions as justifying war, let alone a war carried out by a self-selected alliance of nations without the approval of the UN Security Council. The legality of the two wars - in terms of whether it was legal to declare war (ius ad bellum) - is highly suspect. And, as we know, the legality of the wars in terms of how they have been conducted (ius in bello) is also very questionable; at best, the wars have been scarred by numerous war crimes, from Abu Ghraib to the most recent drone strikes. At worst, the aggressor nations have been guilty of state crimes.
But what is state crime? The International State Crime Initiative defines it as "organisational deviance" leading to "human rights violations": in other words, "organisational deviance" (collective wrongdoing), within a government organisation, which leads to people being harmed. State crime is conduct which breaches human rights and which, wrongly, has organisational backing from within a government (an individual soldier going rogue can't commit state crime).
"Deviance" is a key word here. Deviance is a process, not a state: an organisation becomes deviant by deviating, going morally off course. It's not unknown for a government to be led by somebody who openly flouts the law, laughs at international agreements on human rights and generally acts like Dr Evil; it's not unknown, but it is very, very unusual. When business executives commit crimes they usually reach the point of breaking the law through many small steps - turning a blind eye, making excuses, blaming the competition - and governments are no different. When government ministers commit state crimes, they usually believe that they have to commit them. Or that it's OK this once. Or that the end justifies the means. Or that another government would do it if they didn't...
In business, a tightly-regulated company is an environment where a culture of wrongdoing is unlikely to develop. An unregulated company, running on personal relationships and word-of-mouth instructions, is a 'permissive environment' for organisational deviance. It's the same with governments: some of them are permissive environments for organisational deviance, some aren't. A government which acts on the basis that the head of government is above the law; or that there's a war on (when there isn't); or that terrorism represents a pressing emergency threatening the very life of the nation itself... any government like that is a very permissive environment for organisational deviance and state crime.
Can we talk of state terrorism? Some would say not: terrorism is by definition the tactic of a non-state group. Others (myself included) would prefer to avoid the word 'terrorism' altogether, and talk about 'organised political violence' by non-state groups and 'human rights abuses' by the state. But if we are going to use the word 'terrorism', should the actions of state organisations be excluded?
Changing the subject slightly, there's a big problem with the generally-accepted academic definitions of 'terrorism'. There's a consensus right across the literature: terrorism means indiscriminate attacks on civilians and 'symbolic' targets, carried out with the aim of inducing terror and changing political behaviour - by intimidating the general public and/or by influencing the government. Some terrorist groups certainly fit the bill some of the time: Al-Qaida is only the most obvious example. But there wasn't very much that was 'terrorist' (according to the textbook definition) about the activities of the Red Brigades in Italy or the Provisional IRA in Ireland or the Palestine Liberation Organisation. "Armed struggle" groups don't bomb newspaper offices or murder police officers or assassinate their opponents because they want to terrorise the general public, or even because they want to intimidate journalists and police officers and politicians; they do it because they believe they're fighting a war and those targets represent their enemies.
If the textbook definition of 'terrorism' doesn't describe actual flesh-and-blood terrorists, what does it describe? In political discourse, the word 'terror' goes back to the French Revolution. The first 'Terror' was an eleven-month clampdown on political opponents, involving mass executions of enemies of the regime; between September 1793 and the following July, tens of thousands died on the guillotine. Subsequently the word 'terror' was widely used to describe indiscriminate killing by governments, particularly in the aftermath of an attempted revolution - the Hungarian "White Terror" of 1919-21 is only one example. When the development of military aircraft permitted it, "terror bombing" was carried out in World War II (Dresden, Hamburg), during the Spanish Civil War (Guernica) and in Britain's colonies (Mesopotamia, a.k.a. Iraq). There's no textbook definition for "terror bombing" - or "state terror" - but when you look at the textbook criteria for terrorism (indiscriminate attacks on civilians and 'symbolic' targets, carried out with the aim of inducing terror and changing political behaviour) both Dresden and Guernica seem to fit quite well.
To sum up: governments are much more likely to use terror tactics than most people who are called 'terrorists'. State terror is a state crime (in war it's a war crime), and as such it can only happen on the basis of 'organisational deviance' - a phrase which here means 'a government collectively thinking that it's above the law'. And counter-terrorism - which often brings with it concepts of 'emergency' and 'exceptional situations' - makes a fertile breeding ground for organisational deviance in government.
Wednesday 29 January 2014
Week 3: Islamophobia
In the context of political extremism, and political violence in particular, Islamophobia presents us with a problem. On one hand, right-wing and nationalist extremists often use Islamophobic themes and vocabulary, as well as - or in preference to - straightforwardly racist discourse: immigrants are seen as a threat to the nation specifically because of their religion. Islamophobia, when vocalised by the likes of Anders Behring Breivik, is part of the problem of political extremism.
On the other hand, Islamist militants are responsible for one of the key contemporary forms of organised political violence: 'jihadi' terrorists have killed thousands in the name of Islam. Contemporary counter-terrorist initiatives - such as the British government's PREVENT programme - are sometimes accused of Islamophobia, of presenting Muslims en masse as the enemy rather than targeting the small minority of jihadis and their sympathisers.
On one hand, Islamophobia is part of the vocabulary of contemporary right-wing extremism; on the other, it is an unfortunate error fallen into by otherwise well-intentioned anti-terrorist initiatives. Are these arguments both correct - and if so, how are they connected? How do we relate them to the argument that the Islamists themselves are a politically reactionary force who belong on the extreme Right (just look what they've done to Afghanistan), so that opposition to at least some forms of Islam is justifiable in democratic and liberal terms? What about the argument that religion itself is a reactionary force, so that anyone who believes in democracy and progress actually should be 'Islamophobic' - as well as being Christophobic, Hinduphobic and so on?
I'm not going to give you all the answers! But I think the tensions and contradictions we're looking at here can be traced back to tensions and contradictions in history. Specifically, the ideas of democracy and political liberalism - and the idea that religion should not be a political force - developed in Britain, and other Western nations, at a time when those nations were heavily involved in the imperialist conquest of the rest of the world. This means that it was perfectly possible to be a liberal (opposed to conservatism, monarchy and organised religion) while also being an imperialist; in the nineteenth century, many on the Left argued that the British Empire was a positive force, because it would bring the benefits of civilisation to 'backward' parts of the world (such as Afghanistan).
Britain's historic - and still continuing - imperialist role in the world has two key effects. Firstly, it gets us into fights: a nation whose government did not still have dreams of imperial grandeur would have thought twice about sending troops into Iraq and Afghanistan. Secondly and crucially, it distorts the way that we see those fights. This is why there is an overlap between the world-view of a reactionary racist like Breivik and the assumptions of the British government's PREVENT programme. If you believe that countries like ours have a right to dominate the world, you are going to find it hard to understand when people in other countries fight back. Liberal imperialists under attack are prone to claim that they are being attacked for their liberalism. This isn't necessarily the case!
On the other hand, Islamist militants are responsible for one of the key contemporary forms of organised political violence: 'jihadi' terrorists have killed thousands in the name of Islam. Contemporary counter-terrorist initiatives - such as the British government's PREVENT programme - are sometimes accused of Islamophobia, of presenting Muslims en masse as the enemy rather than targeting the small minority of jihadis and their sympathisers.
On one hand, Islamophobia is part of the vocabulary of contemporary right-wing extremism; on the other, it is an unfortunate error fallen into by otherwise well-intentioned anti-terrorist initiatives. Are these arguments both correct - and if so, how are they connected? How do we relate them to the argument that the Islamists themselves are a politically reactionary force who belong on the extreme Right (just look what they've done to Afghanistan), so that opposition to at least some forms of Islam is justifiable in democratic and liberal terms? What about the argument that religion itself is a reactionary force, so that anyone who believes in democracy and progress actually should be 'Islamophobic' - as well as being Christophobic, Hinduphobic and so on?
I'm not going to give you all the answers! But I think the tensions and contradictions we're looking at here can be traced back to tensions and contradictions in history. Specifically, the ideas of democracy and political liberalism - and the idea that religion should not be a political force - developed in Britain, and other Western nations, at a time when those nations were heavily involved in the imperialist conquest of the rest of the world. This means that it was perfectly possible to be a liberal (opposed to conservatism, monarchy and organised religion) while also being an imperialist; in the nineteenth century, many on the Left argued that the British Empire was a positive force, because it would bring the benefits of civilisation to 'backward' parts of the world (such as Afghanistan).
Britain's historic - and still continuing - imperialist role in the world has two key effects. Firstly, it gets us into fights: a nation whose government did not still have dreams of imperial grandeur would have thought twice about sending troops into Iraq and Afghanistan. Secondly and crucially, it distorts the way that we see those fights. This is why there is an overlap between the world-view of a reactionary racist like Breivik and the assumptions of the British government's PREVENT programme. If you believe that countries like ours have a right to dominate the world, you are going to find it hard to understand when people in other countries fight back. Liberal imperialists under attack are prone to claim that they are being attacked for their liberalism. This isn't necessarily the case!
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