The budget and resources that have been dedicated to combatting terrorism this century are staggering. But has it worked?
In this episode, George Miller talks to Leonie B. Jackson, author of What is Counterterrorism for?, about the exceptional measures that states have taken in recent decades – such as detention without trial and targeted killing – in reaction to terrorist threats which they often portray as existential. When the terrorist spectacularly demonstrates that the state has failed to protect its citizens, Leonie explains, there’s an all-too-familiar recourse on the part of the state to put its response on a military footing.
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Leonie B Jackson is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Northumbria University and an editor of the journal Critical Studies on Terrorism.
What Is Counterterrorism For? is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £8.99.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
01:15 – How did 9/11 and its aftermath play a role in your thinking about terrorism?
02:24 – What was it that drew you to the field of counterterrorism in particular?
06:48 – What are counterterrorism’s animating questions or its concerns?
08:03 – When did counterterrorism actually come on the agenda as something which merits very serious scrutiny?
11:58 – What are the problems with the power counterterrorism grants?
18:01 – How important is it to actually look at what works and what doesn’t work within the field of counterterrorism?
21:38 – Do you see a great variety of counterterrorism approaches?
24:35 – Do you think there’s a public readiness to tolerate if not to embrace the things which have been done in the name of counterterrorism, especially in the last quarter of a century?
28:20 – Is there some way of reaching beyond the academic community and advancing this argument?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
George Miller: Hello and welcome to the Transforming Society podcast from Bristol University Press.
My name is George Miller and I’m the editor of a new series from BUP that launched last year: over the next few years What is it for? will explore the purpose of a range of institutions, beliefs, ideologies and other key elements of the contemporary world: from war to philanthropy; nuclear weapons to free speech; conspiracy theories to veganism.
The latest addition to the series is What is counterterrorism for? by Leonie Jackson. Leonie is an assistant professor in the social sciences department at Northumbria University who has worked extensively on critical approaches to terrorism and counterterrorism.
In her book Leonie examines how counterterrorism became such an all-pervasive part of our daily life and language: she looks at the powers have been claimed for it, and why, and what effect have those powers had, both on terrorism and on wider society.
When I spoke to her recently, I mentioned that I knew she became a student just after 9/11 and I imagined that the events of that day and their aftermath had played a formative role in her subsequent thinking about terrorism and the measures states have taken to counter it.
Leonie Jackson: So I started my undergraduate politics degree in September 2001. And I wasn’t a particularly political person prior to that point, but obviously it changed the way that politics was taught, certainly. And there was a lot of talk about it changing the world, which obviously is a theme that’s addressed in this book. But it completely opened my eyes to how the world was changing at that point. And it completely changed my direction in life as well. I became very interested in terrorism and counterterrorism and how it was talked about in particular. And that is the direction that my academic career has taken ever since.
GM: I guess those events affected a lot of people and in lots of different ways. And I suppose it might have, if you’re studying politics, it might open up a whole range of different pathways through that. What was it, do you think, that drew you to the field of counterterrorism in particular versus some of the other avenues that you might have gone down?
LJ: It’s hard to describe and think about when you look back because it was a very strange time. We were being told that the world was changing and that we were in incredible danger almost daily. It was obviously an incredibly shocking event and it was constantly, I’m sure you remember this, it was constantly on rolling news, on the television. It was something you could not get away from. It was a scary time.
But it was also the changes that were being made in terms of our daily lives that were very strange. And this is speaking as someone who was living in a Western liberal democracy at the time. It’s not, it’s very different to people who were living in countries that were subsequently targeted. But lives were changed in really quite dramatic ways, but also in quite banal ways that we perhaps didn’t even notice at that moment.
And so there was a feeling that everyone was drawn into this narrative of the War on Terror as it was being developed. And that was very interesting to me because it was the stories that were being told about terrorism and counterterrorism that were very powerful, but were very, very interesting.
And that’s what drew me into that field, basically, to understand what these stories that were being told about how the world had changed and what needed to be done in order to protect people, how they were told was fascinating to me and remain fascinating to me.
GM: And did you have a kind of instinctive wish to push back against the narratives that were being put out? Because as you say, they were very powerful. They were cast in existential civilizational-clash terms. But in your early 20s, were you already sensing, hey, there’s probably more to it. There’s probably more nuance. There’s probably more things going on behind the scenes than perhaps these grand narratives allow?
LJ: Yeah, I remember one of my big political awakening moments was the march against the war on Iraq. So that was in March 2003, or just before, February, perhaps. But just before the war in Iraq happened, millions of people across the world came together to protest against the war. And I called in sick to my Saturday job and caught a train down to London to join people there and to see this sea of people in central London marching through the streets, asking for this not to happen, to push back against that. And to see the kind of problems that this would cause the war against Iraq and the war on terror more broadly.
It was very powerful to be part of that. It was something that had a real impact on my life, on my understanding of how ordinary people recognise the harms that are done by counterterrorism and can and do push back against that. And to look back on that some 20 years later it’s a sort of bittersweet moment because obviously it didn’t work. The war on Iraq did go ahead and the War on Terror became more entrenched and more problematic and arguably is still with us today. But it did show that people are engaged and people generally do push back against the violence of counterterrorism and the violence of war. And that was a very powerful thing to be a part of.
GM: And for people who listen to this, who perhaps don’t know very much about counterterrorism studies, what are its animating questions or its concerns? How would you situate it as a field?
LJ: Counterterrorism studies, it sits in lots of fields, because it’s concerned with issues such as human rights, issues such as war and force and when to use that. It sits within the criminology field because some counterterrorism scholars would argue that counterterrorism is effectively crime-fighting, so we should see terrorism as a crime and therefore we should fight it using criminological tools. It sits within the politics field, it’s one of these fields which has a lot of different bases basically. And that’s a wonderful thing, in my opinion, because it brings in the scholarly concerns of lots of different disciplines and lots of different fields to ask very pressing questions about one of the kind of most important state activities of the present moment.
GM: I wanted to ask you about that very thing. When would you say, roughly speaking, the question became pressing because I was thinking, if you go back decade by decade, there might be a point at which asking what is counterterrorism for wasn’t a very meaningful question or wasn’t felt to be a very pressing question, but when do you think it actually comes on the agenda as something which merits very serious scrutiny?
LJ: It has a long history. It hasn’t always been called counterterrorism, but I think we can say this is what is happening, is similar to what is happening in the counter-terrorism field today. So obviously terrorism itself. I mean we probably should say something about this, terrorism itself is a very contested concept I’m sure you know that, people know that. But the first time it comes into use in the French Revolution, so it’s state terrorism, it’s terrorism from above. And we don’t really see counterterrorism at that point. When we see counterterrorism coming into usage, it’s when the state itself is countering a terrorism from below.
So, particularly we see that in the 19th century, when the so-called anarchist terrorists become active across particularly Europe and United States. And we see a worldwide movement basically against anarchist terrorism against the bomb throwers, where states work together and start to develop strategies to prevent this happening. So we see anarchist terrorists, particularly as I said in Europe and Russia in the United States, the ‘dynamiters’ is what they were called, throwing dynamite and assassinating very high-profile people within those states.
And then we see practices and language that becomes shared by these states as means to counter them. And again, you wouldn’t see this called counterterrorism, it’s kind of counter-anarchist or counter-dynamiters. But the practices that are used are things that we would recognise today in counterterrorism of the present moment.
GM: They might not have used the label counterterrorism, but we would recognise the common characteristic of the threat being conceived of as in some cases existential and in nearly all cases as exceptional. There’s something about this which distinguishes it in the eyes of the elite from a criminal threat or a threat of any other kind. So it’s an exceptional threat and therefore it seems to call for exceptional measures. That seems to be a thread that runs through history and therefore runs through your book.
LJ: Yeah, exactly. It’s seen as a civilizational threat, it’s seen as an exceptional threat, and therefore, things that have historically or fairly recently been unacceptable such as torture, such as detention without trial, become acceptable. The scope of acceptability widens, ostensibly just for this small moment and ostensibly just for this one group. But what we tend to see is that that stretches and activities, the counter-terrorist activities that were previously only for a small group or directed towards a small group of so-called dangerous individuals who are seen as an existential threat to the state, it widens and the counter-terrorism apparatus moves its gaze to a broader range of people, because these powers are quite helpful, right? It is quite helpful to not be constrained by the rule of law. So that is what tends to happen with these powers.
GM: As you say in the book, there is a very strong narrative, a very clear, simple black-and-white narrative that can be applied to the implementation of these powers because there is this external threat which is perceived as potentially existential and bent on destruction. Therefore, a state can claim the right to use exceptional measures that would fall outside all norms in normal circumstances. It can claim that in applying such powers, it is protecting its citizenry, it’s acting in the citizen’s best interest.
There are manifold problems, obviously, with that, but they seem to operate in a ratchet kind of effect. There doesn’t often seem to be an ostensible rolling back of those powers and they get misapplied and they fall outside all conscionable norms. So I guess that there are multiple problems with that, but there’s this sort of umbrella narrative that is used to advance them.
LJ: Yeah. And it’s important to note that ratcheting, because the effect of these powers is to say the state can protect you, the individual, the state can protect its citizens because terrorism really spectacularly demonstrates that the state can’t protect its individual, the individuals within its borders. And so once powers are in place to protect those citizens, if another terrorist attack happens, then that again demonstrates it. And so you do have this ratcheting up of these powers. And this is again, one of, as you said, the manifold problems, but this is one of the key problems with that, that the powers tend to be extended and tend to become often more draconian.
GM: I guess the problem for democratically elected politicians is they cannot countenance – and I mean, I can understand why – the prospect of some spectacular security failure. Therefore, to them, it seems more palatable to perhaps use draconian powers to do things that happen out of sight, which may be overreach and are misapplied, because the prospect of failure, on the other hand, would just be so terrible. They’re willing to take that risk. In other words, they don’t have some great securitarian design on society perhaps, but they see the risk of failing to protect the citizenry as one they’re not willing to take.
LJ: Yeah, that is definitely something that you can trace through the ages of counterterrorism. But again, it’s all about the story that we tell about terrorism and counterterrorism. It’s about the narrative. If the narrative is that this is an existential political threat to our society, then it is much more difficult to countenance those threats. But if the narrative is that terrorism is unfortunately like crime, something that is a part of living in a modern society, then it becomes much more palatable to have a proportionate response to that, as we would to crime. We wouldn’t have a police debate because crime went up, we would hope. But we can have that same response to terrorism, but for a variety of reasons, terrorism is seen as this very special type of activity that can and should be responded to in the ways that you’re talking about there, in order that no threat is there, or that there is no possibility of a terrorist attack happening. And that’s a very difficult thing to do in a modern society.
GM: Yeah, because, I mean, the sort of salient difference that occurs to me between crime and terrorism is that crime doesn’t seek to draw attention to itself. Whereas if a terrorist attack isn’t spectacular and doesn’t attract attention, then it’s a failure. So it’s a harder conversation to have than perhaps saying, you know, there will always be a certain level of crime in society, we’ll try to tamp down on it. It’s a harder argument to make that some level of spectacular terrorism is just something we’ve got to get used to and have got to learn to live with, isn’t it?
LJ: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s partly because terrorism so clearly shows the citizens, or the watchers of the attack, that the state cannot protect the citizens. And so it becomes an attack on the social contract between citizens and states. And so it is a difficult thing for states to deal with. There’s no question about that. But the issue here is how states respond to that fact, quite often undermines the social contract anyway. And so there is then a danger from the state in terms of its overreach in protecting citizens against terrorism through its counterterrorism measures, that it actually undermines that very security that it is trying so hard to demonstrate.
GM: So in the field of counterterrorism studies, do you spend time looking at what works and what doesn’t work and trying to discern? Because obviously, the thing that I always go back to thinking is, well, I don’t want to get on a plane and feel that nobody has thought about security, that there’s been no attention paid whatsoever to the prospect of, and I don’t even feel like I want to take a, you know, a sort of calculated risk, although I know that any journey can fit for any matter. It can for any number of reasons be a risk. But I want to feel that something has been done, someone has been thinking about the prospect of terrorism. So how important is it to actually look at what works and what doesn’t work within the field of counterterrorism?
LJ: There is a lot of research that goes into what works and what doesn’t work. And you’re absolutely right. Counterterrorism is because we don’t want to take a risk. Even though we know, for example, that statistically, you’re kind of more likely to drown in your own bathtub than you are to be in a terrorist attack, or we take huge risks when we cross the road, as opposed to getting on a plane.
But we still find, as human beings, psychologically, we find terrorism so frightening because it says something about our moral worth as a human being, because we are being used as a means to an end if we are caught up in a terrorist attack. And so it’s an offense to our moral worth.
And that is one of the reasons why we find it so problematic and why people want counterterrorism measures in place. And that’s perfectly understandable. But what we know is that the kind of measures that deter terrorist attacks are very banal measures. They are things like more security checks in airports. They are things like security barriers in public spaces. They’re things that you wouldn’t, well, you might notice and you might find them slightly annoying, but they wouldn’t necessarily have a massive impact on your everyday life in the same way that, for example, a preventative war might.
So we know that those are the kind of activities that deter and prevent terrorist attacks. But we also know that the kind of activities, counterterrorist activities that create grievances, and therefore encourage further terrorist attacks are the quite expansive activities and preventative activities that target particular communities and that don’t appear to have as strong an influence on undermining terrorism or preventing terrorism than these very, well, relatively simple and everyday activities that are not unproblematic, but that on balance, and that’s key, on balance, prevent without creating huge grievances that go on to cause further terrorist attacks down the line.
GM: And of course, it’s easy to become a bit fixated on air travel. We know from the last 10 or 20 years that it’s possible to commit a terror attack with a knife or with a car or, you know … So you write in the book about substitution effects, where terrorism will find a way to express itself in society.
And I think that’s the point that stuck with me was, I think you say, a society with zero terrorism is probably a totalitarian state. You’d have to go that far in order to be secure that no terrorism would be possible. And even, even then, I guess, a suicide attack is still something you could imagine happening in a totalitarian state.
LJ: Absolutely. And obviously, we’ve seen totalitarian states in the 20th century, and there was still terrorism, or there was something that was called terrorism by the totalitarian state that we would probably call resistance.
GM: When you look around the world, do you see a great variety of counterterrorism approaches, or has there been in this century kind of homogenization effect where, I guess, America sets the tone, and everyone else gets in step and follows the same practices?
LJ: I would argue that we are seeing homogenization. And it’s partly because the War on Terror was so all-reaching, so all-encompassing. It was very helpful for many states, and there were huge sums of money involved in it. And so states have adopted similar practices, basically.
And this isn’t just a 21st century thing, I should say, because we tend to see similar practices throughout history, when we see counterterrorism, irrespective of the type of terrorism, irrespective of the groups and their ideologies. So we tend to see quite harsh counterterrorism measures, such as detention, which is beyond the rule of law, such as assassination, targeted killing, and getting rid of leaders, in particular leadership decapitation.
We tend to see things like torture, and the relaxation of human rights and civil liberties. We’ve seen that historically, we saw it in the period of anarchist terrorism, we saw it during the Cold War, we saw it during separatist terrorist movements throughout the 20th century.
And then during the War on Terror, internationally, there were experts, there were practitioners, there was an awful lot of funding involved for states from the US in order to undertake these kinds of terrorism activities. And so there’s sort of an outflow from the US, but it doesn’t begin with them. And it is important to say that because, as I said, these practices pop up historically in different geographical areas. But what we’ve seen is that these practices are being used still in countries across the world. And I’m not sure I know that much about it anymore. But the practices have been embedded in the way that states do counterterrorism, and so you don’t have to talk about the War on Terror. It’s there, it’s within institutions and the ways of doing things.
GM: So certain practices have been normalised for security services. And do you think they’ve also achieved a certain degree of public tolerance, if not acceptance, that perhaps there is a price worth paying and certain things happen, drone attacks are targeted, but cause a lot of collateral damage, to use an offensive phrase. Do you think there’s a public readiness to tolerate if not to embrace the things which have been done in the name of counterterrorism, especially in the last quarter of a century?
LJ: Yeah, I do think so. I think that norms have been changed. And norms have been, there’s been a relaxation of norms in the 21st century. And perhaps there are, obviously there are groups that are fighting against this and that keep these things on the agenda. And that argue, you know, we shouldn’t accept these changes, these changes in norms, and these legal changes. But I do think there is a degree of tolerance. And it’s to do with the fact that these, the norms are changing and when norms change that implies a degree of social order, social acceptance.
But that’s not to say that they can’t change back. So I don’t want to be too negative or pessimistic about this because it is problematic that norms are changing, and we’re seeing it in conflicts right now. And that norms are changing and that, but people are speaking out against this. So we do need to recognise that it’s not a sort of one way street. Things can change for the better as well as for the worse.
GM: Yeah, because, you know, as we said at the beginning, if you start out with a narrative that’s black and white, and you put some people beyond the pale, that’s a difficult starting position from which to argue that you’ve got to take a more nuanced approach, that perhaps everybody who’s classified as a suspected terrorist may not, that may not be a legitimate suspicion, and the treatment of wider populations, guilt by association is problematic. But if you start from this black-and-white view of the world, it’s, it’s hard to introduce shades of grey isn’t it into the public debate because you’re seen as being an apologist for terror or whatever.
LJ: Exactly. And this is why the terror, terrorism, counterterrorism is all about storytelling. And so if you can tell a story that reaches wide exceptions, that this is a black-and-white situation. Then that can get you so far. But if you introduce those shades of grey by showing, by demonstrating that, yes, not everyone who is suspected of being a terrorist may be a terrorist. And also, you know, we live in a, well, in liberal democratic societies, we live in a world where the rule of law should rule, irrespective of what has been, of what frame has been committed. And so I think that bringing in those shades of grey is so important. And that is where those norms get changed in that kind of discussion and in wrestling with the implications of that black-and-white thinking.
GM: And are there forums, are the ways in which people like you who are studying counterterrorism from an academic point of view interface with people on the policy side, people who are implementing policy, people who are actually thinking about laws and how those are applied? In other words, is there some way of, apart from writing books like the one you’ve written, is there some way of reaching beyond the academic community and advancing this argument or opening up the dialogue so that the world ceases to be seen in quite such black-and-white terms?
LJ: Policymakers, you know, are a diverse bunch of people; we see in the UK, for example, one of the key counterterrorism issues at the minute is to do with the number of people who are now held in northern Syria in refugee camps, who were associated with Islamic State. And there are several people from Britain, including several families, several children, right, who are obviously innocent.
And there are all-party groups parliamentary groups that are dedicated to looking at this issue and looking at how the fact that they are understood as terrorists, that this label sticks to these people and the problems of that. And obviously, there are tens of thousands of people in those camps from all over the world.
So this is not just a problem for one state to deal with. It’s an international issue. And so, counter-terrorism experts, but also families, also NGOs, also kind of lawyers and social workers and health care professionals are all crucially involved in those conversations. And in helping to remove that black-and-white thinking that everyone who was in Syria, while Islamic State were ruling it, is somehow a terrorist or terrorist adjacent in some problematic way.
It’s a classic counterterrorism problem because it’s being dealt with in a very black-and-white way by many states. But it will create grievances. It will create security problems. You know, it’s a problem for down the line. It will come back and it has to be dealt with and thought through.
And obviously, there are very hardline ways to deal with that, which many states have taken and many states are taking. And there are more, there are approaches which are more within the rule of law and more within understanding the civil liberties of those involved, which potentially will have much better solutions, both for human rights, which is obviously a problem, but also crucially for security, which is what counterterrorism is supposed to deal with.
GM: And would you say a broad swathe of the political class and the policymaking class understand that there are remedies that would work better, but they worry, you know, in this country about what the Daily Mail would say, or about what would happen in the ballot box?
LJ: It’s not the lack of creative, constructive thinking about what would work better than the securitized approach. But I guess we’re returning to something we touched on earlier, but just, you know, the political consequences of being perceived to be, in quotes, “soft on terror”. Yeah, that’s definitely an issue. Very definitely an issue.
But we have seen, we have seen these powers be rolled back with fewer political consequences than perhaps were expected. So we have seen that happen. We have seen, you know, very harsh counterterrorism measures be rolled back. The public opinion is a problem. It is a problem.
But the Daily Mail, I know it’s very precipitous, but it is not the container of all public opinion. And it’s really unhelpful for politicians and policymakers to think that there are shades. And many, many people in many, many countries view harsh counterterrorism measures as problematic.
And so I think we always, when we talk about counterterrorism, the security versus human rights argument is always central to all these conversations. We hear it constantly from policymakers when they’re making laws that, you know, we need to balance security against human rights. And what tends to happen is that security comes out on top of that. But there are ways for us to re-articulate the balance between security and human rights in a way that demonstrates, because there is plenty of evidence that shows it, that human rights, protecting human rights, protect security, and that protecting civil liberties can make us more secure.
GM: And the point to which you come at the end of the book is that seeing security in a different light is itself quite a useful exercise, thinking about human security, rather than it being a matter about the state and how it protects its institutions and reputation and so on. Thinking differently about human security can actually broaden the discussion and open up different pathways.
LJ: Yeah, exactly. It’s about what we want to be secure from, because counterterrorism doesn’t secure everyone. You know, there are people who were made very insecure by counterterrorism. And there are people who are made very insecure by the extension of the security state.
So if we’re thinking about some of the key issues that have come to the fore in the last five, 10 years, you know, about in different societies, but about the way that the states can encroach upon our lives, the way that civil liberties are rolled back, the way that militarised policing can over-police some communities and can cause huge insecurity. You know, this is what the Black Lives Matter protests were about, right? That over-policing kills people. And so that doesn’t make, obviously that doesn’t make the African American community in some American cities more secure.
So thinking about security in a more broad sense will allow us to think more about whether these measures actually help keep us secure, whether the security state is actually a desirable thing.
GM: So ineffective, potentially counterproductive, secretive, vastly expensive, undemocratic and a violation of human rights. So your book brings all these things out, but also suggests ways forward. And, you know, it’s not a counsel for despair by any means, is it?
LJ: Hopefully not. Hopefully not. There are some positive shimmers in all of this. And it has been, I do think it’s important to recognise that if counterterrorism is a story, then we can change the narrative. And it is possible to do that. It has been done and it can be done. So it isn’t all doom and gloom. There are some positive steps we can take.