Progressive Geographies

Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire, Columbia University Press, July 2018.

What is terrorism? What ought we to do about it? And why is it wrong? We think we have clear answers to these questions. But acts of violence, like U.S. drone strikes that indiscriminately kill civilians, and mass shootings that become terrorist attacks when suspects are identified as Muslim, suggest that definitions of terrorism are always contested. In Genealogies of Terrorism, Verena Erlenbusch rejects attempts to define what terrorism is in favor of a historico-philosophical investigation into the conditions under which uses of this contested term become meaningful. The result is a powerful critique of the power relations that shape how we understand and theorize political violence.

Tracing discourses and practices of terrorism from the French Revolution to late imperial Russia, colonized Algeria, and the post-9/11 United States, Erlenbusch examines what we do when we name something terrorism. She offers an important corrective to attempts to develop universal definitions that assure semantic consistency and provide normative certainty, showing that terrorism means many different things and serves a wide range of political purposes. In the tradition of Michel Foucault’s genealogies, Erlenbusch excavates the history of conceptual and practical uses of terrorism and maps the historically contingent political and material conditions that shape their emergence. She analyzes the power relations that make different modes of understanding terrorism possible and reveals their complicity in justifying the exercise of sovereign power in the name of defending the nation, class, or humanity against the terrorist enemy. Offering an engaged critique of terrorism and the mechanisms of social and political exclusion that it enables, Genealogies of Terrorism is an empirically grounded and philosophically rigorous critical history with important political implications.

1. The Trouble with Terrorism
2. The Emergence of Terrorism
3. State Terrorism Revisited
4. Terrorism and Colonialism
5. Reimagining Terrorism at the End of History
6. Towards a Critical Theory of Terrorism: Genealogy and Normativity

Inspired by Wittgenstein and Foucault, and contemporary debates about concepts, in this remarkable book Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson undertakes a significant examination of terrorism. Rather than assuming its meaning and looking for that in her sources, she instead allows a multifaceted understanding to emerge from a historical study of texts and practices. A powerful and urgent intervention for our troubled times. Stuart Elden, University of Warwick

This book is political philosophy at its best. It offers an instructive model of mobilizing philosophical genealogy for a critique of a highly-charged idea. It complicates the seeming obviousness with which the concept of ‘terrorism’ is today purveyed. Through meticulous historical and philosophical analysis, this book shows how the concept of terrorism came to be an explosive, dangerous, and contested political idea. Colin Koopman, University of Oregon

Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson’s careful genealogy of ‘terrorism’—tracking the term’s multiple and overdetermined meanings since its first appearance as a political concept in the late eighteenth century—powerfully shows us how we all too frequently ask the wrong questions about terrorism. This critical book offers a necessary corrective to how we think about terrorism, and it reshapes the grounds upon which we should have any meaningful debate about terrorism in the present moment. Andrew Dilts, Loyola Marymount University

E-IR interview with Lisa Tilley

Lisa Tilley is Lecturer in Politics and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. She is also co-convenor of the Colonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial Working Group of the British International Studies Association (CPD-BISA); co-founder of the collaborative research project Raced Markets; and Associate Editor of the pedagogical resource. Her work draws on various theoretical approaches to ‘the colonial question’ in analyses of Global Social Theoryprocesses of accumulation and expropriation, especially along urban and rural extractive frontiers in Indonesia.

Where do you see the most exciting debates happening in your field?

Race has really been the neglected, or deliberately proscribed, category in political economy, the field I am trained in. In fact, the exclusion/displacement of race from analyses of power and the economy is not separable from broader projects of exclusion/displacement of racialised persons in real life spheres. As such, a great deal of work needs to be done to rewrite global political economic histories, revise the core concepts we work with, and redesign curricula to properly account for the complex legacies, and elaborate renewals, of colonial racial ordering. There is, of course, extensive work on race already in existence which continues to be marginalised from most teaching and from disciplinary canon formation. The most vibrant scholarship on political economy is undoubtedly crafted (as it always has been) by Indigenous and otherwise racialised intellectuals and, at its best, this work attends to racial ordering in relation to class, gender, and sexuality too. [continues]

Judith Wambacq, Thinking Between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty – reviewed at NDPR by Laura McMahon.

Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty is the first book-length examination of the relation between these two major thinkers of the twentieth century. Questioning the dominant view that the two have little of substance in common, Judith Wambacq brings them into a compelling dialogue to reveal a shared, historically grounded concern with the transcendental conditions of thought. Both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze propose an immanent ontology, differing more in style than in substance. Wambacq’s synthetic treatment is nevertheless critical; she identifies the limitations of each thinker’s approach to immanent transcendental philosophy and traces its implications—through their respective relationships with Bergson, Proust, Cézanne, and Saussure—for ontology, language, artistic expression, and the thinking of difference. Drawing on primary texts alongside current scholarship in both French and English, Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty is comprehensive and rigorous while remaining clear, accessible, and lively. It is certain to become the standard text for future scholarly discussion of these two major influences on contemporary thought.

Sara Custer, ‘Social media: the good, the bad and the ugly‘, Times Higher Education – may require registration, but should be free to read.

With about one-third of Earth’s 7 billion inhabitants on a social network, it is an inevitable part of scholars’ lives. While many academics find Twitter and Facebook useful means of disseminating their research, Sara Custer finds that the addictive seeking of ‘likes’ has its perils.

I was one of the academics interviewed, and while my comments quoted are all about avoiding social media and blocking sites, I do of course think there are positives too!