Of Partisans and Paranoid Experts

Autor: Julian Bourg
Rok vydání: 2017
Předmět:
Zdroj: boundary 2. 44:77-94
ISSN: 1527-2141
0190-3659
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-4206325
Popis: Beginning in the 1970s, terrorism became an object of contested expert knowledge. Fears over this moralized and loosely defined phenomenon emerged at the very moment that Western states achieved a certain monopoly over legitimate political violence. This politico-epistemological framing itself drew on postwar counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) that had enabled a shift from the figure of the allied partisan to the unconscionable terrorist. Terrorism as an object of knowledge thus fits within a longer story of Western military attempts—from late nineteenth-century colonialism through the early twentieth-century American revival of COIN in Iraq—to tame uncontrollable, asymmetrical threats in part by knowing them.
Databáze: OpenAIRE