9-11: treason in the academic comfort zone?

Aside from academic journals, there are discussions of terrorism published in specialised journals such as Australian National Security Magazine, Australasian Risk Management, Human Rights Defender, in journals of political and cultural commentary such as Arena, and Quadrant, and in para-academic ejournals like borderlands.

Hopefully, this lack of academic concern will be reversed as the relevant research infrastructure improves in Australia. Signs that this may be the case include the establishment of research centres like the Global Terrorism Research Unit at Monash University, and the Centre for Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism (PICT) at Macquarie University. There is also the ongoing work at the Australian Defence Force Academy, which is providing supervision for terrorism research being undertaken by of a number of PhD students from Australia and overseas.

There has also been increased activity at the Australian Research Council, which has begun to support research on terrorism. Hopefully the selection process at the ARC will be made less cumbersome and time-consuming, and be freed of ideological bias and ignorance of terrorism scholarship. It would also be a step forward if available ARC funding is not funneled to a small number of preferred academics and their acolytes, creating a self-reproducing parochialism in terrorism research, such as exists in so many other areas.

Aside from the scandalous lethargy of the Australian intelligentsia, the greatest problem faced in the contemporary academic discussion of terrorism in Australia is the ubiquitous application of the “class, gender, race” theoretical template. This has been augmented over the past five years by a related approach that manipulates the concepts of terrorism, the Other, genocide, settler societies, Orientalism, and post-colonialism like kindergarten building blocks to construct the same small range of arguments, all of which eventually lay blame for terrorism on the West.

Examples of this ideologically burdened writing about terrorism were prominent at the international conference on “Islam and the West: The Impact of September 11”, organised by Monash University in August 2003.

In his presentation, Professor Michael Humphrey, the Head of the School of Sociology at the University of New South Wales, declared, “in Australia … Muslim identity is increasingly constructed as the problematic (Orientalist) Other. … The post-September 11 period has reinforced this … Moreover, the juxtaposition of faith with apocalyptic violence in the “war against terrorism” has only deepened this connection and cultural Othering of Islam and Muslims.”

The “Stockholm Syndrome” of identification with the terrorist is apparent in many other academic contributions, which frequently have an overt political agenda, exploiting various academic forums to denounce the war on terror, the United States, Israel, Australia, and their leaders, while usually insisting that Islam is a religion of peace and is being unfairly targeted. Another prominent approach has been to claim that it is the West that is the “real” global terrorist, allegedly committing acts of state terrorism that dwarf the 9-11 attacks.

Such claims were made at a public forum on the causes of terrorism organised by Deakin University in May 2006. Scott Burchill, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, argued that “most terrorism in the modern world is state terrorism, committed by governments either directly or indirectly. Much of it is Western state terrorism.”

Similarly, in December 2005, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology published an article, “Secret State, Transparent Subject: The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in the Age of Terror”, in which the authors, Jude McCulloch, and Joo-Cheong Tham, claim that recent amendments to the ASIO legislation “increases the risk of torture of persons detained by ASIO”, and that “the increase in state secrecy and its impact are part of a continuing shift in the relative distribution of power between state and subject in liberal democracies; a shift that signals a move to more repressive or authoritarian forms of rule”.

Academic discourse on terrorism is also dominated by second-level analyses of representations and discourses on “terrorism” considered merely as a word. Indeed, it is remarkable how often academics try to derail discussions of terrorism by claiming that the word cannot be properly defined, whereas it has a number of perfectly serviceable definitions, as even a few minutes research reveals.

These academics usually also allege that the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” are value-laden and illegitimately used to label particular groups. They also tend to link any concern with terrorism to racism and genocide, and claim that these appalling characteristics are inherent in so-called “settler societies” like America, Australia, and Israel.

A vivid illustration of this tendency was an article by Katrina Lee Koo, a lecturer in International Relations at the Australian National University, published on-line in 2005 in the ejournal borderlands. She claims that Australian security policies are based on “a commitment to the practices of violence”, and that “we see in both the discourse of security and the development of security policy an acceptance of the violence committed against the Other as a 'necessary evil.'”