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A response based on hope, not fear

By Kevin McDonald - posted Monday, 27 November 2006


The first years of this new millennium have been dominated by war, terror, violence and fear. We are now witnessing the development of what is best called "global terrorism", no longer a proxy for states or primarily addressing states.

One influential view is that this reflects a civilisational opposition, as a world of opposing political systems gives way to a world of opposing cultures and civilisations. This view regards contemporary forms of terror as an expression of cultural and civilisational crisis.

The most influential such account is proposed by Bernard Lewis, who writes of the crisis of Islam and what he calls "the roots of Muslim rage". Lewis took up the term "clash of civilisation" (first used by Christian missionaries in the Middle East), being later popularised by Samuel Huntington. Osama bin Laden is a strong proponent of this view of the world, and warmly endorses much of Huntington's thesis.

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Sociology is increasingly aware of the importance of civilisations and cultures, but largely rejects views of a world made up of hostile civilisations. American historian Richard Bulliet has convincingly argued for what he calls an Islamo-Christian civilisation, demonstrating the extent to which Islam and Christianity have an extraordinary historical interpenetration, to the point that he suggests they constitute one civilisation.

Other social scientists point out the extent to which contemporary forms of terror do not reflect a closed civilisational logic. Arjun Appadurai notes that terror takes a cellular form, as opposed to the hierarchies of states. These are loose networks rather than the vertical structures that tend to characterise organisational forms of industrial society.

Personal relationships play a key role. These networks are decentred - al-Qaida, for example, has no systematic recruitment process nor membership system. Political scientist Olivier Roy points to the importance of personal relationships and mobility in contemporary terror. The people involved in such action are often cosmopolitan, have lived in several countries and speak several languages. Many are trained in technical and scientific disciplines.

Their religiosity has important Western dimensions: the importance of personal beliefs, the construction of personal rituals, evident in the case of Mohammed Atta, whose last testament details a series of rituals that he has invented for the treatment of his body.

Many involved in contemporary forms of terror do not emerge from deep tradition or a closed civilisation. Azahari bin Husin, killed in a police raid on Java earlier this year, was a native of the southern Malaysian state of Johor. He studied mechanical engineering at Adelaide University before gaining a doctorate in property valuation from Reading University in England in 1990, and was a university lecturer before becoming involved in the loose network we call Jemaah Islamiah.

The distance from religiosity is a recurring theme.

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Shehzad Tanweer, one of the four young men involved in the 2005 London bombings, had a history of police cautions for public order offences, and was part of a gang called the Mullah Crew.

It is dangerously simplistic to see terrorism as an export of poorer countries to their richer neighbours. We are not dealing with a clash of civilisations, but complex forms of mobility and sociality.

One important dimension is that played by contemporary media technologies. Violence is increasingly associated with the production and circulation of images. US troops in Iraq last year were trading pictures of dead and mutilated Iraqis to gain free access to Internet-based porn sites. Many of those involved in suicide missions in Iraq film their action right up to the point of the explosion - including very non-traditional public displays of affection to wives before heading off.

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the Pakistani who suggested to bin Laden the idea of flying planes into the World Trade Centre, appears more influenced by images of James Bond than piety and religiosity. After the bombing of a Philippines Airline plane in 1994 he spent a week at a five-star beach resort south of Manila, and on one occasion set out to impress a lady dentist by hiring a helicopter and talking to her on his mobile phone while flying over her clinic.

A key dimension of contemporary terror is the theme of martyrdom, and this is linked to forms of violence that are less and less defined in terms of a rationality of calculation.

We can see this transformation at work in Palestinian violence. At the beginning the Palestine Liberation Organisation was the product of Arab states, its action focusing exclusively outside Israel and the occupied territories. The first intifada pointed to a new type of violence within the territories, aimed at building up confidence and civil society, shaped by a conviction that violence could bring about a new society. The symbol of this violence was a youth throwing stones at a tank.

The violence of the second intifada is radically different. Palestinian society is experienced as corrupt and flawed, the hoped-for national community cannot be achieved, and violence is increasingly turned inwards. The new world can only be brought about through dying, not through living.

In the second intifada we see the development of the suicide bomber. This is violence no longer linked to any vision of social transformation. Only death makes it possible to build a nation that cannot be built by the living.

Here death takes on a religious meaning. Service to God overcomes pain, it challenges the seductive power of symbols of Western pleasure - cafes and bars. Through death, the person can once again become a symbol of the purity of struggle. Religion does not cause this violence, but it is constructed using religious themes.

This type of violence collapses eschatological time (the end of days) and the present into one. There is no medium term, which is the time of social, cultural and political change.

This form of violence is increasingly globalising, to the point that different sociologists now suggest that the jihad is best understood as a global movement. It stands outside the Islamic tradition but it pulls fractured and disconnected bits from this tradition: holy war, martyrdom, diet, dress.

The jihadi movement is not interested in the state, but what it understands are global forms of power. This is why bin Laden initially had little interest in the Palestinians and their struggle.

Bin Laden's agenda is global: he attacks the US for its corporations, for its failure to sign the Kyoto protocol, for its pornography.

Today anyone can be a martyr: this has been democratised. In religious traditions, the martyr is chosen by God. The word itself comes from the Greek: "deaths that are seen". Martyrs kill themselves in public, and the death is an event that creates a public.

But killing is not a means to an end, it is the end itself. This is why this form of violence is catastrophic. It is outside a logic of graduation and calculation. The aim of such violence is to kill as many people as possible.

This form of violence is not the product of Islam, but a dynamic between nations plays a role. In particular, post-colonial logics: between Spain and Morocco, or between Britain and Pakistan. These forms of violence are not generated by religion, but in the absence of political ideologies, the actors involved take religious themes to construct meaning.

The actors construct themselves as generic, abstract Muslims, disconnected from cultures and living traditions. Their abstraction and disconnection make them global people.

Security clearly is part of a response to terror, and the social sciences have an important role to play in this. They can help us understand trajectories into violence, which no longer take the form of joining an organisation, but occur through friendship networks, family networks, the impact of charismatic individuals or the internet.

But the social sciences have a role to play as well in making extreme forms of violence intelligible.

We no longer live in the period of arrogance that in the 1990s celebrated "the triumph of the West". The social sciences need to avoid becoming part of catastrophic views of the world, where the future becomes impossible.

Globalisation has witnessed other important cellular movements that bring new forms of encounters, mobility, cultural production, such as the many groups and networks involved in global action against poverty.

We could call for a 0.1 per cent tax on arms production to support new types of encounter and mobility, global media projects that span borders - a global civil society project made up of decentred networks. We need to think of ways where radically different worlds can encounter each other rather than increasingly fear each other.

We need a type of sociology that can encourage the development of social creativity, new forms of innovation, and strive to construct languages and experiences where conflicts can enter into social and political time.

The social sciences have a key role to play in helping us understand the different forms of violence we encounter in the contemporary world. But we need to remember that where successful responses to terror have emerged - such as in Northern Ireland or the Basque country in Spain - they have always been grounded in images of a world of hope, not fear.

Helping to construct and sustain such images is a key task today for the social sciences - sociology, in particular.

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First published in The Australian on November 22, 2006. This is an edited extract from the T.R. Ashworth Lecture, delivered on November 16, 2006 at the University of Melbourne. Kevin McDonald is a senior lecturer in sociology at the university. The full text is available here.



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About the Author

Kevin McDonald is a sociologist and Research Development Professor in the School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning at RMIT University in Melbourne. He is also a volunteer working with Iraqi academic refugees in Jordan.

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