The structural production of state terrorism: capitalism, imperialism and international class dynamics

Abstract

In this article, I argue for a Marxian approach to critical terrorism studies. The methodological approach of critical terrorism studies focuses on the ways in which particular sets of state managers and/or agents working in conjunction with them are more or less directly implicated in specific terrorist ‘events’, but my contention – which complements an insight made by Richard Jackson – is that there is a need for more theory-laden analyses of the deeper, structural causes of state terrorism. I address this issue by advocating more sustained engagement with broader political–economic issues, and in particular to the ways in which capitalist development, capitalist imperialism and international class dynamics intersect not just to enable state terrorism but to actively produce it.

Keywords:

• Marxism
• political economy of state terrorism
• capitalism
• development
• imperialism

Acknowledgements

I thank Eric Herring and Doug Stokes for their patience and, in particular, David Black for discussions of some of the general issues addressed in this article.

Notes

1. This formulation derives from Roy Bhaskar's realist theory of science, which asks ‘what must the world be like for science to be possible?’ See Bhaskar (1998, p. 13).

2. States’ support for particular acts of state terrorism is the general focus of CTS.

3. One counter-argument here is Nazi Richani's contention that the country's major violent groups benefit from a ‘war system’ in which the major protagonists benefit from a situation of stalemate or what he terms a ‘comfortable impasse’. See Richani (2002).

4. Among the manifold ways in which development has become ‘depoliticised’ is through the propagation of dominant class conceptions of ‘social capital’ and ‘human capital’, both of which reduce complex forms of social engagement to marketised interactions. See, for example, Harriss (2002).

5. There is a further issue to be addressed by CTS here, but it is beyond the scope of my present argument. This relates to CTS's fetishisation of IL and a consequent neglect of the ways in which by subscribing to IL the theory implicitly adopts and normalises a liberal human rights agenda that helps to deepen all of the commodification processes referred to in this article. The problem is succinctly described by David Harvey: ‘The UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is a foundational document for a bourgeois, market-based individualism and as such cannot provide a basis for a thoroughgoing critique of liberal or neoliberal capitalism. Whether it is politically useful to insist that the capitalist political order live up to its foundational principles is one thing, but to imagine that this politics can lead to a radical displacement of a capitalist mode of production is, in Marx's view, a serious error’ (Harvey 2010, p. 49). To the best of my knowledge, however, there is no sustained engagement with this conundrum within the CTS literature. Good engagements with the issue in general can be found in Kennedy (2002), Guilhot (2005), Roth (2008) and McCormack (2009).