Performing terror, anti-terror, and public affect: Towards an analytical framework

Abstract

This essay contends that there is a need for a new conceptual framework in order to analyse the interconnections between three different discourses on global and local terrorism: acts of terror; state mobilizations of anti-terror policy and rhetoric; and thirdly, public affect, which manifests expressions among others of insecurity, suspicion of religious and ethnic Others, and national allegiance. Often the interactions between these three domains enact the ways in which local extremist acts are refracted through global discourses on terror and anti-terror. This paper argues that Butler's notion of ‘performativity’ provides an analytical tool for the examination of these discourses, and that the internet offers the opportunity to analyse these three domains and the ways in which they interact with each other.

A large-scale S. Bombay terrorist attack is going on right now using automatic weapons, hand grenades and possibly a taxi bomb. Commandos and military are supposedly being rushed in. Gunfire is still being heard on live TV.

Makes me wonder what will make our so called LEADERS to stand up and notice of whats happened and again happening [sic]… They of course do not realise the importance of lives of INDIANS, otherwise some concrete action might have taken place… Calling the INDIAN POLITICIALS WEKELINGS [sic] AND COWARDS would be the understatement of the century… (MumbaiAttacksBlogs2.webarchive, emphasis in the original)

Introduction

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai on 26 November 2008 elicited a variety of anguished responses which, as demonstrated in the quotations presented above, ranged from grisly commentaries of the attacks as they happened, to denunciations of the ineptitude of the Indian State's security measures and, even more disturbingly, to comments on the relations between India and Pakistan and on the presence of Muslims in India. Along with such posts on the internet were news websites carrying responses from politicians and government officials,1 and other sites offering a disturbing collage of images, maps, cartoons, slogans, and posts.2 Such sites, by no means unique to the Mumbai attacks, offer the possibility of a close analysis not only of the media coverage of acts of terror, but also the language of state policies and the justifications provided for them, as well as enactments of public affect – anger, suspicion of religious minorities, feelings of insecurity, pronouncements of national allegiance – available in posts, blogs, and discussion groups. This paper presents a possible framework for the examination of these discourses and of inter-relations between them, and argues that the concepts of ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ are key to such analyses.

As demonstrated by a recent news report on a virtual ‘conference’ organized by a radical Islamic group with online forums streamed live,3 discussions about terrorism and national security have had to go beyond conventional concerns to engage with the ways in which the traditional and new media both display and facilitate acts of terror. It is already an academic and journalistic cliché that the media provide the stage for the enactment of terror, that news stories offer the ‘oxygen’ for terrorists. These debates are indicative of the fact that following 9/11, both chronologically as well as in terms of the modality of news coverage that it launched, news organizations have had an uneasy relationship with extremists, formed on the basis of the former's constant search for audience ratings, and the latter's need for publicity. As Nacos (2002) has observed, even more than harming immediate victims, the violent ‘street theater’ of terrorism seeks an audience of mass publics through the media. This symbiosis between the media and terrorism is indicative of the fact that media coverage is vital for both terrorism and the understanding of it (van der Veer 2004). If, as formulated by Appadurai (1996), global mediascapes, visually and narratively through characters and plots, provide the ‘scripts’ with which modern cultures imagine themselves and others in a global environment, mediated terrorism and the political and public responses to it are redolent of the complex interplay between the local and the global. Sontag's (2003) argument about the paradoxical status of representations in contemporary media-rich societies underlines this point. It has become de rigueur among a few theorists inspired by Baudrillard that in the current media-saturated world the image reigns supreme, and has even taken over as ‘real’ experience. Sontag's point however is different, not so much that the image has supplanted the real, but that the vocabulary available to us to describe and even experience spectacular incidents is informed by mediated imagery. The need for the new analytic that this essay argues for is premised on the argument that this vocabulary – both verbal and visual – permeates diverse discursive terrains, intersecting with and feeding off each other. While enactments of terror and the mediation of them has been recognized and written about by scholars, the inter-relations between this and other discursive domains such as the justifications for the state's anti-terror policies and the discussions of the public's concerns over personal and national security, has been examined less often. Adding to these complex interconnections are the ways in which the global discourse on the ‘war on terror’ and the manifestations of them in the local, national, and political landscape inform each other.

The principal aim of this essay is to build on Judith Butler's conceptualizations of the notions of ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ to suggest a conceptual framework with which to systematically examine the mediatization of terror and the responses to terror by the state and citizens in different global and local contexts. Using the internet as the primary site of research, this essay argues, will provide the opportunity to examine the performance, in terms of words and images, across three fields: acts of terrorist violence; enactments of counter-measures by states; and the politics of affect among citizens as displayed in responses to and through the transnational, mediated spaces of the internet. The internationally accessible and globally participatory aspects of the internet allow the complex mapping of the discourse of global terrorism, including news footage, reports, video clips, political speeches, as well as online discussions and posts from the general public, particularly since 9/11. Analysing the complex web of interconnections between the three sites of performance – terror, counter-terror, and public affect – and the ways in which the local dimensions of these intersect with the global obviously requires a way of accessing the data. While much of the discussion of terrorism in Western media either overtly or by implication continues to locate the originators of extremist violence as ‘living in caves’ controlling various extremist networks, the internet has been a site for displays of acts of terror as exemplified by jihadi videos carrying grisly images of beheadings (see Conway & McInerney, 2008 for a discussion of jihadi video and auto-radicalization), of the coverage of anti-terror pronouncements by state actors, and of expressions of public fear and insecurity.

The local refracted through the global

Inevitably, arguments regarding the publicity offered to terrorist incidents by the news media have informed ethical concerns regarding the reporting of terrorist incidents, interviews with alleged perpetrators, and coverage of victims of terrorist acts. As Hoskins & O'Loughlin (2007) have argued, the ‘modulation of terror’ in the media both amplifies threat and contains fear. But relatively recent analyses of the links between terrorism and the media (Retort 2005 and Giroux, 2006, amongst others) have highlighted the struggle over the control of globally available images, circulated and displayed by the media, as a key facet in both acts of terror as well as the enactments of anti-terror from various states. This battle over media images and the political battles that it engenders and embodies clearly has an affective dimension, one that instils feelings of insecurity, fear, and suspicion among the public, which in turn is enacted in various forums. These include concerns regarding immigration policies expressed in op-eds and letters to the editor, to anxieties displayed in internet chat rooms about terrorist incidents and how these affect notions of citizenship, to films exploring the apparent rise of radical Islam, to expressions of disquiet about the increasing number of Islamic schools in various parts of the world. The three spheres of enactment – terrorism, counter-terror, and public affect – occur in different regions and countries, with performances taking on local colouring while refracting the global discourse on the war on terror through the local lens. Sub-national conflicts, such as in Kashmir, have, since 9/11, been re-presented by the State as instances of global terrorism, simultaneously removing any legitimacy from long-running domestic conflicts (in the case of Kashmir, the provenance of the conflict can be traced back to Pakistan and India's independence in 1947), and finding novel justifications for the State's response. It is worth noting the former British Foreign Secretary Miliband's denunciation of the phrase ‘war on terror’4 on the grounds that while it had the merit of underlining the gravity of extremist violence, its suggestion of a unified, global enemy ignored the disparate motivations and identities of terrorist groups. Laskhar-e-Taiba in South Asia, Hezbollah in the Middle East, various Shia and Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq each have a different cause, and are, according to Miliband, as diverse as the extremist groups active in Europe in the 1970s. And yet, while their demands, their terrorist acts, and their victims may be confined to a specific locale, their rhetoric often displays a global awareness and appeal. Similarly, the concept of the ‘war on terror’ provided State authorities with the opportunity to speak of acts of terror in their locales as aspects of a global problem, and consequently of the need to locate such localized acts within a global discourse.

Conversely, it is also clear that contemporary, locally-situated acts of political violence have global reverberations and consequences, not least in macabre justifications offered by perpetrators, who often portray their gruesome acts as instances of global campaigns. In terms of the interconnections between terrorist groups, attempts by States to counter terrorism, and public concerns about security, local terrorist incidents and the responses to them have been granted global visibility through their mediatization. Apart from the incontestable ‘real’ damage to life and property, the enactment of terrorism has inevitable symbolic consequences. One of these, as noted by Zizek (2002), is that the logic of terrorism is at times contained within a Manichean divide that ‘separates the digitalised First World from the Third World “desert of the Real”’ (16). The 9/11 attacks raised terror events to the sphere of the spectacular: ‘they were designed to be visible, designed to be spectacular. They not only bear an eerie similarity to violence-saturated Hollywood disaster films, but are similarly suited to – intended for – endless instant replay on the nightly news, bringing an end to democratic freedoms with democracy's blessings’ (Giroux, 2006, 47). This suspension of democratic freedoms is predicated upon concerns regarding national security, with legitimation being provided by authorities of the state in terms of counter-terror measures. Terrorism as spectacle has inaugurated a new social imaginary across the globe, characterized by the suspension of rights, brutal responses from the State and, perhaps even more significantly, by uncertainty, fear, and suspicion in multi-religious and multicultural societies. The mediation of terrorist spectacles retains its power through the horrible fascination it engenders, and through our inability to turn away from the spectacular, ‘to look away from representations of diseased or damaged bodies, from excremental objects, from the staged decompositions of life that have become central to contemporary aesthetic practice’ (Santer, 2000, 157). The crucial point to note here is the close connection between mediations of acts of terror, the State's response, and public affect characterized by ‘a retrograde notion of the social that is organized around a culture of shared fears rather than shared responsibilities’ (Giroux, 2006, 50).

Equally, counter-terrorism in diverse regions has displayed both disparate and overlapping concerns that reflect both a common project against terrorism as a globally present threat to democracy as well as national sensitivities regarding the enactment of security policies on a multiethnic and multi-religious populace. The articulations of the State consequently portray a global-local dialectic, revealing global concerns refracted through a local prism. For instance, whereas in Europe and Australia the challenge regarding counter-terrorism has been around the rise of radical Islam in multiethnic societies, terrorist incidents in India, prompted by historical sub-national movements in Kashmir and elsewhere, have been recently reinterpreted by the State as evidence of global terrorism. The rhetoric of both the state and the perpetrators arguably shares a similar framework in terms of the iteration of global discourse on terrorism in relation to local acts of terror (Harindranath, 2009).

Thirdly, global-local dialectic is also reflected in the public response to both terrorist acts and the States' attempts at countering them in multicultural societies. If the performance of terrorism exploits perceived and real differences, counter-terrorism policies and the ethical values that underlie anti-terror laws have often necessitated the complex and delicate negotiation of such ethnic and religious difference, multicultural policy, and citizenship. Expressions of affect from the general public after terrorist incidents and in response to declarations by political leaders have professed or contested the existence of such difference. The following post in response to the Mumbai attacks of November 2008 illustrates the ways in which inter-religious politics finds a voice in public affect:

This is clear GENOCIDE OF HINDUS. It also proves that this congress government is in clandestine hands with terrorists and muslims [sic]. It is arresting HINDUS to tarnish their image abroad and in INDIA. This congress government can go to any length to get MUSLIM votes (MumbaiAttacksBlogs2.webarchive, emphasis in the original).

The refraction of the global through the local can thus be argued as manifesting in counter-terrorism in multiethnic societies, in the demands and rhetoric of the perpetrators, which contain locally relevant demands expressed in globally-recognizable rhetoric, and finally, as demonstrated in the quote above, in public affect. Examining this requires a new analytical framework.

The analytics of ‘performance’ and ‘affect’

Butler's (1993) conceptualization of ‘performativity’ is relevant in two important ways: firstly, her emphasis on the process of recitation and reiteration of discourses as constituting specific cultural and historical practices enables the systematic examination of the repetition and iteration of language and images characteristic of the global-local interaction identified in this essay. In her initial formulation, Butler (1993) conceived gender as being constructed through the performance of social rituals, maintained by institutional power. The iteration of specific phrases that constitute the ‘war on terror’, repeated in different national contexts by diverse political leaders and security organizations, points to a similar mode of performance. Of central significance here are the global constituents and local variations of post-9/11 political discourse, enacted both by perpetrators of acts of terror as well as by key authorities of the state. Butler's conceptualization offers an analytical framework with which to examine the mediated performance of terror, the alleged justifications and demands of the perpetrators, and the legal, rhetorical, and emotional dimensions of the ‘war on terror’. The complex scenario of globally-mediated local acts of terror underlines the importance of both the ‘real’ and symbolic aspects of contemporary terrorism. Secondly, ‘performativity’, construed as discourses that constitute the object, facilitates the close analysis of the enactment of terror, counter-terrorism, and security in multiethnic societies. In an interview published in Radical philosophy, Butler (1994) underlined the importance of distinguishing ‘performance’ from ‘performativity’: ‘the former presumes a subject, but the latter contests the very notion of the subject’. Significantly, performativity is linked to ‘performative speech acts, understood as those speech acts that bring into being that which they name. This is the moment in which discourse becomes productive in a fairly specific way. So what I am trying to do is think about the performativity as that aspect of discourse that has the capacity to produce what it names’ (Butler, 1994). In a similar fashion, Butler builds on Austin's (1962) distinction between ‘constantive and performative’ statements, whereby constantives are those that merely describe, whereas performatives are utterances that engender actions, which in turn generate certain effects. Butler's reconceptualization of gender underlines the performative element that constitutes gender – crucially, gender is not an essence in itself but a performative enactment.

It is possible to borrow Butler's formulation of gender as enactment and the analytics that it provides to engage with the enactment of terror, not just in the sense of acts of terror as theatre, but in a deeper analysis of acts of terror in themselves, by way of bringing an interpretive framework to bear on apparently senseless acts such as the indiscriminate shootings and bomb attacks in Mumbai in 2008. In Precarious lives (2004), Butler makes an argument that echoes Zizek's sentiments (mentioned earlier in this essay) that the use of the term ‘terrorism’ re-enacts outdated divisions between West and the Rest, or civilization and barbarism (Secomb, 2008).

In the same book she underscores the connection between official speech or state discourse and the media, arguing that many of the official statements are media performances, ‘a form of speech that establishes a domain of official utterance distinct from legal discourse’ (Butler, 2004, 80). The performatives of state discourse displayed in the media are often a preamble to the enactment of counter-terror measures. They enable and justify policies apparently designed to counter terror and offer security. In recent times, these have included (in North America, Europe, the former Soviet Union, and in Asia) the demonization of Islam. Intrinsic to this are the power dynamics that are evident in such performative discourse:

If performativity requires a power to effect or enact what one names, then who will be the ‘one’ with such a power, and how will such a power be thought? How might we account for the injurious word within such a framework, the word that not only names a social subject, but constructs that subject in the naming, and constructs that subject through a violating interpellation? Is it the power of a ‘one’ to effect such an injury through the wielding of the injurious name, or is that power accrued through time which is concealed at the moment that a single subject utters its injurious terms? (Butler, 1995, 203).

Other formulations of ‘performance’ offer other ways of engaging with and analysing acts of terror and counter terror. For instance, Cottle (2004) and Eyerman (2008), building on Victor Turner's analysis of ritual as social performance in their analysis of the murders of Stephen Lawrence and Theo Van Gogh as mediatized events, engage with the wider context of institutional and societal racism, and radical Islam in Europe, respectively. Their conceptualization of performance provides a useful framework for the analysis of the ritualized aspects of enactments of terror as spectacle, and for the examination of how terrorism and counter terrorism impact on notions of belonging and citizenship. Synthesizing these three conceptions and applications of the notion of ‘performance’ provides the main conceptual scaffolding of this approach.

Regimes of emotion shape notions of belonging among, for instance, Muslim communities in Australia, the UK, and India. Issues pertaining to the nature of civil society, belonging, and democracy are increasingly at the forefront of public debate, as exemplified in the current concerns regarding the emerging global civil society, to which contemporary technologies of communication are said to contribute (Benhabib, 2002; Harindranath, 2006). Of primary significance here is the politics of affect in relation to post-9/11 global discourse. The legal, rhetorical, and emotional aspects of this discourse are of central importance as they impact on questions of race, religion, and the politics of exclusion and inclusion. Derrida's (in Borradori, 2003) diagnosis of contemporary terrorism as symptomatic of an ‘autoimmune disorder’ is noteworthy. He extends the analogy of the disorder, in which an organism's defence mechanism displays an involuntary suicide thereby threatening its ability to defend against an external aggressor, to denote terrorism's effects on the body politic, including an undermining of democracy and its legal institutions, as well as the demarcation between secular and religious forces within it. The imposition of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in India and the Patriot Act in the USA and the debates regarding the duration of detention without trial of terrorist suspects in the UK, exemplify Derrida's contention. Significant in this context is the changing relationship between the West and its Islamic ‘other’, and political consequences and media representations of this relationship, insofar as it has been figured in terms of the intractability of Islam within discourses of globalization and liberal democracy. Several theorists have explored this dynamic, for example Ameli (2002) and Buck-Morss (2003). This climate of fear and the racialization of politics contribute to contemporary notions of civil society and belonging.

In their analysis of BBC World Service online forums, Gillespie, Herbert, and Andersson (2010) offer an insightful analysis of transnational affect following the Mumbai attacks of 2008. One of the striking aspects of this discussion is the performative element – both in terms of performativity as reiteration and citation and as the performance of horror and distaste, as well as complicated feelings that accompany notions of belonging and citizenship – that is revealed in the online forums. As Altheide (2006) has shown, ‘terrorism plays well with audiences accustomed to the discourse of fear as well as political leadership oriented to social policy geared to protecting those audiences from crime’ (127). However, it is possible to examine the media discourse of and on terrorism as contributing to what Thrift (2008) refers to as an ‘affective contagion’ (235), or Brennan's (2004) ‘transmission of affect’ through the analysis of the performatives of affect and the iterative and citational aspects of affective discourse in public discussion forums. In the present context, these performatives are invariably responses to media representations of terror, in which the media, as Thrift points out, constitute an ‘affective technique’:

the proliferation of mass media tends to both multiply and keep this kind of affective platform in the public mind in a way which promotes anxiety and can sometimes even be likened to obsession or compulsion…. What I am trying to point to is the rise of more and more affective techniques, premised on making appeals to the heart, passion, emotional imagination (Thift 2008, 242–3).

The politics of affect embrace the uneasy alliance between ‘real’ and mediated experience of terrorist events mentioned earlier. For Buck-Morss (2003), the attacks of 9/11, by staging violence as a global spectacle, have initiated a novel configuration of extremist violence, the media, and a global public sphere. The global-local dialectic that is intrinsic to this configuration, she argues, requires a revision of the politics of ‘think global, act local’, replacing it with ‘think global, act global’. This is a difficult task, as not only is there no agreement on what constitutes the discursive terrain of the global public sphere, but also because its performative modality is predominantly visual and immanent, which entices immediate empathetic identification which disappears just as easily.

The internet as a source of qualitative data? Towards an analytical framework

Huntington's infamous ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis has been adopted as an organizing principle in the post-9/11 political culture, in which diverse protagonists, assuming extreme positions, have developed binary oppositions between the so-called democratic (mostly, but not exclusively, Western) and the putative ‘Islamic’ worlds. This discursive construction of a supposed clash also underlies justifications for the ‘war on terror’ that has assumed global proportions, forming, as Erjavec & Volcic (2007) argue following Fairclough, a global ‘discursive order’. Like other global discourses however, the ‘war on terror’ displays a local variant, in which the specificities of local and regional politics have been able to establish links, mostly dubious, with the concerns expressed globally. One of the more significant aspects of this is the refraction of the Muslim-as-Other binary through the lens of local political pragmatism. Examining the ‘performance’ of political leaders' mediated responses to acts of terror allows for a closer examination of these manifestations and justifications in different countries and regions. Habermas' (in Borradori, 2003) distinction between three types of terrorist activity is relevant here: ‘indiscriminate guerrilla warfare’ (typified by Palestinian or Sri Lankan suicide militants); ‘paramilitary guerrilla warfare’ (national liberation movements); and global terrorism, which has even less political legitimacy (Borradori, 2003, 56).

In addition to the depictions of the iconography of terrorist spectacle mentioned above, the internet has facilitated the emergence of a ‘networked adversary’ promoting a single global narrative (Ranstrop 2007). Similarly, Conway (2002, 2007) has published analyses of cyber terrorism, and on the ways in which extremist networks use the internet. As pointed out in Eriksson & Giacomello (2007), security in the digital age requires a close examination of terrorist networks in cyber space. The technology of the internet, particularly its interactivity, has enabled the sharing of information and user-generated content, so much so that it has generally been accepted as a space for national and transnational political activity (McNair, 2008; Hassan, 2008). What is significant here, however, is that the internet as a research site offers unique access to a range of media, to political speeches, and to public affect, from diverse regions and crucially, to how these interact. In other words, it is possible to exploit the opportunity provided by the internet in terms of access to news reports (print and television), enactments of terror (for example, the beheadings of kidnap victims), political speeches, and, most importantly, expressions of public affect in the form of posts, blogs, and contributions to online discussion forums. What should be emphasized here, therefore, is that the internet is both a unique as well as a convenient site for data collection and analysis. For instance, as Gillespie, Herbert, and Andersson (2010) demonstrate, the internet is a distinctive source of data on public responses to the mediation of terror, and of concerns regarding radicalization among Muslim youth. As a conduit and a virtual space for the mediatization of multifarious aspects of global and local discourses on terrorism, the internet provides a unique opportunity for the analysis of those discourses. The internet, as an originating as opposed to a merely transmission medium, provides the opportunity for new forms of interaction (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001). Consequently, it has become a site not only for the publicity of terror, but also for the contestations of and justifications for State responses and public assessments of security.

What is crucial here is the complex inter-relationship, as manifested through the internet, between the mediated performances of terrorism, counter-terrorism by the State, and the emotional and political responses of the public, all of which evoke diverse conceptions of the cultural politics of difference. While the hyper-textual and multimedia dimensions of the technology makes the internet an ideal site for a multi-regional study of the mediation of terrorism and counter terrorism, its apparent openness for user-generated content permits the examination of public responses to terrorism.

Qualitative analyses of the diverse types of internet content present a challenge to researchers (Consalvo et al. 2004), and debates continue regarding standard ways of carrying out research on interactive multimedia. The method of computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) proposed by Herring (2004), while adequate for the study of posts and online discussions as verbal language, requires further refinement before it can be applied to images, clips, graphics, and their inter-relations on the internet landscape. Utilizing the multi-modal social semiotic analysis elaborated in Kress & van Leeuwen (2001), enables the refinement of a methodology specifically suited for an analysis of the internet's multimedia environment. Given the aim to trace the network of the interlinked fields of terrorism, counter terrorism, and public response to both as manifested on the internet, the analytical framework may combine discourse analysis of texts, visual analysis of clips and images from chosen websites, and a broad sociological analysis of the performative aspects of the three fields in, for instance, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. As stated earlier, while existing research has mostly focused on the news coverage of 9/11, there have been few comparable studies on the coverage of terrorist incidents in these regions, and fewer on the inter-relations between them. The dynamic environment of the internet will allow access to jihadi web sites, news clips from diverse sources, as well as blogs and online discussions sites with contributions from the general public. The qualitative, multi-modal analysis of the different websites can potentially elicit the following discursive domains in the three chosen fields of ‘performativity’, as conceived by Butler, the analysis of which can locate the commonalities and differences between these fields across different regions:

1.	Interpretive and classificatory performance: the explanatory and classificatory aspects of the process of ‘recontextualisation’ in Bernstein's (1990) terms, that is, the re-presentation of social events through the contextual rationale of another social event, which in turn influence the ways in which these events are represented, evaluated, and legitimized (Fairclough, 2003). What is central for our purposes is the way in which recontextualization contributes to the production of particular interpretations of terrorist events by the media and the public, and how these are related to other discursive regimes. An example of this is the then Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee's attempt to equate 9/11 with ‘Islamic extremism’ in India (Chakravartty, 2002).
2.	Spectacle as performance: the visual analysis of the iconography of mediatized terrorism, that is, clips and images of both enactments and the media coverage of acts of terror as ritualized performance. Firstly, this adds a crucial dimension to the analysis: it is possible to locate the spectacular aspects of acts of terror and the efforts to counter them through the invocation of specific moral and legal discourses and national histories. Secondly, the visual aspects of terrorist incidents contribute in important ways to the circulation of discourses on terror and how such acts are imagined in the public sphere. Such imaginings, and how they in turn contribute to notions of otherness or belonging, are crucial to the study of the intersections of terrorism discourse and democratic formations. The significance of spectacle on the internet is illustrated in the broadcast on Al Jazeera of the images of the ritual beheading of prisoners in Iraq, and the posting on YouTube of images from ‘jihadi videos’ (Conway & McInerney, 2008).
3.	Political performance: the linguistic and visual aspects of terrorism as enactments designed to cause political, social, and moral instability, and of the ‘counter-performance’ of the State and the range of discursive strategies adopted by the main players and most visible actors in the political scene. Such performative actions have both manifest and latent symbolic reference, and such social performances, like theatrical ones, symbolize particular meanings only because they relate to more general, taken-for-granted meaning structures – in this case conceptions of extremism and national security – within which their performances are staged. News clips of the British Foreign Secretary's pronouncements on the phrase ‘war on terror’, and the Pakistani Prime Minister's response to the 2008 Mumbai attacks are illustrations of political performance.
4.	The performance of public affect: a close analysis of blogs and online discussions from the readers of the diverse websites to examine their emotional and political responses to acts of terrorism, security policies of the State, and to perceived enemies and threats to personal and national security. The legal, rhetorical, and emotional aspects of public affect are of central importance as they impact on questions of race, religion, and the politics of inclusion and exclusion. The climate of fear and the racialization of politics contribute to contemporary notions of civil society and belonging. An instance of affective performance emerged on online discussion pages of the Indian television news agency NDTV following the attacks in Hyderabad and later in Mumbai, displaying a variety of responses to the incident, including deliberations of the role of Muslims in India.

The richness of the data and analysis will stem from the examination of the ways in which global discourse on terrorism, including the ‘war on terror’, intersect with local enactments of terror and counter terrorism, and in important ways contribute to the sense of security and threat among the public. Crucially, these in turn contribute to justifications of new policies to counter terrorism, and to the politics of affect among different ethnic and religious groups in the various regions. A clear understanding of the commonalities and variations of these across different regions and how these in turn reveal local political and social concerns is crucial to the development of inter-state and inter-regional cooperation on international security.

To conclude, the proposed framework provides the opportunity to analyse, using Butler's notion of ‘performativity’ and ‘performance’, news reports, blogs, news clips, and photographs on relevant internet sites to systematically delineate enactments of terrorism and counter terrorism across the different geographical regions. It enables the examination of the ways in which global concerns about terrorism intersect with local variants, and the iteration evident in phrases and images, justifications and anxieties expressed by perpetrators, politicians, and journalists. Examining the performance of terrorism and counter terrorism on the internet allows the tracking of the main constituents of public responses, both emotional and political, to both acts of terror as well as the political rhetoric justifying counter terrorism in multiethnic and multi-religious communities in national, regional, and transnational contexts, and to develop, using the distinctive characteristic of the internet as a transnational, multimedia space and a conduit for the global-local dialectic, a relevant analytical framework to examine the complex network of interconnections between the three fields both within and across diverse national contexts and geographical regions.

Notes

1. See for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = d7Ir320NctQ&feature = channel

2. See for example: http://www.google.co.in/images?client = safari&rls = en&q = mumbai +bombing+2008&oe = UTF-8&redir_esc = &um = 1&ie = UTF-8&source = univ&ei = 3LEqTZ6GI4_OrQelmc3DDA&sa = X&oi = image_result_group&ct = title&resnum = 6&ved = 0CFQQsAQwBQ&biw = 1391&bih = 717

3. The Weekend Australian. 2010, July 31–August 1.

4. The Guardian. 2009, January 15.