What's so ‘religious’ about ‘religious terrorism’?

Abstract

This article assesses the validity of the concept of ‘religious terrorism’ and its consequences for research and policy practices. It explores the origins, assumptions and primary arguments of the term and subjects them to an analytical assessment. It argues that the distinctions typically drawn between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ terrorism are problematic, both conceptually and empirically, and that the term is misleading in its typical assumptions about the motives, causes and behaviour of groups classified as ‘religious terrorist’. In particular, it shows that the behaviour of those thus labelled is so diverse, and often so indistinguishable from their ‘secular’ counterparts, that the term has little meaning without further qualification, while simultaneously obscuring important aspects of both ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ violence. It then goes on to illustrate how the term, rooted in a particular historically situated understanding of religion and a particular set of power structures, serves as a disciplinary device to domesticate ‘political religion’, delegitimising certain actors while legitimising a number of highly contentious counterterrorist practices designed to deal with those described as ‘religious terrorists’. The article ends with some suggestions for alternative ways to study the role of beliefs and institutional structures, religious or otherwise, in producing political violence.

Keywords:

• religion
• violence
• terrorism
• secular
• power

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Scott Thomas, Donatella della Porta, Jeffrey Goodwin, A. Alexander Stummvoll, members of the Security Research Group at Aberystwyth University, participants at the EUI Workshop on ‘How (not) to study religious politics’ and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The article's title was inspired by Tucker (2001).

Notes

1. We have debated the problems surrounding the term ‘terrorism’ elsewhere; see Gunning (2007b), Jackson (2011), Toros and Gunning (2009).

2. In terms of the arguments referred to in this article, Cavanaugh (2004) and (2009) covered essentially the same ground. We refer in this article to Cavanaugh (2004).

3. We thank Scott Thomas and Alex Stummvoll for emphasising this.

4. We thank Scott Thomas for this point.

5. Political violence in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, is under-represented in the main data sets (Lia 2004, p. 31), while who is politically designated ‘terrorist’ at any particular time influences what data are included.

6. We thank Alex Stummvoll for this point; see also Lambert (2011), Spalek and Lambert (2008).

7. ‘Ideological’ here describes a comprehensive belief system, regardless of whether it is religious or secular.