Don't confuse me with the facts: knowledge claims and terrorism

Abstract

It became commonplace after 11 September 2001 to declare that the events changed ‘everything’ and that the world would never again be as it was before that date. Many spoke of the dividing line of the pre-9/11 and post-9/11 world, and it became commonplace to assert that the events conclusively demonstrated the validity of the thesis that there was a ‘new’ terrorism, at base religious and apocalyptic, more networked rather than hierarchical and very different from the ‘old’ terrorism. This article reflects upon and evaluates the development of knowledge claims about insurgent terrorism and measures them against the standard of how well these claims have advanced the formulation of theories of terrorism that can be subjected to observational testing. The article examines changes in the lethality of terrorism, the characterisations, boundaries and control structures of the network claims and differences amongst the old and new terrorists and concludes that claims of a ‘new terrorism’ are vastly misleading.

Keywords:

• terrorism
• knowledge claims
• 9/11
• ‘new terrorism’
• lethality
• networks

Acknowledgments

This article was originally presented as a keynote address at the conference, ‘A Decade of Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism since 9/11: Taking Stock and New Directions in Research and Policy’, University of Strathclyde, UK, 10 September 2011.

Notes

1. This approach to empirical social science advocated by Nicholson is therefore not at odds with many aspects of a ‘critical’ approach – the most important of which is the investigation (the critical evaluation) of the context and formulation of knowledge claims, which implies a reflexive emphasis on social context and the derivation and evaluation of knowledge claims. It is at its root a pragmatic epistemology.

2. Rep. Earl Landgrebe, of Indiana's 2nd Congressional District, was one of President Nixon's strongest supporters. On 5 August 1974, Nixon released the documents that showed him issuing orders to his aides to hinder the FBI investigation of the Watergate break-in. Landgrebe was interviewed by the Associated Press on 7 August 1974. He said, ‘Don't confuse me with the facts; I've got a closed mind. I will not vote for impeachment’. Nixon resigned two days later (McShane 1994). The title is also cited in Schell (1974, p. 19) and used by White (1998).

3. Here I use the term wisdom in the same sense that John Kenneth Galbraith used in The Affluent Society: ‘It will be convenient to have a name for the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability, and it should be a term that emphasizes this predictability. I shall refer to these ideas henceforth as the conventional wisdom’ (1956, p. 9).

4. All references to the ‘new terrorism’ of which I am aware refer only to insurgent terrorism (see, for example, Tucker 2001, Duyvesteyn 2004, Spencer 2006, Mockaitis 2008). While there was increased discussion of rogue states and the axis of evil, as identified by the Bush administration, the discussion did not proceed along the same lines as the ‘new terrorism’ debate.

5. See also Burke (2004) and the contributors in Greenberg (2005).