The dispositive of terrorism during the war on terrorism: the UNSC’s approach to concrete terror emergencies in the Middle East

ABSTRACT

This study adopts a constructivist approach to reveal the function of the dispositive of terrorism in the UN Security Council. While some CTS studies focus on genealogies of terrorism at the UN based on a general “global terrorism” discourse, this study focuses on concrete emergencies. The methodology compares 652 states’ deliberations and resolutions during a surge in violence between 2006 and 2009 in four cases: Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel-Palestinian, and Israel-Lebanon. This study argues that the UN discourse in the Security Council on terrorism functions as a way of reifying states, by employing a dyad of self-other, terrorists, and counter-terrorism, which in practice is constructive for state stability and state-building. It bypasses concrete instrumental disputes in favour of a comprehensive approach centred around the sovereign state. This construction sidelines global terrorist organisations such as al-Qaida, and state-terrorists such as Iran.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorism
• discourse
• construction
• state stability
• state-building
• un security council
• Afghanistan
• Iraq
• Israel
• Lebanon
• Hezbollah
• Hamas

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the editor-in-chief, Richard Jackson, and to the wonderful and helpful comments of the anonymous reviewers of this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Throughout the paper I use the term dispositive. In the literature this term is sometime translated to apparatus. Because the latter sometimes reflects a more state-centred perspective I preferred dispositive (Bussolini 2010).

2. All conflicts also involved massive refugee problems, many internally displaced people (IDPs), injured people, and other negative parameters such as the destruction of infrastructures. In Iraq and Afghanistan counter-terrorism operations escalated together with a rise in terror attacks (Iraq Body Count 2020; Godfroy and Collins 2019; UNAMA 2008, 2009, 2010). The major Israeli counter-terrorism operations usually lasted several weeks, and targeted Hezbollah in south Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. These operations, it was claimed, were a response to attacks by these organisations, which sometimes were accompanied by the launching of rockets and missiles into Israeli territory (Israel-MFA 2007; United Nations-HRC 2006; United Nations-OCHA 2009). Finally, after 2009 there was a decline in casualties and relative stability in the region. This abruptly shifted because of the 2011 Arab Spring and later events, which was recently analysed separately (Martini 2021, ch.5). The shift was accompanied by the American withdrawal from the region due to the Obama doctrine; increased interventions in Iran, Russia, and Turkey in the Middle East, and protracted civil wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen (Godfroy and Collins 2019; Kilcullen 2020, 231–235; Quilliam 2020a, 2020b).

3. Deliberations made by non-state actors were left out of the analysis. I counted 203 speeches on the subject of Afghanistan; 211 speeches pertaining to Iraq; 110 speeches referring to Israel-Lebanon; and 128 regarding Israel-PA. The explanation for the gap in numbers of speeches is that the Israeli conflicts were more focused in terms of heightened levels of violence, while the other two cases had seen prolonged violence. It was decided to maintain the exact number of states’ labels and not to align the numbers.