Facing the world as it is? On irony and (counter)terrorism

ABSTRACT

Terrorism and counterterrorism are often described as “ironic”, but conceptual engagement with irony has been very limited. Building on the lifework of cultural anthropologist Joseba Zulaika, this article considers irony as an analytical meta-perspective in the critical study of (counter)terrorism. It draws on the life and work of German-American Christian ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) to argue that the ironies of (counter)terrorism under U.S. president Barack Obama, who admired Niebuhr, point to an unconscious failure of collective self-understanding. Dissolving these ironies requires new narratives of American identity that cut across foreign and domestic politics, state and non-state actors, the “war on terror” and white supremacy in a long view of history. Facilitating this multidirectional process of self-reflection and -transcendence is a key task for critical scholars of (counter)terrorism.

KEYWORDS:

• Irony
• Reinhold Niebuhr
• Barack Obama
• Christian realism
• terrorism
• Joseba Zulaika

Acknowledgements

Part of the research for this article was conducted during a visiting fellowship at the American-German Institute (AGI), Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C. in summer/fall 2023. I thank the AGI for their support. I also thank both reviewers for their kind, considerate, and helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Online search for “iron*” in issues 1(1) to 16(1). Unrelated terms (e.g. “environment” and “Iron Curtain”) were excluded.

2. There are 88 mentions of “ironic(ally)” or “irony” in 65 articles published in 88 issues during the period 2008–2023. If all digitised volumes are included (1997–2023), the figure rises to 168 mentions in 120 articles published in 132 issues (up to and including issue 4 of volume 35). Terrorism and Political Violence was first published in 1989.

3. A different version of the story is told in the Quran (sura 37, verses 102–111).

4. Terror and Taboo does not mention it, but Kierkegaard captures this impossibility of fixing meaning in life, and thus in language, in his master thesis On the Concept of Irony (1841), his first major work.

5. Obama used irony as an analytical tool on several other occasions, including to highlight the adverse effects of Bush’s counterterrorism policy.

6. The phrase also frames the Obama administration’s first National Security Strategy published in May 2010. In 2018, Obama’s former speech writer and national security advisor Ben Rhodes published his own memoir of working for the Obama administration under this title.

7. Zulaika is referencing Laurie Calhoun’s We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age (2016).

8. Despite a substantial decrease in the number of drone strikes under President Biden, there is so far little evidence that the secrecy and logic of pre-emption animating the global war on terror have disappeared, see Finucane and Hartig (2023).

9. Niebuhr adds “pathetic” as a third mode, but since this “arises from fortuitous cross-purposes and confusions in life for which no reason can be given, or guilt ascribed”, it is less relevant for political analysis. See Niebuhr ([1952] 2015), 461).

10. Niebuhr was familiar with psychoanalytical methods beyond his theoretical engagement with Freud: he sponsored the U.S. National Mental Health Foundation and consulted psychiatrists after suffering his first stroke in 1952.

11. Niebuhr later revised some of these positions, as evidenced by his last solo-authored book Man’s Nature and His Communities (1965).

12. Niebuhr also saw the Vietnam War as full of ironies because the U.S. was fighting an unjust war in the belief that democracy made it “innocent of ideology” when in fact its actions were driven by self-righteousness (Niebuhr [1967] 1970).

13. The memoir was adapted as a documentary and accompanying book I Am Not Your Negro in 2016/17.

14. Anderson (2019) argues that Obama achieved this effect by combining rhetorical irony with (African-American) “signifying”.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Josefin Graef

Josefin Graef, PhD, is an Associate Researcher at Aston University, Birmingham, UK. Her research draws on a range of disciplines and cultural resources to explore terrorism in the narrative imagination of Europe and the global “West” since the end of the Second World War, in particular in relation to far-right violence. Her book “Imagining Far-right Terrorism: Violence, Migration, and the Nation State in Contemporary Western Europe” was published as part of Routledge’s Studies in Fascism and the Far Right Series in 2022.