Trivializing Terrorists: An Exchange – The Author Replies www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Trivializing Terrorists: How Counterterrorism Knowledge Undermines Local Resistance to Terrorism www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

15) If you’re still here, this is the 4th article in a series I’ve been working on the politics of knowledge about terrorism: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

14) Our findings suggest that if the strict divide between terrorist violence and state violence doesn’t withstand scrutiny for ISIS—in many ways the archetypal terrorist—it’s time to admit that the term “terrorism” doesn’t simply describe a form of violence. It also enables it.

13) But to many of our interlocutors, ISIS’s violence enabled the unpredictable violence against civilians that can sustain legitimate, if oppressive or hegemonic, state actors. ISIS rose because the international system does not consistently abhor violence against civilians.

12) If states can use the terrifying violence of groups like ISIS to expand or reinforce their own power, then the term “terrorism” loses its meaning as a distinct form of violence. We want to believe that ISIS’s violence is anathema to how legitimate states maintain power.

11) Public secrecy removes state violence from conversations about terrorist violence, which allows counterterrorism to continue as a discrete practice against bad actors, without emphasizing how those bad actors evaded capture, or moved across borders, etc, so easily.

10) Public secrecy discourages scholars and analysts from documenting the non-antagonistic interactions between states and terrorist groups, which helps to minimize the scrutiny that this receives. We scoured the #TerrorismStudies literature; it’s very rarely explored.

9) BUT, our interlocutors also said that they tend not to write about state facilitation of ISIS in their professional capacity for several reasons. We argue that this makes it a “public secret”—something that experts discuss widely but seldom document officially.

8) We argue that we need to start thinking of terrorist groups in this way: they reproduce through and alongside state power rather than only in opposition to it.

7) In other words, ISIS may be a revolutionary movement against the established order, but it is also the malignant byproduct of that order.

6) Essentially, they suggested that states can maintain power by enabling, and profiting from, unpredictable and plausibly deniable violence in the periphery—something that groups like ISIS supply in abundance.

5) Most pointed to key moments where states chose not to stand in the group’s way because it gave (/gives) them plausible deniability for their own violence against civilians whom they sought to subjugate, marginalize, expel, extort, or rob.

4) We conducted more than 60 interviews across Iraq with Iraqi and Western security analysts, journalists, humanitarian workers, and diplomats. Almost all our interlocutors suggested that state actors had intentionally facilitated ISIS, at least at times.

3) The Iraq-based narrative we identify doesn’t deny this. But it also places ISIS within a more mundane mosaic of political, economic, and territorial competition where authoritarian states, external counterterrorism, and terrorist groups all reproduce one another.

2) The mainstream narrative about #ISIS emphasizes its exceptional organizational capabilities, particularly its military capacity, ideology, propaganda, governance/state-building apparatus—and the weakness of its state opponents.