Location

Stewart Center 318

Session Number

Session 21: REFLECTIONS ON TERRORISM ACROSS TIME AND SPACE 1

Start Date

10-9-2011 9:00 AM

End Date

10-9-2011 10:30 AM

Abstract

Terrorism’s definition is hotly debated and notoriously problematic. The resulting instability of counterterrorism and counterterrorist identity, however, is less often explored. This paper analyzes the prehistory of the War on Terror to explore how the meaning and associations attributed to terrorism by counterterrorists in the 1990s reflect the latter’s priorities, agenda, and anxieties. Prevalent ahistorical post-Cold War representations of terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as a “new” threat indicate that WMD-wielding terrorists functioned to justify the continued existence of the American national security state after the Soviet Union collapsed. Close readings of Rainbow Six, a Tom Clancy bestseller and textual nexus of counterterrorist politics and popular culture, contextualize analysis of this characterization of terrorism. The element of WMD in Rainbow Six and similar narratives magnifies the reality of small-scale terrorism to sustain grandiose transnationalist rhetoric about threats to the survival of the human species, which then implicates reproductivity and the gender politics of the “culture wars” in counterterrorist discourse. Clancy’s novel also stages anxieties about multi-national corporations, privatization of technological development, and the body’s vulnerability in a world of permeable borders. The multiple valences of counterterrorist opposition to non-state groups are united by a counterterrorist fantasy of mirroring terrorist dissociation from state institutions to engage in extralegal practices, which anticipates controversial aspects of the War on Terror. The analysis therefore raises the possibility that 9/11 may have slipped into an already developing cultural narrative, been absorbed into its logic and then driven by its own independent compulsions.

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Sep 10th, 9:00 AM Sep 10th, 10:30 AM

The Cultural Politics of WMD Terrorism in Post-Cold War America

Stewart Center 318

Terrorism’s definition is hotly debated and notoriously problematic. The resulting instability of counterterrorism and counterterrorist identity, however, is less often explored. This paper analyzes the prehistory of the War on Terror to explore how the meaning and associations attributed to terrorism by counterterrorists in the 1990s reflect the latter’s priorities, agenda, and anxieties. Prevalent ahistorical post-Cold War representations of terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as a “new” threat indicate that WMD-wielding terrorists functioned to justify the continued existence of the American national security state after the Soviet Union collapsed. Close readings of Rainbow Six, a Tom Clancy bestseller and textual nexus of counterterrorist politics and popular culture, contextualize analysis of this characterization of terrorism. The element of WMD in Rainbow Six and similar narratives magnifies the reality of small-scale terrorism to sustain grandiose transnationalist rhetoric about threats to the survival of the human species, which then implicates reproductivity and the gender politics of the “culture wars” in counterterrorist discourse. Clancy’s novel also stages anxieties about multi-national corporations, privatization of technological development, and the body’s vulnerability in a world of permeable borders. The multiple valences of counterterrorist opposition to non-state groups are united by a counterterrorist fantasy of mirroring terrorist dissociation from state institutions to engage in extralegal practices, which anticipates controversial aspects of the War on Terror. The analysis therefore raises the possibility that 9/11 may have slipped into an already developing cultural narrative, been absorbed into its logic and then driven by its own independent compulsions.