Suchergebnisse

Compares Colombia's guerrilla warfare and other paramilitary actions with the anti-government armed conflict in Argentina in the 1970s.

This essay takes a critical look at the rubric "age of terror," a rubric which has enjoyed a certain amount of theoretical and philosophical cachet in recent years. My argument begins by noting the continuity between this hypostatization and contemporary "war on terror" rhetoric, a continuity that is, in certain respects, ironic given the politics of the "age of terror" theorists. It then movesvia Machiavelli, Max Weber, and Hannah Arendtto a consideration of the topics of state violence (on the one hand) and totalitarian terror (on the other). I use Arendt's theorization of totalitarian terror for a dual purpose: first, to emphasize the gap between totalitarian terror and the more familiar "terror as means"; second, to question the characterization of recent Islamic terrorism as totalitarian in essence. Arendt's distinctions between violence, terror and totalitarian terror help us avoid the Schmittian logic installed by advocates of the "war on terror" and by a variety of writers anxious to identify a ill-defined and generic "totalitarianism" as the transhistorical and transcultural "other" of liberalism. Adapted from the source document.

THE AUTHOR CHALLENGES TRADITIONAL INTERPRETATIONS OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN NORTHERN IRELAND. BASED ON A SERIES OF ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDIES UNDERTAKEN IN REPUBLICAN AND LOYALIST COMMUNITIES IN BELFAST, SHE ARGUES THAT THE ISSUE OF STATE LEGITIMACY -- NOT MATERIALISM, CULTURE, OR RELIGION -- IS CORE TO UNDERSTANDING THE BASIS FOR POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN NORTHERN IRELAND. HER RESEARCH FINDINGS SUGGEST THAT COMMUNAL SUPPORT FOR AND TOLERANCE OF PARAMILITARY GROUPS AND THEIR TACTICS ARE UNDERPINNED BY SECURITY-RELATED CONCERNS AND A CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY THAT RENDERS THE STATE UNABLE TO CLAIM A MONOPOLY ON THE USE OF FORCE. IN CONTRADISTINCTION TO COUNTERINSURGENCY THEORISTS, SHE ARGUES THAT THE BASIS FOR PARAMILITARISM IS NOT CREATED BY FEAR OF REPRISAL OR INTIMIDATION. RATHER, INTRACOMMUNAL FEARS OF IDENTITY LOSS AND THREATS (BOTH PERCEIVED AND REAL) FROM THE OUT-GROUP HAVE CREATED A SPACE FOR REPUBLICANISM AND LOYALISM IN BOTH ITS POLITICAL AND PARAMILITARY FORMS.

MOZAMBIQUE HAS EXPERIENCED POLITICAL VIOLENCE FOR 30 YEARS. AFTER SUBJECTION TO COLONIALISM AND A LIBERATION STRUGGLE, EVEN INDEPENDENCE BROUGHT WITH IT FURTHER DESTRUCTION IN THE FORM OF COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND EXTERNAL AGGRESSION. THE 1992 PEACE AGREEMENT BETWEEN FRELIMO AND RENAMO MARKED THE BEGINNING OF A PROCESS OF RECONCILIATION WHICH, WITH THE INTERVENTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS, CULMINATED IN THE COUNTRY'S FIRST EVER ELECTIONS IN OCTOBER 1994. WHILE THE OFFICIAL ESTABLISHMENT OF A MULTI-PARTY DEMOCRACY IN MOZAMBIQUE APPEARS TO SOLVE THE OUTSTANDING POLITICAL PROBLEMS OF THE LAST DECADES, THE INHERITANCE OF A BRUTAL PAST AND THE FAILURE TO ADDRESS ITS LEGACY THREATENS TO SUBVERT THE RECENT POLITICAL GAINS.