The Ethics of Capitalism - Social Europe Journal

the September 11 attacks merely
confirmed this trend. The
trouble was that none of the
(self-styled) experts could provide
a coherent explanation for
what was happening. What
exactly did the ‘new terrorism’
consist of Where did it come
from And how should it be
fought With the notable exception
of the American scholar
Bruce Hoffman, who traced
some of the key developments
with great insight and precision,
the idea of ‘new terrorism’ was
often used as a slogan which
signalled that things were different
from the past but provided
no real explanation of how and
why things had changed.
In my new book Old and
New Terrorism I am trying to
shed light on some of the questions
which many experts have
failed to answer. My investigation
begins with a look at the
three areas in which terrorism
has changed.
First, terrorist groups have
become more diffuse.
Traditionally, many terrorist
groups adopted hierarchical systems
of organisation with clear
lines of command and control.
Even groups like the IRA and
the Basque group ETA, which
had decided in favour of a supposedly
more flexible ‘cell’ system,
were fully integrated into
the chain of command. In the
IRA’s case, for example, access
to explosives was controlled by
the group’s regional commanders,
thus making sure that none
of the cells could carry out a
bombing without the leadership’s
knowledge and approval.
By contrast, the structures of
the ‘new terrorism’ are far more
difficult to grasp. They are often
described as networks rather
than as organisations, because
formal hierarchies have been
replaced with personal relationships.
What matters is not
someone’s formal rank but
whom they know and what connections
they can facilitate.
Although truly ‘leaderless resistance’
continues to be quite
rare, the difficulty in tracing terrorist
attacks such as Al Qaeda’s
bombings in Madrid and
London to any conventional
‘leadership’ illustrates quite
how messy and confused terrorist
group structures have
become in recent years.
Another novelty lies in how
terrorist organisations are
increasingly transnational in
orientation, not only reaching
across borders but creating an
entirely new kind of social
space. For the ‘old’, territorially
based groups such as ETA and
the IRA, everything related back
to the struggle in their homeland,
even when they went
abroad in order to buy weapons,
train, or raise money. Al Qaeda,
on the other hand, can be
described as truly ‘de-territorialised’.
When studying Al
Qaeda members, the French
scholar Olivier Roy found that –
typically – ‘the country where
their family comes from, the
country of residence and radicalisation,
and the country of
action’ are all different.
Furthermore, the group’s ‘centre
of gravity’ has constantly shifted
– often across continents –
depending on where members
and their leaders believe victory
is most likely.
The second significant difference
between ‘old’ and ‘new’ is
the rise of religiously motivated
terrorism. The ideologies of terrorist
groups are often mistakenly
thought of as existing in a
space completely separate from
the (non-violent) political mainstream.
In reality, terrorists’
political ideas always reflect a
given society’s radical ideological
currents, with the obvious
difference that terrorists are
pursuing their (radical) ends
through violent means. It
should come as no surprise,
then, that – in the 1960s and
1970s – when most of the radical
social and political movements
were either Marxist or
nationalist, these ideologies
were also dominant among the
terrorist groups of the time.
Indeed, almost all of the ‘old’
European terrorists were one or
the other – often, in fact, they
were both.
In the 1980s and 1990s, however,
religious issues gradually
found their way back into the
mainstream political discourse.
Many scholars detected a ‘religious
revival’ – manifestations
of which could be found on all
continents and in all religions.
As with Marxism and nationalism
in earlier decades, the rise
of radical religiously inspired
political movements came to be
reflected in a number of religiously
oriented terrorist
groups. This included militant
Christian anti-abortionists in
the United States, Jewish
extremists in the West Bank, the
Buddhist inspired cult Aum
Shinrikyo, and various groups
in the Muslim world ranging
from Hezbollah and Hamas to
Al Qaeda. In fact, Hoffman
showed that, whereas in the late
1960s, not a single terrorist
group anywhere in the world
could be described as religiously
inspired, the share of religiously
motivated groups had
risen to nearly a third by the
mid-1990s.
Finally, terrorism has become
42 Social Europe Journal Summer 2009