The logic of self‐fulfilling prophecy – a false definition of a situation that evokes a new behavior that makes the original false conception become true – obtains in large and small historical events, in politics and in economics, in education, in financial cycles, as well as in matters of war and terrorism. This logic follows from what sociologist Robert Merton called the Thomas theorem: If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. Pre‐emption in war, the projections of threats in terrorism, the anticipation of future crises in economics are examples of situations in which the time manipulation of a feared future may force reality to become self‐fulfilling.

A key concern for critical terrorism studies is the extent to which counterterrorism contributes to the promotion and perpetuation of terrorism. When dealing with either the events leading to 9/11 or the current anti-Muslim movements in Europe, we owe serious attention to the self-generating process by which terrorism and counterterrorism operate as an edge that simultaneously and constitutively links and separates both aspects of the phenomenon. The 9/11 Commission Report established that the events could probably have been prevented; there were after all 50-60 officers who knew two of the future attackers were living in the United States. What requires analysis are the blind spots in counterterrorist thinking that lead to such failures and ultimately to the self-fulfilling nature of the war on terror. This article will examine the conceptual similarities between witchcraft societies and the counterterrorist thought and policies put in practice by various US administrations-having to do with the perversions of temporality, the logic of taboo, non-hypothetical knowledge, secret information, the passion for 'expert' ignorance, mystical causation and dual sovereignty. The need for an epistemic shift that will take into account the constitutive nature of discourse and the political subjectivities of the actors will be advocated.

Political violence, labeled loosely as “terrorism,” is a seemingly ubiquitous factor in twentieth-century world politics. Coping with it has become a major preoccupation of governments and is the object of considerable international cooperation among them. The purpose of this paper is to examine the case of ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna or Basque Country and Freedom) within the Basque nationalist movement in order to underscore several of the conceptual weaknesses in the literature on terrorism while also suggesting avenues for future research.

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