Making sense of terrorism: a narrative approach to the study of violent events

Abstract

How does violence become understood as terrorism? In this article, we show how a narrative approach to the study of violent events offers a conceptually productive way to understand the process of "seeing" an event as a terrorist act, one that explicitly integrates the phenomenology of violence. While the collective practice of defining terrorism in academia and the policy arena has struggled to produce a universal definition, we identify a set of "common sense" characteristics. We argue that if the framing of violent events prominently features these characteristics as discursive anchors, this primes processes of sensemaking toward interpreting violence as terrorism. While terrorism markers are often articulated as being pragmatic and apolitical indicators of terrorist acts, we show that they are indeed at the core of political contests over historical and physical facts about violent events. The narrative approach we develop in this article underscores that intuitive leanings toward interpreting violence as terrorism are a sign of political agency precisely because they are produced through the stories political agents tell.

Defining Terrorism: how Ambiguous Definitions and Vague Classifications Open Doors for Power Acquisition

“…or how to define it comprehensively (Bruce, 2013;Homolar & A. Rodríguez-Merino, 2019;Martini & Njoku, 2017). Some, as Meisels (2009) argue that the absence of wiliness of the academic community to commit to a definition of terrorism shows the bias and political inclinations of the community.…”

“…Scholars disagree on almost everything regarding terrorism, and as Michael Kronenwetter (2004, p. 4) aptly notes, "one thing we know for sure: terrorism is wrong". Some scholars believe that creating a universal definition of terrorism is inevitable (Ganor, 2002;Hoffman, 1984); others argue that this would be close to impossible to do so (Bruce, 2013;Homolar & A. Rodríguez-Merino, 2019;Martini & Njoku, 2017;Richards, 2012). Some research is focused on the state vs non-state actor's dilemma, arguing that any government-produced definition of terrorism is self-serving; thus, it would be inevitably worded in a way to serve and protect the government (Kronenwetter, 2004;Meisels, 2009).…”

A call to arms: Hero–villain narratives in US security discourse

“…A prominent example from the security realm is the use of the terminology of 'appeasement' to justify the use of military force, which triggers the reasoning shortcut that conciliatory responses to hostility will only encourage further aggression. Because people do not make judgements about a new situation in a discursive vacuum, when political agents rely upon such discursive anchoring through salient cognitive reference points in their security stories, they prime us to evaluate what is new within familiar frames and to link together contemporary security events with earlier episodes, even if this involves disregarding or downplaying the substantive differences between them (Homolar and Rodriguez-Merino, 2019).…”

“…Such works have demonstrated how states utilize ‘strategic narratives’ to shape international politics (Freedman, 2015; Krebs and Jackson, 2007; Miskimmon et al, 2013), how modes of rhetorical expression can shape national security policy (Krebs, 2015a, 2015b; Solomon, 2015; Widmaier, 2016), and what role narratives play in processes of identity construction (Berenskoetter, 2014; Campbell, 1998; Hønneland, 2010). They have also made the case for integrating narratology into feminist security studies (Wibben, 2010) and the study of terrorism (Homolar and Rodriguez-Merino, 2019) and interrogated the narratives of the discipline itself (Linklater, 2009; Suganami, 2008). Yet despite the emergence of a ‘narrative turn’ in the study of international politics (Galai, 2017; Subotić, 2016), which increasingly perforates the disciplinary mainstream, such scholarship has told us little about what it is that makes a powerful story, and how audiences are drawn into lending stories weight.…”

Speaking of hybrid warfare: Multiple narratives and differing expertise in the ‘hybrid warfare’ debate in Czechia

“…Although a given situation might not necessarily have a meaning and cohesiveness in itself, a narrative helps to craft a coherent interpretation – a story – that reduces any complexity and uncertainty that the situation might be posing and reconstructs the identity of the narrator (Homolar, 2011; Subotić, 2016; Wagenaar, 2011: 215). Thus, narratives assemble heterogenous elements (protagonists, practices, wider structures and conditions influencing behaviour) into a larger story, articulated along particularly defined causes and effects (Bueger and Gadinger, 2018: 74; Edkins, 2019; Homolar and Rodríguez-Merino, 2019). This also means that narratives can speak ostensibly about the same issue, yet establish very different links between the presented causes, effects and prospective actions, leading to stories with markedly different meanings (Stampnitzky, 2014: 6–7).…”