On Politics and Civilisation: Terrorism, the Political Arena and Challenges to the International Order

Abstract

The article presents a theoretical and discursive understanding of international terrorism and links the hegemonic power relations constituting the international order with the formation of global discourses on international terrorism. Starting from the understanding of international terrorism as a discursive construction, it analyses theoretically the implication of labelling a specific kind of violence as “terrorism” and the resulting depoliticization and securitization. Grounded in these theoretical reflections, it is argued here that the discursive construction of a specific kind of violence such as international terrorism at a global standardised level depends on the power relations that constitute the international community, its identity and its legitimacy – i.e., the reason of state, the reason of the system and the reason of civilisation. The main thesis is that, from this theoretical perspective, the historical discursive formations of international terrorism centred on a specific kind of violence representing an ideological threat to these power relations, their universality and legitimacy. The article presents a genealogy of these standardised discursive formations which emerged at an international level in contemporary history and it deconstructs these formations through the theoretical approach presented here.