steven radill the geopolitics of religious terrorism-libre
TRANSCRIPT
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The Geopolitics of Religious Terrorism
Steven M. Radil, Department of Geography, Ball State University Colin Flint, Department of Geography, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
1. Introduction
The agenda of social scientists and practitioners with interest in international security
issues has become dominated by the topic of terrorism. Catalyzed by the attacks of September
11, 2001, and given a dubious academic crutch by the revived notion of a ‘Clash of
Civilizations,’ it appeared as if new geopolitical actors and agendas had suddenly materialized to
reshape the very essence of international security (Huntington, 1993; Esposito, 2002; Stern,
2004; Hoffman, 2006; White, 2011). No longer was the focus upon inter-state competition and
the possible resort to ‘old wars’ in a Clausewitzian sense (Black, 2010). Instead, it was claimed
we had moved to an era of ‘new wars’ in which an ugly assortment of criminal, religious,
ideological and state groups fought for the ability to keep fighting and to attain more ill-gotten
gains (Kaldor, 2001). Globalization, the military dominance of the United States, cultural
differences, and terrorism as the chosen method of conflict were seen to underlie security
practitioners’ interest in “asymmetric warfare” (Kaldor, 2001; Kahler and Walter, 2006) and
academic interest in religious terrorism (Juergensmeyer, 2000; Stern, 2004). Though the
contemporary impact and threat of religiously motivated terrorism is hard to deny, our approach
is to look at the geography of religious terrorism to critically engage its “newness” (Rapoport,
2001; Flint, 2003; Flint and Radil, 2009). In particular, we engage whether religious terrorism is
just a new representation of old political motivations or whether new geographies of terrorism
are emerging.
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Our investigation of these questions is organized in the following way. First, we
introduce terrorism as a form of geopolitical agency that occurs, but is not determined by,
geographic settings. Religious terrorist groups are geopolitical actors and their actions are part of
the complex process of the dynamic social construction of space; a construction that is situated
within existing social and geographic settings but may change existing patterns. Second, we
move from the general idea of the social construction of space to the key geopolitical actors in
this analysis, religious terrorist groups. We introduce contemporary religious terrorism using the
historical framework of Rapoport’s (2001) waves of terrorism, and discuss their geographical
expression. Third, we discuss why religious terrorism is expected to produce a new geography of
violence. In the fourth section we introduce our case study of terrorism in India to investigate
whether terrorist activity is indeed becoming increasingly motivated by religious belief and, if
so, whether it actually displays new geographic patterns. Tentative conclusions are offered to
close the chapter.
2. Terrorists as geopolitical agents
Though theoretically and methodologically eclectic, the discipline of human geography may be
defined by one overarching axiom: that the built environment is socially constructed, or it is the
product of individual and collective action (Massey, 2005). Moreover, the process is recursive in
that the geography of the built environment is the setting which, to some degree, limits the
possibility of future actions while subsequent actions maintain but also alter the geographic
setting and political and social possibilities. The recursive process is one that identifies a range of
possible or likely actions by individuals and groups, but is not deterministic (Agnew, 1987).
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Geopolitics is a particular form of the social construction of space that focuses on
political actions and the political geographies that they form and operate within (Flint, 2011).
Historically, geopolitics was the preserve of statesmen with normative agendas for their own
state’s foreign policy agendas (Dodds and Atkinson, 2000). However, the revival of geopolitics
has reclaimed the topic for social scientists wishing to analyze rather than proscribe the world. In
addition, the cast of actors involved in geopolitics has expanded beyond the singular
concentration upon states to include social movements, multi-national companies, religious
organizations, and the media (for a review see Cox, Low and Robinson, 2008).
Terrorism, and religious terrorism in particular, is readily accommodated in the new
geopolitical research agenda. Terrorism is a form of political activity that operates within
existing political geographic settings with an agenda to disrupt them and impose new spatial
political arrangements (Flint, 2003). Hoffman (2006: 37) provocatively refers to terrorists as
“altruists” to illustrate how they develop a belief system that frames their violent actions as
necessary to right the wrongs imposed upon a marginalized social group. Such rhetoric claims
that all conventional, and peaceful, political avenues have been closed and the resort to violence
is the only means left to pursue a political agenda that will offer a long sought after justice for an
oppressed group. In other words, the geopolitical agency of terrorist groups is one in which the
violence is calculated to have a lasting political impact.
From a geographic perspective, Hoffman’s terminology requires a further element that
helps us to understand the reason for the sense of injustice and oppression and also highlights the
implications of a successful terrorist campaign. The perceived goals of terrorist groups can be
more fully identified as political geographic altruism (Flint, 2011: 177). The conceptual
framework of the social construction of space requires us to think of politics and geography as
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mutually constructed. Hence, any sense of political injustice is associated with a geographical
arrangement that creates and perpetuates the injustice. In turn, any proposed political alternative
is likely to require the construction of a new geographic arrangement. The inseparable
connection between politics and geography, with regard to terrorism, is probably most clear in
the arena of national separatism. For example, the demands of the Irish Republican Army or the
Basque separatists Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) are framed within an understanding that the
existing territorial expressions of the United Kingdom and Spain, respectively, are unjust; in that
they do not allow the full expression of Irish and Basque national identity. In turn, the goals of
these groups are a re-drawing of political boundaries in a way that is seen to enable national
liberation. In sum, the political solution requires a new geography, and the existing political
injustices are an expression of a “flawed” or oppressive geographical arrangement.
Geography also plays a role in the way that terrorists strategize. The choice of target is,
partially, a geographic decision based upon the symbolic value of geographic settings. Timothy
McVeigh’s 1995 attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was not
based solely on the politics of identifying the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms as
unconstitutional oppressors of the people, but also as a statement that this was a battle in and for
the geographic realm of the “American heartland.” The decision of the IRA to enact a campaign
on the British “mainland” sent a message that the question of Irish republicanism was a British
problem and not just Ulster’s. In each case, the geographic setting of terrorist activity has a
symbolic value connected to a general understanding of the cultural and historic significance of
particular spaces or places (Flint, 2005: 200). With regard to religious terrorism, Al Qaeda’s
representation of the Arabian Peninsula as the spiritual home of Islam has provided the basis for
its justification of the US as both an invading and infidel force.
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There is one more component of geopolitics that is useful for our discussion. Geopolitics
is both practice and representation (Flint, 2011: 35), in that it is not only the actions of
geopolitical actors that are important but the way they are represented. Representation is the
discourse used by an actor in an attempt to portray their actions as necessary and just. Of course,
in the competitive world of geopolitics opponents offer their counter-representations. In the
classic statement “one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter,” terrorist groups portray
themselves as liberators while the state authorities they fight portray them as “murderers.” The
identification of geopolitics as both practice and representation is not simply a semantic exercise
or a call for a discursive analysis (Ó Tuathail, 1996). The issue is that we should not identify the
goals and identification of terrorist groups just by what they say but also, arguably primarily, by
what they do. In other words geopolitical actions speak louder than geopolitical words in
identifying the purpose of a terrorist group.
We take this stance in order to critically investigate contemporary terrorism and the
argument that we are living through something fundamentally new: an era of religious terrorism.
Moreover, we believe that the mutual construction of geography and politics provides a means to
tackle this question. Religious terrorism is believed to have fundamentally different objectives
than previous expressions of terrorism, motivated by nationalist and ideological agendas
(Rapoport, 2001). The geographic perspective leads to hypotheses that changing agendas are
likely to create new geographies of terrorist activity, including intra-state patterns of terrorist
attacks. Our case study of India is an empirical examination of trends in terrorist activities to see
if geographic patterns of activity expected from a rise in religious terrorist activity are actually
occurring. But before we can focus on a particular case study we must introduce the broad
historical trends of terrorist activity to situate and understand contemporary religious terrorism.
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3. Waves of terrorism
Rapoport (2001) has identified four waves of terrorism in the modern era. These broad
categorizations are useful in situating contemporary terrorism, and assessing the argument that
we are currently experiencing a fundamentally new period dominated by religiously motivated
terror (Juergensmeyer, 2000). Each of these periods has a related geographic expression (Flint,
2011: 180-184). However, one geographic issue that is still to be addressed is the change in the
geographical location of terrorist attacks that is implied in the conceptual understanding of how
and why terrorism is inspired by religious belief. To understand the intra-state geography of
terrorism that is the focus of our case study we must first situate religious terrorism in broader
historical trends.
The first wave of modern terrorism occurred, generally speaking, between 1880 and 1914
(Rapoport, 2001). The main motivating force was the ideology of anarchism and its goals of
revolutionary change against monarchies and aristocratic regimes. The gradual electoral and
social reform that European governments were, reluctantly, making were seen by the anarchists
as a mere sop, but one that could dampen the revolutionary ardor of the masses. Hence,
anarchists believed that dramatic events – such as the assassination of prominent political elite
figures – would act as a trigger to tip society across a threshold and into revolution. The
geographic focus of this wave of terrorism was intra-state, or the overthrow of particular national
governments to be replaced by a new form of national political organization (Flint, 2011: 180).
The key event that marked the end of this period, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
in Sarajevo in June 1914 illustrates that the political motivation of terrorism was already
changing.
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The second wave of terrorism, roughly 1920-1960, occurred within a context of
decolonization: Specifically, the dismantling of the formal European empires in the aftermath of
the First and Second World Wars and the rise of US power that emphasized an open world
economy (Rapoport, 2001; Smith, 2003). Following on from the assassination of Franz
Ferdinand, the inspirational power of anarchism was replaced by the ideology of nationalism:
The belief that individuals were members of national groups that had a right to independent
sovereign and territorial states. The geographic strategy of this wave of terrorism was aimed at
creating new nation-states, rather than changing the form of government in existing states as in
the first wave (Flint, 2011: 180). Examples of terrorism in this wave include Irgun’s activities
and the desire to create the state of Israel and the Mau Mau campaign for an independent Kenya.
The third wave of terrorism, generally speaking 1960-1990, maintained the nationalist
motivations of the previous wave but added a twist of political ideology and a new geographical
expression (Rapoport, 2001). Political ideology of the extreme left and right became part of the
terrorist lexicon. In some cases this was the sole focus – such as the Red Brigade and Baader
Meinhof Gang – while in others it blended with nationalist goals- such as the Irish National
Liberation Army (Laqueur, 1987: 214). More significantly for the argument we make in this
chapter, the organization and strategy of terrorist organizations became transnational (Flint,
2011: 181). Groups cooperated with each other for training purposes. Furthermore, terrorist
actions were undertaken to ensure a global impact. The PLO’s killing of Israeli athletes at the
Munich Olympic Games in 1972 was staged in a manner that the whole world could no longer
claim ignorance of the nationalist aspirations of the Palestinian people. The practice of aircraft
hijacking also ensured that terrorist activities were transnational: A plane of a particular national
airline being hijacked en route from one country to another and being diverted to yet another
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country transnationalized acts of terror. Hence, though the geography of terrorist aims remained
largely focused on territorial states and the politics of nationalism the geographic expression of
terrorist activity was loosening its bonds to specific national territories.
The fourth wave of terrorism, roughly the 1990s to the present day, displays a
continuation of this geographic trend but with a dramatic change in the motivation for terrorist
activity. Rapoport (2001) claims that we are living in an era of religious terrorism; described as a
fundamental shift and an unprecedented situation. Though focus in the US and Europe may
simply identify religious terrorism with Islamic extremism, it is actually identified as a global
phenomenon. Extremist Christian, Jewish, Sikh, and Buddhist groups have also been identified
as advocating and committing acts of terrorism (Juergensmeyer, 2000).
The trend towards pan-religious extremism is suggested by mapping terrorism events
associated with religion. As seen in Figure 1, we have mapped the number of events by country
using data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) available from the National Consortium
for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START, 2011). The GTD contains
information on terrorist events around the world from 1970 through 2010, including a variety of
information about incident locations, groups involved in attacks, and the types of targets.
Mapping incidents where religion was a primary targeting motive suggests that religious
terrorism is a global phenomenon with incidents present in numerous countries all around the
world. While the specific motivations behind the acts of violence are not universal (for example
the high number of incidents in the US is attributable to abortion-related violence which is nearly
unique to the US), this global geography bolsters Jurgensmeyer’s (2000) claim that religious
terrorism is more than just Islamic extremism.
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Figure 1. In keeping with Jurgensmeyer’s notion of pan-religious extremism, the global geography of religiously-motivated terrorism belies the notion that extremism is simply an Islamic phenomenon.
4. The Geography of Religious Terrorism
The geographic expression of religious terrorism, as conceived by Western academics, is
possibly a fundamental change and one with worrying implications. Juergensmeyer (2000)
claims that religious terrorists are fighting what they perceive as a “cosmic war” – a war over
good against evil adjudicated by a supreme deity. The implication is that religious terrorism will
provoke a greater level of violence than terrorism motivated by nationalist or ideological goals.
The reasoning behind this logic rests on the assumption that secular inspired terrorists realize that
at some stage they are likely to engage in a political negotiation with state authority. Hence,
secular groups balance a belief that they must commit atrocities in order to be placed on the
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political agenda with a strategy to keep the level of violence within certain bounds to enable a
government to justify the morality of talking with them. Religious terrorists, fighting for their
understanding of what a supreme deity demands of them, have no interest in potential
negotiation with secular authorities and instead are compelled to commit massive acts of
violence that will usher in a period of final judgment for mankind. In addition, religiously
motivated terrorism may also be seen as a performance intended to reach a broad audience,
beyond state elites, to communicate the ideals such groups are fighting for (Jurgensmeyer, 2000:
124). Accordingly, constructing the broadest possible audience demands increasingly spectacular
acts of violence.
However, going back to our definition of geopolitics that identifies the interaction of
practice and representation (Flint, 2011: 35), what a geopolitical actor claims may just be a form
of justification or public image that belies underlying motivations and strategies. Most scholarly
studies of terrorism, like Jurgenmeyer’s (2000), focus almost exclusively on the representations
of the groups that use this particular form of violence but pay little heed to potential
inconsistencies between the practices of these groups and their representations. Rather than focus
on representations, we instead consider the actual practices of terrorism across Rapoport’s (2001)
third wave of secular terrorism and fourth wave of religious terrorism. We consider practices
because we would expect the geography of secular terrorism to be quite different from that of
religious terrorism. For instance, terrorism motivated by national separatism is more likely to
have a geographic expression in the areas that are at the heart of the territorial claim, with also
some activity in urban centers associated with political control of the claimed areas, such as a
national capital or provincial capital. On the other hand, if Jurgensmeyer’s (2000) claims are
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correct, we expect that religious terrorism would target population centers in an attempt to inflict
maximum casualties and to communicate to the broadest possible audience.
By theorizing the material geographies of terrorism in this way and drawing on
geopolitics as both practice and representation, we also provide an opportunity to consider if the
practices of religious terrorism actually differ from those of secular terrorism. If the practices do
differ, then our findings would support the arguments that religious terrorism is indeed a unique
phenomenon with a correspondingly unique set of issues at its core as argued by Jurgensmeyer
(2000) and Rapoport (2001). However, if we see little difference in the practices of religious and
secular terrorism, we may be left to conclude that all that is really new is the choice of
representation to portray large-scale violence as necessary and just.
As our approach is to consider the practices of terrorism, we have chosen to focus our
analysis on a particular state where both types of motivations for terrorism are present. While the
global geography of religiously motivated terrorism suggests more than a few candidates, we
focus on the geography of terrorism within the state of India. Since independence in 1950, India
has suffered from protracted communal and terroristic violence between Hindus, Muslims, and
Sikhs. While much of the violence has direct roots with the partition of India and the creation of
Pakistan and East Pakistan (which later gained full independence and is now called Bangladesh),
religion has been central to many of these conflicts as a basis for collective identity.
Additionally, India has also seen a long-running Maoist insurgency. The Naxalite movement has
engaged in violence since the mid-1970s, aimed at ushering in Marxist-Leninist style political
and economic systems within India. Put succinctly, India has a long history of both religiously-
and secularly-motived terrorism and constitutes an ideal case to consider our argument.
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The specifics of our approach are as follows. First, by drawing on the above arguments
about differing geographies of secular terrorism and religious terrorism, we would expect
religious terrorism to be a largely urban phenomenon within India. The perceived need to
commit spectacular acts of violence (meaning large number of victims and witnesses) is
expected to lead to a strategic focus on cities as the likeliest stage for the ‘performance.’ In
contrast, secular terrorism is less likely to be an exclusively urban phenomenon due to the
perceived need to challenge state control in all contested areas, including rural areas, smaller
villages and minor cities or towns in the urban hierarchy in India (e.g., Lohman and Flint, 2010).
Second, by drawing on Rapport’s arguments about shifting motivations for terrorism between
historic waves, we would expect a corresponding shift in the geography of terrorist attacks over
time within India, moving beyond contested areas and into major population centers.
Taking on these questions requires a robust set of data on the geography of terrorism over
time and for that we have used the GTD (START, 2011). The GTD is a longitudinal dataset,
covering terrorism from 1970 to 2010. As such, it spans the two most recent waves of terrorism
in Rapoport’s formulation, including what Rapoport sees as the nationalist/ideological
motivations for terrorism through the 1970s and 80s and the religious motivations for terrorism
from 1990 on. The GTD is also a geographically disaggregated dataset as it records the
geographic location of incidents within states as precisely as possible. As a practical matter, this
often means that incidents are assigned to the smallest administrative areal unit in a particular
county when more detailed information is not available. However, even when incidents are
geographically aggregated in this way the GTD also codes for incident location based on an
urban/rural typology. These twin features of the GTD allow an examination of changing space-
time patterns of terrorism within India across two arguably distinct eras.
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To be included in the GTD, incidents have to meet a combination of several criteria,
including intentionality, the use or threat of violence (including property violence and sabotage),
political, religious, or social motivations, an intent to coerce local or state officials, or the
deliberate targeting of civilians and/or non-combatants (START, 2011). However, the GTD does
not record violence by state forces against opposition forces or civilians and therefore may
provide only an incomplete presentation of the geography of terroristic violence within an
individual state. With these criteria and limitations in mind, the GTD yielded 5,355 incidents
within India from 1970 through 2010 with incidents coded as occurring either within rural areas
or within urban areas at the level of a District (an administrative unit below that of States and
Union Territories in India). This represents a robust longitudinal set of data with enough
geographic specificity for the examination of our key questions.
First, we drew on the rural/urban coding of incidents to consider the overall geography of
terrorism in India within the urban hierarchy. For instance, the GTD codes 75% of all incidents
from 1970 to 2010 as occurring within urban settings, which is defined by India’s census as
inhabited places with 5,000 residents or settled areas with a population density of 400 people per
square kilometer (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2011). At first glance, such an overwhelmingly
urban geography of terrorism could be seen as support for the Jurgensmeyer’s cosmic war thesis
(2000) as we have hypothesized that the geography of religious extremism would likely be
focused on cities. However, grouping the data using Rapoport’s typologies suggests that this
geography is dynamic over time but in a way that complicates the cosmic war thesis. From 1970
to 1989, the GTD codes only 7% of all incidents as rural while from 1990 on, 29% are coded as
rural (see Table 1). While the geography of terrorism is clearly dynamic across Rapoport’s third
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and fourth waves, the trend is precisely opposite of what we might expect from a cosmic
motivation. Terrorism in India has become more rural over time rather than more urban.
All Incidents (1970‐2010)
Third Wave (1970‐1990)
Fourth Wave (1991‐2010)
Rural Urban Rural Urban Rural Urban
Incidents 24.8% 75.2% 6.8% 93.2% 29.4% 70.6%
Fatalities/Event 2.57 2.42 2.60 2.49 2.56 2.40
Table 1. The geography of terrorism in India has become more rural during Rapoport’s fourth wave while the lethality of terrorism has remained largely unchanged over time.
Second, this dynamic geography of incidents also confounded our expectations of the
cosmic war thesis when we considered the average lethality of incidents in the GTD. Based on
fatality data present in the GTD, we calculated the mean number of fatalities per incident in both
rural and urban settings. As shown in Table 1, the mean number of fatalities per incident was
slightly higher among rural incidents than urban incidents in both time periods (1970-1989 and
1990-2010). Further, the mean lethality of incidents has declined overtime, whether rural or
urban. Put plainly, terrorism in India was slightly more deadly outside cities in either era, but has
become less deadly in the era of religiously motivated violence.
Finally, we considered the overall geographic distribution of incidents within India based
on the expectation that religiously-motivated violence would have a broader geographic
expression than would secular terrorism. By mapping the percentage of the total number of
incidents by state/union territory in each period, the overall geography of terrorism was largely
unchanged (Figure 2). Indeed in both periods, terrorism was focused within disputed areas
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associated with partition and the creation of India and Pakistan/Bangladesh; specifically Jammu
and Kashmir and Punjab states in the northwest and Assam, Bihar, and West Bengal states in the
east. Notably, terrorism was less common in the second period in Delhi state (the national
capital) and more common in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand states. Both outcomes are related to
the expansion of the Naxalite movement, as terroristic violence by various Naxalite groups
spread to these largely rural states in the second period. Rather than religiously-motivated groups
being responsible for a broader geography, the expansion of terrorism within India had to do
with a deepening secular resistance.
Figure 2. Counter to the expectations of cosmic war, terrorism has become more rural in India during Rapoport’s wave of religious terrorism, as rural states like Chhattisargh and Jharkhand have seen significant increases in attacks.
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In sum, we found little in the changing geography of terrorism within India that is
consistent with the expectations drawn from the ‘cosmic war’ thesis. We theorized that a shift
toward religious motivations for terrorism would produce a shifting geography of terrorism that
was more urban in form and more violent. We also theorized that in a ‘wave’ of religious
terrorism attacks would be less focused on historically-disputed territory or places that represent
centralized state authority. Despite our expectations, we found that terrorism became more rural
rather than more urban and no more violent that it had been previously, while remaining
concentrated in disputed areas.
5. Religious Terrorism as Geopolitical Representation
As our analysis shows, the changing geography of terrorism within India raises questions
about the validity of the cosmic war thesis and the associated claims that terrorism is now
motivated by issues beyond earthly politics. We recognize that a study of India does not allow
for universal claims. Rather, our case study is suggestive that the claims to a “cosmic war” need
to be tempered and that more analysis of the actual changing pattern of terrorism is necessary to
interrogate the motivations underlying contemporary terrorism. Claims to a new “cosmic war”
suggest that terrorist groups now seek to inflict the maximum number of casualties to bring about
a period of final judgment for mankind and to communicate with the broadest audience possible.
We have hypothesized that such new motivations will also necessarily produce new geographies,
with terrorism shifting to population centers in search of more victims and more witnesses. By
considering the case of India, a state with a long history of terroristic violence associated with
both secular and religious issues, we have indeed uncovered new geographies of terrorism.
However, counter to our expectations, terrorism within India has become less urban and less
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deadly over time while simultaneously concentrating over time within areas associated with
long-standing territorial disputes.
Because our findings are based on terrorism data, one possible explanation for this
unexpected result may be the nature of terrorism data itself. Because terrorism is a subjective and
contested phenomena, there is a potential for large sample, cross-sectional datasets (such as the
one we have used) to be biased geographically. The GTD, like most similar terrorism databases,
are largely created from media reports of incidents and attacks. Reporting agencies and news
organizations may bias coverage toward large urban areas, especially if an attack produces no
fatalities. The sum effect of such geographic bias could be to depress the reporting of rural
incidents, particularly in the early years of the dataset which covers Rapoport’s secular third
wave.
Given that we partially base our findings on the increasing of percentage of rural
incidents between the third and fourth waves, we assessed how many additional unreported third
wave rural incidents would be necessary to present the same rural/urban proportion as observed
in the fourth wave. To reach the same proportion of rural incidents as found in the fourth wave,
there would have to be over four unreported rural incidents for every reported rural incident
during the third wave. This is the level of underreporting required to produce an unchanged
geography of terrorism between Rapoport’s secular (third) and religious (fourth) waves.
Accordingly, far more underreporting would be required to produce a geography where terrorism
matched the expectations of the cosmic war thesis by shifting into urban areas and population
centers. Bias toward urban incidents may indeed be present but such a markedly high level of
underreporting seems unlikely.
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What then can we attribute this counter-intuitive geography of terrorism to? For this, we
return to our argument about geopolitical practice and representation. By focusing on the
material geography of terroristic attacks in India we have revealed the geopolitical practices of
intrastate terrorism during eras with presumably differing motivations. These practices give no
indication of the pursuit of “cosmic war” (Jurgensmeyer 2000) in India. Rather, we may see the
rhetoric of religious terrorism as part of the geopolitical representation of the use of terroristic
violence. By connecting the use of violence against civilians or non-combatants to larger
struggles of good versus evil, the leadership of groups can attempt to portray their actions as
necessary and just to both internal and external audiences. Further, this kind of representation is
connected to the process of demonizing one’s opposition, a process that Jurgensmeyer (2000:
171-178) himself argues is a necessary step in engaging in organized violence of all stripes.
There is a need for further analysis to see if such conclusions find support in other parts of the
world.
Despite the adoption of the language of cosmic war to represent the necessity and
justness of violent struggle, the practices of terrorism in our example suggest far more earthly
concerns. As we described earlier, a key point regarding Jurgensmeyer’s notion of cosmic war is
the assumption that evil cannot be negotiated with and must be destroyed. This assumption, in
combination with the desire to communicate to a mass audience, is thought to lead to a lack of
restraint in the use of violence. In other words, religious terrorism is not about creating
opportunities to force state elites to negotiate settlements that create new political geographies on
the ground. That is an earthly outcome and presumably of no interest to those who see their
cause as an “all-or-nothing struggle against whom [they are] determined to destroy”
(Jurgensmeyer, 2000: 148). And yet, the geographies of terrorism we have uncovered in India
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suggest a persistent concern with more terrestrial motivations. For instance, the high levels of
violence in the main areas of partition (Punjab and Bengal) are artifacts of the creation of
geographical arrangements that have been seen as persistent sources of social injustice. And
while violence in these areas is indeed connected to religion, the Punjabi and Bengali partitions
were primarily attempts to create new political geographies to resolve long-standing communal
clashes between Hindus and Muslims (and to a lesser extent Sikhs) during decolonization. In
other words, issues associated with religiously-motivated nationalism did not lead to a geography
of cosmic war. Instead, it led to a geography that appears little changed from the previous waves
of terrorism in which the construction of new geographic arrangements was dominant.
By concerning ourselves with more than what terrorist groups say, we believe we have
exposed what may actually be fundamentally new in Rapoport’s (2001) wave of religious
terrorism and Jurgensmeyer’s (2000) era of cosmic war. What could be new about contemporary
terrorism is the set of geopolitical representations that have adopted the rhetoric of religious
symbolism to justify and moralize the use of violence in ongoing conflicts. And just as terroristic
violence is one tactic among many available to geopolitical actors, the geopolitical
representations of conflicts often shift over time and can be quite disconnected to actual
practices. This disconnect can occur as geopolitical elites search for effective ways to motivate
their rank and file to continue the struggle, counter the representations of their opposition, and
influence external parties. As such, it is possible that contemporary terrorism has actually
changed little over time as it is still concerned with political geographic altruism and the
construction of terrestrial political geographies aimed at redressing perceived injustices and
grievances (Flint, 2011); even in a state like India where representations that draw on religious
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arguments regarding good and evil might resonate due to the presence of religiously-defined
communal conflicts.
The rush to find something new about terrorism after the attacks of September 11, 2001
has led to an imbalanced understanding in the terrorism literature that has overly emphasized the
religious themes in the geopolitical representations of terrorism. A more balanced and sensible
approach is one that considers geopolitical practices as well. Given the persistence of groups that
employ terrorism as a tactic and of the earthly issues that motivate them, terrorism scholars
would do well to consider both representation and practice. Doing so is an ideal way to consider
what’s fundamentally new the next time terrorism seems to reshape the very essence of
international security.
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