Complex and troubling mindscapes

Thinking like a villain: In ‘The Dark Knight’, The Joker said, ‘If a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics because it’s all part of the plan’. But if a schoolbus is blown up, then it is not only about the carnage but the sense of fear, insecurity and anxiety it planted in society.

AFTER the Christchurch terrorist attack, apart from the shock and horror, an immediate reaction by many is to point out that it is not only Muslims who are terrorists.

In a way, such reminders are necessary given that Islamophobia is a real and concrete problem. But at the same time, it also speaks of the sad state of prejudice and historical illiteracy we are in because anyone with a modicum of understanding of history would know that Islam, or any other religion, is far from being the only signifier appropriated for acts of systemic or random violence.

“Secular” ideologies such as anarchism, Nazism, nationalism, separatism and communism have their fair share of blood-letting too.

But to stop at the claim that terrorism can stem from any religion or ideology is to make the term completely meaningless in the analytical sense. If every act of violence is terrorism, then nothing is terrorism. And if terrorism loses its function to signify a unique category of violence, the term risks getting abused as it is today for the purposes of slander, persecution and sensationalist reporting.

While certainly a criminal act, terrorism cannot be addressed as a typical criminal act, even if the intersection between crime and terrorism, such as in the case of Abu Sayyaf, is well-known. To begin, there should at least be some clarity as to what constitutes terrorism, even if a strict definition of terrorism still eludes experts to this day.

In my opinion, an act or threat of coercion and violence can be considered terrorism if it fulfils three criteria.

First, it must be perpetrated by “non-state actors”. This is not to say that state actors are strangers to violence. In many instances, the violence they cause is far greater than any terrorist group. But it is important to reserve “terrorism” as a term for non-state actors so that their challenge to the state as the monopoliser of violence, to use a popular Weberian definition, be made prominent. For atrocities committed by the state, terms like genocide can be used, which was the term coined by the United Nations regarding the Rohingya crisis.

Second, terrorist acts are almost always targeted at civilians. This constitutes the terror element of terrorist acts because its shock value lies in the fact that it goes against all rules of war.

The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight puts it eerily and aptly: “If a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics because it’s all part of the plan”. But if a schoolbus is blown up, then it is not only about the carnage but the sense of fear, insecurity and anxiety it planted in society.”

Third, terrorism is violence committed for a cause, be it ideological, political or religious.

Even if terrorism today is increasingly committed by lone wolf actors, it cannot be understood as one-person vendettas. As it is today with violent jihadism, or in the past with communist militancy, a grand cause holds together groups, splinters, cells and individuals; the many divergences in

ideology and competing interests notwithstanding.

Having a grand cause is why victims of terrorism are often several degrees removed from the stated grievances of the terrorist.

Someone in New York had to die for injustices, perceived or real, in Riyadh. A plane was hijacked from France even if the animus was directed against Israel. The fact that notions of revenge and justice by global terrorists today is grounded in historical and systemic terms implies that terrorisms victims will be increasingly

random because the death and destruction serve a symbolic

agenda rather than a personal one.

Nevertheless, it is not enough to know that the Christchurch attack and the Islamic State (IS)-related attacks qualify as terrorism. For anyone interested in tackling the phenomenon productively, it is also important to identify the similarities and differences that are shared between different terrorist groups and actors.

For example, to address terrorism as committed by al-Qaeda in the same manner as those committed by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) is unhelpful because they are terrorism of different contexts, ideologies, scopes and methods.

Let’s say we compare IS-linked attacks with that of Christchurch. The major difference is still ideology. One is informed by transnational violent jihadism, while the other is informed by white supremacy.

The former had a lead group championing the cause, although its so-called caliphate is now abolished with the loss of its last bit of territory in Baghouz, eastern Syria. The latter has no such flag carrier, even though we can’t the discount the possibility of one in the future.

Why is such a difference important given that both ideologies are similarly exclusivist, intolerant and incredibly violent?

This is because while both ideologies represent visions of order (one theocratically rooted, the other racially), they were imposed within different contexts with different means, even with spectacular violence as the common denominator.

For IS, the context it operated in was that of geopolitical chaos in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region.

Its strength lay in the weakness of states because it was the infighting and power vacuum in Syria and Iraq that allowed the group to establish its own proto-state. While no less ideological, IS’ method was very grounded, or in other words, territorial.

IS needed the territory to breathe life into this alluring idea of the caliphate that could still attract a segment of Muslims around the globe. It needed control over a government so that it could show the world, and primarily Muslims, that it could govern differently, “righteously” and most importantly, better than the other secular governments out there (not a tall order in zones of perpetual warfare, corruption and poverty).

That is why even its offshoot in the Philippines tried to replicate this idea of seizing territory and imposing Islamic rule in Marawi.

In fact, reports have emerged to show that IS once commanded large and complex bureaucracies in Syria and Iraq, and had run cities with utilities and basic services intact.

Taking off from al-Qaeda’s preoccupation with taking down the United States as the global hegemon, IS tried to confront Western hegemony with its own hegemonic project. Its violence is more than just violence of resistance, but that of state- and order-building.

White supremacist “terror”, on the other hand, festers less in the breakdown of states; it is instead emboldened by the capture and abuse of states by right-leaning, chauvinistic political actors, a trend emerging in both North America and Europe.

There are many reasons for such trends, of course. Not having the space to discuss them here, my point is just that such trends showing the ugliest side of the “tyranny of the majority” lean closer to the ethno-religious fervour seen in Myanmar and India than that with IS. This is except for one fact.

Unlike Hindutva nationalism and Burman-Buddhist supremacy, white supremacy is now adopting a global outlook.

While both IS and the kind of white supremacy expounded in the Christchurch manifesto have seeds that can be traced all the way back to the colonial experience, the directionality of thought in their ideology differs significantly. White supremacy looks backward in its attempt to reclaim the lost glory of the colonial days, when assumptions of racial and cultural superiority were unquestioned (and it is still not questioned enough today).

IS, on the other hand, despite all its allusions to Islam’s glory days, is not backward-looking. It is trying to carve out a new world order for Muslims in this secular system of Westphalian nation-states.

This can be clearly seen from the fact that the “caliphate” it instituted is nothing like the last-standing caliphate in the world, the Ottoman Empire, which was to a significant degree more plural, cosmopolitan, pragmatic and with less heed to dogma. The Tanzimat reforms initiated by Sultan Mahmud II were aimed at integrating the empire into a world of nation-states instead of carving a new global order based on its own image.

This is not to say that both types of terrorism occur within a different zeitgeist altogether, which is practically impossible in this world connected, for better or worse, by social media.

It is obvious that the Internet played a major role in the radical­isation of these “terrorists”. The Christchurch attacker “lived on the Internet”, as a New York Times report put it; so do many of IS’ followers. They are your arche­typal postmodern terrorists, living socially isolated lives until they were connected to this grandeur, empowering dream of world-saving or building, or both.

Gone are the days of hierarchical structures (unless it is within the territories IS governed directly), strict discipline and programmatic induction of members, which was the case for communist militants in the Cold War period.

One thing that connected both

IS and the Christchurch terrorist attack is that it is aimed at a global audience for a global goal.

The Christchurch attacker is not concerned about New Zealand. He himself is Australian and spray-

painted on his gun, amongst others, was the name of a Swedish girl, Akerlund, that has become a rallying call for the far-right.

Unlike the way the IRA is solely concerned about the Irish Republic or Hamas with Palestine, his motivation lies in the perceived receding power of the people of

the “European” stock all over the world.

Similarly, IS earned global appeal – as seen in its massive influx of foreign fighters – because its goal is global and not rooted in ethnic tribalism and self-limiting nationalism.

Nevertheless, the commonalities in the mythology of both ideologies in its embrace of online subculture, “go-pro” stylised violence and conspiracy theories is revealing of its youthful outlook and Internet heritage.

The same incubator does not preclude diverging substance, however. The manifesto of the Christchurch attacker focuses on the “survival” of “European” people in the face of more fertile Muslim communities, whereas IS embraced a millenarian ideology that celebrates death (echoing the infamous “We love death as much as you love life” IS taunt) as it prepares itself for the battle of the prophetic End of Days.

So, what are we to make of

these complex and troubling mindscapes?

It is beyond my scope to prescribe policy solutions here, but I think at the very least, there is a need to not brandish the term terrorism wantonly without sufficient intellectual processing because its aggrandisement is also its trivialisation. After all, in the 18th year of the US-led war on terror, nobody needs to be convinced of terrorism’s urgency.

While it is important to take note of how terrorism affect the lives of its victims, it is also equally important to take a deeper peek into the lives of these “terrorists”. If terrorism’s reach is global, its “solution” systemic and its concerns

identity-based, perhaps we should counter it with rectifications that address a globalised culture, tackle the world’s systemic challenges and radically rethink the way identity politics play out in our daily social-political discourses.

Unfortunately, since we fail to do so for climate change, it is unconvincing that we can do so for terrorism.

Nicholas Chan, a founder of IMAN Research, is now a PhD student at the University of Cambridge.