Citation

Chowdhury A, Krebs RR. Eur. J. Int. Rel. 2010; 16(1): 125-150.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, European Consortium for Political Research, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/1354066109352917

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Counter-terrorist state forces and terrorist insurgents compete to control not only territory and populations but language.The success of counter-terrorism, therefore, hinges crucially on representational practices. Defeating terrorism in the long run requires both undermining the legitimacy of political violence and its purveyors and opening space for the pursuit of a less violent but still legitimate politics, and these are fundamentally rhetorical projects. Yet the literature has not shed much light on either the range of conceivable counter-terrorist representational strategies or on states’ particular representational choices.This article presents and illustrates a typology of counter-terrorist representational strategies. It argues that state leaders should ideally delegitimize the extremists’ means while politicizing some of their aspirations. Leaders often do not pursue this rhetorical path, however, due to the constraints imposed by existing understandings of terrorist organizations and especially by foundational discourses. These arguments are explored empirically through studies of the Indian, Spanish, and Turkish counter-terrorist campaigns. The article concludes by extending the framework to clarify why the militarized rhetoric of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ is counterproductive.