Social Science Research Council

Fiona Adamson
Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC)
Stanford University

Memo for the conference "International Law, International Relations and Terrorism"

International Terrorism as a Conceptual Challenge for International Relations

The problem of international terrorism presents a conceptual challenge to the discipline of International Relations (IR), which has traditionally been concerned with understanding conflict and cooperation among state actors, rather than the role that non-state actors play in the international security environment. Yet, international terrorism is inherently an international phenomenon that impacts on overall levels of international security and international stability, and therefore falls squarely within the domain of what IR should be able to explain and understand. In this memo, I wish to suggest a framework for thinking analytically about international terrorism from an IR perspective.

Rather than focusing on specific groups, particular ideologies or even particular strategies or threats of terror and violence, I will argue that the most fruitful approach for IR scholars to take is to devise a broad research agenda around the role that non-state actors play in the international security environment. Specifically, I propose that there is a common and identifiable pattern of transnational organizing and transnational strategies that non-state political entrepreneurs adopt when mounting a violent challenge to the political status quo. I call this broad pattern the "logic of transnational mobilization" and argue that it has been a prevalent feature of international politics for at least the past two centuries. By analyzing international terrorism within the broader context of transnational mobilization by non-state political entrepreneurs, it is possible to begin to think about what would constitute an appropriate long-term political response to this broader phenomenon, as opposed to relying exclusively on military and regulatory instruments.

Non-State Actors as a Prevalent Feature of the International Security Environment

The use of strategies of violence and terror by non-state actors is not a new feature of the international security environment. For at least the past two centuries, politically motivated non-state groups have organized transnationally as a way of mounting a challenge to the political status quo, and many of these groups have employed violence as a means of furthering their goals. One need only think of late 19th century America, for example, and the perceived security threat that was posed by the international anarchist and socialist movements. Law enforcement officials of the time struggled to manage the consequences of the new technology of dynamite, which had been invented by Alfred Nobel in 1866 and had quickly become the weapon of choice for radicalized groups in both the United States and Europe. The technology had been used to build "suicide bombs" that were almost impossible for law enforcement officials to detect.(1) As one anarchist newspaper advised its readership in 1884, "One man armed with a dynamite bomb is equal to one regiment of militia when it is used at the right time and place . . . the whole method of warfare has been revolutionized by latter day discoveries of science".(2) A sympathizer of the time commented, "it is among the Anarchists that we must look for the modern martyrs who pay for their faith with their blood, and who welcome death with a smile because they believe, as truly as Christ did, that their martyrdom will redeem humanity".(3)

In addition to anarchist and socialist networks, a number of nationalist movements were also organized transnationally during the late and early 20th centuries.(4) This pattern continued throughout the 20th century in the form of transnationally organized anti-imperial, anti-colonial and separatist nationalist movements, all of which used strategies of terror and violence.(5) Today, a wide variety of contemporary conflicts, from Kosovo to Kashmir and from Chechnya to Northern Ireland, have involved transnationally-organized non-state actors who use strategies of violence and terror to pursue their goals.(6) While there are certainly important differences between previous transnationally organized movements and the activities of al-Qaeda and other radicalized groups, there are also many striking similarities in terms of both their transnational dimensions and their strategic uses of violence.(7) These similarities provide important points of comparison, and together suggest a fruitful analytical lens through which to view the role played by non-state actors in the contemporary security environment.

Existing IR Approaches to Non-State Actors and International Security

There has been a surprisingly limited amount of theoretically informed research in IR on the role that non-state actors play in the international security environment. This arguably stems from two factors. The first is theoretical and path-dependent, in the sense that the discipline has been driven and moved forward by debates that are structured around some widely accepted starting propositions regarding what constitutes legitimate areas and methods of enquiry in IR, and which, in some respects, has had the effect of marginalizing questions relating to non-state actors.(8) The second factor has to do with the sociology of knowledge production, in which the research agenda of IR has historically been either consciously or unconsciously driven by U.S. foreign policy interests and, unlike most other states in the world, the US has been relatively untouched by international terrorism over the past half-decade.(9) Despite the relative paucity of research on the topic of non-state actors and international security, it is nevertheless possible to identify two general perspectives that have dominated the discipline, which can be broadly identified as Realist and Liberal perspectives on non-state actors and international security.(10) The two perspectives each suggest a different type of lens through which to formulate appropriate policy responses to international terrorism.

The Realist Perspective acknowledges the existence of non-state actors, but argues that they are peripheral to the international security environment as compared to states. Security threats emanate primarily from states, and are responded to primarily by states. Power is treated as an attribute that is distributed across unitary state actors who must each prioritize their own security interests. When realists do look explicitly at the activities of non-state actors, they often view them as being mere extensions of existing configurations of state power and capabilities. The realist lens suggests a particular response to international terrorism: the logical response is to either refocus attention on threats from states, treat violent non-state actors as proxies for state interests, or to view non-state actors as being "state-like." The overall policy response is therefore to combat terrorism as one would combat security threats emanating from states - through a militarized response.

In the Liberal Perspective, non-state actors have figured much more prominently in their view of the international security environment. Liberals view power as being distributed not just across states, but also embedded in other entities such as international institutions and NGOs. Their view of power is multidimensional, with an emphasis on the "soft power" of economic factors or the power of ideas, in addition to military power. In this world-view, non-state actors have been largely assumed to play a stabilizing role in the international system -- as extensions of domestic interest groups, or as members of a global civil society that can contribute to international stability by performing tasks such as monitoring human rights violations and assisting in post-conflict reconstruction and development.

Yet, because liberals have overwhelmingly focused their attention on non-state actors that do not advocate strategies of force and violence to achieve their goals, their overall conclusions regarding the role that they play in the international security environment have been flawed. The full range of non-state actors in the international system includes not just NGOs such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace, but also groups such as Hizbullah and Hamas. Liberals will be reluctant to lump these two kinds of non-state actors together into a single framework of non-state "interest organizations," and the logical response will be to treat international terrorism as a "global problem" much like cross-boundary pollution or the spread of disease, that needs to be managed through cooperative ventures among states within the framework of international regimes and institutions. The liberal response is therefore likely to be a regulatory response.

A Political Mobilization Perspective on Non-State Actors and International Security

As opposed to adopting either a Realist or a Liberal perspective on international terrorism, I argue that a more useful way of thinking about the role that non-state actors play in the international security environment is through the lens of a Political Mobilization Perspective.(11) This perspective focuses on the fact that terrorism is a strategy that appears within the broader context of political mobilization and contention by non-state actors. Within this context, one can identify a common logic of transnational mobilization used by non-state actors. By using strategies of transnational mobilization, relatively weak non-state actors can consolidate spatially dispersed resources from across the international system and convert them into coherent projections of power that directly challenge the political status quo. One can identify three broad strategies of transnational mobilization used by relatively weak non-state actors: transnational constituency formation, transnational resource mobilization, and transnational organizational expansion and contention.

Transnational Constituency Formation

Non-state political entrepreneurs construct a transnational constituency by using a politicized identity category or ideology to create transnational networks of political support, and to turn "passive networks" into activated political forces. In the past, nationalism has been a common mobilizing ideology, at other times socialism, anarchism or liberalism have been deployed. In the case of al-Qaeda and other groups a radical version of Islamism has been used to create and politicize a transnational support base. The process of politicization involves the deployment of a salient and meaningful political ideology in combination with strategies of propaganda and coercion.

Transnational Resource Mobilization

Non-state political entrepreneurs draw on transnational networks to exploit a spatially dispersed resource base. The strategy of transnational resource mobilization that is used by al-Qaeda is not new, but rather follows a common pattern in which non-state actors draw upon a varied transnational resource base to mobilize and consolidate resources. Resource bases to be mobilized include grey economy networks, organized crime, charities and NGOs, legitimate businesses, voluntary contributions from their political support base, "taxes," extortion, and the recruitment of both skilled and unskilled labor.(12)

For example, between 1916 and 1921, nearly 800,000 Irish Americans joined nationalist organizations, contributing over $10 million to Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the cause of Irish independence from Great Britain.(13) In the early 1970s Irish-Americans supplied at least half of the Irish Republican Army's total budget via the organization Irish Northern Aid (Noraid), which was based in New York and had ninety-two chapters in the U.S., with a paid membership of 5,000.(14) The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of Sri Lanka has one of the most effective contemporary transnational fundraising organizations. Their $50 million annual budget is acquired through a combination of direct donations by Tamil migrant communities, money skimmed off from the budgets of Tamil NGOs, human smuggling operations and Tamil-run businesses. Tamil diaspora communities in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia are estimated to provide $1.5 million a month via donations and informal taxes.(15) A three percent war tax on all earnings abroad was collected by the Kosovo Liberation Army's "Homeland Calling" fund during the Kosovo conflict, and the Zurich-based newspaper Voice of Kosovo routinely appealed for donations to the KLA from the transnational diaspora of supporters.(16) These are all analogous examples of the "terrorist financing" strategies used by al-Qaeda.

Transnational Organizational Expansion, Coalition-Building and Contention

Political participation has generally been viewed by political scientists as something that occurs within the context of state institutions. Yet, there have always been other non-territorial organizations that competed for the loyalties of individuals. Political entrepreneurs operating transnationally build up cross-border organizational structures that command political loyalties and mobilize resources. Groups such as the PKK, the FLN, the IRA, Hamas and other transnationally organized non-state political actors fall somewhere on the continuum of transnational social movements, de-territorialized proto-states, and organized networks of terror and crime. They are not just involved in violence, but also provide social services, such as welfare, policing, education, employment, membership, identity and existential meanings - to constituencies that are marginalized within the given political order. Contemporary political science has largely relegated participation in non-state organizations as belonging to the realm of "civil society," but this misses the fact that transnationally-organized movements may have a geopolitical agenda, rather than simply a social or cultural agenda, and/or view themselves as directly challenging the interests and identities of existing state elites. The transnational organizational structures that are built up by non-state actors who employ violence therefore represent both practical and conceptual challenges. Practical, in that networks of violence are often intimately intertwined with networks of services that are relied upon by marginalized constituencies. Conceptual, in that the labels "terrorist network," "social movement" or "proto-state" each only provide partial descriptions of the overall phenomenon.

Terrorism as a Political Tool

Within the broader context of transnational mobilization in the pursuit of political goals, strategies of terrorism and violence are one component of an overall agenda that is designed to challenge the status quo. In addition to inflicting pain and damage, and weakening the existing political order, terrorism, writes Hoffman, "is designed to create power where there is none or to consolidate power where there is very little. Through the publicity generated by their violence, terrorists seek to obtain the leverage, influence and power they otherwise lack to effect political change on either a local or an international scale".(17) As a "weapon of the weak," terrorism is deployed by groups to gain media attention and visibility as the first step in gaining "name recognition" within the international community.(18) Even if acts of terrorism are universally condemned, they can stimulate media coverage of an issue and provide an opening for the more moderate organizations to ask the public to consider the legitimacy of the cause as separate from the tactics with which the cause is being promoted.(19) In this regard one must note that one of the observable outcomes of 9/11 has indeed been a spotlight of media attention on the Middle East and Islam, and an opening for more moderate voices to have their grievances at least publicly considered and deliberated, to a much greater extent than had been possible prior to 9/11.

Implications of a Political Mobilization Perspective on International Terrorism

If a Realist Perspective suggests a military response to terrorism as a long-term strategy, and a Liberal Perspective suggests a regulatory response to terrorism as a long-term strategy, then a Political Mobilization Perspective suggests the need for a political response to terrorism as a long-term strategy.(20) In other words, if terrorism is a political tool used in the context of transnational political mobilization, there is a need to both de-legitimize and criminalize this political tool, while simultaneously, over the long-term, providing alternative channels for grievance articulation and claims-making by non-state actors. The international system does not have an infrastructure available to non-state actors to effectively channel political demands and grievances, other than through states and the representatives of states. Using Huntington's terms, it could be argued that the process of "modernization" has outpaced the process of "institutionalization" at the level of the international system.(21) If the strengthening of effective intelligence collection, coordination, policing and surveillance is the only form of institutionalization that occurs at the global level as a long-term response to terrorism, the result will be a gross imbalance. It is useful therefore to at least frame the question in terms of thinking about the types of political institutions that could be used to address this broader issue over the long term. For researchers in international relations, this means thinking outside the conceptual straightjacket imposed by "states in anarchy" and instead beginning to think in terms of the factors that create political stability at the domestic level - such as legitimacy, robustness of institutions, and avenues for democratic participation - and what such factors might look like transposed to the level of the international system.(22)

Rather than concluding at a rather abstract level about the potential role that new institutions of global governance could play in this regard, I prefer to end with a concrete illustration of the types of processes that deserve further study. One example is the impact that European Union enlargement and accompanying processes of regionalization have had in providing new domestic and regional institutional channels for articulating political demands in ways that de-legitimize and offer alternatives to strategies of violence and terror as political tools for articulating grievances. I am thinking particularly of transnationally-organized non-state actors in the case of Turkey, where both Kurdish political entrepreneurs and Islamist political entrepreneurs increasingly draw on the European Court of Human Rights to articulate grievances and engage in claims-making against the Turkish state, instead of using strategies of violence.(23) While other factors have also been at play, such as the international policing action that arrested the leader of the PKK, the role that new regional and domestic channels have played in this process cannot be underestimated.(24) The lifting of many restrictions on Kurdish expression in Turkey, and the recent victory of the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party, which ran on a pro-European and pro-secular platform provide other examples of the moderating effect that the complex institutional developments are having.

Of course, the EU is a unique case in many respects, and it is valid to ask to what extent aspects of the model can be applied to other regions. But as a general model of the role that robust institutionalization can play in addressing the political dimensions of transnational mobilization by non-state actors in ways that provide institutional channels and legitimate avenues for the articulation of grievances, such an approach deserves closer study. In my view this is one possible research agenda that scholars in the fields of both International Relations and International Law could converge on, and that could potentially generate useful insights for the formulation of long-term political responses, as a complement to short- and medium-term military and regulatory responses, to the challenge posed by international terrorism.


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Notes:

(1)For a fascinating account by a law official of the time, see Michael J. Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists (New York: Arno Press, 1977 reprint of 1889 edition).

(2)Citation is from the October 18, 1884 edition of the Alarm as cited in Schaack, pp. 87-88.

(3)Cited in Emma Goldman, Anarchism (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1969, first published 1910), 86-87.

(4)Examples include the Irish, Young Ottoman, and a number of Balkan nationalist movements.
(5)Examples include the Irish, Algerian, and Palestinian nationalist movements.

(6)For a discussion, see Mary Kaldor, New Wars and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

(7)I would argue that the primary differences are of a technical and political nature, as opposed to differences in fundamental logic, organization and strategies. Some of the technical differences include the global scale of operations, the role played by new communication technologies, and the potential for acquisition and use of weapons of mass destruction. The "new threat" posed by al-Qaeda is not necessarily an objectively new feature of the international security environment, but is rather subjectively experienced as new to this generation of American citizens. The magnitude of the attacks of 9/11, the fact that they occurred within the territorial borders of the United States and were directed at US civilians, and that the US is the declared target of al-Qaeda's activities all magnify this subjective experience.

(8)This includes, for example, prioritizing relations between states, assumptions of international anarchy, acceptable modes of enquiry, etc. The path-dependent nature of theoretical innovation doesn't necessarily preclude, but does certainly structure choices to investigate some phenomena at the expense of others.

(9)For a discussion along these lines, see Steve Smith, "Paradigm Dominance in International Relations: The Development of International Relations as a Social Science," Millennium: Journal of International Studies 16 (2) 1987: 189-206.

(10)This characterization is obviously an over-simplification. For the purposes at hand, I am characterizing much of the constructivist work on non-state actors as compatible with a broadly defined Liberal perspective.

(11)Such a perspective can be found in the sociological and comparative politics literatures on political mobilization, contentious politics, social movements and resource mobilization. For examples, see Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978) or Doug McAdam, Sidney G. Tarrow and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

(12)The transnational flow of labor remittances is estimated to be $75 billion annually. Global revenues from transnational organized crime have been estimated as being as high as $1 trillion annually - the size of the entire US Federal Budget in 1993. Drug smuggling alone generates approximately $500 billion per year, which is more than the annual global trade in oil. Trafficking in humans brings in approximately $9 billion in revenues annually, with more than 4 million people smuggled across state borders every year. See Philip Martin, "International Migration and Trade," HCO Dissemination Notes No. 29 (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1994; Manuel Castells, End of the Millennium (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 169; Fiona Carruthers, "Escape at Any Price," Time Magazine, June 7, 1999.

(12)Kerby A. Miller, "Class, Culture, and Immigrant Group Identity in the United States: The Case of Irish-American Ethnicity," in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, ed., Immigration Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990): 96-129.

(13)James Adams, The Financing of Terror (London: New English Library, 1986), 131-155. Raymond James Raymond, "The United States and Terrorism in Ireland, 1969-1981," in Yonah Alexander and Alan O'Day, eds., Terrorism in Ireland (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984).

(14)Daniel Byman, Peter Chalk, Bruce Hoffman, William Rosenau and David Brannan, Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements (Santa Monica: Rand, 2001), 48-49.

(15)Chris Hedges, "Kosovo's Next Masters," Foreign Affairs 78 (3) May/June 1999, 24-42.

(16)Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 4.

(17)Brigitte Nacos, Terrorism and the Media: From the Iran Hostage Crisis to the Oklahoma City Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

(18)This intangible quality of legitimacy, rarely discussed by IR theorists, is what separates a terrorist from a freedom fighter, what can transform a rebel into a statesperson, an opposition movement into a regime. See Yossi Shain, The Frontier of Loyalty: Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-State (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989) for a discussion regarding competing claims of legitimacy by dissident exiles and governments.

(19)By a political response, I do not mean in the sense of responding to specific demands or grievances that are articulated by non-state actors who use strategies of violence, as has been suggested by some with regard to the specifics of US foreign policy in the Middle East. I bracket this issue for the purposes of this discussion.

(20)Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).

(21)If one scholar's assessment that the current conflict between al-Qaeda and the US is analogous to the early stages of a "global civil war" is correct, then the use of domestic analogies for achieving international stability becomes even more salient. See Stein Tonnesson, "A Global Civil War?" forthcoming in Security Dialogue 33, 3, 2002.

(22)The Kurdish Human Rights Project in London, for example, has submitted more than 100 cases to the European Commission and European Court of Human Rights, and engages in monitoring of compliance and the effects of Court decisions on Turkish legislation and practice. See their web site at www.khrp.org. The Court is also being used as a venue by Islamist women for mounting a legal challenge to the Turkish banning of headscarves in universities and other public institutions.

(23)In interviews that I conducted in Germany during 1999-2000, members of the PKK indicated that the shift in strategy was based in large part in their confidence in their ability to increasingly work through institutional channels in Europe, together with the prospects for democratization in Turkey based on Europe's decision to accept Turkey as an official candidate for membership in December 1999.