9-11: treason in the academic comfort zone?

Five years after the September 11 attacks on America and nearly four years after the Bali bombings, it is appropriate to make an assessment of the state of research into terrorism in Australia. In this article, this will be done in terms of three areas of critical concern.

1. Academic interest: it seems clear that academic research into terrorism in Australia is characterised by a level of disinterest that verges on the irresponsible or even deliberate avoidance.
    
2. Research infrastructure: one bright spot is the emergence of several centres of research and policy development in Australia that can now more adequately support research into the various dimensions of terrorism.
    
3. Ideological orientation: unfortunately, like so many of the humanities and social sciences, terrorism research has been badly infected by the simplistic “class, gender, race” theoretical template, which is being combined with related concepts to produce highly predictable research results that invariably conclude that it is the West and not terrorism that is at fault. As we shall see below this appears to be a version of the “Stockholm Syndrome” reaction to stress.

The general academic approach to terrorism is tragically reminiscent of the timid and acquiescent response of European intellectuals to the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. This phenomenon was described and denounced in 1927 by the French philosopher Julien Benda in his polemic, The Treason of the Intellectuals.

Benda himself was committed to the tradition of Enlightenment rationalism and he saw the indecisive responses of the European intelligentsia to the looming threat of totalitarianism as a capitulation to irrationalism and the worship of power.

While Australian academics and intellectuals might protest at the comparison, it is impossible to ignore the way in which they has chosen to marginalise any concrete study of the actual terrorist atrocities that have been committed in New York, Washington, Bali, Madrid, Moscow, Beslan, London, and many other places. Instead, they indulge in ever more abstract debates about such questions as the meaning of the term “terrorism”, and promoting the bizarre view that the true threat to world peace is the West and not the global terrorist networks and their nation-state backers that are operating on a global scale.

Australian academics are not alone in reacting in this fashion, as a recent article, “Terrorism as an Academic Subject after 9-11” (Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, January-February, 2005), indicates. This article helps to explain the supine position that was so quickly assumed by the Australian intelligentsia in response to the terrorist threat.

The author, Avishag Gordon, concludes that the academic response to 9-11 was an example of “Stockholm Syndrome”, whereby, “the victim who is terrified needs assurance of his protection, something that will build hope in him. This hope leads him to ignore the negative side of the abuser and eventually to adopt the abuser's worldview and rationalization for the act. The victim … comes to believe he deserves the abuser's violence.”

The level of academic disinterest in terrorism research in Australia is astonishing. While terrorism is an area of enormous public concern, this is not reflected in relevant Australian academic journals, as can be seen from a review of a representative sample of relevant academic journals covering the five years since the September 11 attacks.

For example, a search of the Australian Journal of Sociology shows that apart from three short articles published in 2002, there have been no specific studies on terrorism. Even a special issue on “Fear and Loathing in the New Century” (December 2004) makes only a passing mention of terrorism. A similar analysis of The Australian Journal of Politics and History reveals that it devoted one issue to “Reflections on 11 September 2001” in September 2003: of the other 100 or so articles published in that journal between 2002 and 2006, only one (in March 2006) focused on terrorism.

Similarly the Melbourne Journal of Politics published only one article on terrorism, in 2005. The Australian Journal of Political Science also offered only a solitary article, together with a few reviews of books on terrorism. The Australian Religion Studies Review showed more energy, publishing a special section in its Spring 2003 issue on “Religion, Diversity and Social Cohesion after September 11” and several other articles at different times. Similarly, the Australian Journal of International Affairs published some studies of terrorism in Australia’s region.

On the other hand, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology published only a review article on terrorist books in December 2003, augmented by two articles on the war on terror, one of which is on “representations”, and one that sees the war on terror as a device to introduce authoritarian regimes in the West that can more readily make use of torture.

It should be noted that a small number of Australian authors publish in international journals of terrorism research, such as Terrorism and Political Violence, and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. The fact that they choose or are forced to do this is indicative of the absence of suitable alternatives in Australia.

Aside from academic journals, there are discussions of terrorism published in specialised journals such as Australian National Security Magazine, Australasian Risk Management, Human Rights Defender, in journals of political and cultural commentary such as Arena, and Quadrant, and in para-academic ejournals like borderlands.

Hopefully, this lack of academic concern will be reversed as the relevant research infrastructure improves in Australia. Signs that this may be the case include the establishment of research centres like the Global Terrorism Research Unit at Monash University, and the Centre for Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism (PICT) at Macquarie University. There is also the ongoing work at the Australian Defence Force Academy, which is providing supervision for terrorism research being undertaken by of a number of PhD students from Australia and overseas.

There has also been increased activity at the Australian Research Council, which has begun to support research on terrorism. Hopefully the selection process at the ARC will be made less cumbersome and time-consuming, and be freed of ideological bias and ignorance of terrorism scholarship. It would also be a step forward if available ARC funding is not funneled to a small number of preferred academics and their acolytes, creating a self-reproducing parochialism in terrorism research, such as exists in so many other areas.

Aside from the scandalous lethargy of the Australian intelligentsia, the greatest problem faced in the contemporary academic discussion of terrorism in Australia is the ubiquitous application of the “class, gender, race” theoretical template. This has been augmented over the past five years by a related approach that manipulates the concepts of terrorism, the Other, genocide, settler societies, Orientalism, and post-colonialism like kindergarten building blocks to construct the same small range of arguments, all of which eventually lay blame for terrorism on the West.

Examples of this ideologically burdened writing about terrorism were prominent at the international conference on “Islam and the West: The Impact of September 11”, organised by Monash University in August 2003.

In his presentation, Professor Michael Humphrey, the Head of the School of Sociology at the University of New South Wales, declared, “in Australia … Muslim identity is increasingly constructed as the problematic (Orientalist) Other. … The post-September 11 period has reinforced this … Moreover, the juxtaposition of faith with apocalyptic violence in the “war against terrorism” has only deepened this connection and cultural Othering of Islam and Muslims.”

The “Stockholm Syndrome” of identification with the terrorist is apparent in many other academic contributions, which frequently have an overt political agenda, exploiting various academic forums to denounce the war on terror, the United States, Israel, Australia, and their leaders, while usually insisting that Islam is a religion of peace and is being unfairly targeted. Another prominent approach has been to claim that it is the West that is the “real” global terrorist, allegedly committing acts of state terrorism that dwarf the 9-11 attacks.

Such claims were made at a public forum on the causes of terrorism organised by Deakin University in May 2006. Scott Burchill, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, argued that “most terrorism in the modern world is state terrorism, committed by governments either directly or indirectly. Much of it is Western state terrorism.”

Similarly, in December 2005, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology published an article, “Secret State, Transparent Subject: The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in the Age of Terror”, in which the authors, Jude McCulloch, and Joo-Cheong Tham, claim that recent amendments to the ASIO legislation “increases the risk of torture of persons detained by ASIO”, and that “the increase in state secrecy and its impact are part of a continuing shift in the relative distribution of power between state and subject in liberal democracies; a shift that signals a move to more repressive or authoritarian forms of rule”.

Academic discourse on terrorism is also dominated by second-level analyses of representations and discourses on “terrorism” considered merely as a word. Indeed, it is remarkable how often academics try to derail discussions of terrorism by claiming that the word cannot be properly defined, whereas it has a number of perfectly serviceable definitions, as even a few minutes research reveals.

These academics usually also allege that the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” are value-laden and illegitimately used to label particular groups. They also tend to link any concern with terrorism to racism and genocide, and claim that these appalling characteristics are inherent in so-called “settler societies” like America, Australia, and Israel.

A vivid illustration of this tendency was an article by Katrina Lee Koo, a lecturer in International Relations at the Australian National University, published on-line in 2005 in the ejournal borderlands. She claims that Australian security policies are based on “a commitment to the practices of violence”, and that “we see in both the discourse of security and the development of security policy an acceptance of the violence committed against the Other as a 'necessary evil.'”

She believes that the concern with terrorism in America doesn’t arise from the fact that the country is actually under attack by well-resourced terrorists, but is merely “generated by the media (for ratings) and the government (for political benefits derived from fear generation and domestic political compliance)”.

This tendency to link anti-terrorism with racism, genocide and “settler societies”, and so on, is also exemplified by the special “Regimes of Terror Issue” of borderlands published in 2006. The editor, Goldie Osuri, from Macquarie University, claims that the Australian Government, under the auspices of the US, operates a “terror formation” that produces “racialised laws, sovereignties, securities, market economies … and territories”.

Moreover, she claims that these “regimes of terror” are inherent in Australian history, and that the contributors to the special issue “have carefully traced the historical continuities within racial and colonial relations of power with the post 9-11 discourses of security and terror that enable the contemporary formation of regimes of terror [in Australia]”.

These other contributions include articles on the “Draconian Counter-Terrorism Laws and the Déjà Vu of Indigenous Australians”; “Terror Australis: White Sovereignty and the Violence of Law”; “Sovereignty, Torture and Blood: Tracing Genealogies and Rethinking Politics”; and “Live and Let Die: Colonial Sovereignties and the Death Worlds of Necrocapitalism” by Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, who is Professor of Strategic Management and Director of Research at the International Graduate School of Business, at the University of South Australia.

So predictable has such work proven to be that it has been remarked by a researcher involved in the field that it might be a good thing that so few Australian academics write about terrorism, because the quality of their work is so bad that the world is better off without it!

Nevertheless, we must expect and demand more from the Australian academic community, otherwise it won’t be long before we see endorsements of the view put forward by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed of the University of Sussex, that 9-11 was an act of “state-sponsored self-terrorism” carried out by America against itself to further its nefarious ends.