Description
In a “post-9/11” world, a dominant Western-centric narrative has emerged. It portrays terrorism as originating primarily from brown Muslim men, belonging to extremist groups, and primarily threatening Western security, even where transgressions take place in the non-West. While states in the Global South have long suffered from terrorism “pre-9/11”, the phenomenon’s Western-centric study has often overlooked such local contexts and histories. Despite the calls for theorizing beyond the West on security and terrorism, terrorism studies still lags behind. This lacuna creates an insufficiency for IR scholarship in fully understanding terrorism, global security responses, and the “international”. Egypt’s terrorism is understudied, with few works on terrorism drawing upon postcolonial theory. Accordingly, this dissertation examines these shortcomings by taking Egypt (1952-present) as a case study, and addresses “How have narratives of terrorism in the Global South influenced and been influenced by Western narratives of terrorism?”
This project highlights two interlinked arguments: (1) Despite how Western-centric narratives operate through shaping the security imaginaries in the Global South, the Global South’s political elite still exercise agency in reshaping global definitions and interpolating their own realities. (2) The Global North can also adopt counterterrorism tactics from the Global South. In that sense, this research aims to present a novel analysis of the politics of terrorism by (1) revealing how travelling happens spatially in both directions from and to West and temporally from pasts to presents and (2) showing how the narrative evolves through the interplay of hybrid dynamics, in ways that shape security responses to terrorism across the globe. This work can be read as a contribution to the broader critique of Western-centrism in IR, approaches to security generally and terrorism specifically, and the advancement to Postcolonial IR, critical security and terrorism studies, and the study of terrorism in Egypt.
