Description
What role do non-violent (or, at least, non-physically violent) practices and actors play in discourses of ‘terrorism’ and ‘counterterrorism’? What is the interplay and relation between these and other aspects of terrorism and/or insecurity?
Drawing on interview and ethnographic data generated in the West Bank, Palestine, this paper deploys a vernacular security framework to make visible a range of practices and agents that are overlooked or side-lined in traditional, state-centric frames of ‘terrorism’.
Specifically, by examining ‘non-violent’ actions (ranging from practices of visual or spatial appropriation, use of psychological practices, to the destruction of non-human material property) within ‘non-elite’ or ‘everyday’ public discourses – itself a notable silence in research on Palestine - on ‘terrorism’, this paper explores how locating security within the ‘every day’ or ‘personal’ offers a significantly different vantage point on the concept itself. I begin to unpack some of the methodological and conceptual implications of this within the paper.
