Description
Both pacifism and anarchism have made appearances in recent CTS scholarship, but the mutually reinforcing dimension of several of their arguments means that their contribution is more potent when considered together. Three main themes emerge when approaching CTS with anarcho-pacifist lenses. First, labelling some violence as ‘terrorism’ entails disproportionate focus on it and sets the scene for larger-scale organised violence in response, with too little reflection on who gets to inflict political violence. Second, not only is the state implicated in the production of counter-terrorist violence, but the monopoly it purports to project over ostensibly ‘legitimate’ violence amounts to what could be termed ‘institutional terrorism’ to advance the interests of some over many others. Third, important though human security and socio-economic and political justice are for effective counter-terrorism, terrorism (whether bottom-up or top-down) is best resisted nonviolently for several reasons, including: that violence often fails whilst nonviolence tends to be more effective; that inevitable moral uncertainty counsels against irreversible lethal action; that nonviolence wrestles with the humanity of adversaries; that political action is constitutive and prefigurative; and that nonviolence is therefore more likely to trigger counter-responses that are nonviolent too, paving the way for an emancipatory reconstitution of agonistic political practice.
