Description
Proscribing anticolonial movements and indigenous struggles for national liberation and self-determination as terrorists and terrorism is a consistent strategy of imperialism and settler states. Terrorism is not so much the name given to a particular form of political violence, says Heike Schotten, as an ideological tool by which resistance to empire and colonisation is illegitimated out of existence. Proscription not only engenders legal obstacles against anticolonial movements, but it also hypermoralises them, casting their political demands as illegitimate and anachronistic.
This panel seeks to draw attention to the different tactics employed to buttress the moral castigation of resistance, such as the racialised and orientalist employment of sexuality and gender. This panel would host research and discussion on the plasticity of the label “terrorist” and the conditions under which anticolonial movements move in and out of this ideological terrain. It speaks to the similarities between the cases of Irish and Palestinian resistance against imperial and settler control, as well as other cases, such as the Kurdish and Kashmiri movements and indigenous struggles worldwide.
