Description
This paper explores the politics of deploying the term ‘terrorism’ in the context of Israel’s war on Gaza and the West Bank since October 2023. Working within a critical terrorism studies framework, it explores four key discursive episodes that are emblematic of a phenomenon that this paper conceptualizes as ‘terror work’.
‘Terror work’ entails the political wranglings /strategies of actors to define their violence against (often non-state) adversaries as ‘counterterrorism’ and, as such, benefit from permissive norms within the structure of the Global War on Terror that legitimate violence as counterterrorism. By advancing the concept of ‘terror work’ - itself inspired by the critical legal concept of ‘legal work’ - I aim to highlight the politics of deploying the term ‘terrorist’ beyond the permissibility of just physical violence as counterterrorism.
Specifically, I argue that terror work – the ability to use power to define ‘terrorism’ in alignment with particular counterterrorism agendas – aims not only to make acts of violence permissible, but to expand the acceptable remits and normative limits of the term ‘terrorism’ itself. In so doing, state actors especially are able to deploy violence as counterterrorism in spaces where it might otherwise be questions, resistance, or rejected.
By looking at Israel’s designation of non-militant Palestinian actors as terrorist, I aim to highlight examples of terror work. Relatedly, I link terror work to the related concepts of terroristization (the discursive production of all Palestinians as terrorist) and of terrorwashing (the retroactive deployment of the term terrorist to redirect scrutiny for acts that violated global norms).
