Description
This paper explores how inquiries and internal reviews into terrorist attacks make them ‘domestic’, by discursively separating political violence from its international, political and historical context. By undertaking fact-finding work, inquiries apply a technocratic, micro-level focus to the days, hours, minutes and seconds before an atrocity – jettisoning the international and historical factors which may otherwise have appeared relevant. The violence is produced as an ‘event’, discrete in its nature, and disconnected from international politics, foreign policy and international history. Inquiries and internal reviews tend to create knowledge, instead, around ‘missed opportunities’ for security professionals to have intervened in the short-term or missed chances for information sharing between frontline agencies and counterterrorism officers. They then draw a linear connection to the technocratic solutions which would close off the potential for a repeat occurrence, recommending adjustments to communications technologies used by the emergency services, training for event staff, or additional reporting requirements for stockists of chemicals or vehicles that have been used in recent attacks. But amongst this prosaic work of ‘bounding’ and knowing the event, occurs a simultaneous unknowing of any connections to international politics, foreign policy and history. Drawing from work on ignorance studies, the paper explores how inquiries – in their search to ‘know’ – also enact a profound unknowing of the international drivers of terrorist attacks. The work of the aftermath involves this deeper reconstitution of the socio-political imaginary, through unknowing any connections between foreign policy and the ‘blowback’ of violence upon the metropole. Inquiries and reviews construct ‘domestic’ terrorism through this ontological work of unknowing. The imaginary of ‘radicalisation’ facilitates much of this work. It assists the sidestepping of foreign policy as a motivation for attacks, before locating the causes of terrorism in the unregulated spread of extremist material online, and its consumption by vulnerable individuals.
