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War without end? Magic, propaganda and the hidden functions of counter‐terror
Author(s) -
Keen David
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
journal of international development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.533
H-Index - 66
eISSN - 1099-1328
pISSN - 0954-1748
DOI - 10.1002/jid.1264
Subject(s) - humiliation , politics , magic (telescope) , fallacy , political economy , spanish civil war , covert , motivated reasoning , war on terror , sociology , social psychology , criminology , political science , law , psychology , epistemology , philosophy , linguistics , physics , quantum mechanics
This paper suggests that current tactics in the ‘war on terror’ are predictably counterproductive, and that these ‘failing’ tactics actually serve a range of political, economic and psychological functions for diverse actors who make up the ‘war on terror’ coalition. It compares the ‘war on terror’ to civil wars, especially in Africa, where experience shows that predictably counterproductive tactics are common and the aim is not necessarily to win . Current violent responses to terror—which represent ‘magical thinking’ in important ways—are based on the fallacy of a finite group of evil people who can be physically eliminated; more productive would be a genuine attempt to understand the processes that lead people to embrace violence and an attempt to engage with processes of exclusion, humiliation and discrimination. This is something that needs to be built into any developmental initiative; otherwise, we are left with a vast pool of anger and a counter‐terror reflex that only exacerbates the problem. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.