Terrorism as an aesthetic signifier: The afterlives of terrorism discourse in Western reactions to wartime suffering

Tavares Furtado, Henrique

Abstract

What are the legacies of the War on Terror? This paper seeks to answer this question through an analysis of vernacular uses of terrorism discourse in political commentary on the Ukraine War. The paper describes how the set of tropes, ideas and recurrent metaphors that constituted the historical backbone of narratives about terrorism before and after 9/11 is now being mobilized in the context of inter-state conflict. Instead of rejecting such deployments of terrorism as lay misappropriations of an otherwise objective concept, we argue that they evidence the aesthetic force of terrorism discourse in organizing our ethical relationship to different experiences of (in)human suffering. The paper advances the concept of terrorism as an aesthetic signifier, to provide two contributions to terrorism studies. First, we argue that narrative approaches to the study of political violence in IR can only move forward if they bypass the field’s traditional framing of terrorism – which we dub the (il)legitimacy trap – and push the boundaries of critique beyond the idea of terrorism as unacceptable violence. Second, we contend that IR scholars must situate the signifiers orbiting the discourse on terror within wider racialised aesthetic regimes dictating the visibility and invisibility of collective suffering. With these two moves we hope to bring more attention to the question of victimization in terrorism studies, a field historically focused on perpetrators and the conditions of perpetration of violence.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 26, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Nov 13, 2024
• Publication Date: Feb 28, 2025
• Deposit Date: Sep 27, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 9, 2025
• Journal: European Journal of International Security
• Print ISSN: 2057-5637
• Electronic ISSN: 2057-5645
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 40-59
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/eis.2024.37
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/13083468