| tantrikebhairab |
Posted
on 16-Oct-03 03:57 PM
Realising Hegemony? Symbolic Terrorism and Roots of Conflict
I have recently returned back from Palawan Islands of Philippines, there we were shadowing the Abu Sayaff Islamic International Terrorist Network. We were stunned to see Non Resident Nepalese supporting these groups for making money. This ranged from money laundering through the "Tipanii system" used by the Hong Kong based Marwaris to providing the group IT support in international recruiting and public relations support.
There is currently a division between conflict analysis and studies of terrorism, despite the fact that similar actors are involved in the "new wars" and "new terrorism" and that there are similarities interms of root causes. Both conflict and terrorism studies are increasingly crossing disciplines in their attempts to present coherent frameworks and bodies of theory, however. As the divisions between war, and peace, conflict and terrorism, between friend and enemy, soldier, criminal, and civilian breakdown, there is now potential for a critical reading of the insights this presents. Theterrain on which violence has been traditionally deployed has now shifted to a more symbolic terrain requiring a reassessment of assupmptions terrorism and conflict studies rest on.
I coclude:
Is terrorist activity the deranged expression of the politically immature, the zealous expression of conflicting ideologies, be they religious, political, cultural, or the (unacceptable) expression of those who, qualifying on the grounds of all or several of the aforementioned, find themselves unable to make any sort of impact on the conduct of International Relations, the global economy, dominant idelologies and norms? How far are such activities a challenge to developed countries in fold of Westrn norms of social, political, and economic behavior to produce and reproduce a watertight international, transnational, and local security system against those who rebel against the dominant norms and myths that are propagated? Or is this challenge itself a red herring, the key being to find a way of assuaging such feelings so that the inevitable weaknesses of states' security systems are not exploited and turned against them by those who feel justified to do so because they perceive such systems and approaches to be exploiting them, or simply because they aspire to an ideology of violence? What is more, why is it in conflict zones that have not been "pacified," and have not yet succumbed to the Western ideologicalisation that goes with its social, political, and economic approaches to making paece on the periphery?
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