- Title
- Responding to terrorism in the era of the governance state
- Creator
- Jose, Jim
- Relation
- If It Was Not for Terrorism: Crisis, Compromise, and Elite Discourse in the Age of War on Terror p. 175-190
- Relation
- http://www.cambridgescholars.com/if-it-was-not-for-terrorism-16
- Publisher
- Cambridge Scholars
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- In the modern era states have been conceptualized and accepted as having their own specific geographical area with which they identify and are identified, and within which their sovereign authority is accepted as legitimate. And by extension a particular view of sovereignty, of sovereign political authority, has come to be assumed in which a state's sovereignty is singular, exclusive and undisputed, at least within its own territorial space. Two corollaries are assumed to follow from this view of state sovereignty: first, a state is understood to have the right to use lethal violence to protect its borders and to subdue unruly populations living within those borders, and second is the principle of non-interference in the affairs of another sovereign state. Despite the contrary and disconfirming behaviors of states, these understandings have proven remarkably durable and continue to dominate contemporary scholarship in political science and related fields. The actual historical events and trajectories informing these understandings unfolded differently and in uneven ways depending on particular circumstances. The emergence of modern states into the form that we currently recognize was often a violent process as the sovereign authority in question gradually disarmed and subjugated those whose interests might pose challenges to its capacity to rule. The outcome was a gradual identification, through one means or another, of the apparatuses of the state with the entity embodying the sovereignty of that state, be it monarchy or parliament. As part of this process the role and position of military forces with respect to sovereign political power underwent a transformation. In the pre-modern period independent military forces were common. Not only did monarchs or princes have their own armies, so too did other feudal powers such as nobles, churches, guilds and cities. Moreover, mercenary forces were also common and in Bobbitt's (2002, 331) view were "the dominant armed instrument of the State because they were an economical alternative to more expensive standing armies". This chapter questions to what extent a state can be said to exercise such sovereign authority when its capacity to enforce that authority is outsourced in varying degrees to non-state actors. The emergence of non-state centers of military power, sanctioned and indeed legitimized by the state as part of various privatization arrangements and public-private partnerships, raises serious questions about the nature of the contemporary state's sovereign political authority, and by extension the state's capacity to respond to terrorism. If the military muscle of the state is shared or fragmented such that other authorities are capable of physically negating the state's monopoly of force, then the state may no longer be able to command respect for and obedience to its rules. In such a situation the state's capacity to respond to terrorism would be undermined; worse, it would generate the very conditions in which terrorism might thrive.
- Subject
- terrorism; conflict; foreign policy; state power
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1053365
- Identifier
- uon:15572
- Identifier
- ISBN:144383162X
- Language
- eng
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