INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS

30 INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS

2 Discussions of non-legitimate actors in international relations are

3 incomplete without mentioning terrorist organizations. Violent polit-

4 ical action against civilian targets has long been a feature of both

5 domestic and international politics. Yet it is with the terrorist attacks

6 of 11 September 2001 that the study of global terrorist organizations

7 has moved up the agenda of IR. The events of 9/11 demonstrated to

the world that world politics wasn’t simply about conflicts between the world that world politics wasn’t simply about conflicts between

One of the problems for the student of IR when it comes to the issue of terrorism is that often it is very difficult to accurately define what a terrorist organization actually is (is a terrorist any different from a freedom fighter?) (Chomsky 2002). More fundamentally, some would argue that states themselves can engage in acts of terrorism – assassinations, acts of mass murder, hijackings, bombings, kidnapping and violent intimidation have all been carried out by states. States also play an important role in supporting terrorist organizations thus blurring the line between the state and the non- state actors (Byman 2005). So essentially we can see that looking at terrorist organizations in IR raises several questions about the role of the state in international politics that cannot adequately be dealt with within the realist frame.

CHALLENGING STATE CENTRICISM: RECONCEPTUALIZING WORLD POLITICS

Reflecting on the overview of all of the different transnational actors surveyed in this chapter, let us turn now to think more closely about

C 98 HALLENGING ANARCHY

C HALLENGING ANARCHY

1 how the emergence of these global actors confronts and undermines

2 the realist vision of world politics. First, there is the rather obvious

3 point that the emergence of all of these different actors presents a

4 challenge to the view that the state is the most important actor in

5 world politics. Second, while many organizations may not have the

6 same kinds of power and resources as states, they do challenge the

notion of state-sovereignty (the principle that establishes the nation-

8 state as an independent actor with supreme political authority within

9 the international system) because their activities easily cross state

10 boundaries and often because of this easily escape state control. For

1 example, a state may wish to regulate the activities of a MNC

2 operating within its borders that is polluting the local environment

3 but worries that if it puts pressure on the MNC it will simply move

4 to another state in which environmental regulation is much more

5 lax. Another example might be that a state wants to crack down on

6 activities of criminal gangs but finds that it is almost impossible to

7 track the business activities of these gangs because of the way in

which criminal finances are ‘laundered’ through off-shore banking

9 centres. Finally, it could also be claimed that the development of vast

20 networks of interrelationships in global politics and the emergence 1222 of new centres of authority and power beyond the state presents

2 a challenge not only to ideas of world politics being made up of

3 sovereign states, but also challenges that notion of anarchy that is

4 so fundamental to realist analysis.

5 In Figure 5.2, for example, we present two quite different pictures

6 of the international system. On the left we see the realist view, in

7 which IR is made up only of sovereign states (and these states collide

8 against one another like ‘billiard balls’). In the right-hand side of

9 the diagram we present a quite different picture in which IR is made

30 up of a range of different actors and these actors operate inside and

1 outside of the state. Thinking about the world in terms of networks

2 of interconnected actors allows for a rather more sophisticated

3 understanding of the world than the colliding billiard balls of realism

4 (Risse-Kapen 1995; Dicken et al. 2001).

5 What we have seen in this chapter is that there are a complex

6 range of actors in world politics. But how might we try to recon-

7 ceptualize world politics to take account of all of these different actors?

We have already come across some concepts that introduce new ways

State

State

State State

State

Intergovernmental organization

State State

State

MNC

State State

Terrorist

State

organization Criminal

State

organization

Figure 5.2 Two ‘pictures’ of actors in world politics

C HALLENGING ANARCHY 101

1 of thinking about international politics – for example multilevel

2 governance and triangular diplomacy. We now turn to look at some

3 of the more general ways of conceptualizing an international politics

4 made up of multiple and varied actors.