State/terrorism: Discourses of terrorism and state identity-formation
Creators: name: Dixit, Priya
Publisher: name: American University
Year: 2023

description: This dissertation explores how commonsensical identities of states and terrorists are produced within representational practices and how they shift through time. By analyzing the official rhetoric of terrorism, this dissertation extends previous work of critical security scholars by applying poststructural discourse analysis to the study of terrorism. At the same time, this dissertation contributes to the subfield of terrorism studies by utilizing a relatively less-used methodology, that of poststructural discourse analysis, to question commonsensical narratives of states and terrorist relations as always reactive and antagonistic. While the initial focus is on the use of the language of "terrorism" in Nepal's official security discourses, this dissertation adopts a Foucauldian genealogical approach to compare representational strategies in Nepal with those of the British state in its relations with the Irish Republican Army (IRA). In the following pages, this dissertation examines the strategies (mechanisms) through which identities of states and terrorists are constituted, focusing on linguistic representations. Using a concept of identity as relational, official accounts of danger especially those relating to the Maoists in Nepal and the IRA in Britain are studied and the subsequent changes in identity outlined. This dissertation adopts the view that identity does not exist without representations. Three issues are of concern here: one, the counterterrorist state produced in both Northern Ireland and Nepal was not a self-evident identity but was produced during social interactions, especially in the process of representing others as "terrorist". Two, this counterterrorist identity was always in contention with other representations present at the time. Three, commonsensical narratives about terrorism, such as states always act to counter terrorist violence and that states do not talk to terrorists, if unpacked, allow for illustrating the contingent, contextual nature of such claims. As both the IRA and the Maoists relations with states indicates, states often do talk to so-called "terrorists", even if "terrorist" groups have not renounced violence. Overall, this dissertation argues strategies of representing such as managing stake and establishing authority recur in more than one context. How these strategies play out in the construction of state/terrorist identities in Nepal and Britain is the focus of my study. Examining these strategies helps explain how state relations with "terrorists" were legitimated, but also how stakes and authorization were open to question. The use of "terrorism" to label acts and groups was inconsistent and difficult to stabilize. Official representations of groups as "terrorist" did not always "stick", once again questioning the inevitable counterterrorist identity of states as posited in much of mainstream terrorism studies. Thus, this dissertation examines how state and terrorist identities are produced and how relations among them shift. It studies the politics of representing selves and others.