The question of terrorism is hard to avoid these days. It is the subject of new books by a leading left intellectual, on the one hand, and a venerable liberal social scientist, on the other. Yet neither Mike Davis nor Neil Smelser explains terrorism very successfully, if by “terrorism” we mean violence directed against ordinary civilians for political ends. After reviewing their work, and its limitations, I want to suggest another way forward.
Davis's book is learned, engrossing, and frustrating. Between a short introduction and conclusion, he leads the reader on a whirlwind tour of more than two dozen bloody conflicts, occurring over nearly a century and across several continents, in which car bombs – and, more generally, vehicular bombs – played a conspicuous role. Many of these conflicts are well known, but some are now largely forgotten. The story begins with the dynamite-laden, horse-drawn wagon that the anarchist Mario Buda exploded on Wall Street in 1920 (killing 40) and concludes with the ongoing conflict in Iraq, where hundreds of car bombs have killed untold thousands. Davis describes each conflict – from Palestine to Corsica, from Saigon to Belfast, from Beirut to Oklahoma City – in a few concise and vivid pages. Along this tour, we learn how clandestine agents of powerful states have been especially active in both using and diffusing the technical know-how of car bombing. That know-how, Davis suggests, is now irreversibly globalized.
Buda's Wagon is perversely entertaining and hard to put down – in the same way it is difficult to divert one's eyes from a car crash of the more ordinary type. The book is gracefully, at times powerfully, written. A compelling subplot of the book is that car bombs have induced more “significant mutations in city form and urban lifestyle” than “the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bioterrorism” (p. 7). Davis has masterfully extracted for full view, from a wide range of sources, a fascinating, half-hidden sliver of recent history. His goal is not simply to catalogue the use of car bombs, however, but to explain the global diffusion of this technology. This latter effort, however, is not altogether successful. For it remains unclear from Davis's account why particular insurgent groups and not others (as well as government agents and criminal gangs) have chosen to use car bombs as they have, or why they have decided to use them at all.
Why would Mike Davis, one of the foremost intellectuals of the contemporary left, choose to write a history of the car bomb or of any “triumphant modern technology” (p. 7), as Davis puts it? This phrase, and such a history, suggests a fetishisation of technology of the type that radical analysts have so often criticized in the work of “bourgeois” historians and economists. Are car bombs for Davis simply a window onto “terrorism” in its various forms (insurgent, state-sponsored, and criminal)? Davis does note, albeit not until his conclusion, how Marx warned that the history of any technology “depends upon existent social structures (or ‘relations of production’) capable of developing its potentials and harvesting its effects” (p. 188). Does Davis attempt then to discern the social structures or social relations that have somehow encouraged the use of the car bomb and led to its globalization? Does he succeed in demonstrating that these relations are class structures?
Not exactly. This is a story in which technical and tactical innovations on a core technology by a variety of agents, not class or other social structures, hold center stage. Davis is good at summarizing the social and political fault-lines beneath each conflict he examines, although these generally turn out to be ethnic or national, not class, conflicts. He also describes the political goals of those who use car bombs – although it must be said that such goals do not by themselves explain the choice of means to realize them. At the end of the day, however, the main thrust of Davis's book is that the car bomb, precisely because of its technical features – it is very deadly, cheap to make, and difficult to trace (“anonymous” is Davis's term) – has become the main weapon of mass destruction available to “marginal actors in modern history” (p. 11). Car bombs, says Davis, are the “‘poor man's air force’ par excellence” (p. 8). That poor or marginal actors, or some of them at any rate, would want to use car bombs, or some such deadly technology, seems simply a given for Davis. It is the background noise to his main narrative of technological diffusion and innovation. Davis points out that car bombs “offer extraordinary socio-political leverage to even small, ad hoc groups without significant constituencies or mass political legitimacy” (p. 11). In fact, the main actors in Davis's narrative – besides clandestine state agents and criminal gangs – are multi-class national or ethnic movements, on the one hand, and small underground networks, on the other. Movements of the poor or working class are conspicuous by their absence.
Davis concludes his tour by suggesting that the car bomb, because it remains so difficult to prevent – and because the poor are not likely to disappear anytime soon – “probably has a brilliant future” (p. 195). “Brilliant”, of course, is not here a moral judgment. Unlike most histories of technology, Davis's is not celebratory. On the contrary, his is a tragic tale in which the poor and marginalized have been forced – perhaps “tempted” is the better word – to take up a weapon that is “inherently indiscriminate”, hence “inherently fascist,” “guaranteed to leave its perpetrators awash in the blood of innocents” (p. 10). Accordingly, while Davis suggests that car bombs may be ideal for terrorizing and demoralizing a population, “they are equally effective at destroying the moral credibility of a cause and alienating its mass base of support” (p. 10). Davis pronounces a “categorical censure” on the car bomb, although he adds that this censure “applies even more forcefully to the mass terror against civilian populations routinely inflicted by the air forces and armies of so-called ‘democracies’ like the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Israel” (p. 10).
Not all of these claims, it must be said, are entirely persuasive. Leaving aside the problematic idea that indiscriminate violence is ipso facto “fascist,” whatever Davis may mean by this term, is it true that car bombs are “inherently” indiscriminate? Davis himself suggests otherwise. For example, one of the most historically important vehicular bombings was Hezbollah's truck-bomb attack in October 1983 on the U.S. military barracks in Beirut (the “Beirut Hilton”, a former PLO headquarters). This was the deadliest of several attacks that led to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Lebanon in 1984 – “the Reagan administration's most stunning geopolitical defeat”, says Davis, “as well as the worst setback for the Western powers in the Arab world since the victory of the Algerian revolution” (p. 87). Davis reports that the bombing killed 241 Marines and Navy corpsmen but not, apparently, any civilians. Hezbollah would subsequently employ car bombs against the Israeli Defense Forces and local proxies in southern Lebanon, with very few civilian casualties and little damage – quite the contrary – to Hezbollah's moral credibility or mass base among Lebanon's Shi'a population. Davis is of course right that car bombs are capable of inflicting extensive “collateral damage” upon civilians, to use the Pentagon phrase, but much depends on the nature of the tactical operation and the skill of the operatives. (In the wrong hands, machine guns or RPGs could inflict considerable “collateral damage” too, but it seems doubtful that Davis would categorically censure the use of these weapons by insurgents.)
One could cite other examples of armed movements, besides Hezbollah, that remained (or remain) powerful despite, or rather because of, their use of car bombs, including the National Liberation Fronts in Algeria and Vietnam, Palestinian nationalists, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka. But Davis does not offer an explanation (nor even take notice, it must be said) of the fact that car-bombing campaigns have destroyed the moral credibility and alienated the mass base of some but not all of the groups that have used them. In fact, some armed movements – the NLF in Vietnam is a good example – have been able to curtail substantially the collateral damage they cause and have thereby retained or even enhanced their popularity. Most importantly, perhaps, the mass followings of some armed groups, as I discuss below, regard civilians “on the other side” not as Davis's “innocents”, but as morally complicitous enemies who are legitimate targets of violence. Any clear-eyed view of insurgent terrorism must try to understand this. Davis does not.
The main weakness of Buda's Wagon is Davis's failure to analyze systematically how or indeed whether oppositional groups – not to mention states and criminal gangs – actually decide to employ car bombs and similar devices. Davis is obviously aware that some insurgent groups have chosen not to use, or to discontinue the use of, car bombs, at least as a weapon against civilians. But what accounts for this? Davis praises Nelson Mandela's perspicacity for polemicizing from prison against the use of car bombs, following the death of civilians in operations carried out by Umkonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), the armed wing of the African National Congress. In fact, the ANC is the tip of an iceberg. A great many armed movements, large and small, successful and failed – never mind the many movements that have chosen nonviolent resistance – have eschewed car bombing, primarily because they have rejected “terrorism”, that is, the use of violence against ordinary civilians: Castro's 26th of July Movement, Italy's Red Brigades, the Weather Underground in the U.S., urban guerrillas in Latin America's “southern cone”, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the FMLN in El Salvador, the broad movement against the Shah in Iran, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico – one could go on and on. Were these movements really just more far-seeing or level-headed than others when they rejected a strategy of terrorism and car-bombing tactics?
A number of the groups that Davis does discuss, it must be noted, did not employ car bombs against civilians, but against military targets (e.g., Hezbollah and the NLF in Vietnam) or commercial infrastructure (e.g., the Irish Republican Army during the 1990s). But why refuse to use car bombs against “soft targets”, including civilians, when those bombs are so deadly, cheap, and “anonymous”? Obviously, group decisions to use car bombs, and exactly how to use them, involve factors besides the technical aspects, and sheer availability, of such bombs. But Davis does not seem interested in discerning those factors. One repeatedly expects Davis to offer up a theory or some general accounting of terrorism, but it never arrives.
So be it. No book can do everything. But this theoretical weakness undermines Davis's attempt to explain the global diffusion of car bombing. Alas, his account of this process tends to rely upon misleading metaphors precisely when a careful analysis of group strategizing is called for. These metaphors make it seem as if the global proliferation of car bombing has occurred behind the backs of human actors, not because such actors have decided that it makes sense (or not) to employ car bombs in particular ways. Some examples: “Like an implacable virus, once vehicle bombs have entered the DNA of a host society and its contradictions, their use tends to reproduce indefinitely” (p. 6). “It is more helpful, perhaps, to think of spores, germinating wherever veterans of Afghanistan were available to pass on urban sabotage techniques, rather than ‘sleeper cells’ implanted by a single diabolical hand” (p. 155). “After Beirut and Kabul … the car bomb proliferated across the planet like a kudzu vine of destruction, taking root in the thousand fissures of ethnic and religious enmity that globalization has paradoxically revealed” (pp. 188-189). (This belated reference to “ethnic and religious enmity”, incidentally, comes from out of the blue.)
Replicating viruses, germinating spores, proliferating kudzu – one might appreciate Davis's attempt to employ such vivid metaphors if they did not repeatedly obscure the fateful human decisions – and the reasoning behind those decisions – that actually explain the spread of car bombing. Davis's previous book focused on a real as opposed to figurative virus, the avian flu (The Monster at Our Door [2005]), which may explain his choice of metaphors. But this cannot of course justify the elision of human agency.
Neil Smelser, a professor emeritus at Berkeley, is well known for a book, Theory of Collective Behavior (1962), that was attacked by a younger generation of radical scholars for its depiction of political rebels and protestors as less than fully rational. His new book seeks to explain “terrorism” in order to discourage it more effectively. He assumes, without argument, that terrorism is always unethical. But that surely depends on how we define terrorism. Oddly, Smelser does not provide a definition until we reach an appendix, but it seems fairly if only implicitly clear from the text that he is concerned with lethal violence by clandestine political organizations. One wonders: Is it plausible that all such violence is illegitimate and should therefore be discouraged? In any event, Al Qaeda is the most frequently mentioned political group in the text, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army, Italy's Red Brigades, and Germany's Red Army Faction also appear at several junctures.
Smelser's formal definition of terrorism is extremely broad. Terrorism consists, he says, of “intended, irregular acts of violence or disruption (or the threat of them) carried out in secret with the effect of generating anxiety in a group, and with the further aim, via that effect, of exciting political response or political change” (p. 242; my emphasis). But Smelser shows no interest in groups that merely make threats, or that disrupt but do not kill. (Nor does he seem concerned, practically speaking, with large-scale urban or rural rebellions, including guerrilla insurgencies, although these too employ terrorism according to his definition.) Conspicuously missing from Smelser's conceptualization is the common idea that terrorism is violence directed indiscriminately against “innocent” people or noncombatants – an idea that Mike Davis clearly shares. Smelser recognizes that much state violence also fits his definition, but he suggests (quite sensibly in my view) that state violence – including covert violence – has very different causes than oppositional violence and so deserves separate consideration. That said, Smelser does not address one fairly widespread theory on the left, namely, that oppositional violence is a direct response to state violence.
Smelser's definition of terrorism is not to be taken too literally; what really seems to interest him are oppositional political groups – or the specialized agents of such groups – that operate secretively and employ deadly violence. How then does he explain such “terrorism from below”? Like Buda's Wagon, The Faces of Terrorism will frustrate those looking for a coherent account or theory of terrorism. Much of Smelser's book is simply written at an overly general level. Most of his claims about terrorist groups – for example, the “dispossession” on which they are based, their methods of recruitment and socialization, their concern with ideological consistency, their attention to multiple audiences and to the media – apply to a very wide range of political organizations, including those that eschew violence and clandestinity. As a result, the book frequently reads more like a primer on social movements than an analysis of terrorism. The Faces of Terrorism makes a lot of interesting points, but many are not particularly pertinent to terrorism as a distinctive strategy of contention.
To explain terrorism, we must ask why some political groups decide to go underground and kill people, especially ordinary civilians, to advance their agenda. But Smelser only addresses this question in a portion of one chapter. His answer is that political groups turn violent when authorities block nonviolent, legalized paths to political influence, but are not so oppressive as to render all collective action impossible. Smelser then suggests that the combination of factors that is most conducive to terrorism includes “the experience of dispossession and oppression, the unavailability of political channels of influence, and a perception of oppressors’ vulnerability” (p. 31). Although he states this claim without fanfare – almost in passing – it is the closest thing to a parsimonious and falsifiable theory of terrorism that Smelser offers.
Alas, this theory is not altogether adequate. It does not tell us why some political organizations turn to violence instead of other non-institutionalized forms of protest (for examples, strikes, demonstrations, civil disobedience, and the like). And it certainly does not explain why some political organizations direct violence against ordinary people in addition to armed forces (soldiers, police, etc.). Now, Smelser would probably argue that these puzzles are explained by the organization's ideology. He clearly thinks ideology is extremely important. The book includes a chapter on “the ideological bases of terrorist behavior.” Like so much of his book, however, Smelser's treatment of ideology is also overly general, concentrating on several features of ideologies as such. He does intermittently discuss “terrorist ideologies” – as well as parallel “antiterrorist ideologies” – which seem to encourage violence because they involve the vilification of enemies, the opposition of absolutes, and an exaggerated sense of the enemy's power (to the point of omnipotence).
There are two problems with Smelser's discussion of terrorist ideologies. First, his claims can be criticized on empirical grounds. Some political groups that have employed violence, for example, have grossly underestimated the power of their opponents. I think this was true, at the outset, of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and it is arguably true of Al Qaeda. More importantly, Smelser fails to explain why some groups or individuals (but not others) would cobble together or believe such “terrorist ideologies” in the first place. If the answer is not “the experience of dispossession and oppression, the unavailability of political channels of influence, and a perception of oppressors’ vulnerability,” then what is? Smelser does not adequately examine the social-structural or organizational bases of the ideologies professed by clandestine groups.
What then might explain the decision by certain political organizations to use violence against ordinary civilians? If we simply assume that some group wants to kill lots of people, then its preference for car bombs as opposed to some other technology (e.g., mortars, body bombs, mines or “improvised explosive devices” [IEDs]) is obviously explained by the technical factors Davis emphasizes: Vehicular bombs are more deadly than available alternatives, and yet they are not prohibitively expensive nor easily traced. But the more important question here is why a political group would want to kill lots of ordinary folk in the first place. Absent this aim, the question of which deadly technology to employ is moot.
When insurgent groups attack civilians, it bears emphasizing, they do not attack just any civilians. In fact, insurgents are also usually interested in winning the active support of civilians, to develop a mass base of supporters. So who are the “bad” civilians whom armed movements attack? In a word, politically “complicitous” civilians. Armed movements typically regard civilians as complicitous insofar as the latter (1) support the state the insurgents are fighting, (2) routinely benefit from the actions of that state, and/or (3) have a substantial capacity to influence that state. Social structures that blur the distinction between the state, including the armed forces, that an armed movement seeks to change, on the one hand, and the citizens of that state, on the other, encourage terrorism, insofar as the latter rests upon the insurgents’ refusal or inability to draw a moral or even conceptual distinction between a hated political regime and “its” citizens, or some subset of them. Factors that brighten this distinction, on the other hand, discourage terrorism by dissociating ordinary civilians from the targeted state and its policies. Insurgents, for example, generally do not attack civilians who are politically excluded or violently repressed by the state – these are usually potential allies.
But why physically attack complicitous civilians? Oppositional terrorism is usually intended to induce such civilians to stop supporting, or to proactively demand changes in, certain government policies, or the government itself. Oppositional terrorism, in other words, mainly aims to apply such intense pressure to complicitous civilians that they will demand “their” government change or abandon policies the insurgents oppose. Terrorism may also be intended to avenge acts of violence by the state or by complicitous civilians themselves, provoke a violent overreaction by the state that will ultimately benefit the insurgents, seize territory from the state, or undermine efforts at peace or reconciliation between the state and competing oppositional groups. Davis and Smelser allude to some of these objectives when discussing particular insurgent groups, but they do not explain why insurgents would employ terrorism to realize them.
Armed groups that have employed a strategy of terrorism are usually drawn from, and claim to act on behalf of, national or ethnic groups that have suffered extensive and often indiscriminate state repression (think of French Algeria, the West Bank and Gaza, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, or, to a lesser extent, Northern Ireland). In these cases, there also was or is a perception by insurgents of substantial support for (or at least passive toleration of) that repression by civilians “on the other side” (European settlers, Israelis, Sinhalese, Russians, and British, respectively). In fact, the governments that carried out the repression in these cases had or have a substantial measure of democratic legitimacy among the dominant ethnic group. Democratic rights and institutions in general, in fact, are often effective at creating among insurgents the impression that there exists substantial solidarity between citizens and “their” states. To be sure, there have been many situations in which populations without effective democratic rights may become the targets of terrorism, as present-day Iraq demonstrates. Insurgents may view civilians as “complicitous” who collaborate with or support nondemocratic regimes or foreign occupations or who belong to “alien” ethnies or “heretical” religious groups.
When extensive and indiscriminate state violence is seen to be supported by civilians, it is hardly surprising that armed movements would tend to view both repressive states and the civilians who seem to stand behind them as legitimate targets of counterviolence, typically justified as “self-defense”. Nor is it surprising that retribution for state violence would be directed at civilians as well as the state's armed forces. And it would also be reasonable under these circumstances for insurgents to conclude that attacking civilians might cause the latter to put substantial pressure on “their” states to change their ways. Extensive state terrorism, in other words, begets extensive oppositional terrorism when the state has popular support, usually because the dominant ethnic group has significant democratic rights. Democratic “ethnocracies”, then, would appear to be a common breeding ground – and target – for terrorism. In more authoritarian or autocratic contexts, by contrast, one generally finds much less terrorism: most ordinary civilians do not support or benefit from the state, so insurgents would view them as potential allies, not enemies. Insurgents here would employ violence against state forces and the elite sectors of the population who support and benefit from them. They would turn to guerrilla warfare, not terrorism.
Another social-structural factor that encourages terrorism is the weakness or absence of a history of political alliance and cooperation between insurgents and their mass base, on the one hand, and complicitous civilians, on the other. Where one finds this particular type of political disconnection (or “structural hole”, to use network jargon), together with mass-supported state violence, it is not uncommon to find among the victims of that violence ideologies and cultural idioms that depict complicitous civilians as inherently cruel, evil, or inhuman. Such ideologies and idioms obviously encourage terrorism, other things being equal, as Smelser suggests. By contrast, terrorism is discouraged when – more rarely – we find significant political alliances or forms of cooperation between insurgents and dissident complicitous civilians. When an insurgent group and its mass base, that is, have a history of collaborating politically with civilian groups “on the other side”, they are not likely to classify complicitous civilians as such as enemies. To attack such civilians would jeopardize politically valuable alliances and the resources and legitimacy attached thereto.
I believe that this last factor is extremely important for understanding why the ANC in South Africa rejected a strategy of terrorism, a decision that cannot be reduced simply to Nelson Mandela's unusual “perspicacity”, as Davis implies. The ANC eschewed terrorism even though there was very extensive and often indiscriminate state violence against the opponents of the apartheid regime and their supporters. This violence, moreover, was accepted and even applauded by large segments of the white, especially Afrikaner, population. The white population elected the Nationalist Party governments that unleashed the security forces against the apartheid state's enemies. So why did the ANC adhere to an ideology of “multiracialism” and refuse to view whites as such as enemies? The answer lies, I believe, in the ANC's long history of collaborating with white South Africans – as well as with Indian and “colored” (mixed race) South Africans – in the antiapartheid struggle. Especially important in this respect was the ANC's long collaboration with whites in the South African Communist Party. Tellingly, an important, long-time leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC's armed wing, was Joe Slovo, a white Communist. (Try to imagine an Israeli Jew leading Hamas's armed wing, or an American directing Al Qaeda!) For the ANC to have indiscriminately attacked South African whites would have soured this strategic relationship, which, among other things, was essential for securing significant aid for the ANC from Western Europe and the Soviet Union. In short, given the long-standing multiracial – including international – support for the antiapartheid movement, a strategy of indiscriminate terrorism against complicitous (white) civilians made little strategic sense.
There is much more to be said, of course, about oppositional terrorism – not to mention state and criminal terrorism – and I do not presume that the ideas sketched here explain every instance of it. But these thoughts may at least point us toward the type of “existent social structures” and social relations that encourage the use of car bombs and other deadly technologies that have been used against ordinary folk in modern history. Certainly, terrorism is not “the poor man's air force,” and it has little direct connection to class structures. It would be truer to say that terrorism is the heavy artillery of organizations that act in the name of national or ethnic groups that are oppressed by states with a popular base among privileged national or ethnic groups.
