Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson

I'm a political theorist who thinks about the life of ideas in Western political culture.

My first book, Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Terror, Empire (Columbia University Press, 2018), problematized ostensibly obvious assumptions about terrorism in the immediate post-9/11 moment. I was interested in what charges of terrorism did politically, rather than what terrorism really was and how we should best define it. Based on archival research about post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism, French counterterrorism during the Algerian Revolution, the Russian revolutionary movement, and the upheavals of the French Revolution, a pattern emerged which indicated that terrorism has functioned since the late eighteenth century as a mechanism of social defense that justified the use of the sovereign right to kill in the name of human life. 

My current project argues that the American age of terrorism did not begin in 2001. It shows that terrorism has a long and sordid history that is intrinsically bound to struggles over the American way of life. In these struggles, terrorism is both a response to perceived threats to a way of life, and the name we give to those threats.