When did acts of political violence become classified as terrorism? Who is considered a terrorist? And how do we understand terrorism in the United States?
These are the questions that philosophy and political science professor Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson has spent her career investigating. She's currently working on new book that explores terrorism in the United States, which is commonly considered to have begun with 9/11. She argues however that the origins of terrorism in the U.S. are intertwined with colonialism and white supremacy.
Read on for a Q&A with Erlenbusch-Anderson to learn more about her work.
What are your research interests and why are you passionate about these areas of study?
I'm a political theorist who thinks about the life of ideas in Western political culture. Over the past two decades, I've been thinking mostly about the idea of terrorism, why we talk about it the way we do, and how it shapes our political culture. I’m drawn to these questions because, like any philosopher worth their salt, I’m pretty allergic to common sense. And there is so much common sense about terrorism going around: what it is, why it’s bad, what we are justified to do to prevent it—it all seems so obvious. But common sense makes for bad thinking and worse policy, so I feel passionate about coming up with better ways of understanding issues, like terrorism, that have such enormous influence on all our lives.
Can you tell us about your book Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Terror, and Empire?
Genealogies of Terrorism traces a genealogy of terrorism from the French Revolution to the War on Terror to problematize ostensibly obvious assumptions about what terrorism is. The book was born of a confusion tied to the specific historical conditions of the immediate post-9/11 moment. I wanted to understand how this concept had come to acquire such power in enabling and constraining what seemed to be politically thinkable at the time. I was interested in how terrorism worked and in what it did in and to our political lives, rather than what it really was and how we should best define it. Archival research led me from post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism to the Cold War and French counterterrorism during the Algerian Revolution, and further to 20th-century international law, Bolshevik state terror, the Russian social revolutionary movement, and the upheavals of the French Revolution. I read as much as I could, and over time some patterns emerged which indicated that terrorism had emerged in the late eighteenth century, and has functioned since then, as a biopolitical mechanism of social defense that justifies the use of the sovereign right to kill in the name of the life of the nation, class, or humanity.
You're currently working on your second book, which explores terrorism in the United States. Can you tell us about it?
I’m currently working on my second book, which explores the widespread idea that it was 9/11 that brought terrorism to American shores. In my first book, I was particularly concerned with how terrorism had shaped U.S. foreign policy in an imperial moment after the proclaimed end of history. But after finishing Genealogies of Terrorism, several political developments seemed to suggest a certain domestication of terrorism in the United States. For example, after the 2017 “Unite the Right Rally” in Charlottesville, Virginia, elected officials from both parties described the march as terrorism. A series of mass shootings motivated by white nationalist ideas—most notably in Pittsburgh, PA, in 2018, El Paso, TX, in 2019, and Buffalo, NY, in 2022—led to bipartisan legislative efforts to introduce a domestic terrorism statute and make domestic terrorism punishable as a federal crime. This legislation has still not been passed. Executive agencies at the state and federal level responded by classifying white supremacist extremism as a terrorist threat. In 2019, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issues a Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence that extended counterterrorism frameworks to white supremacist violence, given its similarities to (foreign) terrorism. When a heavily armed mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to overturn the presidential election, Democrats and Republicans alike denounced the event as an act of terrorism. Since then, the Trump administration has pardoned January 6 rioters and cut government programs to prevent far-right violence, while simultaneously designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization and describing Black Lives Matter activists, immigrants, student demonstrators, and Tesla protesters as domestic terrorists.
It’s almost trite to say that terrorism is a highly effective rhetorical weapon against political opposition and that domestic counterterrorism policy is partisan by design—built to quash political dissent while portraying the state as guardian of order and security against dangerous terrorists. My question is: how did we get here?
I find this particularly fascinating because the concept of terrorism entered the American political lexicon in the late eighteenth century, when it signified a system of government of the sort Robespierre had established in France. At that time, there was a widespread view that terrorism simply could not be practiced in America. On the one hand, the country was too large for factionalism and extremism to take hold. On the other hand, American virtuousness ensured that the American Revolution did not devolve into terror. Instead of by guillotines and massacres, it was won in honorable battles.
But of course, early Americans were no strangers to the kind of violence Robespierre and his ilk had practiced in France—except that their targets were mostly Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans. It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century, however, that such practices of violence were called “terrorism.”
I find this extraordinarily intriguing, and I’m interested in how these changes happened. Based on my historical research, I’m convinced that the practice of cruelty that came to be defined as terrorism during the French Revolution can be traced, in North America, to the very beginning of colonization in the seventeenth century and that it was—and is—part and parcel of a project of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. So, it seems to me that in the United States terrorism and white supremacy are so tightly interwoven that one cannot be understood without the other. I want to know as much as possible about this connection in order to think more clearly and ask better questions about our own present, when terrorism is again marshalled in the service of an openly white supremacist political project.
You’re currently teaching PHIL 219: Class, Gender, Race. What are the key ideas you hope students take away from the course?
Terms like identity politics, DEI, or affirmative action have become flash points of contemporary politics. According to some people, we give undue consideration to race, gender, and class, while others think that we do not pay enough attention to these categories. But it’s not at all clear what we mean by “class,” “gender,” and “race,” or what the relationship is between them. Most of us don’t really think about how these categories came about, how they shape U.S. society, and how they function within our individual and social lives. And yet at the same time, all these categories are so familiar and obvious for us. In Phil 219, we try to become unfamiliar with these notions and think about them differently than we already do.
What is your favorite part of teaching?
Students’ curiosity and openness to ideas that are strange, unconventional, and outlandish.