Culture, Crisis and America's War on Terror

Croft, Stuart

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511607356

Cited by 211 publications

(97 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…thereby legitimately entitled to benefit from the provisions of universal human rights, have produced classes of subjects who are ethically deemed less than human: lives that are unliveable and deaths that are ungrievable. Richard Jackson (2005) and Stuart Croft (2006) have both discussed the ways in which the "war on terror" discourse has produced a spatially polarised world in which particular states and individuals are constituted as "other" and thereby the legitimate objects of various kinds of violent force and disciplinary power.…”

Section: Prefacementioning

confidence: 99%

Democracy Promotion as Foreign Policy

Elliott¹

2017

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This book looks at democracy promotion as a form of foreign policy. Elliott asks why democracy was seen to be the answer to the 7/7 bombings in London, and why it should be promoted not in Britain, but in Pakistan. The book provides a detailed answer to these questions, examining the logic and the modes of thinking that made such a response possible through analysis of the stories we tell about ourselves: stories about time, history, development, civilisation and the ineluctable spread of democracy.Elliott argues that these narratives have become a key tool in enabling practices that differentiate selves from others, friends from enemies, the domestic from the foreign, civilisation from the barbarian. They operate with a particular conception of time and constitute a British, democratic, national identity by positing an "other" that is barbaric, alien, despotic, violent and backward. Such understandings are useful in the wake of disaster, because they leave us with something to do: danger can be managed by bringing certain people and places up-to-date. However, this book shows that there are other stories to be told, and that it is possible to read stories about history against the grain, and author alternative, less oppressive versions.Providing a genealogy drawing on material from colonial and postcolonial Britain and Pakistan, including legislation, political discourse, popular culture and government projects, this book will be of interest to scholars and students focusing on democracy promotion, genealogy, critical border studies, poststructural international relations, postcolonial politics, discourse analysis, identity/subjectivity, and the "war on terror".Cathy Elliott is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the School of Public Policy, University College London. She previously worked as a development manager in Pakistan. Her research interests include poststructural international relations; time, temporality and history; politics and aesthetics; and feminism and gender. InterventionsEdited by: Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University and Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of WarwickThe Series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that engages with alternative critical, post-structural, feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and cultural approaches to international relations and global politics. In our first 5 years we have published 60 volumes.We aim to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within broad critical post-structural traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics. Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies in international politics.For a full list of available titles please visit https://www.routledge.com/series/INT.The most recent titles in this series are: Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Refugees in Extended Exile © 2017 Cathy Elli...

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Section: Prefacementioning

confidence: 99%

Democracy Promotion as Foreign Policy

Elliott¹

2017

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“…The Bush Administration adeptly incorporated these experiences within official constructions such that Americans became affectively invested within them. Moreover, these constructions accounted for affective experiences and plugged back into the broader cultural context thus facilitating its embeddedness within American society (Croft, 2006;Jackson, 2005). By accounting for affect and plugging into the cultural context, the war on terror discourse produced a resonant official construction of 9/11, with which it was difficult to argue (Krebs and Lobasz, 2007).…”

Section: The Politics Of Affect: Resonance and Affective Investmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affect is what states make of it: articulating everyday experiences of 9/11

Holland

Solomon

2014

Critical Studies on Security

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This article considers the politics of affect and official discourses of '9/11'. Drawing on the work of William Connolly and others, it is argued that to understand the resonance of dominant constructions of '9/11' it is necessary to revisit their successful incorporation of prevalent American affective experiences of September 11 th . To date, this relationship between affect, resonance, and discourse has been underexplored in International Relations. Its investigation offers important empirical insights on resonance, as well as theoretical innovation in connecting established work on narrative and discourse with emerging work on bioculture and affect. To this end, the article introduces a framework for the future analysis of affect, culture and discourse within International Relations. The article concludes, however, that, notwithstanding its importance to resonance, in 'crisis' situations such as '9/11', affect is what states make of it.

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“…First, the ontological shift from terrorism to ÔterrorismÕ opens space for the entrance of new materials, methodologies and questions into terrorism research. Media reportage (Spencer 2010), political speech (Jackson 2005), video games (Power 2007;Sisler 2008), films (Riegler 2010), body art (Croft 2006) and memorial websites (Jarvis 2010(Jarvis , 2011) all now enter this fieldÕs remit. In the process, they contribute to a far more detailed understanding of terrorismÕs percolation through sites and practices of social, political, and everyday life.…”

Section: Terrorism Time and Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“Night fell on a different world”: experiencing, constructing and remembering 9/11

Holland

Jarvis

2014

Critical Studies on Terrorism

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This article explores the endurance of the pervasive framing of Ô9/11Õ as a moment of temporal rupture within the United States. It argues this has persisted despite the existence of plausible competitor narratives for two reasons. First, because it resonated with public experiences of the events predating this constructionÕs discursive sedimentation. And, second, because of its vigorous defence by successive US administrations. In making these arguments this article seeks to extend relevant contemporary research in three ways. First, by reflecting on new empirical material drawn from the Black smoke billowed up from the Pentagon. Airplane wreckage smoldered on a Pennsylvania field. Friends and neighbors, sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters Ð they were taken from us with a heartbreaking swiftness and cruelty. And on September 12, 2001, we awoke to a world in which evil was closer at hand, and uncertainty clouded our future. In the decade since, much has changed for Americans. WeÕve known war and recession, passionate debates and political divides. We can never get back the lives that were lost on that day or the Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice in the wars that followed (Obama, 2011). This presentation of September 11th as a tragic and unforeseen bringer of a new, fallen, world will be instantly familiar to followers of US political rhetoric throughout the decade since those attacks. Augmented, on this occasion, by related remembrance activities including ceremonies at the four crash sites, the ringing of New YorkÕs ÔBell of HopeÕ, and the televised reading of victimsÕ names, ObamaÕs remarks contribute to the reinforcement of 9/11Õs now relatively uncontested status as both exceptional event and temporal rupture. Once more are the attacks positioned here as unforeseen, unpredicted; an event almost, if not entirely, sui generis. Once more, moreover, are they positioned as a marker of transition to a present of evil and uncertainty radically incommensurate with the immediate past.This very specific, but particularly widespread temporal positioning of the events of 11 September 2001 has, unsurprisingly, attracted much academic commentary. Within this, a great deal of attention has been paid to three questions in particular. First, how was Ô9/11Õ produced in this way within political language, popular culture and other discursive activities (Collins and Glover

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Culture, Crisis and America's War on Terror

Cited by 211 publications

References 5 publications

Democracy Promotion as Foreign Policy

Democracy Promotion as Foreign Policy

Affect is what states make of it: articulating everyday experiences of 9/11

“Night fell on a different world”: experiencing, constructing and remembering 9/11

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