著者

山口 優人

出版者

一般財団法人 日本国際政治学会

雑誌

国際政治 (ISSN:04542215)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2021, no.204, pp.204_83-204_98, 2021-03-31 (Released:2022-03-31)

参考文献数

61

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Since the September 11 attacks, the United States has led the global war on terrorism, which primarily targeted terrorists motivated by radical Islam, also known as Global Jihadists. This international military campaign caused many serious problems, such as heavy civilian casualties by the U.S.-led military actions, the expansion of Jihadist militant groups by the power vacuum in Iraq, and the overwhelming refugee influx in Europe. Many experts on international law or human rights have criticized preventive attacks, torture, and drone strikes targeting those suspected of being involved in terrorism activities as illegitimate.Critical terrorism studies have regarded the methodological vulnerability of mainstream terrorism studies as one of the causes of this problematic counterterrorism. This article reflects on the omissions of conceptual analyses in terrorism studies as an American social science by focusing on fanaticism, which is one of the key concepts in the New Terrorism theory. The assertion is that the concept of fanaticism has distorted the recognition of the Global Jihad in academic and political contexts. Thus, this article deconstructs the binary system of reason/fanaticism, exposing the arbitrariness of the system by hidden political power.The first section describes the process of constructing binary systems in terrorism studies: secular/religious motives and reason/fanaticism. This process is revealed by shedding light on significant works by Bruce Hoffman and Walter Laqueur. Hoffman has claimed the possibility of unprecedented attacks by religious terrorists because of the radical difference between secular motives and religious ones. He concluded that religion inspires terrorists to more destructive violence, for example, the use of weapons of mass destruction. Laqueur developed the binary system of secular/religious motives, using the term fanaticism, which means a mental illness caused by a loss of reason. He constructed the structure of reason/fanaticism in the core of his New Terrorism theory.However, this structure is invalid because our minds cannot be transcendentally divided between reason and fanaticism. The second section of the article thus points out that the structure’s boundary has been drawn arbitrarily from the perspective of the Enlightenment and Western modernization. By reviewing the Foucault/Derrida debate about madness, the author clarifies that our minds are the mixture of truth and falsehood. This means that terrorists who seem to be absolute fanatics follow truth to some extent. As long as scholars persist in using this term, terrorism studies will naturalize the distorted understanding of Global Jihad.Finally, the article presents some concepts in psychoanalysis or social psychology as an alternative approach to the New Terrorism theory. These studies have explained our irrational behaviors by focusing on our minds’ unconsciousness. We should reflect on the conceptual problems of existing studies from a critical perspective, paying attention to micro approaches more positively for the development of multidisciplinary terrorism studies.