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This article was downloaded by: [McMaster University] On: 19 December 2014, At: 12:03 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Critical Studies on Terrorism Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rter20 Liberal democracies and the globalisation of state terrorism in the 21st century Ruth Blakeley a a School of Politics and International Relations , University of Kent , Canterbury, UK Published online: 12 Aug 2010. To cite this article: Ruth Blakeley (2010) Liberal democracies and the globalisation of state terrorism in the 21st century, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 3:2, 169-172, DOI: 10.1080/17539153.2010.491314 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2010.491314 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions

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Page 1: Liberal democracies and the globalisation of state terrorism in the 21st century

This article was downloaded by: [McMaster University]On: 19 December 2014, At: 12:03Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Critical Studies on TerrorismPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rter20

Liberal democracies and theglobalisation of state terrorism in the21st centuryRuth Blakeley aa School of Politics and International Relations , University ofKent , Canterbury, UKPublished online: 12 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Ruth Blakeley (2010) Liberal democracies and the globalisation ofstate terrorism in the 21st century, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 3:2, 169-172, DOI:10.1080/17539153.2010.491314

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2010.491314

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: Liberal democracies and the globalisation of state terrorism in the 21st century

Critical Studies on TerrorismVol. 3, No. 2, August 2010, 169–172

ISSN 1753-9153 print/ISSN 1753-9161 online© 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/17539153.2010.491314http://www.informaworld.com

RTER1753-91531753-9161Critical Studies on Terrorism, Vol. 3, No. 2, Jun 2010: pp. 0–0Critical Studies on TerrorismEDITORIAL

Liberal democracies and the globalisation of state terrorism in the 21st centuryCritical Studies on TerrorismR. Blakeley

On 18 March 2010, over 500 students attended a screening of the documentary filmOutside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo (2009) (Worthington and Nash 2009), at theUniversity of Kent, Canterbury. This was followed by a question-and-answer session withAndy Worthington, one of the film’s directors, and with Omar Deghayes, British citizenand former Guantánamo Bay detainee. Both the film and Deghayes’ sharing of his experi-ences – detained for four years at Bagram, Kandahar and, eventually, Guantánamo – gavethe audience a rare insight into the methods used by the United States and its allies in the‘War on Terror’ in an attempt to break detainees alleged to have been involved withal-Qaeda-inspired terrorism. Frequently, the United States had no evidence to link thosedetainees to terrorism. Instead, as was the case with Deghayes, who had been carrying outhumanitarian work in Afghanistan on the eve of the US-led invasion and occupation, andwho had fled to the Pakistani capital, Lahore, they were simply seized by bounty huntersand handed over to American forces who transferred them to the Bagram Theater Intern-ment Facility. Many in the Canterbury audience were shocked by the detailed accounts ofUS brutality, and were, for the first time, exposed to the terrorising effects that illicitdetention, interrogation, and torture have, not only on victims, but also on the families andpeers of those the US has detained, frequently on very flimsy grounds indeed. Both speak-ers stressed that Guantánamo is the visible face of a much wider network of rendition,detention, and torture. That network remains largely hidden from view, even though it isthought to involve the intelligence and security agencies of dozens of states and isresponsible for tens of thousands of forced disappearances.

The forms of state terrorism to which Deghayes and many other victims of renditionand proxy detention in the ‘War on Terror’ have been exposed are not new. Neither is itthe first time that US complicity in such practices has been exposed. That same week inMarch that the film was screened at Kent, I assessed the accounts submitted by my final-year undergraduate students1 of the findings of the 1996 Guatemalan Truth Commission.The Truth Commission was established following the signing of the Oslo Peace Accordsin 1994 to provide a historical account of three decades of violent conflict, during which tensof thousands of Guatemalans ‘lived under the shadow of fear, death and disappearance asdaily threats’ (Tomuschat et al. 1999). The Truth Commission documented 42,275individual cases of serious violations of human rights. Of these, 23,671 men, women andchildren were victims of arbitrary execution, and 6159 were victims of forced disappear-ances. The Commission also provided detailed evidence of the widespread use of numerousforms of torture and rape, including women and children, and estimated that over 200,000people were killed or disappeared over a 30-year period. The Commission concluded thatthese atrocities constituted a deliberate policy of state terrorism, and found the state,

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through the conventional armed forces, intelligence agencies, allied paramilitaries anddeath squads, to be responsible for 93% of them. The Truth Commission also concludedthat US support for state-led counterinsurgency operations, through training and financingof the Guatemalan officer corps, had a significant and negative effect, exacerbating humanrights abuses by the state. Just as Guantánamo provides only a small snapshot of a muchwider, pernicious, and largely hidden network of state terror, the Guatemalan Truth Com-mission is just one of numerous Commissions conducted in Latin America at the end ofthe Cold War which uncovered many of the same practices of state terrorism, orchestratedand led by the National Security States in the region, in cahoots with successive USadministrations that armed, funded and facilitated regimes that were responsible for thetorture, detention and murder of hundreds of thousands of citizens.

Parallels between the findings of the Guatemalan Truth Commission and the practicesof the United States in the ‘War on Terror’ were not lost on those students who hadcompleted their analysis of the Truth Commission and had also attended the screening ofOutside the Law. Most obviously, rendition, as used in the ‘War on Terror’, is a moderniteration of forced disappearance; today, the security agencies of third-party states areused to provide proxy detention for those the United States wishes to ‘disappear’. Studentsalso noted the role of the judiciary in each case. One of the ways in which the atrocitieshad escalated in Guatemala was through the power exercised by the military and intelli-gence services over all functions of the state, especially the judiciary. This led to the judi-ciary providing impunity to those military leaders who espoused the National SecurityDoctrine as a vital imperative in defeating the communist insurgency. My students notedthat in a similar way the assumed state of emergency brought about by the 9/11 attackshad led to very senior lawyers in the George W. Bush Administration offering impunity tothose who sought to use torture on the dubious grounds that this would lead to the securingof intelligence that would thwart future attacks. Just as the Guatemalan state’s commit-ment to the total prohibition of torture under the Geneva Conventions and the UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights was eroded in the face of the communist threat, so it hasbeen at the highest levels of the US state in the ‘War on Terror’.

These brief reflections on the parallels between state terrorism in the Cold War and bythe United States and its allies in the ‘War on Terror’ are by no means exhaustive. Indeed,they simply imply that many questions remain unanswered. Firstly, the numerous truthcommissions conducted at the end of the Cold War to evaluate the use of repression,including state terrorism, in Latin America offer many insights into the nature of stateterrorism, how it evolves, how it affects society, and even how it ends. A sustained andcareful engagement with these reports might better equip us to hold contemporary states toaccount for their use of state terrorism in the ‘War on Terror’.

While the truth commissions, especially the Guatemalan one, have provided compre-hensive accounts of the various actors involved in state terrorism during the Cold War, westill know very little about the roles of and relationships between the many actors, collab-orating across state boundaries, in the forced disappearances, illicit and often secret deten-tion, and torture of detainees in the ‘War on Terror’ that may number in the thousands.Attention has been drawn through the work of human rights lawyers and investigativejournalists to the US’s and UK’s role. The non-governmental organization (NGO)Cageprisoners, and its senior researcher, Asim Qureshi, has begun the painstaking task ofattempting to identify the various detention sites that exist around the world, as well as toidentify patterns in how rendition and detention are being used (Cageprisoners 2006a,2006b, Qureshi 2010a, 2010b). Many questions remain though about the roles of thenumerous states providing proxy detention and carrying out torture on behalf of the

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (and we must assume this is ongoing, since PresidentBarack Obama failed to close a legal loophole which allowed the CIA to engage in therendition and proxy detention of non-US terror suspects). Which other states are involved?Are there patterns in the ways in which rendition and proxy detention occur? Are thereregional variations in these practices? What do participating states in this apparentlyUS-led network receive in return? To what extent do participating states operate autono-mously in this globalised practice?

The Latin American truth commissions contribute to a wider body of literature whichexplores questions of transitional justice. The various truth commissions took differentapproaches in dealing with the perpetrators of the violence that they identified, with thegranting of amnesty at one end of the spectrum, and the pursuit of justice through domesticand international courts at the other. This broader literature might offer very helpful insightsinto how a successful transition might be made from the excesses of the Bush Administra-tion to an international order in which the prohibition on torture and other cruel, inhuman,and degrading treatment might be fully reinstated in the foreign policy practices of theUnited States and its allies.

Detailed analysis of the history of state terrorism, including that perpetrated by liberaldemocracies, is essential in both understanding the functions it is intended to serve and theeffects it has, as well as in showing how infrequently it serves any useful purpose in thefight against terrorism, generating instead resistance among communities affected by itsbrutality. With the emergence and growth of scholarship in the field of Critical TerrorismStudies, this systematic work on the use of state terrorism, which builds on the work ofscholars who explored Western state terrorism at the height of the Cold War (Chomskyand Herman 1979, Stohl and Lopez 1984), has begun (Blakeley 2007a, 2009), but is by nomeans complete. The transnational system of rendition and proxy detention that has evolvedand expanded during the ‘War on Terror’ shows us that powerful liberal democratic stateshave played a pivotal role in the globalisation of state terrorism. The academic communityneeds to pay much more attention to state terrorism, as I have argued before (Blakeley2007b, 2008), both to enhance our understanding of key issues in International Relationsand Terrorism Studies, and to assist those involved in efforts to ensure that states complywith the domestic and international human rights laws they claim to uphold and defend.

Ruth BlakeleySchool of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

[email protected]

Note1. These students were the 2009–2010 cohort, taking the optional course ‘The US and Latin America’

(PO633) offered by the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent.

ReferencesBlakeley, R., 2007a. Why torture? Review of International Studies, 33 (3), 373–394.Blakeley, R., 2007b. Bringing the state back into terrorism studies. European Political Science,

6 (3), 228–235.Blakeley, R., 2008. The elephant in the room: a response to John Horgan and Michael Boyle. Criti-

cal Studies on Terrorism, 1 (2), 151–165.Blakeley, R., 2009. State terrorism and neoliberalism: The North in the South. London: Routledge.Cageprisoners, 2006a. Beyond the law – the war on terror’s secret network of detentions. Available

from: http://www.cageprisoners.com/beyondthelaw.pdf [Accessed 5 July 2009].

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Cageprisoners, 2006b. Inside Africa’s war on terror: War on terror detentions in the Horn of Africa.Available from: http://www.cageprisoners.com/downloads/InsideAfrica_sWaronTerror.pdf[Accessed 25 April 2009].

Chomsky, N. and Herman, E., 1979. The Washington connection and Third World fascism: Thepolitical economy of human rights, Vol. I. Boston, MA: South End.

Qureshi, A., 2010a. Rules of the game: Detention, deportation, disappearance. London: C. Hurst).Qureshi, A., 2010b. ‘War on Terror’: the African front. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 3 (1), 49–61.Stohl, M. and Lopez, G., eds., 1984. The state as terrorist: The dynamics of governmental violence

and repression. Westport, CT: Greenwood.Tomuschat, C., Lux-de-Cotí, O. and Balsells-Tojo, A., 1999. Guatemala: memory of silence. Report

of the Commission for Historical Clarification. Available from: http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/toc.html [Accessed 30 March 2010].

Worthington, A. and Nash, P., directors, 2009. Outside the law: Stories from Guantánamo [Docu-mentary Film]. Spectacle Productions.

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