Dr. Asta Maskaluinaite will speak on the Concept of terrorism and its (political) uses 12. November 5:30pm WI LT 31 All welcome! The Concept of terrorism and its (political) uses. Expansion of the use of the term and its consequences in Spain ‘Terrorism’ is one of the most contested concepts both in political life and in academia. Even if there is general agreement as to what constitutes terrorism, when it comes to concrete acts perpetrated by concrete groups/organisations/individuals for reasons that are more or less grounded in some political ideology, passions run high and the term itself comes to be used not so much as legal term but as a swearing word meant to smear a political opponent. ‘Terrorist’ seems to have become the greatest insult in the contemporary democratic political arena. The attacks of September 11 and the resulting ‘war on terror’ exacerbated these aspects of the term to the extent that some academics proposed abandoning its use altogether and re-opening a debate on the utility (or lack thereof) of the concept. In the political sphere, too, the term has been put to some rather unsavoury uses when some not-so-democratic regimes lumped together all their opponents as terrorists and when even democratic regimes started expanding its use to the until-then untouched domains. One of democratic states to significantly inflate the use of the term was Spain. The years 2001-2002 saw the gradual expansion of the legislation to include into category of ‘terrorism’ not only the Basque separatist organisation ETA, but also organisations of its ‘environment’: the political party, the taverns, youth organisations, prisoner support groups, etc. In this presentation, I will start with the discussion of debates surrounding the concept of terrorism and move on to address the case of Spain, the reasons behind and the consequences of the decision to expand the concept to cover not only the organisation that deals violent blows but also those which apparently give it ‘voice’. Dr. Asta Maskaliūnaitė is currently a lecturer in War and Conflict Studies at the Baltic Defence College, Tartu, Estonia. She started her studies at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, University of Vilnius, and received her MA and Ph.D. from the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. She has been working on the issues of terrorism since 1999. During the PH.D. research and later she concentrated on the case of ETA and the role of this organization in the Spanish political life, looking into these issues through the prism of discourse. Her current research also includes investigation into the conceptual origins of terrorism and use of discourse theories in research on terrorism and counterterrorism.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 13:11:54 +0000
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