Terrorism as a cycle of violence
A critical discourse analysis of the ‘Orwellian’ response by the French state to the Paris attacks
Source: Pancho, in Council of Europe 2017
Laura van den Vrijhoef S4066014 25 July 2017 Master thesis: final version Supervisor: prof. dr. Henk van Houtum Conflicts, Territories and Identities Radboud University Nijmegen Word count: 36.029 words
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Executive summary
This thesis investigates how the French state has responded to the Paris attacks, both in terms of discourse and policy making. It makes clear that the French state’s discourse on terrorism promotes a repressive response of military and security measures, which contributes to a cycle of aggression (Bueno Lacy et al., 17 June 2016) on the international level, and a cycle of radicalization (Adida et al., 14 January 2015) on the national level. While these measures are implemented with the intention of protecting France against future attacks, they seem to be contributing to the maintenance of the terrorist threat (Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017). As a result, the French state’s approach to terrorism implies a disproportionate exertion of state power, which has sincere consequences for people’s lives. While the French state aims to defend human rights, it is violating them in a disproportionate way, both in war zones and at home (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016; Unicef, 15 March 2014; World Vision, 1 March 2016; Amnesty International, 26 October 2016a; Amnesty International, 26 October 2016b, Airwars, 17 January 2017).
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Acknowledgements
Nijmegen, 20 July 2017
This master thesis is written as part of the master specialization Conflicts, Territories and Identities, a combined master program of Human Geography and the Centre for Conflict Analysis and Management (CICAM) at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. This master program has been an interesting follow-up to my bachelor in Political Science. During two years of intensive courses on international conflict, elective courses on the Arabic language, and an internship at the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research (NCBR), this master program has strengthened my skills of analytical thinking, critical reasoning and academic writing, and has challenged me to question my taken for granted knowledge about international conflict. It has especially triggered my interest for the topic of terrorism, which polarizes public debates in a way that I do not feel comfortable about. This thesis is just the beginning of my search for a better understanding of the societal tensions that cause, and are caused by, radicalization and terrorism.
There are a couple of names that deserve to be mentioned here. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor prof. dr. Henk van Houtum for his guidance throughout the entire research process. I am thankful for the freedom and trust he has given me to find my own voice and build my own story. Our conversations often left me in a state of confusion, but they always turned out to be very helpful for the realization of my story line.
Moreover, I was allowed to be part of CICAM, the Human Geography Department and NCBR. I am thankful for the interesting conversations I was able to have with a great diversity of people. In particular, Rodrigo Bueno Lacy and his tireless inspiration will not be forgotten soon. He has often flooded me with new insights and has never been reluctant to share his critical opinions.
Additionally, I would like to thank Sarah Dresden, my tutor and sparring-partner from the Nijmegen Centre for Academic Writing. Despite our different academic backgrounds, not much words were needed for her to understand what I was doing and where I wanted to go. She has helped me to structure my ideas and find a common thread within the bulk of information in which I had immersed myself when I knocked at her door for the first time.
Finally, and most importantly, I would like to express my thanks and love to my parents Mireille and Peter and my boyfriend Funs for their never ending support during the challenging process of writing a master thesis. They have been there for me with hugs and good food during each and every ‘up’ and ‘down’ and have encouraged me to never stop believing in myself.
I am proud of the result and I hope that it can be an inspiration for others.
Laura van den Vrijhoef
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Preface
This text is a personal story that is based on the news broadcast of Nieuwsuur1 (13 November 2015) and an extra news broadcast of the NOS2 (14 November 2015a).
13 November 2015 I am drawing a painting while sitting on the couch next to my father. Drawing helps me to process my experiences of the day. It is my way out in times of bad weather, which stops me from having an evening walk through the polder landscape. My mother is upstairs brushing her teeth before going to bed. She has to get up early tomorrow morning and values a good night rest. My boyfriend is laying on the other couch working on his laptop. It is a normal Friday evening in November, just like we have had many; drinking tea after a nice dinner and watching TV. It is ten o’clock when Nieuwsuur starts off with a report about the cabinet’s failed plan for a renewed tax system. It does not interest me that much to shift my eyes from my piece of paper to the television screen.
The Dutch home care organization TSN must reverse the proposed wage reduction. Jihadi John has been killed by an American drone. We hear John Kerry, the American Minister of Foreign Affairs, warning: “The terrorists associated with Daesh need to know this: your days are numbered and you will be defeated”. Kurdish Peshmerga fighters have recaptured the city of Sinjar from Islamic State. The police has arrested 18 Kurdish protestors in the building of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Street musicians in Amsterdam will be banned. Then, in between two news items, anchorman Jeroen Overbeek firmly announces:
“We just have received the news that there have been shootings in a restaurant in Paris. French media report several deaths. We will inform you as soon as we have more information.”
Nieuwsuur continues with a report about a proposal to introduce a euthanasia pill for people with incurable diseases. After that, it elaborates on a personal story of a refugee family from Syria, living separately in the Netherlands and Turkey. The Dutch government plans to restrict the possibilities for family reunification. Then, the anchorwoman, Marielle Tweebeeke, interrupts:
“There have been shootings in a restaurant in Paris. As far as we know, two people have been killed and seven are injured. We will of course let you know when there is more to tell.”
Nieuwsuur returns to the news of the day again. Councilors express their concerns about their possibilities for monitoring the City Council after national health care responsibilities have been transferred to the municipalities. An elderly woman tells about the home care she receives, which has been reduced with three hours a week.
“And back to the situation in Paris. This night, shootings have taken place in a restaurant. Two deaths, seven injuries. We have heard that there have also been several explosions at a football stadium. Ron Linker, our correspondent in Paris, is on the line at the moment, hello Ron?”
It remains silent on the other side of the line.
1 A Dutch daily news program that provides background information to the news. 2 The Dutch national news channel of the public service broadcasting. 4
“We had hoped to get more information from him, but unfortunately the connection is not working.”
The anchors rush through the remainder of the news broadcast and try to get into contact with Ron Linker several times, but the connection continues to fail. In the meantime, sports anchorman Gert van ‘t Hof continues with sports news. He has not yet finished his item about Johan Cruijff, whose position at the management of Ajax seems to be under pressure, when Marielle Tweebeeke interrupts again:
“We will elaborate on this in a few minutes, but first we return to Paris. Earlier this evening, we reported on the shootings that have taken place at a restaurant. In the meantime, it has become clear that eighteen people have died. In addition, things are happening at Stade de France3, where president Francois Hollande was attending a soccer game. He has now returned to the Elysée Palace4. As soon as we have more information… Oh, that moment is now. We finally have Ron Linker on the line, our correspondent in Paris. Ron, tell us more!”
In the minutes and hours that follow, the series of coordinated attacks that are taking place in Paris unroll themselves to our living room and to the rest of the world. When Nieuwsuur comes to an end, the NOS starts an extra news broadcast in which the anchors alternate with the correspondent in Paris, endlessly repeating what has already been said, each time with a little bit more of information. Pictures, videos and stories of eyewitnesses appear on social media. Panic, chaos and fear seem to take over the city. The amount of deaths continues to increase to 26, 30 and eventually ‘dozens’.
The anchors and correspondents try to search for meaning. Can we think of a link between the sites of the attacks? Do they have something to do with the attacks on Charlie Hebdo? France just took extra security measures to prepare itself for the upcoming international climate summit, could this have something to do with it? How much security do we need? Is it even possible to defend ourselves against these kind of attacks? And where on earth have the shooters gone?
During the days that follow, the news is dominated by – what has come to be known as – the Paris attacks. I remember how my father in law, who used to be a calm and rational man, interprets them as ‘game changers’ in the history of international politics, similar to 9/11. Public discussions are dominated by feelings of outrage and powerlessness. They do not allow much room for reflection. I experience how people who carefully try to take a nuanced standpoint, and question the position of Muslim migrants in France, are not taken seriously, and rejected as senseless people who disrespect the victims of Paris. I start to wonder how these social dynamics work. Do we really get overwhelmed by these attacks or does this attitude of surprise cover up a certain logic? I decided to figure it out.
3 A football stadium in the North of Paris (BBC, 9 December 2015). 4 The official residence of the French President (France24, 9 November 2016). 5
Table of contents
Executive summary 2 Acknowledgments 3 Preface 4 Table of contents 6 List of figures 8
I Introduction 9
II The academic context 13
The study of terrorism 13
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 14 Social constructivism 14 Discourse 15 Power 16 CDA in the study of terrorism 18
Gaps within the critical approach 18 The empirical gap 18 The methodological gap 19
The application of CDA within this thesis 20 The fictive level: ‘1984’ 20 The ideational level: speech act 20 The material level: policies 21
Concluding remarks 22
III The empirical analysis 23
The international context 24 ‘1984’ 24 Speech 25 Policies 35 The international coalition 35 The French case 36 Timelines of the war 38 The myth of protecting civilians 44
The national context 47 ‘1984’ 47 Speech 47 Policies 53 The Banlieues 54 Radicalization 54 The unequal restriction of human rights 55
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Concluding remarks 58
IV Conclusion & Discussion 61
The terrorism debate 61
Suggestions for future research 63
Policy recommendations 64
Postface 66
Bibliography 67
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List of figures
Figure I Peace for Paris
Figure II The terrorism frame by the French state
Figure III Coding scheme
Figure IV Coded speech
Figure V Representations of the war with Islamic State
Figure V.1 How the war between France and Islamic State is generally represented by the French state and international media
Figure V.2 An alternative representation of the war between France and Islamic State
Figure V.3 How the war between European states and Islamic State is generally represented by European political leaders and international media
Figure V.4 An alternative representation of the war between European states and Islamic State
Figure VI Cycle of violence schematically
Figure VII Cycle of violence in pictures
Figure VIII France’s state of emergency
Figure IX Cycle of radicalization schematically
Figure X Cycle of radicalization in pictures
Figure XI Terrorism as an ‘Orwellian’ cycle of violence
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I Introduction
On 13 November 2015, the city of Paris fell victim to a series of coordinated terrorist attacks (BBC, 9 December 2015). Bombs were exploded nearby the Stade de France, where the French and German national soccer teams were playing a friendly match. Mass shootings were conducted in several public spaces of cafés, restaurants and terraces, where people were enjoying their Friday nights off. Visitors of the Eagles of Death Metal band were taken hostage and most of them killed in the Bataclan music venue. These terrorist attacks, conducted by French associates of Islamic State, caused the deaths of 130 people, left 368 people injured and traumatized the lives of many more (The Atlantic, 22 November 2015). Currently known as the Paris attacks, they were to enter the history books as the deadliest attacks on France since World War II (BBC, 14 November 2015).
The Paris attacks led to intense outcry within and outside France (BBC, 14 November 2015). Barely recovered from the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in January that year, people unified along feelings of disbelief and wondered why France had to become the target of such cruelty. As stated by Nathalie Nougayrède (9 January 2016), the former editor of the French newspaper Le Monde, the attacks hit ordinary people in all their vulnerability, and this could happen to anyone at any time. The French cartoonist Jean Jullien (13 November 2015) powerfully captured this emotion in his ‘Peace for Paris’ image that merged the Eiffel tower with the universal sign for peace (figure I). It became the symbol of international mourning and was widely shared at sights of commemoration and on social media (Time, 14 November 2015).
Figure I Peace for Paris
Source: Jullien, 13 November 2015
Besides expressions of unity, the fear for new attacks was spreading over Paris and the rest of France (New Yorker, 19 November 2015). Hundreds of people ran away in panic during a public gathering of commemoration at Place de la République two days after the attacks. The gunfire they thought they heard turned out to be firecrackers (BBC, 15 November 2015). This fear was reinforced by the extensive reports on the attacks that appeared in the news. News media tended to enter into endless speculation in their attempt to get a grip on the situation (Mondon, 14 November 2015). The populist leader Marine LePen exploited this environment of fear by confronting the French state with its inability to secure the safety of its citizens and soon gained popularity from her call for strong leadership (The Guardian, 1 December 2015).
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While until then, president Francois Hollande was known for his soft and conflict-avoidant attitude, his reaction to the Paris attacks gave him the appearance of a forceful leader (The Guardian, 16 November 2015a). Ever since the earlier attacks on Charlie Hebdo, Hollande had been struggling to formulate a convincing answer to the threat of and fear for new attacks. Now, his inability to prevent the Paris attacks encouraged him to take a tough stand (The Guardian, 16 November 2015a). During the same nights of the attacks, he announced a state of emergency throughout the entire territory of France, which allowed for house arrests and police searches on a massive scale (Hollande, 13 November 2015). Three days later, in his speech before a joint session of the French Parliament, he announced to marshal the full strength of the state to strike back (Hollande, 16 November 2015). On the international level, he declared war to Islamic State and announced to increase the French airstrikes on Islamic State’s strategic targets in Syria and Iraq. On the national level, he announced an extensive package of security policies that would strengthen the state’s capacities to monitor potentially dangerous citizens (Hollande, 16 November 2015).
Polls indicated that this response was met with popular support (YouGov, 22 November 2015; Foreign Policy, 16 July 2016). Both the state of war and the state of emergency last until today. However, several human rights organizations have increasingly expressed their concerns about these measures. They criticize the way in which the French state’s fight against terrorism leads to a disproportionate use of state repression. Within the context of the war against Islamic State, they point to the lives of innocent civilians that are put at risk while too little is done to protect them (Amnesty International, 26 October 2016a; Airwars, 17 January 2017). Moreover, they argue that the state of emergency causes the violation of human rights on a national scale (Human Rights Watch, 3 February 2016; Amnesty International, 4 February 2016; The Local, 22 February 2017; Human Rights Watch, 27 June 2017). France does not stand alone in this; this repressive tendency dominates many state discourses on (counter)terrorism (Jackson 2007a).
This repressive tendency is backed up by the traditional study of terrorism. As a research discipline that is closely linked to state structures, it follows the same assumptions as many states: it interprets terrorism as an exceptional threat to the national security of states, which calls for the adoption of repressive measures (Jackson 2009). As a consequence, the traditional study of terrorism appears to be irresponsive to studies that question this established image (Jackson 2009). Instead, it confirms the repressive counterterrorism and security policies of many states and provides political leaders with a scientific justification for them (Jackson 2009).
However, this traditional approach is critiqued for taking terrorism as a self-contained phenomenon, with objectively observable characteristics, causes and solutions, whereby it overlooks the political context in which the concept is defined (Jackson et al. 2007). This has led to the development of a critical approach to the study of terrorism, which investigates terrorism through an alternative paradigm and takes it as a discourse (Hülsse & Spencer 2008). As such, the critical approach recognizes the political nature of the terrorism concept and explicitly integrates this into research projects. Among other things, it investigates how the general understanding of terrorism legitimizes a repressive response, while excluding non-repressive measures from the political spectrum (Jackson 2009).
In doing so, these research projects show a strong focus on the United States, as they are regarded as the precursor in the repressive trend of counterterrorism policies (Jackson 2007b). In contrast, the European Union’s discourse on terrorism has been taken as the nuanced counterpart to the American discourse, approaching terrorism in a much softer way, both in terms of words and policies (Jackson
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2007b). However, within the current context of terrorist attacks that are taking place in western Europe, individual European states increasingly tend to follow the American path. Amnesty International warns that European states are taking “Orwellian counter-terrorism laws stripping rights under guise of defending them” (Amnesty International, 17 January 2017a), with France acting as one of the forerunners since the Paris attacks (Amnesty International, 17 January 2017b).
By this, Amnesty International refers to the story of 1984 (Orwell 1950). In this dystopian novel, George Orwell describes a future society that is governed by a totalitarian regime in its most extremist form. On the basis of this, he powerfully captures how fear for a certain threat can lead to the adoption and approval of far reaching policies that imply a disproportionate use of state repression. Although this story pushes state repression to its extremes, Amnesty International (17 January 2017a; 17 January 2017b) warns that the French state, in its attempt to protect France against future attacks, threatens to slip into the same direction. As put by Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy (2017), ‘the political extreme’ tends to become ‘the new normal’. For this reason, this thesis delves into the French state’s response to the Paris attacks and analyzes the use of repressive means in its fight against terrorism. This leads to the central question of this thesis:
How has the French state responded to the Paris attacks, both in terms of discourse and policy making?
In order to investigate this, the following sub-questions need to be addressed. How is terrorism framed by the French state? How does this terrorism frame inform the adoption of repressive counterterrorism policies? How do the repressive counterterrorism policies have an effect on people’s lives?
In doing so, this thesis applies the lens of 1984 (Orwell 1950) to the French state’s discourse on terrorism as a way to deconstruct it. Since discourses have a naturalizing effect (Fairclough 1985), it can be difficult to recognize its discrepancies and tensions when being subject to the discourse yourself. Therefore, the fictive story of 1984 (Orwell 1950) will help to expose repressive tendencies of the French state in the real world. This analysis will be twofold. On the one hand, the speech that president Francois Hollande (16 November 2015) gave three days after the Paris attacks will be analyzed to see how terrorism is framed by the French state and how this informs the adoption of repressive policies. On the other hand, news items and policy reports will be analyzed in order to see how these policies work out in practice. As such, this thesis builds on the critical approach to the study of terrorism by investigating the interrelatedness of language, action and power (Jäger & Maier 2009). Yet, while the critical approach shows a strong focus on texts (Blommaert 2001), this thesis explicitly integrates counterterrorism policies and their effects into the analysis, which forms the scientific relevance of this thesis.
This analysis should not be taken as a matter of fact, but as an alternative representation of terrorism. As such, the societal relevance of this thesis is to create awareness of the power relations that are underlying the French state’s discourse on terrorism and the human suffering resulting from that – tendencies that might also be present in other discourses of European states. It thereby hopes to contribute to the development of a discourse that does more justice to the widely shared value of human rights. On the basis of this, it has the aim of challenging the readers of this thesis to reflect on their own taken-for-granted assumptions about terrorism.
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This thesis is structured as follows. Chapter II places this thesis within its academic context. It makes a case for a critical approach to the study of terrorism and follows the theoretical and methodological premises of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Chapter III contains the empirical analysis of the French state’s discourse on terrorism. It connects the fictive level of 1984 (Orwell 1950), the ideational level of the speech by president Francois Hollande (16 November 2015), and the material level of the French state’s counterterrorism policies. Chapter IV formulates an answer to the central question of this thesis. It thereby reflects on the lens of 1984 (Orwell 1950) and discusses in what ways this is helpful to understand the French case. This final chapter concludes with suggestions for further research and policy recommendations for alternative ways to deal with terrorism.
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II The academic context
This chapter starts with an overview of the academic debate on (counter-)terrorism. In doing so, it makes a case for a critical approach and explains why the topic should be studied as a discourse. As such, this thesis can be positioned within the academic framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Therefore, what follows is a discussion of CDA: its roots within social constructivism, the concept of discourse and the way in which discourse is related to mechanisms of power. Then, the gaps within the critical approach to terrorism will be discussed, as well as the way in which this thesis tries to respond to them. Finally, this chapter explains how CDA will be applied in this thesis.
The study of terrorism The study of terrorism can roughly be divided into two approaches. On the one hand, the traditional approach to terrorism seeks to define terrorism as a social phenomenon by determining its structures, strategies and causes (Hülsse & Spencer 2008). On the other hand, the critical approach to terrorism investigates terrorism through an alternative paradigm and takes it as a discourse. Instead of asking what terrorism is, it asks how terrorism is constructed through discourse (Hülsse & Spencer 2008). Both positions will now be explained, which will result in the case for a critical approach, as this recognizes the political nature of the terrorism concept.
The traditional study of terrorism has developed from the field of security studies. As a research discipline that is closely linked to state structures and often financed by state resources, it tends to follow the same theoretical assumptions to which many states adhere: this type of violence poses an exceptional threat to the national security of states, this threat is rooted within extremist interpretations of Islam, and a repressive response is needed to counter it (Jackson 2009). This results in research projects that are mainly concerned with problem-solving rather than problem-understanding, meaning that they focus on solutions without having a clear understanding of the causes of terrorism (Gunning 2007).
Their research develops from the concept of ‘new terrorism’, assuming that the current type of terrorism marks a unique historical phase in the development of modern international terrorism. Because of the intensified use of violence, contemporary ‘religious terrorism’ is said to fundamentally differ from anarchist, nationalist and Marxist terrorism in the 19th and 20th century (Rapoport 2001). As put by Morgan (2004), “rather than focusing on conventional goals of political or religious movements, today’s terrorists seek destruction and chaos as ends in themselves” (Morgan 2004, p. 30). The transnational organization structure of contemporary terrorist groups, their potential use of weapons of mass destruction and their large-scale actions of indiscriminate killing are said to pose a destructive threat, which needs to be countered with evenly intensified measures (Laqueur 1999, Morgan 2004).
At the same time, several studies show opposing tendencies and question these traditional assumptions. It is argued that the security threat from terrorism is relatively limited (Mueller, in Jackson 2009), that there is no significant causal link between the religion of Islam and terrorism5 (Sageman; Pape; Bloom; Holmes, in Jackson 2009), and that repressive approaches appear ineffective to counter terrorism (Jackson 2009). In addition, the concept of new terrorism, and the extent to which
5 These studies emphasize that terrorism is not rooted in the religion of Islam. Instead, they argue that the religion of Islam is politically (mis)used by terrorist groups to legitimize the use of terrorist means in order to achieve political goals (Jackson 2009). 13 it can be regarded as fundamentally different compared to previous types of terrorism, is questioned and debated extensively (Tucker 2001; Copeland 2001; Spencer 2006; Duyvestein 2010).
However, the traditional study of terrorism has not been responsive to these new academic developments. Similarly to the public debate, as explained by Jackson et al (2007), it seems to suffer from a moral threshold that prevents it from questioning its own assumptions. There is the risk “that understanding terrorist motives equates to sympathizing with them and explaining their behavior equates to justifying or exonerating it” (Jackson et al. 2007, p. 4). The traditional field holds on to its theoretical assumptions, despite the gap between theoretical grounding and empirical evidence. As a consequence, they confirm the repressive counterterrorism and security policies of many states and provide political leaders with a scientific justification for them (Jackson 2009).
The central problem of the traditional approach is that they fail to recognize that the term terrorism is a fundamental political concept (Jackson et al. 2007). This means that the choice to present a particular act of violence as terrorist is a political choice and thus motivated by political interests in terms of power. More specifically, states deliberately apply the term terrorism to resistant groups in order to undermine their legitimacy, and thereby strengthen the legitimacy of the state (Wecke 2003). The traditional study of terrorism excludes this political context from the analysis: it unjustly takes terrorism as a self-contained phenomenon with objectively observable characteristics, causes and solutions, and thereby overlooks the political context in which these characteristics, causes and solutions are defined (Jackson et al. 2007).
This shortcoming of the traditional approach has led to the development of a critical scientific approach towards terrorism, which includes this political context into the analysis (Gunning 2007). The critical stand focuses on the interrelatedness of language and action, which is intermediated by power interests. In particular, the critical approach focuses on the way in which political actors talk about terrorism and how this informs the policies they adopt to counter it. Moreover, it analyzes how, through these words and practices, certain societal relations of domination are produced and secured. As such, it approaches terrorism as a discourse and is rooted within the academic framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Jackson 2007a). What this means, will be explained in the upcoming section.
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) As said, the critical approach to the study of terrorism is rooted within CDA. CDA is an integrative framework of philosophical, theoretical and methodological premises that is concerned with the study of discourse. In order to understand what CDA is and does, several aspects will be discussed: first, CDA’s roots within social constructivism; second, the concept of discourse; third, the way in which discourse is related to mechanisms of power; and finally, its emancipatory aims. This section concludes with a summarizing statement on what this all means for the critical approach to the study of terrorism.
Social constructivism CDA derives from social constructivism. This is a strand within the philosophy of science that is based on specific assumptions about the nature of the social world and how we as human beings know it. Most importantly, social constructivism assumes that our knowledge of the social world is fundamentally subjective (Jorgensen & Philips 2002). We as human beings are formed by our surroundings – such as social networks, education, and societal norms and values – which influence how we look at the world. This means that our understanding of the world is created and maintained
14 through social processes. As a result, knowledge is socially constructed; through social interaction “we construct common truths and compete about what is true and false” (Jorgensen & Philips 2002, p. 5). Knowledge therefore is contextual. It is the product of specific historical and cultural circumstances and can change over time and space (Jorgensen & Philips 2002).
Language is seen as one of the most important mechanisms in this respect. Social constructivism assumes language to be a pre-condition for thought (Burr 2015). As a consequence, our access to reality is always mediated through language (Jorgensen & Philips 2002). With language we create representations of reality. However, words are never a mere and direct reflection of reality; they always carry a layer of meaning with them. As such, the words we use also contribute to the construction of reality. This is also known as the performative characteristic of language: when someone talks about something, he or she automatically constitutes it. This does not mean that physical objects do not exist, but rather that they only gain meaning, for us as human beings, through language (Jorgensen & Philips 2002). For this reason, CDA scholars show a strong focus on the investigation of texts. Texts are seen as the manifestation of social action (Wodak & Meyer 2009). Rather than merely describing particular texts, CDA scholars investigate their broader dynamics and embeddedness within social structures, thereby linking language use to its societal context (Wodak & Meyer 2009).
Social constructivism emphasizes that we are always and inevitably bounded to our ways of interpretation, such as language. In other words, “there is no escape from representation” (Jorgensen & Philips 2002, p. 14). This means that it is impossible to generate universal or objective truth. Rather than trying to grasp some objective reality that is ultimately inaccessible for the human mind, social research should therefore be interested in understanding how people actively make this reality through the construction of knowledge, meaning and truth (Patterson & Cook 1997). In other words, we should not ask ourselves whether something is true, but how truth is produced through social processes (Jorgensen & Philips 2002). As such, research is socially embedded and should not considered to be separate from society (Wodak & Meyer 2009). In addition to this, critical scholars emphasize that the social construction of knowledge is embedded in systems of power and therefore fundamentally political in nature. What we define as true and meaningful, depends on who has the power to define (Jorgensen & Philips 2002). These representations – our collective stories about what is true and meaningful – is what CDA scholars mean when they talk about discourse. In the next part, the concept of discourse will be explained in further detail.
Discourse In their use of the term discourse, many CDA scholars build on Michel Foucault’s theory of discourse (in Jäger & Maier 2009). On the basis of this, discourses can be defined as follows:
Discourses are institutionalized ways of thinking and talking, which regulate action and thereby exert power (Link, in Jäger & Maier 2009, p. 35).
Discourse is a complex concept and its various aspects are unified in this singular definition. They will now be explained step by step. First of all, discourses are ‘ways of thinking and talking’. This aspect refers to discourses as systems of representation. A discourse is a particular representation of a certain topic – an object, an event, a person, a relationship, etc. – that consists of a particular set of meanings, statements, metaphors, stories, images and imaginaries (Burr 2015). Due to these systematic representations, statements surrounding a certain topic appear to be repetitive. Only those statements that fit within a certain discourse are accepted as true and meaningful (Jorgensen & Philips 2002). As
15 a consequence, although in principle there is an infinite number of ways to talk about a certain topic, a lot of alternative representations remain unsaid or unheard. In this way, discourses create ‘truth effects’; a particular representation is presented and received as the only true representation of a certain topic. Foucault (in Jorgensen & Philips 2002) refers to this collective construction of truth as ‘regimes of knowledge’.
Second, discourses ‘regulate action’. This aspect means that discourse, as a particular representation of the social world, forms the basis upon which people act. Besides defining which statements are possible and acceptable, discourses therefore also determine which actions are possible and acceptable. In this way, a discourse restricts people’s possibilities for action: “within a particular worldview, some forms of action become natural, others unthinkable” (Jorgensen & Philips 2002, p. 6). In other words, certain actions are legitimized by discourse while others are delegitimized.
Thus, due to the performative characteristic of language as discussed above, action is inherent to the functioning of discourse. In relation to this, Jäger & Maier (2009) emphasize that discourses are not merely ideational; they are also material realities. In other words, they do not only exist in our minds as ideas that reflect the social world, but they also make or enable the social world: “Without discourses, there would be no social reality” (Jäger & Maier 2009, p. 36). Therefore, while discursive elements (thinking and talking) are often the focus of CDA scholars, they can only be understood in relation to non-discursive elements (actions) (Jäger & Maier 2009).
Thirdly, discourses are ‘institutionalized’. This means that they are embedded in social institutions. Social institutions can be understood as ‘self-regulating conventions’ (Phillips et al. 2004). They entail certain mechanisms, which are socially constructed, and which enforce people to obey to the particular modes of knowing and acting of a particular discourse. In this way, social institutions police their own boundaries of acceptable statements and behavior, also known as ‘discursive limits’ (Philips et al. 2004).
Examples of social institutions are the family, the school, the workplace, the church, the courts or the government (Fairclough 1985). The mechanisms of control can be tangible, for example going to jail when conducting or preparing terrorist attacks. They can also be much less tangible, for example in case of self-censorship with regard to controversial political statements. As mentioned above, someone who questions the dominant public understanding of terrorism might risk to be rejected as a sympathizer or justifier of terrorism (Jackson et al. 2007). As such, not only actions but also ideas that exceed certain discursive limits are policed through social processes.
Finally, discourses ‘exert power’. Because our knowledge of the world is socially constructed through discourse, and social processes are inherently political, power is crucial to the functioning of discourse. Jäger and Maier (2009) distinguish two ways in which power plays a role: there is the power of discourse and the power over discourse. This will be explained in the following paragraph.
Power On the one hand, the power of discourse refers to the existence of discursive limits (Jäger and Maier 2009), as mentioned above. Since discourses determine what can be said, under what conditions and by whom, they evoke processes of inclusion and exclusion; they provide some and denies others the right to speak. These processes of inclusion and exclusion also work out in practice: people are included and excluded from actual groups, activities and privileges in social life. As such, discourses create and maintain relations of domination, whereby some people benefit and others suffer from a
16 certain societal hierarchy. CDA scholars are concerned with the ways in which discourse produces and reproduces these forms of social domination, as well as the way in which dominated groups try to resist this (Wodak & Meyer 2009).
At the same time, discourses function to cover up this aspect of power. According to Fairclough (1985), the defining characteristic of discourses is their capacity to naturalize. Naturalization gives certain political representations the status of objective and common sense knowledge, making their ideological underpinnings invisible. Due to this functioning of discourses as Foucauldian ‘regimes of knowledge’ (Jorgensen & Philips 2002), people often take political knowledge and practices for granted and perceive them as ‘natural’ or ‘logical’, rather than recognizing the particular interests they represent. In this way, if often happens that certain political beliefs gain an almost unchallenged status, whereby most people accept them as truth or even forget that there are alternatives to the status quo (in Wodak & Meyer 2009).
On the other hand, the power over discourse refers to the ability to determine, control and change discourses (Jäger & Maier 2009). As said, discourses reflect particular representations of the social world within an endless range of possible representations and are never completely coherent. Alternative representations are always available. This leaves room for contestation and resistance, and evokes a struggle over representation. Although some people have more power over discourse than others – for example political elites who have a privileged access to media and financial resources – dominant discourses will always be contested by opposing voices. In order to remain dominant, discourses require constant investments in their reproduction, thereby preventing alternative stories to gain a foothold in collective thinking (Fairclough 1985). This can be seen, for example, in the way in which state leaders continuously address their peoples after a terrorist attack has occurred. In this way, they try to control how the public interprets these events (Bligh et al. 2004). However, despite these efforts of political elites, individuals or singular groups do not have this determining power over discourse on their own. Discourses are ‘supra-individual’, meaning that everybody is co-producing discourse and its final result is not precisely intended (Jäger & Maier 2009). For this reason, power effects resulting from discourses “should not necessarily be interpreted as the conscious and manipulative intent of some individual or group” (Jäger and Maier 2009, p. 39). The goal of CDA is not necessarily to point an accusing finger, but to expose these power dynamics.
As such, CDA has emancipatory aims. Because of the assumed political nature of knowledge, CDA scholars are concerned with critiquing and changing society beyond understanding and explaining it (Wodak & Meyer 2009). By making the interconnectedness between knowledge and power visible, they aim to create awareness among those who suffer from a particular discursive order. On the basis of this, the discourse, and by this the unjust societal order, can be changed. The goal of CDA therefore is “to produce and convey critical knowledge that enables human beings to emancipate themselves from forms of domination through self-reflection”, which could be achieved by “creating awareness in agents of their own needs and interests” (Wodak & Meyer 2009, p. 7).
To this it should be added that liberating oneself from domination is not necessarily a solitary affair. Instead, fighting structural social inequality and injustice is a shared moral responsibility (Young 2006). One of the problems of social domination lies in the fact that dominated people have difficulties to be heard. Therefore, the aim of CDA should also be to make people aware of each other’s needs, interests and well-being, and to stimulate a sense of sympathy and social responsibility.
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CDA in the study of terrorism Rather than the exercise of ‘offering critique’, it is the interest in the functioning of power through discourse that makes the CDA approach to the study of terrorism critical rather than traditional. It starts from the idea that representations of terrorism are not objectively obtained but politically motivated, which implies that some people benefit while others suffer from them. The critical approach aims to make this interconnectedness between knowledge and power visible. As such, it aims to create awareness of injustice, and by this to change the dominant discourse and related societal order. In this way, it engages with social processes and public debate on terrorism instead of maintaining the myth of scientific objectivity within the so-called ‘ivory tower’ of the traditional approach.
In sum, to study terrorism from a critical perspective means: first, to study how certain ways of thinking and talking about terrorism persist and become accepted as truth; second, how these beliefs regulate action to counter terrorism; third, how these beliefs and actions are institutionalized within state structures; and finally, how these state structures produce and maintain certain relations of power. This has already been shown by the way in which terrorism is consistently defined as an exceptional threat to national security. Due to this recurrent interpretation of terrorism, political actors tend to be irresponsive to nuancing standpoints, which question the actual degree of the security threat from terrorism. In this way, the idea of terrorism as an exceptional security threat is incorrectly accepted by many academic and political actors as an objective fact (Jackson 2009). Moreover, this persistent idea regulates action by informing the policies that are adopted by many states to counter terrorism. More specifically, it legitimizes repressive policies and excludes non-violent means, such as political dialogue and compromise, from the range of possible actions (Jackson 2009). In addition, these ideas and actions are institutionalized in all kinds of ways. This does not only happen through the development of counterterrorism laws, which has the aim of preventing and punishing terrorist acts, but also through the development of societal norms, which prevents people from questioning the dominant public understanding of (counter)terrorism (Jackson 2007a). Finally, this dominant discourse on terrorism exerts power by promoting means of state repression. At the same time, this exertion of state power has largely been naturalized. It is not being recognized as a political choice, but accepted by many people as the only adequate possibility to counter terrorism (Esch 2010). In the empirical analysis in the next chapter of this thesis, these dynamics will be explained in further detail.
This critical approach to the study of terrorism is starting to be seen as a useful paradigm for understanding the social dynamics of contemporary terrorism, now that the amount of terrorist attacks in so-called western states, especially in western Europe, are increasing (Jackson et al. 2007). At the same time, just as every scientific approach, it is still developing and has its own weaknesses and gaps. These will be discussed in the following section.
Gaps within the critical approach The critical approach to the study of terrorism shows some weaknesses in its implementation of CDA. Most significantly, two biases can be observed: one empirical and one methodological. I will now explain what they entail and how they have resulted in the focus of this thesis.
The empirical gap First of all, from an empirical point of view, the critical approach to the study of terrorism shows a geographical bias towards the political realm of the United States (Jackson 2007b). Examples of studies that delve into the main premises of the ‘war on terror’ discourse as promoted by the Bush administration in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 are numerous (Merskin 2004; Jackson 2005;
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Croft 2006). The same applies for accounts of the extent to which this discourse has been continued by the Obama administration (Jackson 2011; Reyes 2011; McCrisken 2014).
Although Europe has become a target of contemporary terrorism as well, much less attention has been assigned to the European political discourse on terrorism (Jackson 2007b) – in addition to other parts of the world. Moreover, analyses that do take the European context into account, tend to focus on the level of the European Union (Jackson 2007b, Baker-Beall 2013). From this point of view, the European Union’ discourse on terrorism is being seen as the nuanced counterpart of the American discourse, approaching terrorism in a much softer way, both in terms of words and policies. As the European Union would define terrorism mainly as a criminal act rather than an act of war, it is believed that its approach secures international criminal law and human rights, values cooperation over war and aims to address its root causes (Jackson 2007b). Moreover, its tone would be less alarmist, showing awareness of the effects that language can have, especially in the case of terrorism (Jackson 2007b).
Apart from the question whether this still is the case, or whether this has ever been the case, this representation tends to overlook current tendencies of the European Union’s member states within their national political contexts. As shown by alarmist reports of Amnesty International, European states follow a disproportionately repressive approach towards terrorism (Amnesty International, 17 January 2017), with France acting as one of the forerunners (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016). Moreover, the Paris attacks have increased the French public distrust against the European Union, which encourages the French state to take up a national approach rather than leaving up the mandate to the European Union in the fight against terrorism (Lequesne 2016). For this reason, this thesis focuses on the European state level and highlights France as an exemplary case for the broader tendencies that European states are experiencing.
The methodological gap The second gap that can be observed within the critical study of terrorism is related to the methodological approach. From this perspective, CDA approaches to the study of terrorism show a strong focus on language. As already mentioned, language is indeed an integral part of discourse, but it derives its significance from its relation to action (Jäger & Maier 2009). Yet, many CDA scholars tend to focus on a particular text, or a small set of texts, while the link with broader societal structures of power often remains implicit (Blommaert 2001). As a consequence, “even though CDA researchers claim to interpret society through text, they usually end up simply interpreting text” (Blommaert, in Breeze 2011, p. 516).
A clear example can be seen in the work of Jackson (2007b), where he analyzes the development of the European Union’s counterterrorism discourse after 9/11 by comparing it to the American state discourse. The largest part of this analysis focuses on a comparison between both actors’ language use. After this, Jackson (2007b) does enter into a discussion of the implications, but this remains rather abstract and theoretical. At some point, he mentions the policy implications, but only comes to the minor conclusion that, on the basis of the existing discourses, policies might be “ineffectual at best and counterproductive at worst” (Jackson 2007b, p. 243). He does not fortifies this important point with empirical evidence.
Yet, when one wants to generate change, which is CDA’s main goal, one should make tangible what the practical effects are of the use of certain words and expression for people’s lives. Only in this way, the functioning of power through discourse can actually be made visible. For this reason, this thesis
19 includes an extensive analysis of the material realm of counterterrorism policies in France and thereby makes visible how the French state’s ideas about terrorism work out in practice. How this link between language and policies is made within this thesis through the application of CDA will be the subject of the following section.
The application of CDA within this thesis CDA does not prescribe “a rigid formula that can be followed mechanically to produce results” (Jäger & Maier 2009, p. 56). Rather, the particular theories and methods depend on the social problem and research question(s) the research aims to address. For this reason, Jäger & Maier (2009) emphasize that researchers within CDA should be flexible and imaginative, and build a story on the basis of that. This section explains how this thesis applies CDA to the French case. In particular, it brings together three levels of analysis: the fictive, the ideational and the material. What this means can be read below.
The fictive level: ‘1984’ This thesis takes the fictive story of 1984 (Orwell 1950) as the starting point for entangling the repressive tendencies within the French state’s response to the Paris attacks. As explained above, discourses are never completely coherent; parts of them will always be contradictory or paradoxical. These sights of contestation carry the potential for critique and social change. At the same time, through its effect of naturalization, discourses cover up internal tensions, giving them the appearance of coherence and objectivity (Fairclough 1985). Since we are subject to state discourses on terrorism ourselves, it might be difficult to recognize these tensions. For this reason, a fictive story, in which these tensions are pushed to its extremes, can help to expose them in the real world. Literature is known for encouraging our reflexive abilities to understand the complexity of everyday reality. It holds up a mirror to our ‘zeitgeist’ and calls taken for granted knowledge, norms and values into question (Schram 2011). The dystopian novel 1984 (Orwell 1950) is thus taken as the lens to analyze the French state’s discourse on terrorism.
In particular, this novel helps to see two paradoxes: on the international level, the state is fighting war in order to defend peace; on the national level, the state is increasing surveillance in order to defend freedom. This paradoxical reasoning forms the basis for a disproportionate use of state power in the attempt to protect the political community against disruption. As such, the story of 1984 (Orwell 1950) helps to link up the ideational level of words and the material level of policies (Jäger & Maier 2009), which I will now turn to.
The ideational level: speech act This thesis analyzes how the Orwellian tendencies within the French state’s discourse on terrorism manifest themselves through language. This is investigated through an analysis of the speech that has been given by the French President Francois Hollande (16 November 2015) during a joint meeting of the Congress three days after the Paris attacks. Although this thesis only includes one speech act, this particular text can be seen as exemplary for the French state discourse on terrorism for two reasons. First, the speech was given in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, which means that emotions were still intense and people expected a strong leader who rendered calmness and decisiveness. For these reasons, there was little room for self-reflection, self-critique and relativization. In other words, this speech was given at a moment in time when the terrorism discourse, and the limits to what can and cannot be said, showed itself in the most explicit and narrow ways possible. Second, the speech is the
20 only recent text from the French state responding to terrorism6, which extensively links an analysis of the problem to policies that are proposed as a solution. As such, it integrates a complete argumentation into one single text, through which the underlying discourse becomes explicit and visible.
The speech is analyzed on the basis of Entman’s (1993) framing theory. Framing theory sees texts as a political message, which consists of a particular set of statements that together make up a political argumentation. In particular, framing theory provides two analytical tools. First of all, on the basis of framing categories, the terrorism frame of the French state can be reconstructed. Entman (1993) distinguishes four categories – the problem definition, the diagnosis of the causes, the moral evaluation and the proposed solution – and explains them as follows:
“Frames, then, define problems – determine what a causal agent is doing with what costs and benefits, usually measured in terms of common cultural values; diagnose causes – identify the forces creating the problem; make moral judgments – evaluate causal agents and their effects; and suggest remedies – offer and justify treatments for the problems and predict their likely effects.” (Entman 1993, p. 52).
These categories are used to analyze how the problem of terrorism is constructed by the French state and how this informs the adoption of repressive policies that should counter the problem. This reconstruction of the terrorism frame is achieved through the method of coding. The text of the speech is coded according to the argumentation categories, which are translated into a colored coding scheme (figure II and III, next chapter). Blue indicates sentences that define the problem, purple indicates sentences that diagnose the causes of the problem, red and green indicate sentences that include a moral evaluation of the causal agents (respectively negative and positive) and orange indicates the prescribed solutions to the problem. As such, the coded text visualizes the argumentation scheme.
The second analytical tool that Entman’s (1993) framing theory provides is the concept of framing strategies. On the basis of framing strategies, it can be analyzed how Hollande (16 November 2015) attempts to secure the terrorism frame. Entman (1993) distinguishes two strategies: saliency and selection. These framing strategies drive the psychological effects of a certain frame. On the one hand, saliency means that frames highlight some pieces of information while attenuating others. This can be achieved by their positioning within the text, through a repetition of statements or by associating them with culturally familiar symbols. As a result, saliency “enhances the probability that receivers will perceive the information, discern meaning and thus process it, and store it in memory” (Entman 1993, p. 53). On the other hand, selection means that frames take certain aspects of the communicated topic into account while leaving out others. In other words, selection means inclusion and exclusion of information. For this reason, frames guide the audience not only by what they tell, but also by what they do not tell. These strategies are used to analyze the dynamics of the French state’s power over discourse (Jäger & Maier 2009) in its fight against terrorism.
The material level: policies In addition to language, this thesis analyzes how the Orwellian tendencies within the French state’s discourse on terrorism manifest themselves through actions. This analysis builds on two empirical sources. First, a diversity of international news items is brought together in order to make a reconstruction of the historical context in which the Paris attacks have taken place. This analysis includes online news items from the following news agencies: Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, DailyMail,
6 It should be noted that this is the case for texts that have been translated into English. This has been a condition for selection, as I do not master the French language well enough to incorporate French texts into the analysis. 21
New Yorker, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Independent, The Local, Reuters, Time and Washington Post7. Second, a diversity of policy reports from human rights organizations are analyzed in order to reflect on the practical consequences of the proposed policies for people’s lives. The analysis of international policies is based on reports from Unicef (15 March 2014), World Vision (1 March 2016), Amnesty International (26 October 2016b) and Airwars (17 January 2017). The analysis of national policies is based on two extensive reports from Amnesty International (4 February 2016; 17 January 2017b). These empirical sources are used to analyze the dynamics of the French state’s power of discourse (Jäger & Maier 2009) in its fight against terrorism.
Concluding remarks This chapter has set out the academic context of this thesis. It has first made a case for the critical approach to the study of terrorism. The critical approach recognizes the social and political nature of the terrorism concept, as well as knowledge in general. On the basis of this, this chapter has explained that terrorism should be studied as a discourse. This means that research projects on terrorism should aim to entangle and expose the relation between language, action and power. As such, this thesis has been positioned within the theoretical and methodological framework of CDA.
Moreover, we have seen how this thesis tries to respond to current gaps within the critical study of terrorism. By taking the French state as its case, it aims to shed light on the European state level in the international fight against terrorism. In addition, it aims to expose the practical implications of certain language use by explicitly including the material level into the analysis.
Finally, this chapter has explained how the French state’s discourse on terrorism is studied in this thesis. It has explained how the fictive level of 1984 (Orwell 1950), the ideational level of the speech (Hollande, 16 November 2015), and the material level of counterterrorism policies are linked up in order to entangle repressive tendencies within the discourse. What this means will become clear in the next chapter.
7 Only news agencies that publish in English have been included into the analysis, as I only msater the English language well enough for this analysis (besides the Dutch language). 22
III The empirical analysis
In his speech on 16 November 2015, before a joint session of the French Parliament, president Francois Hollande expressed his feelings of horror about the Paris attacks that had taken place three days earlier (Hollande, 16 November 2015). In a shocked, overwhelmed and disturbed state of mind, he wondered how it was possible that such a peace loving nation as France could be attacked by such cruelty, out of nowhere, and for no reason. In an attempt to render strong leadership, he announced “to marshal the full strength of the state to defend the safety of its people” (Hollande, 16 November 2015). On the international level, he declared war to Islamic State and announced to increase the French airstrikes on Islamic State’s strategic targets in Syria and Iraq. On the national level, he announced an extensive package of security policies that would strengthen the state’s capacities to monitor potentially dangerous citizens (Hollande, 16 November 2015).
The repressive tendency underlying this response was understandable given the loss, pain and fear the Paris attacks have caused for so many people inside and outside France. While the terrorist threat was enduring, nobody wanted this to happen again. There was a general understanding that all possible means should be used to prevent terrorist attacks in the future. However, it could be questioned to what extent the use of military means on the international level, and the use of emergency measures on the national level, have contributed to a structural solution for the problem. Instead, Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy (2017) suggest that these policies might have been counterproductive and contributing to the maintenance of the threat. They point to the ‘Orwellian’ tendencies underlying this response, which tend to result in a disproportionate use of state power. In relation to this, Amnesty International (17 January 2017b) has called attention for the ‘securitization’ of the French state and several other European states.
In his famous book 1984 (Orwell 1950), George Orwell powerfully captured how fear for a destructive threat can lead to such a disproportionate use of state power. This dystopian novel describes a future society8 that is governed by a totalitarian regime in its most extremist form. The rhetorical legitimization for its power is based on the paradoxical slogan: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. On the basis of this, the regime promotes the idea that the society’s free and peaceful existence is in constant danger of disruption, due to an external threat from aggressive other empires as well as an internal threat from rebellious citizens. Therefore, the regime has set up permanent mechanisms of war and surveillance, which should prevent these enemies from striking an attack. In other words, the regime is fighting a war in order to defend peace and controlling its citizens in order to defend freedom.
However, throughout the entire novel it remains unclear whether these enemies actually exist. They rather seem to be a cover for infinite state power, whereby the mechanisms of war and surveillance function to protect the society’s hierarchal structure. People are made to accept, approve, and even demand for this totalitarian exertion of state power, because of their intense feelings of fear and hatred against the society’s enemies, which are stimulated through propaganda on a massive scale. People have learnt to be ignorant to the regime’s extreme power, as it is the society’s protector without which people would not be able to survive. In this way, they have internalized the idea that ignorance creates strength.
8 The story takes place in 1984, while the book was published in 1949. 23
In short, 1984 (Orwell 1950) describes how the state secures its power through the construction of a dangerous enemy that legitimizes state repression. Although the situation in 1984 (Orwell 1950) is pushed to its extremes, Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy (2017) suggest that similar tendencies might be present in the French state’s response to the Paris attacks. Similarly, Amnesty International (17 January 2017b) warns that the French state’s counterterrorism laws are “stripping rights under guise of defending them”. Therefore, this chapter applies the lens of 1984 (Orwell 1950) to the French case as a way to disentangle the French state’s discourse on terrorism. As such, the lens of 1984 (Orwell 1950) helps to make visible how its repressive tendencies are constructed and naturalized through discourse and how they work out in practice. This analysis is divided into an international and a national section. I will now turn to the international context.
The international context My analysis of the international context consists of three steps. First, I will zoom in on the ‘war is peace’-paradox of 1984 (Orwell 1950) and see how this paradox naturalizes state repression on the international level. Second, I will analyze the speech by President Francois Hollande (16 November 2015) in order to see how the French state’s interpretation of terrorism informs the adoption of repressive policies on the international level. I will thereby reflect on the framing strategies (Entman 1993) that Hollande (16 November 2015) applies to secure this terrorism frame. Thirdly, I will discuss the material consequences of the proposed policies by relating them to the international war context in which they are taken. Finally, in a concluding statement, I will bring these steps together and show how the French state’s discourse on terrorism results in a cycle of violence and retaliation with Islamic State (Bueno Lacy et al., 17 June 2016).
‘1984’ The story of 1984 (Orwell 1950) takes place in Oceania, one of the three empires that control the future world order in 1984. Oceania is continuously involved in a war with one of the other two empires, Eurasia and Eastasia. On the basis of the paradoxical slogan War is peace, the regime produces and maintains the idea that it needs to fight war in order to defend peace. This seems to contain a fundamental contradictory, as both terms – war and peace – are each other’s counterparts. Yet, the regime presents the enemy empires as inherently bad and aggressive, wanting to destroy Oceania’s peaceful existence. This enforces Oceania to fight back in order to protect itself against disruption by outside forces. Therefore, the apparent contradiction does not work out in a conflicting way: it means that a war is fought abroad in order to defend peace at home.
The idea of an inherently bad and aggressive enemy is reinforced through propaganda and hate campaigns, which are centered around Oceania’s leader Big Brother as the image of hope in times of barbaric war. For example, there is the daily Two Minutes Hate on television, and the annual Hate Week with military parades, speeches and hate songs. These campaigns promote a dehumanized image of the external enemy and aim to unify the people along feelings of hatred and animosity. People are not at all informed about the effects of the war abroad, or allowed to have contact with foreigners, in order to prevent any sense of sympathy or human connection. This is what makes it acceptable for them to sacrifice the peace abroad for the sake of their own peace. They are not confronted with, and therefore not aware of, the human suffering that is caused by the war.
In reality, the aggressor of the war is difficult to define. Oceania turns out to be involved in a permanent state of war with the other two empires. All empires constantly switch alliances, but none of them ever gains the power that is needed to overthrow the others. In fact, concluding the war would not even benefit any of them. Through this permanent state of war, the different regimes maintain each
24 other. It allows them to sell their power to their people’s as a necessity to defend them against external threats. In this way, they produce and maintain each other’s legitimacy. War has primarily become an internal affair, which helps to secure the state’s internal hierarchal structure.
The following analysis of the French case will make clear that France’s war with Islamic State shows similar tendencies as Oceania’s war with the other empires. The war tends to gain a permanent status, whereby the intention of protecting French society against Islamic State’s aggression is coming under pressure (Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017). As such, the war tends to lose its external relevance and gains an internal function, which is to secure the power of the French state internally (Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017). As said, I will first look at the ideational level and see how the ‘war is peace’- paradox is constructed in Hollande’s (16 November 2015) speech, on the basis of which he promotes means of war as the ultimate response to the Paris attacks.
Speech This analysis of the speech builds on the text that has been coded according to Entman’s (1993) framing theory, as has been explained in the previous chapter. I have translated this into a coding scheme, which is presented in figure III. To recapitulate, blue indicates sentences that define the problem, purple indicates sentences that diagnose the causes of the problem, red and green indicate sentences that include a moral evaluation of the causal agents (respectively negative and positive) and orange indicates the prescribed solutions to the problem (Entman 1993). This has resulted in the coded text as presented in figure IV, which visualizes the argumentation categories. On the basis of this, I have summarized the terrorism frame in figure II, which forms the basis of my analysis.
Figure II The terrorism frame by the French state
EVALUATION France = good Islamic State = bad
CAUSE PROBLEM SOLUTION LIKELY EFFECTS Radicalism Terrorist attacks State repression Destroy the threat: - International: war defend peace and - National: surveillance freedom
LEGITIMIZATION Destructive threat
Source: the framing categories are based on Entman (1993), the frame is based on Hollande (16 November 2015)
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Figure III Coding scheme
Color Argumentation category Label Blue Problem Terrorism Purple Cause Radicalism Red Moral evaluation I The bad other Green Moral evaluation II The good self Orange Solution Repressive state power
Source: based on Entman (1993)
Figure IV Coded text
Mr. President of the Congress, Mr. President of the Senate Mr. Prime Minister Ladies and Gentlemen, Members of the Government, Ladies and Gentlemen, Parliamentarians,
France is at war. The acts committed in Paris and near the Stade de France on Friday evening are acts of war. They left at least 129 dead and many injured. They are an act of aggression against our country, against its values, against its young people, and against its way of life.
They were carried out by a jihadist army, by Daesh, which is fighting us because France is a country of freedom, because we are the birthplace of human rights. At this exceptionally solemn moment, I wanted to address a joint session of Parliament to demonstrate our national unity in the face of such an abomination and to respond with the cool determination that this vile attack against our country calls for.
In truth, our democracy has triumphed over much more fearsome enemies than these cowardly murderers. Our Republic is under no threat from these despicable killers. I shall marshal the full strength of the State to defend the safety of its people. I know I can count on the dedication of police officers, gendarmes, service personnel, and you yourselves, our national representatives. You know what duty means and, when necessary, the spirit of sacrifice.
Terrorists believe that free people will allow themselves to be intimidated by horror. That’s not the case, and the French Republic has surmounted many other trials. It is still here, still alive and well. Those who have sought to defy it have always been on the losing side of history. The same thing will be true this time. The French people are a staunch, tough, courageous people. They do not resign themselves, and when one of their children is thrown down, they rise up. Those who wanted to destroy them by deliberately targeting innocents are cowards who fired on an unarmed crowd. It cannot be said that we are engaged in a war of civilizations, for these assassins do not represent one. We are in a war against jihadist terrorism that threatens the entire world, not just France.
In this war, which began some years ago, we are all aware that we need time, and that patience is every bit as necessary as the endurance and fierceness with which we will fight. The enemy uses the vilest means in its attempts to kill. But it is not beyond capture, and more specifically, it is not out of reach.
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So during this sad and difficult time, a time when our citizens have faced such horror, it is important to remain cool-headed. I appeal once again to all our compatriots to demonstrate those virtues that are a credit to our country: perseverance, unity, lucidity, dignity. Today, our country is in mourning. We think about the innocent people who were cut down in Paris and in the outskirts of the city by armed killers. We think of their families who are experiencing the most inconsolable pain. We think about the hundreds of young people, young men and women, who were hit, wounded, traumatized by this terrible attack. As I speak, some of them are still fighting for their lives. I applaud the work of our emergency rescue services, which have been mobilized since Friday. Our healthcare system had prepared for such an emergency situation, and it rose to the occasion, fulfilling its mission perfectly.
I also want to pay tribute to the security forces who are fully engaged in guaranteeing the safety of the French, as evidenced by the courage of those police officers who – when it came time to launch their assault on the Bataclan to free the hostages who were condemned to certain death without their intervention – once again showed determination and no thought for themselves.
On Friday, the terrorists’ target was France as a whole. France, which values life, culture, sports, celebrations. France, which makes no distinction as to color, origin, background, religion. The France that the assassins wanted to kill was that of its young people in all their diversity. Most of the dead were under 30. Their names were Mathias, Quentin, Nick, Nohemi, Djamila, Hélène, Elodie, Valentin, and I’ve left out so many others! What was their only crime? Being alive.
What the terrorists were attacking was the France that is open to the world. Among the victims were several dozen of our foreign friends, representing 19 different nationalities. Since Friday evening, I have been receiving messages of solidarity from heads of state and government around the globe. And the three colors of the French flag have adorned the most famous landmarks, reminding us that France has always been a beacon for humankind. And that when it is attacked, the whole world is thrown for a while into shadow.
Friday’s acts of war were decided upon, planned and prepared in Syria. They were organized in Belgium and carried out on our soil with French complicity. Their objective was quite clear: to sow fear in order to divide us and to keep us from fighting terrorism in the Middle East.
We are facing an organization, Daesh, which has a territorial base, financial resources, and military capabilities. Since the beginning of the year, Daesh’s terrorist army has struck in Paris, Denmark, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Libya. Every day, it massacres and oppresses populations.
That is why the need to destroy Daesh concerns the whole international community. I have therefore asked the Council of Security to meet as soon as possible to adopt a resolution expressing our common will to combat terrorism.
Meanwhile, France will step up its operations in Syria. Yesterday I ordered 10 French fighter jets to launch airstrikes on the Daesh stronghold of Raqqa. They destroyed a command center and a training camp. I want to congratulate the French pilots who successfully carried out this mission. I also want to thank our American allies who provided assistance in this operation. And I want to announce here, before Congress, that we will continue these strikes in the weeks to come. On Thursday, the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier will set sail for the eastern Mediterranean, which will triple our capacity to act. And we will act indefatigably and without respite.
Those who ordered the Paris attacks must know that far from undermining France’s resolve, they further strengthened our determination to destroy them.
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We are fighting terrorism wherever the very survival of States is under threat. That was the reason for my decision to intervene in Mali, and it still justifies the presence of our troops in the Sahel where Boko Haram carries out massacres, kidnappings, rapes, and murders. We are fighting terrorism in Iraq to allow the authorities of that country to restore their sovereignty throughout the entire country, and in Syria, where we are resolutely and tirelessly seeking a political solution, one that does not include Bashar al-Assad. But our enemy in Syria is Daesh. There is no question of containing it. This organization must be destroyed, both to save the populations of Syria and Iraq, and those of Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey – all the neighboring countries. And to protect ourselves, to keep foreign fighters from coming to our country, as was the case on Friday, to commit terrorist acts. But we must do more. Syria has become the largest breeding ground for terrorists that the world has ever known, and the international community - as I have noted more than once - is divided and incohesive. From the outset of the conflict, France has called for this unity, which is so necessary in order to act.
Today, we need more airstrikes, which we will carry out, and more support for those who are fighting Daesh, which we, France, will provide. But we need all those who can really combat this terrorist army to unite as part of a large, single coalition. That is what we are striving for.
In the next few days, I will therefore meet with President Obama and President Putin to unite our forces and to achieve a result which, at this point, has been put off for far too long.
France is speaking to everyone - to Iran, Turkey, the Gulf States. The Paris attacks occurred just as we were meeting with these countries in Vienna to find a political solution in Syria. Now, all of us – the neighboring countries, the major powers, but also Europe - must live up to our responsibilities.
I have asked the defense minister to take up this matter tomorrow with our European colleagues under article 42 (7) of the Treaty on European Union, the solidarity clause, which states that when one State is attacked, all the Member States shall have the obligation to provide aid and assistance because the enemy is not just France’s enemy, it is Europe’s enemy. Europe cannot live in the belief that the crises around it have no effect on it. The refugee issue is directly linked to the wars in Syria and Iraq. The inhabitants of those countries, particularly those living in territories controlled by Daesh, are suffering hideously and they are fleeing. They are the victims of this same terrorist system.
That is why it is vital for Europe to offer a dignified welcome to those who are eligible for asylum and to send home those who are not. That requires effective protection for our external borders, which is not yet the case. France is working on it. We were the first to sound the alarm, and France and Germany are currently working to ensure that the countries facing an influx of refugees receive help. The first to receive help must be the countries of the region: Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. And if Europe does not control its external borders – we are seeing this before our very eyes – that means a return to national borders, when it’s not walls and barbed wire. That will mean the dismantling of the European Union. It is also imperative for France’s longtime demands to be implemented in Europe. I’m talking about controlling the arms trade, establishing coordinated and systematic border controls, and approving, before the end of 2015, what we call the European PNR, to track the return of jihadists and arrest them.
These are the demands that France will convey once again through the Interior Ministry to the meeting that will be held at our request on Friday.
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Given the acts of war committed on our soil – coming in the wake of the attacks of January 7, 8 and 9, and in the wake of so many other crimes committed in recent years in the name of this same jihadist ideology – we must be merciless.
It hurts to say it, but we know that these were French people who killed other French people on Friday. Living here in our land are individuals who start out by committing crimes, become radicalized, and go on to become terrorists. Sometimes they leave to fight in Syria or Iraq. Sometimes they form networks that provide training, in certain cases, or which help one another, with a view to carrying out terrorist acts at a time determined by their sponsors.
We have thwarted a number of these acts in the past few months, and now we know, alas, what the plot was, what the organization was, and what was being prepared in the course of those months. It is therefore urgent for us to defend ourselves, on a long-term basis. What’s at stake is the protection of our fellow citizens and our ability to live together.
Friday night, once we knew the terrible toll taken by the shootings, I convened the Council of Ministers. I ordered the immediate reestablishment of border controls and I proclaimed a state of emergency, as recommended by the Prime Minister.
It is now effective throughout France, and I expanded the ability to carry out police searches in every department of continental France. Last night, more than 104 people were placed under house arrest and there were 168 police searches. And there will be more.
But with the acts of war on November 13, the enemy has taken things to a new level. Democracy is capable of responding. Article 2 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen affirms that safety and resistance against oppression are fundamental rights. So we must exercise them. In accordance with these principles, we will provide the means to once again guarantee the safety of our fellow citizens.
I have decided that a bill prolonging the state of emergency for three months, adapting its content to the changes in threats and technologies, will be brought before Parliament on Wednesday.
Indeed, the law which governs the state of emergency of 3 April 1955 cannot really match the kind of technologies and threats we face today. But it includes two exceptional measures: house arrest and police searches. These two measures offer useful means to prevent terrorist acts. I will ensure that they are fully implemented and strengthened. The Prime Minister will therefore propose to Parliament that we adopt a comprehensive legal scheme for each of these provisions. And you, parliamentarians, I invite you to vote on them before the end of the week.
But we have to go beyond the emergency situation. I have thought about this issue a lot. I honestly think that we must develop our constitution to allow the government authorities to take action against terrorism that incites war, in accordance with the rule of law.
Our Constitution currently has two specific schemes that are not appropriate for the situation we are in. The first scheme involves Article 16 of the Constitution. It specifies that the regular functioning of public authorities be suspended. The president will then take such measures as warranted by the circumstances, overriding the distribution of the constitutional powers.
And then there’s Article 36 of the Constitution, which relates to the state of siege. And this isn’t appropriate either. A state of siege is decreed in situations of imminent peril resulting from a foreign war or an armed insurrection. In this situation, various powers are then transferred from the civil to the military authorities.
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As you can see, neither of these systems is suited to the situation we find ourselves in. The regular functioning of the government authorities – and we are proving that today – has not been interrupted. Transferring power to the military authorities would be inconceivable. However, we are at war. But this war is a different kind of war, we are facing a new kind of adversary. A constitutional scheme is needed to deal with this emergency.
This was what was proposed in 2007 by the committee chaired by Edouard Balladur who looked at changes to our Constitution. He suggested changing Article 36 of our Constitution to include reference to a state of siege as well as a state of emergency, and his proposal was to allow a basic law to lay down the conditions in which these schemes will be used.
And I believe that this approach should be reintroduced. We need to have an appropriate tool to provide a framework for taking exceptional measures for a certain period without recourse to the state of siege and without compromising public freedoms.
This revision of the Constitution must be accompanied by other measures. The issue at stake is the deprivation of nationality. The deprivation of nationality should not result in making someone stateless, but we need to be able to strip French nationality from an individual found guilty of a terrorist act or other acts against a country’s fundamental interests even if he was born a French person, if he has another nationality.
In the same way, we must be able to prohibit dual nationals from returning to our country if they constitute a terrorist threat, unless they agree to be closely monitored, as is the case in Britain.
We should be able to expel more rapidly foreigners who represent an especially serious threat to public order or the country’s security, but we should do so in accordance with our international commitments.
I know that other proposals have been made to strengthen the surveillance of certain individuals, especially those who are on file. The government, in a spirit of national unity, will ask the Conseil d’Etat to look at whether these proposals are in accordance with our international commitments and our basic laws. That ruling will be made public and I will draw all the consequences.
We should think carefully about this decision. Our Constitution is a collective agreement. It unites all our citizens. It is a common rule. It includes principles; it has a preamble which shows that France is a state governed by the rule of law. The Constitution is a common charter. It is a contract which unites all the citizens of the same country. And if the Constitution is a collective agreement, an essential agreement for living together, then the Constitution should include responses for combating those who want to undermine it, in the same way that groups and associations that incite hatred or incite others carry out terrorism should be dissolved.
Ladies and gentlemen, parliamentarians, I ask you to think about the decision that I have taken. I will ask the Prime Minister to prepare this revision with you so that it can be adopted as soon as possible because we, or you, will extend the state of emergency beyond the 12-day period to three months. But after the state of emergency is lifted we must observe the rule of law in our efforts to combat terrorism.
And since the threat is going to continue and we will be involved in the fight against Daesh for a long time abroad and at home, I also decided to substantially strengthen the resources available to the justice system and the security forces.
Firstly, the investigation services and anti-terrorist judges should, within the context of judicial proceedings, be able to have recourse to the whole range of intelligence techniques offered by new technology, whose use is authorized, within an administrative context, through the intelligence law. Criminal proceedings should also, as far as possible, take account of the specific nature of the terrorist threat.
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Secondly, the magistrates should have access to the most sophisticated investigation methods, notably in order to combat the trafficking of arms because terrorist acts are committed with these illegal weapons. Penalties will be significantly increased.
Lastly, in the face of violent terrorism, the self-defense of police officers and the conditions under which they can use their weapons should be addressed within the framework of the rule of law.
These various issues will be part of a major legislative project, which I will ask the prime minister to be conduct and initiate immediately, together with the ministers concerned - the Justice Minister, the Minister of the Interior - so that we do not lose any time before taking action.
These provisions will complement all the measures that have been adopted since 2012, that is to say two anti- terrorist laws, an intelligence law, the considerable strengthening of resources. But I am also aware that we need to further strengthen our resources because if we are at war, we cannot just use the provisions that we had a few years ago in the law on military planning and other texts, which were aimed at preserving the security of our citizens.
Five thousand additional jobs for police officers and gendarmes will be created within the next two years in order to bring the total to 10,000 security-related jobs over five years. This is a substantial effort that the government will assume within the budgetary context that you are aware of. But it will make it possible to restore the capacity of the internal security forces to 2007 levels.
The creation of these jobs will benefit the anti-terrorist services, the border police and, more generally, the country’s overall security and will go hand in hand with the investment and equipment necessary to carry out the missions to combat terrorism. Similarly, the Ministry of Justice will add 2,500 additional jobs in the prison service and the judiciary service. And I shouldn’t forget the customs service, which will need an additional 1,000 employees in order ensure border control, if necessary.
As for our armed forces, they are increasingly needed for operations abroad, which we will continue in order to ensure the necessary security of our compatriots. So there, too, I have decided that there will be no cutbacks in defense personnel until 2019. And this reorganization of our armed forces will benefit operational, cyber defense intelligence units. The government will, as swiftly as possible, submit a new plan for changes in defense personnel up to 2019.
I also want to make better use of defense reserves who are still being underused in our country, while we do have this resource. Reservists form a strong link between the nation and the army. They could in the future form a national guard that is trained and available.
All these budgetary decisions will be taken within the framework of the Finance Law, which is, at the moment, under discussion for 2016. They will necessarily result in extra spending, but under these circumstances, I believe that the security pact will have precedence over the stability pact.
So ladies and gentlemen, the faces of the dead, the wounded, the bereaved families, weigh heavily on my mind. This memory fuels an unwavering determination, which I know you share, to combat terrorism.
In my determination to combat terrorism, I want France to remain itself. The barbarians attacking it want to disfigure it. They will not succeed. They will not be able to disfigure it. They will never succeed in destroying the French soul. They will never prevent us from living, from living the way we want to, freely and fully, and we must demonstrate that with cool heads. And I’m thinking of the young people. I am thinking of those who feel wounded through all these victims and are wondering whether they can still live in a state governed by the rule of law.
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We must continue, continue to work, to go out, to live, to influence the world and that is why the major climate conference event will not only still go ahead but will be a moment of hope and solidarity. A moment of hope because the future of the planet is at stake and a moment of solidarity, too, because, there will undoubtedly be more than 100 heads of state and government who will come here to negotiate a lasting, binding agreement, one which is differentiated so that we can all live and so that our children and grandchildren can continue to have the planet they will inherit. But they will also tell France, a country of freedom, how much the whole world stands in solidarity with it, and how much the whole world also needs to mobilize its efforts in order to combat terrorism.
In the same way, our democratic timetable will not be subject to blackmail by the terrorists. Regional elections will take place as planned and political life will come back into full operation. It’s our duty to ensure that.
Mr. President of Congress, Mr. President of the Senate, ladies and gentlemen, parliamentarians, those who represent the entire nation, you represent it in all its diversity, in all its sensitivities and in its unity. You represent a free people, an invincible people, when it is united and comes together. It is our most precious asset. And we have to avoid any one-upmanship or excesses. That is our republican duty. By giving up the battle that the Republic should have been waging, it was able to distance itself from certain circumstances; we must ensure that this isn’t the case today.
In the face of this new context of war, the Republic must equip itself with the means to eradicate terrorism, while upholding our values and without compromising the rule of law.
We will eradicate terrorism because the French want to continue to live together without fearing anything from their neighbors. We will eradicate terrorism because we are attached to freedom and to raising France’s profile around the world. We will eradicate terrorism so that the movement of people and the mixing of cultures can continue and so that human civilization is enriched. We will eradicate terrorism so that France can continue to lead the way. Terrorism will not destroy France because France will destroy it.
Long live the French Republic and long live France.
Source: Hollande (16 November 2015)
I will start my analysis at the center of the frame: the problem definition. Clearly, the central problem Hollande (16 November 2015) is responding to are the Paris attacks. He frames the Paris attacks as an act of war: “They are an act of aggression against our country, against its values, against its young people, and against its way of life” (Hollande, 16 November 2015). As such, he states that France’s peaceful existence is endangered by the aggression from Islamic State, who is held responsible for the attacks. The aims that the attackers sought to achieve by carrying out the attacks are explained by Hollande (16 November 2015) in destructive terms. They kill, fight, destroy and attack with the ultimate aim of disrupting and disfiguring French society, its values and its ‘way of life’ (Hollande, 16 November 2015). What this way of life entails, is not entirely clear or explicitly defined, but Hollande (16 November 2015) continuously appeals to common cultural values, such as freedom, tolerance, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. These principles are presented as the determinants of French society, which are now under attack. Hollande (16 November 2015) does not elaborate on what the terrorists hope to gain from the attacks or the benefits they seek to achieve. Their ultimate aim is destruction and the intolerable costs that come with this are the lives of innocent civilians. In this way, the attackers are presented as irrational and fanatical men, who are solely driven by hatred rather than
32 political motives (Jackson 2007a). Taken together, the problem definition creates the idea that France has fell victim to terrorism out of nowhere and for no reason, which endangers its peaceful existence.
However, at one point in the speech, Hollande (16 November 2015) does shortly mention the possibility that the terrorists might have wanted to push back the French military interference in the Middle East. He states: “their objective was quite clear: to sow fear in order to divide us and to keep us from fighting terrorism in the Middle East” (Hollande, 16 November 2015). This phrase reflects much less radical motives, which could actually undermine France’s innocence in the conflict. Yet, it is almost made invisible by its positioning between the moral evaluation part, which is intense and emotional, and the solution part, rendering fierceness and strong leadership. Through this effect of saliency (Entman 1993), Hollande (16 November 2015) covers up the possibility that not Islamic State, but France could be seen as the aggressor of this conflict, thereby securing the victimized image of France.
This image is also supported by other aspects of the terrorism frame, such as Hollande’s (16 November 2015) account of the cause of terrorism. Taking a look at the purple sentences immediately reveals that Hollande (16 November 2015) hardly discusses this aspect of the frame. Only at one point in the speech, he quickly refers to radicalization and radicalism, but he does not elaborate on this. At this point, the terrorism frame seems to raise a discursive limit: Islamic State is so inherently wrong, and the Paris attacks have caused so much pain, that any attempt to understand where they have come from, would be wrong in itself. Considerations of the deeper roots that drive people to take up arms and actually carry out violent attacks are therefore completely excluded from the frame. Through this functioning of the selection strategy (Entman 1993), the irrationality of the attackers is strengthened.
The image of France as the innocent victim of terrorism is also strengthened by the moral evaluation part of the frame. The moral evaluation reflects a moral dichotomy of causal agents, which has the effect of dehumanizing the enemy. On the one hand, there is the enemy, who is held responsible for the terrorist attacks, and who is evaluated as inherently bad. The attackers are framed as ‘cowardly murderers’ and ‘despicable killers’, who conducted attacks that were ‘vile’, ‘terrible’ and ‘horror’ (Hollande, 16 November 2015). They used ‘the vilest means’ in their ‘attempts to kill’ with ‘the deliberate aim of targeting innocents’ (Hollande, 16 November 2015). The relatively high amount of these moral evaluations results in a barbaric image of the enemy, which makes it difficult to recognize the human nature of these people. In fact, Hollande (16 November 2015) explicitly states that the attackers do not represent any form of civilization.
On the other hand, there is France, which is presented as inherently good and is seized by this horror out of the blue. According to Hollande (16 November 2015), France equals freedom and democracy. It is ‘the birthplace of human rights’ and the ‘beacon for humankind’ (Hollande, 16 November 2015). It values ‘life, culture, sports, celebrations’ (Hollande, 16 November 2015). It is ‘open to the world’ and makes no distinction to ‘color, origin, background, religion’ (Hollande, 16 November 2015). When looking at the red and green colored phrases, the image of the evil other is constantly contrasted to an image of the peaceful self. As such, both are defined in opposition to one another (Winkler 2006). France is everything terrorists are not and vice versa. At this point, the problem definition and the moral evaluation seem to coincide. The moral dichotomy between a ‘civilized self’ versus a ‘barbaric other’ has the effect of essentializing the problem of terrorism as a conflict between good and bad, instead of a conflict between political interests (Esch 2010).
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It is this black-and-white representation that pushes Hollande (16 November 2015) into the direction of a repressive response. The representation of Islamic State as an inherently violent aggressor creates the idea that he has no other option than to strike back: terrorism must be destroyed before terrorism can destroy France. This makes the use of repressive military means the only adequate response and excludes non-violent alternatives, such as more constructive and preventive measures, from the frame (Jackson 2007). Through this functioning of the selection strategy (Entman 1993), military repression is presented as the necessary and inevitable solution to terrorism. On the basis of this, Hollande (16 November 2015) declares war to Islamic State and announces to increase the French airstrikes on Islamic State’s strategic targets in Syria and Iraq, with the aim of destroying the organization. He continuously emphasizes his determination to combat terrorism, as “there is no question of containing it” (Hollande, 16 November 2015).
However, when taking a closer look at this argumentation, it turns out to be paradoxical. Hollande (16 November 2015) defines the French ‘way of life’ by referring to the values of peace, freedom, tolerance, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. The terrorist threat is seen as destructive, because Islamic State is believed to proclaim and enforce the exact opposite of these values. Their aspiration to destroy the values of liberal democracies makes the terrorist threat an absolute one, endangering the fundaments to this ‘way of life’. For this reason, Hollande (16 November 2015) finds himself enforced to make the defense of these values an absolute matter. Any defensive measure seems allowed, even if it would imply a departure from the values themselves. Therefore, he puts France’s ‘liberal’ values aside and takes ‘illiberal’ measures to combat the threat (Neal 2009). This results in the paradoxical idea that, before the terrorists can enforce the French state to deviate from its values, it is already doing this itself. In this way, the French state, taking policies that undermine its own ‘way of life’, tends to become its own destructive threat (Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2007).
At this point, the ‘war is peace’-paradox comes to light. On the one hand, Hollande (16 November 2015) presents the French state as inherently peaceful, thereby opposing it to the barbarian nature of terrorists. At the same time, within the same speech, he announces to take repressive policies and promotes mechanisms of war as the only adequate means to counter terrorism. This implies the exact opposite of the value of peace, which he claims to defend. As such, he follows the same ‘war is peace’-argumentation as the regime in 1984 (Orwell 1950): he promotes war for the sake of defending peace.
In addition, when zooming in on the ‘war is peace’-paradox, the French case is even more pressing than the situation in 1984 (Orwell 1950). In the end, the regime in 1984 (Orwell 1950) does not claim to value peace in general. What matters is Oceania’s own peaceful existence. Both the regime and the people are willing to fight a war abroad in order to defend peace at home. However, this is not what Hollande (16 November 2015) is claiming. The effects that he expects to achieve through these measures of war, is “to save the lives of people” (Hollande, 16 November 2015) abroad and at home. As such, he does not only want to defend peace in France, but also in Syria, Iraq and “all the neighboring countries” (Hollande, 16 November 2015). This means that Hollande (16 November 2015) wants to protect the lives of people who are living in the places where he is dropping his bombs. The upcoming analysis of the material realm will make clear that this argumentation is problematic to uphold.
In sum, the previous analysis of the speech has shown how the moral dichotomy of the terrorism frame informs the adoption of repressive military means to counter terrorism on the international level. Moreover, two central tensions have been addressed that are underlying this terrorism frame. First, the
34 terrorism frame promotes an image of France as the innocent victim of terrorism, and thereby covers up the possibility that the French state might be one of the aggressors in this conflict. Second, the terrorism frame paradoxically promotes mechanisms of war for the sake of defending peace. I will now turn to the material level and analyze the practical implications of these tensions. It will become clear that the French state has its share in the conflict and carries responsibility for the aggression by Islamic State and the occurrence of the Paris attacks. As such, the proposed mechanisms of war do not only defend, but also violate the value of peace, and thereby contribute to human suffering.
Policies This analysis of the counterterrorism policies links up the speech act from President Francois Hollande (16 November 2015) to its broader societal context. I build this analysis on the basis of two empirical sources. First, I bring together a diversity of international news items in order to make a reconstruction of the historical context in which the Paris attacks have taken place. I have also translated this reconstruction into timelines, which helps to visualize the historical context. Second, I analyze reports from human rights organizations in order to reflect on the practical consequences of the proposed policies. I will now turn to the historical context and discuss the international context in which Islamic State came about, which led to the formation of the international coalition against Islamic State. After that, I will reflect on the position of the French state in all this.
The international coalition Islamic State was formed in the aftermath of the American-led invasion in Iraq in 2003 and the rushed retreat of American troops in 2011, which left Iraq with a weak army and central government (NRC, 13 June 2014). It was able to benefit from this unstable situation and soon gained territorial foothold in the region, following a repressive strategy based on violence, force and fear (Lister 2014). It also profited from the civil war in Syria, which had broken out in 2011 as a result of the Arab Spring (BBC, 7 April 2017). On 29 June 2014, Islamic State used an audio recording to officially declare a caliphate in Iraq and Syria, with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as its caliph (Al Jazeera, 30 June 2014).
Earlier that month, the Iraqi government had asked the United States for military support (BBC, 18 June 2014). This led to the establishment of a US-led international coalition against Islamic State in September 2014 (The Guardian, 5 September 2014). As the United States were not prepared to send in troops again, the military strategy was focused on airstrikes on Islamic State’s strategic targets and training of local rebellion fighters (Zandee 2015). In addition to the United States, an alliance of so- called western and Arab states9 agreed to provide the ‘coalition of the willing and the capable’ with extensive military support by launching airstrikes against Islamic State (European Parliament, 17 March 2015). At the moment, 68 states provide support to the coalition in some way or another (The Global Coalition 2017).
In an immediate reaction to this deployment of military means, Islamic State encouraged its sympathizers in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe, and France in particular, to hit back and carry out terrorist attacks on these state’s own territories (The Guardian, 23 September 2014). In a 42-minute audio statement, Islamic State’s spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani proclaimed: “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European – especially the spiteful and filthy French – or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah,
9 Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom (European Parliament, 17 March 2015). 35 and kill him in any matter or way however it may be” (The Guardian, 23 September 2014). In this way, Islamic State aimed to enforce these states to fight the war on its own territory rather than solely on Islamic State’s territory (Chavannes, 14 November 2015). The following discussion of the French involvement makes clear why France was singled out as one of Islamic State’s main targets.
The French case France has been described as the strongest advocate among European states of a military response to terrorist groups (Dworkin 2016). Since January 2013, it has been leading an increasingly violent military campaign in the Sahel since January 2013, fighting affiliates of Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and other terrorist groups throughout Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Gao, Mali and Mauritania (New York Times, 16 March 2015). Moreover, France was the first European state to join the international coalition against Islamic State in September 2014 and soon took up a leading role alongside the United States (The Guardian, 14 November 2015). According to Ragazzi (in NOS, 14 November 2015b), it should therefore not be seen as a coincidence that France was singled out by Islamic State as one of its main enemies. In a video released in November 2014 by Islamic State’s media center, right after France had started bombing Islamic State, French affiliates of Islamic State warned the French state that: “As long as you keep bombing, you will not find peace” (New York Times, 20 November 2014).
Indeed, France was not about to find peace. On 7 January 2015, two armed masked men infiltrated into the head quarter of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, and opened fire on the journalists who were having their weekly editorial meeting (BBC, 14 January 2015). The attackers were able to escape the police while leaving behind a group of shocked and injured survivors, who had witnessed how eight fellow journalists, their receptionist, an external guest and two police officers were killed in front of their eyes (BBC, 14 January 2015). And the violence did not stop here. The day after, a member of the same terrorist cell invaded a Jewish supermarket, located in the eastside of Paris, where he took the employees and costumers hostage and killed four of them (BBC, 14 January 2015). In the meantime, the other two attackers had been on the run for the police and ended up in a printing company, where they took people hostage again. In the end, the police was able to put an end to both hostages and killed the attackers (BBC, 14 January 2015).
Although these attacks were conducted by French citizens (The Guardian, 12 January 2015), the Al Qaeda branch in Yemen as well as Islamic State claimed responsibility (Middle East Eye, 15 January 2015). In a video shared through the internet, the local Al Qaeda commander Nasr Ibn Ali al-Ansi claimed responsibility for the attack on Charlie Hebdo and praised it as an act of revenge for the magazine’s depictions of the prophet Mohammed (CNN, 14 January 2015). By stating that “if the freedom of your speech is not restrained, then you should accept the freedom of our actions” (Al Jazeera, 14 January 2015), Al-Ansi promoted the attack as a way to silence insults to Islam. In line with this, the French state framed it as an attack to the freedom of expression in France (France Diplomatie, 7 January 2015). Yet, while this aspect gained much attention in public debates, Al-Ansi also emphasized that the attack was strongly motivated by the French military presence in Africa: “It is France that has shared all of America’s crimes. […] It is France that has committed crimes in Mali and the Islamic Maghreb10. It is France that supports the annihilation of Muslims in Central Africa in the name of race cleansing.” (CNN, 14 January 2015).
10 ‘Islamic Maghreb’ refers to North Africa (CNN, 14 January 2015). 36
In another video, shared on the internet from one of Islamic State’s propaganda accounts, Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack on the supermarket by praising the shooter Amedy Coulibaly as “a soldier of the caliphate” (The Guardian, 11 January 2015). The video showed how Coulibaly swore allegiance to Islamic State’s caliph Al-Baghdadi. Similarly to the attack on Charlie Hebdo, this video emphasized that France’s military contribution to the coalition had been the primary motivation for the attack. In a reaction to the question, shown in text, why he decided to carry out the attacks, Coulibaly stated: “It’s perfectly legitimate, amply deserved. You and your coalition carry out bombings regularly over there, you kill civilians, you kill fighters – and why, because we apply sharia? Is it you decides what goes on on this earth? No. We won’t allow it. We are going to fight.” (The Guardian, 11 January 2015). To another question onscreen, asking for his advice to Muslims in France, he responded: “What are you doing when the prophet is insulted repeatedly, what are you doing when they massacre entire populations?” (The Guardian, 11 January 2015).
These retributive motives did not encourage the French state to question its military strategy against foreign terrorist groups. Instead, in September 2015, France was one of the first European state to extend its airstrikes from Iraqi to Syrian territory (Dworkin 2016). This implied a major strategic shift in the common European approach to the fight against Islamic State (Dworkin 2016). Most military contributions by European states had been restricted to the air campaign in Iraq11, as the government had officially asked for military support, in contrast to Syria (NRC, 5 December 2015). For this reason, the international legal basis for France’s strategic shift was rather weak (Dworkin 2016). It was not backed up by a UN resolution, but the French state appealed to the issue of self-defense. It said to have indications that Islamic State was planning new attacks against France (The Guardian, 27 September 2015).
This scenario indeed became reality two months later when the Paris attacks took place on 13 November 2015. Although these attacks were also carried out by French citizens (BBC, 27 April 2016), Islamic State claimed responsibility again (SITE Intelligence Group, 14 November 2015). In its official statement Islamic State warned that France and its allies would be attacked “as long as they boast about their war against Islam in France and their strikes against Muslims in the lands in the lands of the Caliphate with their jets, which were of no avail to them in the filthy streets of Paris” (SITE Intelligence Group, 14 November 2015). Again, from the perspective of Islamic State, the Paris attacks were a response to France’s military aggression instead of the other way around. While France’s strategic shift was motivated by self-defense, it seemed to have made France even more vulnerable as a target for terrorist attacks.
Still, the French state took the Paris attacks as renewed aggression, which encouraged a renewed military response (Hollande, 16 November 2015). Supported by the United States, it stepped up its military operations in Syria and Iraq (Reuters, 24 November 2015). The French state first ordered ten French fighter jets to launch massive airstrikes on Islamic State’s strategic targets in Raqqa, known as the Islamic State capital, which resulted in the destruction of a command center, a recruitment center for jihadists, a munitions depot and a training camp for fighters (The Guardian, 16 November 2015b). In addition, the French state activated the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier, which contained more than two dozen fighter jets and tripled France’s military capacity in the region (Defense News, 17 November 2015). Moreover, the French state encouraged other European states to provide military support in Syria. While The United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands were
11 This applied to European states; the political considerations for Arab states and their interests in the region were different (CNN, 17 December 2015), but this goes beyond the scope of this thesis. 37 already bombing Iraq, they agreed to extend their support to Syrian territory despite initial restraint (Dworkin 2016). Again, this military action was answered with terrorist attacks. During the months that followed, many of these states were hit by attacks, taking place in Nice, Brussels, Berlin and London (Reuters, 22 March 2017).
This ongoing mechanism of action-reaction, or ‘tit-for-tat’ as referred to by Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy (2017), is continuing up till today. States keep struggling to find an effective way to deal with terrorism, while in the meantime both terrorist attacks and military interference continue to occur. When zooming out from the ‘heat’ of the conflict, a underlying structure of mutual aggression becomes visible, which seems to be going back and forth through an endless circle (Bueno Lacy et al., 17 June 2016). This is what Bueno Lacy et al. (17 June 2016) mean when they talk about the ‘recycling’ of violence. While they focus on the representation of terrorism by maps, this circularity can also be illustrated, and explicated, through a reconstruction of the timelines of the war. This is what I have done in the next paragraph.
Timelines of the war On the basis of international news items, I have constructed four timelines, which can be found in figure V. They visualize the chronological development of terrorist attacks in France and Europe alongside French and European military involvement in Syria and Iraq. I will now explain how France and other European states try to cover up the latter.
Figure V.1 shows how the war between France and Islamic State is usually portrayed by the French state and international media, which solely contains terrorist attacks in France without their wider political context. This one-sided representation promotes the idea that France is seized by violence out of nowhere, simply for ‘being alive’ as stated by Hollande (16 November 2015). In contrast, Figure V.2 shows an alternative representation of the war between France and Islamic State, by placing the terrorist attacks within the wider political context of France’s military operations against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
When zooming in on this second timeline, it is surprising that only one day before the earlier terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket on 7/8 January 2015, the French government had already announced to send its Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier to Iraq (Reuters, 6 January 2015). The same accounts for the Paris attacks of 13 November 2015, which followed two months after the French government had extended its military operations from Iraq towards Syria (The Guardian, 27 September 2015), and one week after it had announced to deploy the aircraft carrier in Syria (Defense News, 5 November 2015). Similarly, the truck driver attack in Nice on 14 July 2016 occurred just one day after the French government announced to send the aircraft carrier to Syria again (Reuters, 13 July 2016). At the same time, in all of the three cases, Hollande used these terrorist attacks to legitimize the deployment of the aircraft carrier – “The current situation justifies the presence of our aircraft carrier” (The Guardian, 14 January 2015) – while it had already decided to do so.
It should be noted, however, that it would be too easy to assume that these terrorist attacks in France are targeted acts of retaliation by Islamic State, which are a direct response to France’s deployment of the aircraft carrier in Iraq and Syria (Dworkin 2016). In some cases, the links between the terrorists and Islamic State can be traced back more directly. As already mentioned, Amedy Coulibaly, the shooter in the kosher grocery store, swore allegiance to Islamic State in a video. Moreover, many suspects of the Paris attacks had travelled to Syria to join Islamic State. Their links to Islamic State were supported by a video that was released by Islamic State to show how they had been trained
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Figure V Representations of the war with Islamic State
V.1 How the war between France and Islamic State is generally represented by the French state and international media
LEGEND Thick red line: terrorist attacks that are repeatedly referred to by European political leaders and media, and which seem to be stored in collective memory. Thin red line: terrorist attacks that are mentioned in news items reporting on all terrorist attacks in France since Charly Hebdo. The color red corresponds with the negative moral evaluation of the terrorism frame.
Source: based on BBC (26 July 2016).
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V.2 An alternative representation of the war between France and Islamic State
LEGEND Thick red line: terrorist attacks that are repeatedly referred to by European political leaders and media, and which seem to be stored in collective memory. Thin red line: terrorist attacks that are mentioned in news items reporting on all terrorist attacks in France since Charly Hebdo. Thick green line: military actions with a significant impact on the battle on the ground compared to the situation before. Thin green line: military language announcing new military action, but with a less significant practical impact on the battle on the ground. Green block: continuous militarism contrasted to instant terrorist attacks. The color red corresponds with the negative moral evaluation and the color green corresponds with the positive moral evaluation of the terrorism frame.
Sources: the red part is based on BBC (26 July 2016). The green part is based on a diversity of sources. 1. September 2014: BBC, 19 September 2014. 2. 5 January 2015: Reuters, 6 January 2015. 3. February – April 2015: Defense News, 23 February 2015; Defense News, 5 November 2015. 4. 7 September 2015: BBC, 7 September 2015. 5. 27 September 2015: The Guardian, 27 September 2015. 6. 5 November 2015: Defense News, 5 November 2015. 7. November 2015 – March 2016: Defense News, 18 November 2015; Naval Today, 14 July 2016. 8. 13 July 2016: Reuters, 13 July 2016. 9. September – December 2016: UK Defence Journal, 30 September 2016; DailyMail, 26 October 2016. 10. 26 October 2016: DailyMail, 26 October 2016.
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V.3 How the war between European states and Islamic State is generally represented by European political leaders and international media
LEGEND Thick red line: terrorist attacks that are repeatedly referred to by European political leaders and media, and which seem to be stored in collective memory. Thin red line: terrorist attacks that are mentioned in news items reporting on all terrorist attacks in Europe since Charly Hebdo. The color red corresponds with the negative moral evaluation of the terrorism frame.
Source: based on BBC (15 February 2015); Reuters (22 March 2017).
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V.4 An alternative representation of the war between European states and Islamic State*
LEGEND Thick red line: terrorist attacks that are repeatedly referred to by European political leaders and media, and which seem to be stored in collective memory. Thin red line: terrorist attacks mentioned in news items, which report on all terrorist attacks in France since Charly Hebdo. Thick green line: military actions with a significant impact on the battle on the ground compared to the situation before. Thin green line: military language announcing new military action, but with a less significant practical impact on the battle on the ground. Green block: continuous militarism contrasted to instant terrorist attacks. The color red corresponds with the negative moral evaluation and the color green corresponds with the positive moral evaluation of the terrorism frame.
Sources: the red part is based on BBC (15 February 2015); Reuters (22 March 2017). The green part is based on a diversity of sources. 1. September 2014: The Guardian, 5 September 2014; Washington post, 25 September 2014. 2. September 2015: The Guardian, 27 September 2015. 3. December 2015: BBC, 3 December 2015a; Independent, 4 December 2015. 4. January 2016: Reuters, 26 January 2016. 5. April 2016: Reuters, 19 April 2016. 6. May 2016: New York Times, 13 May 2016. 7. December 2016: The Local, 2 December 2016.
*Clearly, the complete picture is much more complicated and impossible to capture in a simple timeline. For example, from the beginning the US-led coalition also included Australia, Canada and several Arab countries (The Guardian, 5 September 2014). In addition, much more states, independently or in the context of coalitions, are active in the war against Islamic State (BBC, 3 December 2015b). However, it is decided to only include European states within this timeline, as they are the subject of this thesis. As such, this timeline aims to show that European states are involved in repressive actions against Islamic State just as Islamic State is involved in repressive actions against European states. This shows at least more of a complete picture than the one-sided story of terrorist attacks in Europe.
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(BBC, 27 April 2016). Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian citizen who is identified as the ‘mastermind’ behind the Paris attacks, had been a local commander of Islamic State in Syria (New York Times, 15 November 2015). In other instances, the so-called ‘lone wolf’-scenario seems more convincing. In case of the Nice attack, where Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel used a heavy truck to drive into the crowd that was celebrating Bastille Day on the boulevard of Nice, there was little evidence indicating that the man had been acting in Islamic State’s name (The Guardian, 16 July 2016). Yet, Islamic State did claim responsibility in a statement on its radio station Bayan, saying that the man was a soldier who had successfully carried out a “new, special operation” (The Guardian, 16 July 2016). Here, it seemed more plausible that Islamic State had claimed responsibility for a random attack, conducted by a radicalized individual without clear links to Islamic State.
Thus, radicalized French citizens take up Islamic State’s call to carry out terrorist attacks on French soil, but it remains unclear whether the exact execution and timing are directed by the Islamic State leadership. Moreover, Islamic State’s official statements do not refer to concrete military actions, such as the deployment of the aircraft carrier, as a legitimization for their attacks. For this reason, the terrorist attacks in France are not necessarily a direct response to France’s deployment of the aircraft carrier in Iraq and Syria. Yet, what the alternative timelines show is that war implies continuous repressive actions, going back and forth between both sides of the conflict, conducted by and directed at both of them (Bueno Lacy et al., 17 June 2016). This means that the war between France and Islamic State is a two-sided story. However, the terrorism frame promotes a narrow, one-sided story, covering up France’s violent action and emphasizing aggression by Islamic State.
Similar tendencies can be observed for the wider European context. Figure V.3 shows how the war between European states and Islamic State is usually portrayed by European state leaders and international media. Similarly, a one-sided image is created, just showing terrorist attacks throughout Europe without the wider political context in which they are taking place. As described by Bueno Lacy et al. (17 June 2016), this portrays Europe as the victim of unpredictable and unpreventable violence. In contrast, figure V.4 shows an alternative representation of the war, which includes the military presence of European states in Syria and Iraq and their fight against Islamic State.
These timelines show that France and other European states are not random, but deliberate targets of terrorist attacks, because they are involved in a war against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (Bueno Lacy et al., 17 June 2016). As noted by Dworkin (2016), “Western strikes against the group have been followed by an escalation of terrorist attacks. ISIS’s major terror attacks in Europe came after European countries had launched airstrikes against the organization in Iraq (and in France’s case, Syria).”. These attacks should therefore be seen as “the very reliable and sadly predictable material response to very specific material aggression in the Middle East” (Bueno Lacy et al., 17 June 2016). It would be unrealistic to believe that a war could be fought one-sidedly; when a state is involved in a war on foreign territory, it can expect counterattacks on its own territory (Van der Dunk 2016). When considering this, it could be argued that European states, compared to their enemy, are still facing a relatively low intensity of violence while in a war. This is also reflected in Figures V.2 and V.4: whereas terrorist attacks are instant moments of violence, the large-scale airstrikes by France and the other European states, in the context of the international coalition against Islamic State, produce a continuity of violence. In sum, these timelines show that the states who fight Islamic State carry a responsibility for the continuation of terrorist attacks taking place on their own soil, but cover this up by upholding an illusion of innocence.
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When taking this historical background into account, it seems remarkable that Hollande’s (16 November 2015) first reaction to the Paris attacks was to declare war against Islamic State, as this war had already been going on for more than a year. Instead of an unprecedented act of aggression, as it was framed by Hollande (16 November 2015), the Paris attacks were part of a war in which France was already heavily involved. This part of the story is covered up in the terrorism frame in order to maintain the image of the French state’s innocence. Yet, the previous reconstruction of the international context has revealed that France is a deliberate target of terrorist attacks, because it is heavily fighting Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and terrorist groups elsewhere (Bueno Lacy et al., 17 June 2016). Therefore, France is not just a passive victim, but also an active aggressor, which carries responsibility for the continuation of the conflict.
This does not necessarily mean that Islamic State is ‘right’ in portraying France as the ultimate aggressor. To be clear, this analysis is not an indirect justification for terrorist attacks. What this analysis has shown, is that, within the context of a war, it is often difficult, or maybe impossible, to reconstruct who started the conflict from an objective standpoint. Instead, which action can be marked as the beginning of the war is a subjective matter. The point here is that this subjectivity is exploited by both Islamic State and the French state. They point to the other ones as the moral wrong-doers, on the basis of which they justify their own use of violence as a retributive response. The Paris attacks should therefore be seen as one of the violent events within a cycle of retaliation, which has come along with the war between France and Islamic State (Bueno Lacy et al., 17 June 2016). I have visualized this dynamic in figures VI and VII.
For this reason, the French state’s military response to terrorist attacks seems to be ineffective (Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017). The international coalition has been active now for almost three years. Although it might have weakened Islamic State, the defeat of the group still remains an illusion (Clarke, 18 May 2017). As stated by Dworkin (2016), “while a military response to terrorist acts orchestrated from abroad presents an image of resolution and determination, its practical effectiveness in preventing attacks appears to be minimal”.
Instead, both France and Islamic State contribute to the maintenance of the war, which thereby tends to gain a permanent status. As such, the war tends to lose its external function of protecting French citizens against an external aggressor, while its internal function seems to have become of much greater relevance (Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017). This means that the war has the function of creating a sense of unity by connecting people on the basis of a common enemy. In this way, the French state can legitimize its power to the French people as means of protection against Islamic State’s violence: people are made to accept state power as a necessity for the future existence of their political communities. As such, the ‘war is peace’-argumentation tends to promote a sense of ignorance regarding state power, and thereby helps to secure it. This is the Orwellian tendency that can be seen in the international aspect of the French state’s discourse on terrorism. I will now turn to an analysis of reports from human rights organizations in order to reflect on the practical implications of this tendency.
The myth of protecting civilians In the aftermath of France’s intensified airstrikes, media increasingly reported about civilians who were caught in the middle of the war (The Intercept, 19 November 2015). Although monitoring civilian deaths and gathering data about war crimes is a difficult exercise in the complex context of Syria’s civil war (BuzzFeed, 2 September 2015), several local monitoring groups – such as the Syrian Network for Human Rights, Airwars, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Violations
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Figure VI Cycle of violence schematically
MILITARY AGGRESSION
TERRORIST ATTACKS
Figure VII Cycle of violence in pictures
12 Source: Airwars (5 May 2017) Source: Airwars (4 May 2017)
Source: NY Daily News (14 November 2015).
12 This pictures is taken in the aftermath of a Russian airstrike on Aleppo. According to Airwars, it is difficult to find similar images of the victims of coalition airstrikes, because they rarely make the news (Airwars, 4 May 2017). 45
Documentation Centre – are active in reporting about civilian casualties. The work of these organizations shows that the international coalition cannot continue bombing without making dirty hands13 (Airwars 2017). As stated by journalist Chris Woods, who is the driving force behind Airwars: “We have to remember that however the media paints the Islamic State, they occupy civilian cities. Raqqa, Aleppo, a host of other cities, Mosul, Fallujah, these are all civilian cities under occupation and when we bomb those cities we are bombing civilian cities” (The Intercept, 19 November 2015).
In addition to the deaths of innocent people, the military interference by the international coalition has devastating effects on people’s daily lives. Several aid organizations have reported on the deteriorating living circumstances of millions of people living in Syria and Iraq, warning that “a generation is at risk of being lost forever” (Unicef, 15 March 2014). In its report of 2015, World Vision (1 March 2016) conveyed that 5 million Syrians have fled to neighboring countries. Another 6,3 million people have left their homes but remained in Syria, where most of them are living in remote areas. In Iraq, 3,3 million people have become homeless. In total, about a half of them are children. In both countries, schools, hospitals, roads and water supplies have become targets of violence. In Syria, 13,5 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance. Four out of five Syrians live in poverty and life expectancy has dropped by more than twenty years. Many people are living with stress, fear and other psychological problems (World Vision, 1 March 2016).
The work of these human rights organizations formed the basis upon which Amnesty International (26 October 2016a; 26 October 2016b) published an extensive report on an investigation of eleven airstrike operations from the international coalition during a period of two years since its establishment. This also incorporated an investigation of media reports, interviews with eyewitnesses and analyses of satellite images, photographs and video material. Although the airstrikes were aimed at Islamic State, the report revealed that they had caused the death of around three hundred civilians. In addition, it found that efforts to minimalize civilian deaths and damage to civilian property were limited. Moreover, it identified a lack of (the political will for) transparent research of war crimes and civilian casualties, which fell short of international standards. This was associated with a lack of recognition, excuse and compensation regarding the victims who had lost their beloved ones and stayed behind in destroyed areas. In conclusion, the report rejected the airstrikes for being extremely disproportional and indiscriminate (Amnesty International, 26 October 2016a; Amnesty International, 26 October 2016b).
In sum, the previous analysis of the material realm has shown how the French state’s use of military means against Islamic State, in response to the Paris attacks, has contributed to a cycle of violence and retaliation, and thereby contributed to the maintenance of the terrorist threat (Bueno Lacy et al., 17 June 2016). Although Hollande (16 November 2015) rendered resolution and determination in his speech, and tried to answer to the feelings of fear and pain that the Paris attacks have caused, this repressive reaction has not have the intended effect of protecting citizens against the violence from Islamic State. Terrorist attacks in France continue to occur, causing more suffering and loss. The war in Syria and Iraq is enduring, which has devastating effects on the lives of innocent people. Therefore, the French state should not be reluctant to reconsider the use of military means and search for ways to break the established action-reaction dynamic of aggression between France and Islamic State (Van
13 Clearly, the international coalition is not the only force who is making dirty hands in this conflict. The Syrian government and its allies (including Russia), Islamic State, and armed opposition groups can also be held responsible (Amnesty International, 26 October 2016). 46
Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017). Now that I have come to a conclusion of the international context, I will turn to my analysis of the national context.
The national context My analysis of the national context follows a similar three-step-analysis as has been applied in the international analysis. First, I will zoom in on the ‘freedom is slavery’-paradox of 1984 (Orwell 1950) and see how this paradox naturalizes state repression on the national level. Second, I will analyze the speech by Hollande (16 November 2015) in order to see how the French state’s interpretation of terrorism legitimizes repressive policies on the national level. I will thereby reflect on the framing strategies (Entman 1993) that Hollande (16 November 2015) applies to secure this terrorism frame. Thirdly, I will discuss the material consequences of the proposed policies for the national context. Finally, in a concluding statement, these three steps will be brought together and show how the French state’s discourse on terrorism contributes to a cycle of radicalization among Muslims in France (Adida et al., 14 January 2015).
‘1984’ The international discussion of 1984 (1950) has shown how the regime of Oceania exerts power through mechanisms of war. However, state repression is not only focused outwards, but also inwards through mechanisms of surveillance: the regime exerts totalitarian control over its own people. On the basis of the paradoxical slogan Freedom is slavery, it produces and maintains the idea that it needs to control its citizens in order to defend their freedom. Again, this contains a fundamental contradictory, as both terms – freedom and slavery/control – are each other’s counterparts. Yet, the regime points to an internal threat from some of its own citizens, who try to resist and rebel against the regime. These rebels are said to aim for disruption of Oceania’s social coherence and stability, and thereby disruption of the conditions that allow the people of Oceania to live in freedom. This enforces the regime to suppress resistance in order to protect the community against disruption from inside. This control over citizens for the sake of defending their freedom is inherently contradictory.
The idea of an internal threat is concentrated around the image of the mysterious figure Emmanuel Goldstein, who is said to lead a resistance movement called The Brotherhood. This internal enemy is subject to hate campaigns as well, which propagate an image of a strange rebellious force, penetrating into Oceania’s society while not really belonging there. This construction of an internal enemy invokes feelings of hatred and channels potential discontent among the people towards forces outside the regime. In reality, the real existence of the resistance movement cannot be verified. It merely functions as a way for the regime to maintain itself. Similar to the international context, the idea of an internal enemy allows the regime to sell its power to its people as a necessity to defend them against disruption from inside. In this way, it produces and maintains its own legitimacy.
The following analysis of the French case will make clear that France’s national counterterrorism policy framework shows similar tendencies as Oceania’s control over its citizens: mechanisms of surveillance are promoted for the sake of defending freedom. I will now turn to the ideational level and see how the ‘freedom is slavery’-paradox is constructed in Hollande’s (16 November 2015) speech, thereby promoting security measures as the ultimate response to terrorism on the national level.
Speech This analysis of the speech builds on the same coded text as has been presented in figures II, III and IV on p. 25-26 of this thesis. The former analysis of the speech has shown how Hollande (16
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November 2015) frames the Paris attacks as an act of war, thereby appointing Islamic State as France’s evil enemy who wants to destroy France’s peaceful existence from outside. On the basis of this moral dichotomy, he legitimizes the use of military means to destroy this external threat. However, it needs to be added that, within this black-and-white representation, Hollande (16 November 2015) also touches upon an important nuance. At some point, he recognizes that the attackers were French citizens: “It hurts to say it, but we know that these were French people who killed other French people” (Hollande, 16 November 2015). This phrase undermines the understanding of terrorism as an external threat and turns the enemy into an internal part of French society. The recognition of the French roots of the attackers has an important function within the frame. If the problem of terrorism had merely been interpreted as an international act of war, then the proposed international means of war would have sufficed as the solution; yet, by mentioning the national aspect to the problem, Hollande (16 November 2015) paves the way for the announcement of national policies.
However, to recognize the French roots of the attackers also carries a risk. It suggests that the French state might carry national responsibility for the problem of terrorism. Hollande (16 November 2015) thereby puts the established image of France’s innocence at risk. In order to overcome this, the speech reflects a strategy to cover up this national responsibility. When taking a look at the self-reflective sentence, one can see that it is immediately pushed to the background, as Hollande (16 November 2015) positions the French attackers within Islamic State’s international terrorist network. He explains that, in the process of radicalization, French citizens are encouraged to fight in Syria and Iraq, become part of international training networks and carry out attacks that are planned and sponsored from outside. Through this effect of saliency (Entman 1993), the frame of terrorism as an external problem is strengthened.
This is further supported by Hollande’s reference to the issue of foreign fighters, which turns terrorism into ‘a new context of war’, ‘a different kind of war’ and ‘a new kind of adversary’ (Hollande, 16 November 2015). He argues that foreign fighters – radicalized French citizens who are adopted into Islamic State’s international network – travel back to France “as was the case on Friday, to commit terrorist acts” (Hollande, 16 November 2015. In this way, Hollande (16 November 2015) suggests that the terrorists might once have been part of French society, but they are not anymore, and have now transformed into foreigners. This mechanism of exclusion is enabled by the moral dichotomy of the terrorism frame, which divides the actors of this conflict into the good France versus the evil Islamic State, thereby ruling out any possible category in between (Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017). In this way, Hollande (16 November 2015) creates the idea that the enemy penetrates into French society from outside in order to ‘disfigure it’ from inside. As such, he attempts to cover up the national responsibility of the French state, while at the same time allowing himself to urge for an internal solution.
This national solution follows the same repressive tendencies as the international response. Since foreign fighters are said to bring the destructive threat from Islamic State inside French society, Hollande (16 November 2015) claims to have no other choice than to take a tough stance. He claims that “What’s at stake is the protection of our fellow citizens and our ability to live together” (Hollande, 16 November 2015) and stresses the urgency to defend the freedom of the French political community, and its ruling democratic principles, against “those who want to undermine it” (Hollande, 16 November 2015). This results in a twofold strategy: on the one hand, the implementation of emergency measures to avert the immediate threat, and on the other hand, the promotion of structural measures to prevent terrorist attacks on a long-term basis. He takes the time to explain what he means.
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Figure VIII France’s state of emergency
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Source: French Government (23 November 2015)
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Most importantly, Hollande (16 November 2015) emphasizes the importance of the state of emergency, which was announced after a cabinet meeting on Friday night, in the midst of the attacks. In addition to this, he announces an extension of the state of emergency for three months beyond the usual twelve-day-period. In an additional text, published by the French government on its website, it is explained what the declaration of the state of emergency means (French Government, 23 November 2015). As can be seen in figure VIII, it allows the French Minister of the Interior to place people under house arrest, block websites and disband associations of people when these are considered to have a link with terrorism. Moreover, prefects in all French departments are allowed to restrict movements of people by imposing security zones, prohibit people from residing in certain parts of French territory, detain people and private resources, prohibit public gatherings, provisionally close meeting places, and authorize administrative searches. In particular, Hollande (16 November 2015) argues that the state of emergency legitimizes two exceptional measures, namely house arrest and police searches. These are presented as “useful means to prevent terrorist acts” (Hollande, 16 November 2015). Hollande (16 November 2015) explains that last night, already more than a hundred people have been placed under house arrest and 168 police searches have been conducted. “And there will be more” (Hollande, 16 November 2015), he adds, emphasizing that these particular measures will be “fully implemented and strengthened” (Hollande, 16 November 2015).
However, he also proclaims that France has “to go beyond this emergency situation” (Hollande, 16 November 2015). Therefore, he announces an extensive package of policies to strengthen national security on a more structural basis. In particular, he announces two sets of national policies. The first set concerns a revision of the constitution, with the aim of expanding the government’s power to take action against terrorism within a more permanent legal framework: “we need to have an appropriate tool to provide a framework for taking exceptional measures” (Hollande, 16 November 2015). At the moment, the French Constitution allows for these kinds of exceptional measures only when France’s territorial integrity is threatened from the outside or when the proper functioning of the constitutional public authorities is interrupted (Centre for European Politics, 14 November 2015). Hollande (16 November 2015) states that a state of emergency should be included in these conditions. In this way, he argues, the constitutional framework corresponds with the new kind of threat that terrorism poses to national and international security and the new kind of policy this requires.
The second set of more structural policies as announced by Hollande (16 November 2015) includes the strengthening of resources that are available to the justice system and security forces, in order to strengthen their possibilities for monitoring and punishment. This means that investigation services and anti-terrorist judges should be enabled to use all kinds of intelligence techniques offered by new technology. Moreover, the magistrates should be given access to sophisticated investigation methods in order to combat trafficking of arms and cut off the terrorists’ possibility to confiscate illegal weapons. Furthermore, the self-defense of police officers and the conditions under which they could use their weapons should be addressed.
In addition to these legal resources, Hollande (16 November 2015) announces to further strengthen the material resources. He announces five thousand additional jobs for police officers and gendarmes in the next two years, going up to ten thousand additional security related jobs over five years. They will be deployed to support anti-terrorist services, the border police and national security in general. This will be associated with an investment in the necessary equipment. Moreover, the Ministry of Justice is planning to create 2500 additional jobs in the prison service and the judiciary service. Finally, the
51 customs service are going to create a thousand additional jobs to support the intensified border controls.
Taken together, these policies reflect repressive tendencies through their promotion of means of surveillance and control (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016). To declare a state of emergency comes down to allowing the limitation of civil liberties for the sake of fighting an imminent threat (Amnesty International, 17 January 2017). In particular, it lowers the judicial threshold for the use of house arrest and police searches. The proposed adoption of emergency measures into more permanent legal frameworks therefore implies the structuralization and normalization of these limitations of civil liberties (Amnesty International, 17 January 2017; Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017). Moreover, to strengthen the legal and material resources for the justice system and the security forces means that the possibilities for the surveillance of citizens, as well as the punishment of suspicious behavior, are opened up (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016).
At the same time, the speech emphasizes that these policies should be implemented “while upholding our values” (Hollande, 16 November 2015) and “without compromising public freedoms” (Hollande, 16 November 2015). Hollande (16 November 2015) continuously appeals to the value of freedom, and the related principles of democracy, human rights and the rule of law. He states that he wants “France to remain itself” (Hollande, 16 November 2015), meaning that the French are ‘attached to freedom’, that France is a state that is ‘governed by the rule of law’ and that its democratic system ‘is capable of responding’ (Hollande, 16 November 2015). In addition to this, he refers to the importance of international treaties, which monitor states to respect human rights, and announces to ask the Council of State “to look at whether these proposals are in accordance with our international commitments and our basic laws” (Hollande, 16 November 2015). Through this effect of saliency (Entman 1993), he attempts to give the national policies the appearance of being in accordance with these fundamental principles.
At this point, the ‘freedom is slavery’-paradox comes to light. On the one hand, Hollande (16 November 2015) presents the French state as ‘the country of freedom’ that breaths democracy, human rights and the rule of law. The moral dichotomy of the speech creates a division between those who support these principles and “those who want to undermine it” (Hollande, 16 November 2015). On the other hand, Hollande (16 November 2015) announces to take repressive policies and promotes mechanisms of surveillance and control, which limit these fundamental principles, as the only adequate means to counter terrorism on the national level (Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017). This implies the exact opposite of the value of freedom, which he claims to defend. As such, he follows the same ‘freedom is slavery’-argumentation as the regime in 1984 (Orwell 1950): he promotes mechanisms of control for the sake of defending freedom.
In sum, the previous analysis of the speech has shown how the issue of foreign fighters informs the adoption of repressive security measures to counter terrorism on the national level. Moreover, two central tensions have been addressed that are underlying this terrorism frame. First, the terrorism frame positions the attackers within Islamic State’s international terrorist network, and thereby covers up the possibility that the French state might carry responsibility for the radicalization of its own citizens. Second, the terrorism frame paradoxically promotes mechanisms of control for the sake of defending freedom. I will now turn to the material level and analyze the practical implications of these tensions. It will become clear that the French state has not been able to counter the marginalization of French Muslims and carries responsibility for the radicalization of Muslim youngsters in France. The proposed mechanisms of control strengthen this dynamic of marginalization and radicalization (Van
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Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017). As such, they do not only defend, but also violate the value of freedom, thereby contributing to human suffering.
Policies This analysis of the counterterrorism policies links up the speech act from president Francois Hollande (16 November 2015) to its broader societal context. I build this analysis on the basis of two empirical sources. First, I bring together a diversity of international news items in order to make a reconstruction of the national historical context in which the Paris attacks have taken place. Second, I analyze two extensive policy reports from Amnesty International (4 February 2016; 17 January 2017b) in order to reflect on the practical consequences of the proposed policies. I will now turn to the national historical context and discuss the social position of French Muslims, as well as the social policies provided to this group by the French state.
The Banlieues The terrorists that had conducted the attacks in Paris, were French and Belgian citizens with parents from Northern African descent (BBC, 27 April 2016). They were born in France and Belgium, living in the suburbs of Paris and Brussels. According to several police and judiciary reports, these men lived in poor areas, had difficulties finding a job and spent a lot of their time drinking, smoking drugs and going out (BBC, 27 April 2016). They were known by the police for pretty crime, such as the possession of drugs and robbery. Some of them had spent time in jail, where they had come into contact with each other (BBC, 27 April 2016). Others were known for links with terrorist organizations or for trying to travel to Syria (Reuters, 16 November 2015).
Their social position drew attention to social segregation and the marginalized position of Muslim immigrants in France, in particular the suburbs of Paris, also known as the Banlieues. Once presented as big housing projects, meant to become some kind of utopia for workers, these areas were known for their relatively high rates of poverty, unemployment and school dropout compared to national rates (The Guardian, 22 October 2015). Flourishing drugs trade and criminality caused a lack of social services, which closed their doors because of security reasons (The Guardian, 22 October 2015). These neighborhoods were associated with high amounts of first, second and third generations of immigrants, mainly from Northern-Africa, who lived somewhat isolated from the rest of French society (The Guardian, 22 October 2015).
The Banlieues were known for their recurring riots where vehicles and buildings were set on fire and violent clashes between inhabitants and policemen broke out. The dominant reaction of the French state had been to turn its back against these people (New Yorker, 31 August 2015). After the last time of riots ten years ago, a state of emergency was declared and emergency assistance plans followed. This time, the riots seemed to be a wake-up call that would enforce serious social policy for these areas. With his promising statements about making an end to the ghetto’s, President Hollande gained a lot of votes from people in the Banlieues (The Guardian, 22 October 2015).
However, these efforts seemed to come too late; the situation did not change in a significant way. In 2015, still more than four million people were living in ‘priority zones’, the toughest parts of the Banlieues (The Guardian, 22 October 2015). The French state had chosen to take a security rather than a social approach, focusing on renovation and policing (The Guardian, 22 October 2015). Besides a lack of investment in employment and education, it also did not provide an answer to the underlying structural problem: discrimination and stigmatization of Muslim migrants (Van Houtum & Bueno
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Lacy 2017). This left many inhabitants of the Banlieues with the feeling of being treated as second- class citizens and being abandoned by the French state (The Guardian, 22 October 2015).
While the media tended to zoom in on the Banlieues, social segregation and discrimination formed structural problems, rooted in French society as a whole, which were only deepened further by the Paris attacks (Adida et al., 14 January 2015). Rather than a direct link between the place of the Banlieues and the development jihadism, which is too easy to assume (Slooter, 24 Januari 2015), the Banlieues could be seen as the symbolic place for the general marginalized position of Muslims in French society. With an amount of six million people, France has the largest Muslim population of Western Europe, where they form about nine percent of the population (Kassem, 4 August 2016). Discrimination is particularly enduring with regard to housing, education and job applications (Kassem, 4 August 2016). For example, the French education system belongs to the most unequal systems of the world, in which children’s societal chances are heavily determined by their social background (The Guardian, 22 October 2015). Moreover, a study conducted by the Institute Montaigne revealed that a practicing Muslim man is four times less likely to get a job interview than a Catholic (The Guardian, 22 October 2015). Against these limited societal chances stands a disproportionate rate of incarceration, making up to sixty percent of the prison population (Kassem, 4 August 2016). The political representation of Muslim migrants is problematic as well. In the 2012 elections, 9 out of 577 seats in France’s National Assembly were won by nonwhite candidates, which was an increase of eight seats (New Yorker, 31 August 2015).
This social inequality is supported by the perceptions of a large part of French citizens. In a poll taken by Le Monde after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, the majority of the respondents agreed that Islam is incompatible with French values (New Yorker, 31 August 2015). According to Adida et al. (14 January 2015), the French white and Muslim population are stuck in a ‘vicious circle of discrimination’: French Muslims who experience discrimination withdraw from French society, which feeds anti-Muslim discrimination, which then further encourages withdrawal, etc. This polarizing and distancing dynamic is exacerbated by every new terrorist attack (Adida et al, 14 January 2015).
Although President Francois Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls have said to recognize this ‘unbearable discrimination’ and ‘territorial, social and ethnic apartheid’ (The Guardian, 22 October 2015) in France, their words were not reflected in action. For example, Hollande went back on his promise to register unmonitored police ID checks, which appeared to target non-white young men disproportionately (The Guardian, 22 October 2015). The state even decided to appeal when a French court ordered the government to pay damages to five men from ethnic minorities after the police had carried out unjustified identity checks (The Guardian, 22 October 2015). These recurrent incidents are illustrative for the marginalization of Muslim migrants in French society and the lack of political commitment by the French state to formulate a structural social solution (Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017). This causes the Muslim youth to lose faith in their chances for a meaningful life and makes them vulnerable for processes of radicalization, as will become clear in the next paragraph.
Radicalization Research shows that cultural identity plays a key role in processes of radicalization (Lyons-Padilla et al. 2015). In particular, European Muslim minorities share the feeling of being ‘culturally homeless’ and lack a sense of belonging (Lyons-Padilla et al. 2015). Many radicalized European youngsters, who join groups like Islamic State and terrorist cells within European states, appear to be ‘on a quest for significance’ and in search of purpose and meaning in their lives (Lyons-Padilla et al. 2015). Being part of these social networks allows them to restore a feeling of self-worth, both in themselves and in
54 relation to others, which they have lost due to “perceived maltreatment by society” (Lyons-Padilla et al. 2015, p. 2). In turn, terrorist groups like Islamic State are aware of this vulnerability. In their recruitment material, they invoke “the humiliation and suffering of Muslims throughout the world” (Lyons-Padilla et al. 2015, p. 2) and appeal to “a collective experience of significance loss” (Lyons- Padilla et al. 2015, p. 2). They present jihad as the ultimate answer to free oneself out of social misery, thereby explicitly promising to bring back a sense of belonging, purpose, recognition and social status (Lyons-Padilla et al. 2015).
Islamic State turns out to be particularly active in this, following a targeted propaganda strategy (Hofman, 27 February 2017). It thereby differentiates between violent images on the one hand, which are shared among non-Muslim citizens in ‘The West’ in order to spread fear, and recruitment material on the other hand, which is shared among Muslim European youngsters in order to present the Caliphate as a peaceful and welcoming community (Hofman, 27 February 2017). For example, in one of the recruitment videos, a British fighter appeals to his Muslim brothers in Great Britain and elsewhere to distance themselves from the societies that make Muslims feel depressed and encourages them to come to the Caliphate, where they can live in honor (Hofman, 27 February 2017). Another example is provided by a poster of an Islamic State fighter that depicts the slogan: “For many years they have treated us as second class, although Allah gave us honor and guidance through Islam”. In this way, Islamic State stimulates the idea that the Caliphate “is the answer to finding honor when one’s social status is not adequately respected” (Speckhard 2015, p. 37).
Moreover, these images are accompanied with messages that play on a sense collective identity and belonging. For example, recruitment videos communicate a sphere of brotherhood and mutual understanding, in which ordinary youngsters explain how the Caliphate works and why it is the best place for Muslims around the world to live (Hofman, 27 February 2017). In addition, through the slogan “We are all ISIS”, which is spread through posters and t-shirts, Islamic State emphasizes the inclusivity of Islam and promotes the idea that “all Muslims belong to the larger Ummah, or family of Muslims” (Speckhard 2015, p. 4). In this way, “ISIS is targeting European Muslims’ resentment by inserting their personal struggles into a greater epic of Muslim martyrdom” (Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy, p. 90).
These kind of messages drive French youngsters, who are alienated from French society, in the arms of Islamic State (Hofman, 27 February 2017). The French state has not been able to break this dynamic by countering the social segregation in French society or by offering Muslim youngsters significant chances for the future (Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017). For this reason, it is stated that there seems to be a “mismatch between the geography of the crimes carried out in Paris and the geography charted by the French president’s response” (Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017, p. 89). While the French state emphasizes the external roots of terrorism and the need for an international solution (Hollande, 16 November 2015), these national roots of radicalization, which are exploited by groups like Islamic State, are important to take into account in the development of a counterterrorism strategy. I will now turn to an analysis of reports from human rights organizations that reflect on the French state’s security measures to counter terrorism on the national level. This will make clear that these policies contribute to the marginalization of Muslims in French society.
The unequal restriction of human rights In February 2016, three months after president Francois Hollande (13 November 2015) declared a state of emergency within the territory of France, Amnesty International (4 February 2016) published an extensive report – entitled: Upturned lives: The disproportionate impact of France’s state of
55 emergency – in which it called attention for the practical consequences of the emergency measures that were being taken. While Hollande (16 November 2015) presents France as the beacon of freedom, democracy, and human rights, Amnesty International (4 February 2016) warns in this report for the deterioration of these principles.
In particular, the report highlights two particular emergency measures: house searches and assigned residence orders (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 7). In principle, French criminal law allows for these measures on the basis of judicial decisions resulting from serious criminal suspicions (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 10; 16). However, the state of emergency weakens the conditions for invoking them. It is enough for authorities to have ‘serious reasons’ to believe that the person under investigation or supervision constitutes a threat to public order and security (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 10; 16). Moreover, it allows to circumvent judicial authorization and procedures. While local representatives of the state are authorized to command police searches, the Ministry of the Interior can issue assigned residence orders (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 10; 16).
Along with this lowering threshold, the protection of democratic principles and human rights is being compromised in several ways (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 6). First of all, the report (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016) shows how the measures have long-term effects for people’s everyday lives. In contrast to ‘normal’ times, house searches can take place during day and night without informing the persons under investigation beforehand (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 10). They are associated with a disproportionate use of force and cause of damage (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 11). The police often bursts into people’s intimate spaces, forcing doors open instead of simply ringing the bell. They handcuff the residents or point firearms at them, sometimes in the face their children. These activities undermine the right to private life and family life, and leave many people with enduring feelings of fear, stress and other health care issues (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 14). Moreover, in many instances, policy officers copy data from electronic devices on a large scale without explaining how it is used, which undermines the right to privacy (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 11).
In addition, assigned residence orders usually include a curfew up to twelve hours, a prohibition on travelling outside a particular area and a daily notification requirement at a police station up to three times a day (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 16). As a consequence, individuals under supervision are not allowed to go to work or medical appointments outside their assigned area. A violation of the terms can lead to imprisonment. As such, assigned residence orders do not only limit people’s freedom of movement, but also undermine their right to work and access to health care (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 21). Moreover, both house searches and assigned residence orders have a negative impact on the perceptions of family, friends, neighbors and employers. This can evoke a process of social isolation and stimulates current societal tendencies of stigmatization and discrimination of Muslims (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 14).
Second, the report (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016) explains that these emergency measures undermine fundamental principles of the rule of law. The absence of judicial authorization and prosecution removes the legal safeguards for suspects, which are established within normal criminal procedures (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 6). Moreover, the implementation of these measures lacks transparency. The people who are put under investigation or surveillance are rarely informed about the reasons behind the measures (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 12; 17). The measures are often taken on the basis of vague grounds, a lack of evidence or inaccessible secret
56 information from security services (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 14; 18). Reports of individuals are written in general terms and rarely include specific suspected signals (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 20). All these issues constrain the possibilities for individuals to defend themselves, which undermines the democratic right to fair prosecution (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 20). Moreover, it often is unclear how this information is collected, which again undermines the right to privacy ((Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 20).
Finally, the effectivity of the emergency measures in relation to the prevention of new terrorist attacks is questioned. According to official statistics, 3242 searches were conducted in houses and other locations – such as restaurants, bars, mosques and civil society organizations – and in between 350 and 400 people were placed under house arrest following the attacks of November 2013 up to January 2016, while only five of them resulted in terrorism-related charges, which comes down to less than one percent (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016; Human Rights Watch, 3 February 2016). For this reason, Amnesty International (4 February 2016) concludes that the emergency measures are extremely disproportionate in relation to their initial goal.
The implementation of emergency measures in France reveals the dangerous tension inherent to a state of emergency, which is the arbitrary and disproportionate use of state power (Amnesty International, 17 January 2017a). This is especially true when considering the fact that France is extending its state of emergency over and over again. Since the Paris attacks, it has been extended five times and is still in force up to today. As a result, the state of emergency tends to become normalized (Amnesty International, 17 January 2017a; Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017).
The French state does not take these repressive measures in an isolated political context. In a report called Dangerously disproportionate: The ever-expanding national security state in Europe, which was published one year later, Amnesty International (17 January 2017a) warns that these measures are part of a wider trend across European states, which are increasingly turning into security states. Building on an extensive policy analysis among 14 EU members states14, as well as international initiatives at the UN and EU level, Amnesty International (17 January 2017a) argues that the protection of freedom and human rights is being dismantled on a wide scale for the sake of fighting terrorism. Although France has been the only EU member state that has recently declared a state of emergency, European states are increasingly appealing to emergency laws. Some have proposed or adopted new legislation and constitutional amendments that lower the threshold for declaring a state of emergency. Others have passed new security laws within a permanent legal framework, while they reflect measures that would typically be taken during a temporary state of emergency (Amnesty International, 17 January 2017a). In this way, European states are collectively normalizing the restriction of their citizens’ rights and freedoms in an attempt to protect them against terrorist attacks (Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017). The report concludes that European states are taking “Orwellian counter-terrorism laws stripping rights under guise of defending them” (Amnesty International, 17 January 2017b).
However, the report on France shows an important difference compared to Orwell’s (1950) story of 1984, as this limitation of freedom and human rights does not hit French citizens in an equal way. In Oceania, mass surveillance is exerted indiscriminately, turning every citizen into a potential risk. On
14 The EU member states that have been investigated are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Spain and the United Kingdom (Amnesty International, 17 January 2017a, pp. 9-10). 57 the contrary, the report shows that the emergency measures in France are associated with discrimination and ethnic profiling with regard to Muslims and non-white French citizens (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 6). The grounds for these measures are often related to religious practices, assumed radical beliefs and assumed ties with radicalized individuals (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 17). Arbitrary signals, such as veils or beards, can be enough to be considered as a potential threat. In addition, a substantive amount of mosques has been closed on the basis of similar arbitrary reasons (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016, p. 24).
As such, the counterterrorism policies turn French Muslims into ‘suspect communities’ (Kundnani 2012). As they target this specific group, they stimulate the already existing mechanisms of discrimination and stigmatization of Muslims in French society (Adida et al., 14 January 2015), which increases their vulnerability for radicalization processes (Amnesty International, 17 January 2017b). In this way, the French state contributes to a cycle of radicalization (Adida et al., 14 January 2015), which is similar to the circular dynamic as has been discussed in the international analysis. This is visualized in figures IX and X. Instead of limiting the terrorist threat, the French state’s national response to the Paris attacks is contributing to the maintenance of the threat.
As such, the emergency measures tend to lose their primary function of protecting citizens against an internal threat. Instead, they tend to gain the effect of legitimizing state power (Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017). This means that the French state can legitimize its expanding power to its people as a means of protecting them against terrorist attacks: people are made to accept this as a necessity to live in freedom. Since the emergency measures only affect a particular group within French society, most people do not experience the direct consequences of this expanding state power. In this way, the ‘freedom is slavery’-argumentation tends to promote a sense of ignorance regarding state power, and thereby helps to secure it. This is the Orwellian tendency that can be seen in the national aspect of the French state’s discourse on terrorism.
Concluding remarks In sum, this chapter has shown that the French state’s discourse on terrorism promotes a repressive response of military and security measures, which contributes to a cycle of aggression on the international level (Bueno Lacy et al, 17 June 2016), and a cycle of radicalization on the national level (Adida et al., 14 January 2015). While these measures are implemented with the intention of protecting France against future attacks, they seem to be contributing to the maintenance of the terrorist threat. On the basis of this, the terrorism frame of the French state, as has been summarized in figure II, can be adapted according to figure XI. As such, this thesis provides an alternative representation of terrorism as an ‘Orwellian’ cycle of violence.
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Figure IX Cycle of radicalization schematically
MARGINALIZATION
RADICALIZATION
TERRORIST ATTACKS
Figure X Cycle of radicalization in pictures
Source: Politico (21 January 2015). Source: France24 (23 February 2017).
Source: The Guardian (23 February 2014). Source: BBC (18 February 2017).
Source: NY Daily News (14 November 2015).
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Figure XI Terrorism as an ‘Orwellian’ cycle of violence
EVALUATION France = good Islamic State = bad
CAUSE PROBLEM SOLUTION LIKELY EFFECTS - International: aggression Terrorist State repression - International: aggression by Islamic State attacks - International: war by Islamic State - National: marginalization - National: - National: marginalization and radicalization of Muslims surveillance and radicalization of Muslims
LEGITIMIZATION Destructive threat
Cycle of violence
Source: the framing categories are based on Entman (1993), the frame is based on Hollande (16 November 2015) and this thesis
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Conclusion & Discussion
This thesis has investigated how the French state has responded to the Paris attacks, both in terms of discourse and policy making. First of all, I have analyzed how terrorism is framed by the French State. I have shown that terrorism is framed as a destructive threat, coming from outside and penetrating into French society with the ultimate aim of destroying its free and peaceful existence. Moreover, I have analyzed how this terrorism frame informs the adoption of repressive counterterrorism policies. I have shown that the moral dichotomy of the evil Islamic State versus the innocent France legitimizes the use of military means as a way to strike back and defend France against future attacks. The reference to the issue of foreign fighters allows for the adoption of national security measures, which should eradicate the terrorist threat from within. Finally, I have analyzed how the repressive counterterrorism policies have an effect on people’s lives. I have shown that the use of military means contributes to the deaths of innocent civilians and the devastation of the living circumstances in the warzones in Syria and Iraq (Unicef, 15 March 2014; World Vision, 1 March 2016; Amnesty International, 26 October 2016a; Amnesty International, 26 October 2016b; Airwars, 17 January 2017). The national security measures allow for the monitoring of ‘potentially dangerous civilians’ on the basis of ambiguous grounds, which limits their right to freedom and fair trial. These policies particularly target Muslim migrants and thereby strengthen existing societal dynamics of the stigmatization and marginalization of Muslims (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016).
On the basis of this, it has become clear that the French state’s discourse on terrorism promotes a repressive response of military and security measures, which contributes to a cycle of aggression on the international level (Bueno Lacy et al., 17 June 2016), and a cycle of radicalization on the national level (Adida et al., 14 January 2015). While these measures are implemented with the intention of protecting France against future attacks, they seem to be contributing to the maintenance of the terrorist threat (Van Houtum & Bueno Lacy 2017). As a result, the French state’s approach to terrorism implies a disproportionate exertion of state power, which has sincere consequences for people’s lives. While the French state aims to defend human rights, it is violating them in a disproportionate way, both in war zones and at home (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016; Amnesty International, 26 October 2016a; Amnesty International, 26 October 2016b). In the remainder of this final chapter, I will relate this conclusion to the academic and societal debate on terrorism and reflect on the contributions of this thesis. After that, I will provide suggestions for further research and recommendations for policy making.
The terrorism debate This thesis has built on the critical approach to the study of terrorism as promoted by Jackson et al. (2007). By following the theoretical and methodological premises of CDA, I have taken terrorism as a Foucauldian discourse and entangled the interrelatedness of language, action and power (Jäger & Maier 2009) within the French state’s response to the Paris attacks. I have reflected on the power over discourse (Jäger & Maier 2009) by investigating the framing strategies (Entman 1993) that Hollande (16 November 2015) applied to secure the terrorism frame. I have also reflected on the power of discourse (Jäger & Maier 2009) by analyzing the way in which the terrorism frame results in the use of repressive means to counter terrorism, as well as the practical effects for people’s lives. In this way, I have tried to denaturalize (Fairclough 1985) the French state’s discourse on terrorism. In doing so, I have tried to provide a response to the methodological gap within the critical study of terrorism. I have shown that the integration of the material realm into the critical discourse analysis is crucial to go beyond an analysis of words (Blommaert 2001), and to make the relation between language, action
61 and power explicit. This explication has formed the basis for the emancipatory aims (Wodak & Meyer 2009) of this critical discourse analysis, which has been to create awareness of the power relations that are underlying the French state’s discourse on terrorism, and the human suffering that results from that.
As such, the contribution of this thesis to the academic and public debate on terrorism is threefold. First of all, it exposes the continuity behind terrorist attacks and counterterrorism measures. The analysis of the speech has shown that the state’s interpretation of terrorism is linked to the counterterror policies that are adopted, and that it applies framing strategies to secure this representation. The constructed timelines of the war have provided an overview of the historical context in which terrorist attacks occur and military means are deployed; an overview that appears to be absent in many political and public debates on terrorism. The analysis of the national context has opened up a discussion on the national roots of radicalization and terrorism; a discussion that usually suffers from a moral threshold and is often avoided in political and public debates. On the basis of this, this thesis has made the broader societal structures visible, which contribute to the occurrence of terrorist attacks, and which are reinforced by the repressive response to terrorism.
Moreover, to see the continuity behind terrorist attacks and counterterrorism measures can help to calm down the fear that is caused by every new terrorist attack. The focus of many European state leaders and international news agencies on individual attacks contributes to the sensation of being overwhelmed by unforeseen outbreaks of violence. Instead, by understanding the historical context in which terrorist attacks take place, the terrorist threat becomes more tangible. This deconstruction of the dominant black-and-white turns the representation of terrorism into a “grey” story. As such, this thesis hopes to stimulate dialogue and introspection within the current tense and polarized public debate on terrorism (Giry 2006).
Finally, the lens of 1984 (Orwell 1950) has appeared to be a helpful tool for analyzing state discourses on terrorism. It has made visible how fear for a certain threat can lead to the adoption and approval of far reaching policies. In particular, it has helped to recognize and explicate the paradoxical way in which the use of repressive measures is legitimized by the French state as the only adequate response to terrorism. Moreover, it has helped to expose how this paradoxical legitimization tends to promote a sense of ignorance regarding a disproportionate exertion of state power for the sake of fighting terrorism. Although the situation in 1984 (Orwell 1950) is pushed to its extremes, it powerfully exposes the ultimate consequences and implications of state repression and creates awareness of both the potential and actual human rights violations resulting from the repressive tendency of counterterrorism policies. As such, the lens of 1984 (Orwell 1950) has been a crucial analytical tool for denaturalizing the use of repressive means to counter terrorism, which easily tends to be taken for granted in public debates.
However, this thesis has also shown an important shortcoming of this lens: while it helps to make state power visible, it does not include internal relations of power within the state. In 1984 (Orwell 1950), every citizen is seen as an equal potential threat to Oceania’s peaceful society, and is therefore equally exposed to forms of state repression. In contrast, the French state’s discourse on terrorism follows the idea that Muslims form ‘suspect communities’ (Kundnani 2012) in French society. This encourages the state to control Muslims, and subject them to repressive means, in a disproportionate way (Amnesty International, 4 February 2016). Yet, it is this unequal treatment of citizens that reinforces current societal processes of the marginalization and stigmatization of Muslims, thereby strengthening the breeding ground for radicalization (Lyons-Padilla et al. 2015). As such, the lens of 1984 (Orwell
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1950) does not cover an important factor for understanding the societal structures that lead to terrorism.
In addition, when applying a dystopian novel to a real life context, one should remain aware of the differences between the two. For example, the regime in 1984 (Orwell 1950) deliberately creates and maintains an external and internal threat in order to legitimize and secure its own power. It thereby stimulates a state of ignorance among its people in order to eradicate the potential for resistance. On the contrary, the threat from terrorism is not intentionally created by the French state; it is real and the state is enforced to respond. The resulting discourse has the effect of promoting a sense of ignorance regarding the use of repressive means, but this effect might not be precisely intended. It results from the search for effective means to protect France against future attacks. These nuances should not be lost out of sight.
Suggestions for future research Due to a limited scope this thesis has not been able to address all aspects of the French state’s discourse on terrorism. Therefore, it leaves some interesting questions and topics for future research. Most importantly, the analysis of the symbolical order is limited to one speech. Although there have been good reasons to highlight this particular text, the singular focus carries the risk of overemphasizing the repressive tendencies within the French state’s discourse on terrorism. As said, this speech was given in ‘the heat of the moment’, which might have encouraged Hollande (16 November 2015) to take a tough stand. As a consequence, the ‘softer’ aspects of the discourse are not included into the analysis, which might create a somewhat distorted picture of the French state’s efforts to counter terrorism (Hellmuth 2015). It would therefore be interesting to contrast the findings of this thesis to an analysis of ‘softer’ policies in order to investigate in which ways they do, and do not, support each other.
Moreover, the singular focus on the speech carries the risk of essentializing this text as a static representation of the French state’s discourse on terrorism. As a consequence, the development of the discourse over time might get lost out of sight. For example, this speech was presented in the aftermath of the Paris attacks. Although these attacks were interpreted as ‘game changers’ for France’s approach to terrorism (Reuters, 15 November 2015), they were not the first attacks taking place in France nor the last (BBC, 26 July 2016). As such, the discourse is both influenced by previous experiences and influences the future reaction. Moreover, terrorist attacks have not been confined to France, but happen in other European cities (and elsewhere) simultaneously. This leads to an exchange of statements between state leaders, on the basis of which certain ideas prevail and others are silenced. Furthermore, the discourse on terrorism is influenced by other events, and the discourses surrounding these events. For example, the presidential election campaign in France politicized the topic (NRC, 21 April 2017), while the election of Emmanuel Macron softened the polarized political debate a little bit (Reuters, 3 May 2017).
Taken together, the French state’s discourse on terrorism is determined by different actors and circumstances, within and outside France. As such, the historicity of the discourse influences the public experience of, and political reaction to, terrorist attacks. As stated by Carragee & Roefs (2004), the transformation of frames within a diversity of texts shows how meaning is continuously constructed and contested. It would therefore be interesting to investigate how the content of the French state’s discourse on terrorism, as well as the strategies applied to secure its dominance, develop over time and space, in interaction with its historical context. In this way, the historical positioning of
63 the discourse analysis in this thesis, which is focused on the material level, could be strengthened with the historical positioning on the ideational level.
Another issue, which this thesis has touched but not elaborated on, is the relation between public perceptions of Islam and the French state’s discourse on terrorism. This thesis has shown how the terrorism discourse results in a focus on Muslim migrants as the target of national anti-terror policies. Because terrorism is understood to be rooted within Islam, Muslim migrants are seen as ‘suspect communities’, which need to be monitored and controlled (Kundnani 2012). This belief that Islam carries a potential threat to European societies does not only emerge in relation to terrorism. It is a recurrent, so-called ‘Orientalist’, stereotype within academic and political discourses on European identity and its relation to other peoples and cultures in the world (Said 1978). These Orientalist stereotypes could be one of the reasons why the repressive reaction by the French state is so persistent, and being fortified after each new attack instead of being questioned (Jackson 2007a). It would therefore be interesting to investigate how public perceptions of terrorism are interwoven with public perceptions of Islam, Muslims and immigrants. As such, the awareness of these stereotypes could help to question the repressive reaction of the French state.
Policy recommendations This thesis has exposed that the French state’s response to the Paris attacks has not been effective, and might even be counterproductive, for countering the societal problem of terrorism. Although terrorism is a complex problem that is difficult to tackle, this thesis provides some starting points for policy makers to build on. Most importantly, the French state should focus less on the event, the occurrence of individual attacks, and more on the underlying structures, the cycles of aggression (Bueno Lacy et al., 17 June 2016) and radicalization (Adida et al., 14 January 2015), that are contributing to the attacks. In this way, besides tackling the symptoms on the short-term, it could strengthen its approach for the root causes on the long-term (Mucha 2017). This implies that the French state has to recognize its responsibility for the maintenance of these cycles of violence, both on the international and the national level. Instead of contributing to a ‘theatre of fear’ (De Graaf 2010), which is created by war rhetoric and the implementation of extreme emergency measures, such a deliberate and decisive approach neutralizes public fear and safeguards societal peace (Martijn 2015).
With regard to the international context, it will be evident that this thesis cannot provide a simple, straightforward solution to the war with Islamic State. Most importantly, this thesis suggests that the use of military means is not contributing to a structural solution to end the violence. This insight could form the basis for a reconsideration of the current approach. Moreover, what is needed for a structural approach is a deeper understanding of the local and international conditions that have led to the emergence of Islamic State; a study that goes beyond the scope of this thesis.
With regard to the national context, this thesis can be of more value. The approach to national counterterrorism policies should be twofold. First of all, the French state should invest in a long-term approach that focuses on the prevention of radicalization. An important step to break the cycle of radicalization would be to embrace the Muslim communities within France as an integral and equal part of French society, instead of pushing them away through policies with repressive and polarizing effects. This means that the social-economic position of Muslim migrants should be improved.
This could, for example, be achieved by developing structural social policy, which focuses on tackling discrimination and social inequality in relation to education, employment and political representation. There should be special attention for the youth and the creation of social chances for them to restore
64 their sense of purpose in life. In addition to this, the physical social segregation, as a consequence of the emergence of the Banlieues and similar suburbs in French cities, should be addressed in order to counter mutual distrust. The government should follow an active integration policy to integrate these so-called ‘parallel communities’ (Baker, in Bizina & Gray 2014) into French society, for example through housing policies (Philips 2009). Finally, the cultural gap between Muslims and other groups in France should be bridged in order to ‘demystify’ Islam (Giry 2006). The Ministry of Social Affairs could, for example, invest in public campaigns that stimulate mutual understanding and create awareness of racial stereotypes and prejudices. This could be integrated into education programs at schools and complemented with advertising on public broadcasting, social media and on the streets.
The second approach to national counterterrorism policies should focus on short-term measures that deal with deradicalization. An important way to counter radicalization among youngsters is the implementation of community based deradicalization programs, which have the aim of giving Muslim communities and mosques a central role in deradicalization (Mucha 2017). Local policy officers have called for the re-establishment of these kind of programs, which have been cut in order to finance the security services, while they have proven to be effective (Martijn 2015). Part of these programs is the development of counter narratives, which provide youngsters with alternative stories about their identity, self-esteem and sense of belonging. As such, they undermine the stories of the recruitment material from terrorist groups (Kruglanski, 28 October 2014). These counter narratives are most effective when they are spread digitally, focusing on the internet and social media (Torok, 29 January 2015), as well as through personal contact, for example in schools, mosques and prisons (Russell & Rafiq 2016).
65
Postface
20 April 2017 When we enter the theatre and take our reserved seats in one of the front rows, I can sense the excitement of the audience that fills up the room. Apparently, I am not the only person who has been looking forward to see Micha Wertheim again. He is my favorite Dutch comedian. A couple of months ago, we have watched his performance Somebody Else (Wertheim 2016). Tonight we are going to see the follow-up that is called Somewhere Else (Wertheim 2017). I immediately recognize the décor on stage: the writing desk, the record player and the bookcase stored with bottles of wine. Wertheim starts his performance where he has left the former. He likes to take his audience into cycles, in which ends appear to be beginnings and beginnings appear to be ends.
In an innovative and artistic way, he reflects on the process of making theatre, and builds an impressive story around that, appealing to the imagination of the audience. The theatre should not be a place for anger and social critique, he asserts. It should be a place where performer and audience together create and uphold an illusion, a theatrical reality, a moment of phantasy and relief, which challenges the outside world indirectly, just by being an expression of art (Zijp, 4 June 2017).
After the performance, we have a drink in the café of the theatre and chat about what we have seen. I have come to value this newly developed tradition of going to the theatre once in a while together with my parents, my boyfriend and one of our friends. While I am sipping my fresh mint tea, I take a quick look at my phone. Three seconds are enough to read the push notification that has been send out by the NOS:
“Police officers shut at Champs-Élysées: one dead, several injured” (NOS, 20 April 2017).
‘Will this affect the presidential elections in France?’, is the first thing that crosses my mind. I see my boyfriend reading the same words on his phone. We look into each other’s eyes for a moment. There are no words needed to reach an agreement: let’s not tell the others, before we mess up this cozy evening with tense discussions on politics, terrorism and Islam.
The next morning I am scanning the news about the attack. The NOS app opens with the headline: “France has become used to attacks” (NOS, 21 April 2017). I start to think to myself that this is perhaps the sad and cynical conclusion that should be drawn from yesterday night. Not only France, but I, and with me many more, am getting used to this kind of news (Groot, 20 December 2016). I remember how the Paris attacks one and a half year ago shocked me and encouraged me to follow the news all night. The uncomfortable idea that I might have become ignorant myself is now passing my mind. Most of the time, I prefer to fence myself off from this misery and take part in the play of my own life, creating my own little peaceful world in which everything seems to be fine. I realize that I am enabled to do this, because I am not hit by terrorist attacks, because I am not hit by bombs, because I am not suffering from discrimination. Maybe I am not that different from other people in this respect. Perhaps we need these little theatres to keep our heads up high and to continue working on the improvement of our society. Although it is not very likely that terrorist attacks will be banned somewhere in the near future, for the time being, each attack will be an important reminder of the suffering of people and the need to search for ways to help them.
66
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