7º Encontro Nacional da ABRI: Atores e Agendas: Interconexões, Desafios e Oportunidades 23 a 26 de julho de 2019, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Belo Horizonte – MG Segurança Internacional, Estudos Estratégicos e Política de Defesa HOMEGROWN “NARCO-TERRORISM”: READING THE “PARIS ATTACKS” (2015) Gabriel Gama de Oliveira Brasilino Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro Abstract: This text is the result of my master’s dissertation, a discursive analysis of contemporary terrorist violence in France. As implicit in the title, I make two central claims: terrorism has its origins also in France/Europe, and not only outside their borders, as some have argued, hence it is a kind of ‘homegrown’ terrorism. Secondly, homegrown terrorism is related to drug abuse, drug-crimes, and drugs-prohibition in several ways, thus I call it ‘homegrown narco-terrorism’. Based on Lene Hansen’s post-structuralist research design developed in “Security as Practice” (2006), I chose to focus the analysis on one single event: the “Paris Attacks” of November 13, 2015, where 130 people were killed in acts of suicide bombing and mass shooting. On the other hand, I focused on several discourses, like politicians’, journalists’, scholars’, rappers’, survivors’ and first respondents’ (as presented in a film-documentary). Although this event cannot be said to represent terrorist violence in France and/or Western Europe, I do make some generalizations and relate the terrorist “attacks” to the wider international political context and debate. In sum, I present a marginal genealogical description of the “Paris Attacks”: the event, the subjects, and the discourses that circulated in mainstream media, institutions, academia, and other cultural representations of it (“terrorism”) and responses to it (anti-“terrorism”). This is not a genealogy of narco-terrorism, but genealogical descriptions helped to unveil and deconstruct current supposedly homogeneous identities and hegemonic (foreign) security policies. The argument is that narco-terrorism is discursively constructed as an antagonistic ‘Other’, the ultimate threat to international peace and security, an enemy to be destructed. However, the effects of those (inter)national security discourses, deeply dependent on war language, have not produced more security, but insecurity; thus, reinforcing the cycle of political violence, including terrorism(s) and war(s). Keywords: terrorism, drugs, France Introduction This text is a reduced version of my master’s dissertation, a discursive analysis of what has been called “the Paris Attacks” in mainstream media. Generally speaking, it is a discursive analysis of contemporary terrorism and counter-terrorism in France, of the context and wider political debate in which that event took place. By discursive analysis I mean Foucault’s discourse analysis, the method and epistemological position, as presented by the French philosopher in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France – The Order of Discourse, in the English translation (FOUCAULT, 1981). In that lecture, as well as in his Archeology of Knowledge (FOUCAULT, 1971), Foucault explained his concept of “discourse”, his historical method, “archeology”, a word he would stop using, and replace, or at least combine with “genealogy”, a critical and genealogical description of the dominant discourse(s) of the present time. In recent times, Foucault has become an often-quoted philosopher in critical international security studies (CAMPBEL, 1998; DER DERIAN & SHAPIRO, 1989; DOTY, 2003; GRAYSON, 2008; JACKSON, 2005; HANSEN, 2006; among others). Lene Hansen (2006), in particular, was fundamental for my dissertation, because she developed an intertextual research design based in Foucault’s discourse analysis. In sum, Hansen’s research design is composed by three intertextual models; the number of Selves, or discursive agents/subjects; the temporal perspective, and the number of events. Following Hansen’s methodology, I decided to base my dissertation in the analysis of one single event, “the Paris Attacks” (2015). According to Hansen, this analysis should identify the basic discourse(s) of the foreign policy debate under study, “and basic discourses are often centered around representations of identities with particular conceptual histories” (HANSEN, 2006, p. 70). In other words, “the discourses of the Self are trying to stabilize the Self’s identity”, although it is “an inherently unstable and often contested project”, (re)produced in foreign policy discourses, and re-articulated by competing ones, which can achieve a greater magnitude when the Self is not a national but a regional or civilizational one, such as ‘the West’ (p. 69), or the ‘International Community’. This dissertation has identified, for instance, that the basic foreign policy discourse related to contemporary homegrown ‘narco-terrorism’ in Western Europe, and the “Paris Attacks” in particular, has been constructed by one of the discursive agents as “fighting terrorism in the Middle East” (HOLLANDE, 2015). Second, choosing one single event, “the Paris Attacks”, already established the temporal perspective: contemporaneity, although genealogical descriptions allowed me to expand that perspective back and onwards, providing detailed insights on the 3 structures of contemporary identities, how some of their particular aspects are deeply rooted, and “how previously important representations have been silenced and written out of the discourse of the present”, arguing that “present ‘objective’ identities are in fact contested, contestable, and hence politically decided” (HANSEN, 2006, p. 70-71). Third, in relation to the discursive agents, they are connected to the intertextual models. Considering that I wanted to analyze the ‘official’ discourse, that brought me to mobilize Hansen’s Model 1, but I also wanted to analyze media coverage (Model 2), as well as cultural representations of the event and the context – Netflix’s film documentary November 13: attack on Paris, and Keny Arkana’s rap music album État d’Urgence – (Model 3A), and marginal political discourses such as academic interpretations of the concept and phenomenon of ‘drugs’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘counter- terrorism’ (Model 3B). So, who are the ‘Selves’ and the ‘Others’? If we say the “terrorists” are the ‘Others’, then who is the Self? The victims? French civilians? Is it France, the Nation-State, and its republican principles and values? What is the political effect of declaring that the ‘Other’ grew up in France and Belgium? That the ‘Other’ lives in the Self at home? The boundaries between self and other get blurred. As the description of the event will show, substantial political questions could be raised about the current (foreign) security policy in France. For example: ‘What happened in Paris on November 13, 2015?’ ‘Who are the “attackers” and their victims?’ ‘What is their connection to the Islamic State in Syria’ (ISIS), and ‘Where does ISIS come from?’ ‘What about (French) State terrorism?’ ‘What are the intersections between ‘drugs’ and ‘terrorism’’? Those are relevant questions for both IR Theory and international politics, but there are limitations for this project to answer all of them. Actually, the goal of the dissertation was not to answer but to add more questions and reflections to the current debate on contemporary terrorism in Europe. It was concerned about the link between homegrown (jihadist) ‘terrorism’ and drug (ab)use, on the one hand, and drug prohibition and ‘war on drugs’, on the other, regarding the case of the “Paris Attacks”. Beyond the case-study, there are multiple and heterogeneous intersections among discursive formations on drugs, drug abuse, drug trafficking, and contemporary terrorism. First, there are those who have committed acts of terrorist violence under the effect of psychoactive substances, including in “the Paris Attacks”. Second, those who have committed drug-related petty and/or violent crimes, being in jail for a period (or not), and, then, recruited in a process of radicalization, jumping into terrorist action or simply expressing the intention to do so, which is extremely complicated from the point 4 of view terrorism prevention policies/politics. Third, those who use the routes used by those fleeing the trauma of civil war and state terrorism (in Syria for example), to trade ‘drugs’ and/or to enter Europe and perpetrate acts of terror. Those are facts, in need of interpretation, but the dominant discourse on terrorism complicates rather than helps to solve the political puzzles in that subject-matter, because it (re)produces orientalist, juridical-moralist, and biopolitical-hygienist stereotypes (DEL OLMO, 1990), it reinforces and normalizes the security dispositive against the subjects and subjectivities associated with those stereotypes, as if all drug addicts/dealers, especially the ones from “non-European cultures” (VAN HOUT et al., 2016), were potential terrorists. Taking one step back, ‘drugs’ and ‘drug-addiction’ “are nothing but normative concepts, institutional evaluations or prescriptions”, suggested the French philosopher of language Jacques Derrida (1991, p. 1) in an interview on the rhetoric of drugs. Whenever we say ‘drugs’ and ‘drug addiction’ and we could add ‘terrorism’ and ‘narco- terrorism’ here, they are embedded in that institutionalized, prohibitionist, and moralist meaning (DERRIDA, 1991). In this sense, by adding the word ‘narcos’ to the concept of terrorism, it is the history of drugs and drugs-prohibition that is referred