The Dictionary of Human Geography

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(Hewitt, 2001: see alsoexception, space of).

In addition, and making a distinction between

its own actions and those of those states, the

USA has identified selected states as ‘spon-

sors’ of international terrorism – notably

Iran, Syria and North Korea.

In both cases, non-state and state, ‘terror-

ism’ functions as what Mu ̈nkler (2005) calls a

‘term of exclusion’: its use is intended to ex-

clude specific acts of political violence from

the sphere of political legitimacy. It follows

that the public attribution of the term depends

on the successful mobilization ofimaginative

geographiesthat deny legitimacy (even hu-

manity) to those who perpetrate such acts of

violence (Coleman, 2004). But terrorism is

itself deeply invested in public acknowledge-

ment: it seeks to spread fear among a much

wider group than those who are its immediate,

physical objects of attack. It is thus a commu-

nicative strategy: ‘Terrorism is a form of war-

fare in which combat with weapons functions

as a drive wheel for the real combat with

images .. .The most important feature of the

recent wave of international terrorism is this

combination of violence with media presenta-

tion’ (Mu ̈nkler, 2005, pp. 111–12; see also

RETORT, 2005). Hannah (2006b, p. 627)

argues that fear has become such a powerful

international weapon in our late-modern world

because the threat of indiscriminate, indeter-

minate violence at once ‘acknowledges and

feeds off the modern biopolitical responsibility

of states’ to protect the welfare of their own

populations: in short, terrorism is now a biopo-

litial strategy (seebiopolitics, biopower).

Compared to mid-twentieth-century terror-

ism, the terrorist organizations that Mu ̈nkler,

Hannah and others have in mind have been

able to launch far more destructive attacks, to

act across far greater distances and to make far

larger political demands. The 2005Human

security reportcalculated that ‘significant’ inter-

national terrorist attacks increased from

seventeen in 1987 to more than 170 in 2003,

with a similarly clear, if uneven, upward trend

in numbers killed and wounded (but see

below). Terrorism continued at otherscales

too, and local and regional terrorist campaigns

continued to kill and maim victims around the

world: people inafrica,asia,europe and

South America had been living with terrorism

long before 11 September 2001, and domestic

terrorism in the USA also plainly pre-dates

9/11 (Nunn, 2007). But as in many other

fields, the closest analytical engagement of

human geography with terrorism was

prompted by the extraordinary reach of

al-Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center

and the Pentagon on 9/11, and subsequent

attacks by al-Qaeda and its affiliates around

the world (see figure). Three geographical re-

sponses can be distinguished:

(1) A more or less ‘popular’geographical

imaginarycast those responsible for ter-

rorist attacks outside any space of reason,

so that to try to explain their actions was

to exonerate them. No cause could jus-

tify such violence: the only response to

barbarians hammering at the gates of

civilizationwas to meet their violence

with greater violence. The cry was taken

up by others who dismissed any oppos-

ition to the enlarged powers of the secur-

ity state as itself a form of terrorism, and

who enlisted therhetoricof the ‘war on

terror’ as a means of legitimizing and

intensifying the apparatus of repression.

At its worst, this slid into an overtracism

that fanned the flames of hostility to

Arabs and Muslims in North America

and Europe. This geographical imagin-

ary conjured up a series of ‘wild spaces’,

‘their’ spaces where deviant others sup-

posedly scurried away in the interstices

and beyond the bounds of ‘our’ spaces

(cf. Coleman, 2004; Gregory, 2004b).

(2) An ‘expert’ or ‘managerial’ response

drew on geographical technologies

(that were also political technologies)

to profile, predict and manage the threat

of terrorism as an enduring mode of late-

modern government heavily invested in

logics of security. The emphasis

was on geographies ofriskassessment,

on geospatial data management and

modelling, and on the vulnerability of

biophysical and built environments to

terrorist attack (Cutter, Richardson and

Wilbanks, 2003; see also Sui, 2008).

This geographical imaginary worked to

transform ‘our’ spaces into ‘safe spaces’:

the domain of homeland security

(cf.Kaplan,2003).

(3) A more critical response was to map the

connections between ‘their’ spaces

and ‘our’ spaces, and to unsettle the

partitions between them. This involved

explorations of the changing political

and theological ideologies of terrorist

organizations, which often involved

locating potential targets within distinct-

ive geographical imaginaries (Hobbs,

2005); analyses of the relations between

material conditions, recruitment zones

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_T Final Proof page 748 31.3.2009 9:40pm Compositor Name: ARaju

TERRORISM