Terrorism: Shifting Paradigms

This subject examines the various dimensions of terrorism and its manifestations. This includes the nation state's capacity to authorise and to create the conditions for the practices known as terrorism. In this subject we interrogate the role of the nation state and the rhetoric/s of anti-terrorism that both produce and contain acts known as terrorism. We look at the psychology of both the nation state and the terrorist through different analytical approaches. To this end we examine the function of different terrorist acts - including suicide bombing in New York and Israel/Palestine, assassinations and bombings in Northern Ireland and England, mass shootings such as by white supremacists and Incels, and practices of state terror in the context of acts of genocide, counter-terrorism including the U.S. drone assassination program and torture. All of these examinations are used to assist in trying to think about a new way of conceptualising violence performed by the state, the individual and the group.

• 1Identify and analyse social, political and psychological processes involved in the rise, transformation and decomposition of different terrorist movements
• 2Analyse the relationship between types of terrorism and wider patterns of social, cultural and political change, in particular contemporary globalisation
• 3Use psychoanalytic, political and socio-legal frameworks to analyse responses to terrorism
• 4Demonstrate an ability to use political theory to critically explore primary source material developed by terrorist groups and/or the nation state
• 5Use political or psychoanalytic theory to explore the relationship between objective and subjective dimensions of contemporary forms of terrorism.