The United States of America: Counterterrorism pre-9/11

Since the attacks of 9/11, political, public, media and academic focus on terrorism and counter-terrorism has proliferated. According to Crenshaw (2004, p. 82), ‘[t]he attacks of September 11 propelled terrorism from obscurity to prominence in the wider field of international relations and foreign and security policy,’ adding that ‘[s]cholars who had previously ignored terrorism now acknowledged it as a major national security concern’. According to Silke (2008, p. 47), prior to 9/11, the study of terrorism was peripheral in academia, but ‘[s]ince the terrorist attacks of 9/11, interest in – and funding for – terrorism related research has increased enormously’. Yet, he argues that there has been an over-emphasis on al-Qaeda and a lack of historical research (Silke, 2009). In fact, when 9/11 occurred it became difficult for many to remember a time when it was someone other than a Muslim perpetrator. In addition to this, much literature, media attention and counter-terrorism since 9/11 has focused on international terrorism and foreign actors, sources and threats, as opposed to domestic ones. The events of 9/11 not only served to determine the terms of terrorism and counter-terrorism, but also overwrote, if not erased, the collective and institutional memory of pre-9/11 terrorism. According to Singh (2003, p. 52), 9/11 ‘heralded a dangerous and unprecedented chapter in the “American experiment”. 9/11 represented the end of what remained of America’s post-1991 innocence about the severity of global threats’. Former Director of the CIA R. James Woolsey (2002, p. v) argued that ‘[i]f the world did not change on September 11, 2001, at least most people’s perception of it did’.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Routledge Handbook of Terrorism and Counterterrorism on 03/09/2018, available online: https://www.routledge.com/9781315744636