Should the Plymouth shooter be considered a terrorist?

For about a decade (at least) there has been a regular debate arising every time violent racist, misogynist killers take up arms and assert their political ideology through attacks against members the public. We have the “lone wolf” debate and analysis about “stochastic terrorism”. Public awareness of the inadequacy of “terrorism” and “extremism” as useful frameworks for understanding threats to public safety are so widespread that largely centrist popular cartoons have lampooned the tendency of these discourses to have a strong element of moralising the ethnicity of attackers (exonerating and exceptionalising white violence to individual actors while externalising political violence undertaken by black and brown people, or in the UK with respect to Irish people, as foreign, of a threat to the nation, and to bring nation state resources to bear against).

The broader conversation in the anglophone cultural sphere has held a cliché for many decades now that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”, even. I think none of these debates around what terrorism is or should be really address the central conceit of terrorism and extremism as modes for analysis because none of them really address the history and purpose of “extremist” analysis, and that’s why we keep cycling through these debates and unsatisfying clichés as ways of explaining away uncomfortable conflicts between what is and ought be.

Analysis of “terrorism” as such comes largely out national security (natsec) practice and scholarship. “Extremism” has a somewhat more recent expansion but a largely similar historical source in terms of where academic funding and research comes from. “Hate” is currently undergoing a similar sort of proliferation as its study and opposition is gradually becoming part of the security state.

One of the things that is well known among security experts but also widely elided is that security models are subjective. Security models are a set of answers to questions which underpin any security thinking:

• Who are our adversaries, and what are their capabilities?
• What assets and capabilities do we hold and want to protect?
• What is the environment we and our adversaries operate within?

Subjectivity, needs and wants are baked in to security, and the security model of the nation state is not the security model of the public. Analysis of terrorism and extremism are very much organised around the security of the nation state which funds it. For members of the public it might be considered a very serious security threat to put our children in harm’s way, but for the nation state it’s absolutely permissible to recruit a number of them specifically to put them in harms way while engaging with achieving security goals domestically in terms of policing or abroad in terms of mililitary applications. National security and public security may well align on things from time to time — liberal society accepts a certain amount of violent crime but terrorist attacks outside of “ordinary” parameters whatever those are on the civilian population threaten to undermine the reputation and perceived capacity of the nation state as a system to function and control its own territory and population. In this sense, the reason why a state built on institutionally and historically racist and sexist foundations may fail to immediately recognise incel violence, or the white nationalist attack on Jo Cox even, as terrorism becomes rather more obvious. The lack of a recognisable “foreignness” or exteriority to the nation state of these vile murderous behaviours becomes sufficient for the state to write it off as “conventional” violent crime. Despite the fact that many “Islamist” attackers in the UK have been born and bred here, it’s hardly controversial to note that citizenship in this country is highly racialised and prone to being stripped for people who are not white.

I’m laying this out in this way because in my opinion, it’s important to decouple the security goals we, the public, want collectively from the set of security goals driven by state interests, because the security goals we want are actually different to those goals motivated by state interests. It’s an important distinction to make because frequently enough in the aftermath of these incidents we see calls for the expansion of the security state in ways which have immediate negative effects on the security of members of the public (for instance expansion of surveillance, degredation of personal privacy rights, policing of benign personal ideological diversity, or even attacks on research focused on understanding terrorism!) We don’t need to keep having these conversations about what a terrorist really is if we set it aside as a mismatch in terms between us and the state, and start talking instead about what sort of measures are needed to address the root causes of these acts of violence at a community level, if we start building a model of public security which we are have a shared stake in.

As a hate researcher and as an anarchist, the distinction matters to me because despite being overwhelmingly opposed to violence as a general principle, I spend a lot of time trying to think about how to respond to and mitigate forms of violence which the state simply doesn’t care about (and never has) while my political beliefs are routinely represented as a threat to national security.