Al Qaeda and the reinvention of terrorism: social sciences and the challenge of post-globalization transnational political violence: Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou

Abstract

Upon its emergence in the mid to late 1980s, al Qaeda ushered in a new phase in the history of terrorism. Over the next quarter of a century, the group formed by Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al Dhawahiri would come to represent the most significant threat to international security, having also conducted the most ambitious attack in the history of terrorism, targeting the United States (US) on its own soil in September 2001. The rapid acquisition of power by this Islamist group – initially set up in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of that country – and the global projection of its political violence mark a historical shift and represent a consequential illustration of terrorism of the transnational mode. Whether through the succession of waves or the accumulation of ages, the history of international terrorism had essentially come to a standstill by the early 1980s. By then, the world had come to experience the contemporary era successive terroristic campaigns of anarchists and nihilists, nationalists, radical leftists, and religious groups. For all their many qualitative differences, these variegated incarnations of the modern terrorist shared two fundamental characteristics: (i) a field of activity by and large centred on or springing from one main contiguous territory, and (ii) a reactive purview on the use of violence that ultimately depended more on the initiative of the state authority they were battling than their own.1 In other words, delineated territoriality and dependent potency had set the boundaries of how terrorism had been manifested internationally over some one hundred and twenty years since the mid-1860s. Per such foundational matrix, Russian students targeted the Czar and his entourage; Algerian nationalists attacked French colonial soldiery and settlers; German and Italian revolutionary youth threatened their respective governments and societies; and Christian, Muslim, and Jewish militants in different settings visited indiscriminate violence on those regarded as infidels or enemies of their respective faiths.