Of Partisans and Paranoid Experts

Abstract

Beginning in the 1970s, terrorism became an object of contested expert knowledge. Fears over this moralized and loosely defined phenomenon emerged at the very moment that Western states achieved a certain monopoly over legitimate political violence. This politico-epistemological framing itself drew on postwar counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) that had enabled a shift from the figure of the allied partisan to the unconscionable terrorist. Terrorism as an object of knowledge thus fits within a longer story of Western military attempts—from late nineteenth-century colonialism through the early twentieth-century American revival of COIN in Iraq—to tame uncontrollable, asymmetrical threats in part by knowing them.