Intellectual History of Terror

<p>This book investigates terrorism and anti-terrorism as related and interacting phenomena undertaking a simultaneous reading of terrorist and statist ideologists in order to reconstruct the ‘deadly dialogue’ between them.</p><p>This work investigates an extensive array of violent phenomena and actors trying to broaden the scope and ambition of the history of terrorism studies. It combines an extensive reading of state and terrorist discourse from various sources with theorizing of modernity’s political institutional and ideological development forms of violence and its guiding images of self and other order and disorder. Chapters explore groups of actors (terrorists pirates partisans anarchists Islamists neo-Nazis revolutionaries soldiers politicians scholars) as well as a broad empirical source material and combine them into a narrative of how our ideas and concepts of state terrorism order disorder territory violence and others came about and influence the struggle between the modern state and its challengers. The main focus is on how the state and its challengers have conceptualized and legitimated themselves defended their existence and most importantly their violence. In doing so the book situates terrorism and anti-terrorism within modernity’s grander history of state war ideology and violence.</p><p>This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies political violence sociology philosophy and Security Studies/IR in genera</p><p><strong>Mikkel Thorup</strong> is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and the History of Ideas University of Aarhus Denmark. </p>