Terrorism, counter-terrorism, and mimetic rivalry. Interview with Mathias Delori
In his recent book La guerre contre le terrorisme comme rivalité mimétique, published by Peter Lang, Mathias Delori, a political scientist at the CERI (Sciences Po, Center for International Studies, CNRS) examines the conceptual categories that encompass the notions of terrorism and counter-terrorism, their relevance for thinking about and understanding these phenomena, and their impact. Based on a socio-historical investigation involving archive research and interviews, Mathias Delori analyses how supporters of armed jihad and the global war on terror have constructed a world that has made an escalation of violence possible. Read our interview.
In an earlier interview you stressed the difficulty of defining terrorism, which you said could not be considered a sociological concept. Could you tell us how you went about defining terrorism and studying its forms in this book?
There are academic definitions of terrorism. For Raymond Aron, any act of violence whose “psychological effects are out of proportion to its purely physical result” is labelled terrorist. The sociologist Isabelle Sommier refined this definition by suggesting that armed groups can produce such effects by creating a “disjunction” between the victims, often civilians, and the target, namely the state. These definitions are useful for describing and understanding certain phenomena of domestic political violence, especially when liberal states refrain from resorting to exceptional counter-terrorism policies, thus creating a clear demarcation between terrorism and counter-terrorism (...)
