Nice. Istanbul. Brussels. As the world is shocked by one terrorist attack after another, the European Union lurches precipitously towards total disintegration, and various populist parties seem to be gaining traction the world over, one cannot help but feel that our little planet has become a slightly more terrifying—and certainly more uncertain—place than it was even two decades ago. In Liberal Terror, Brad Evans provocatively unpacks this complex terrain of post-9/11 global (in)security and fear by scrutinizing the aspects of liberal order which make it particularly susceptible to terror—and, in Evans’ view, actually propagate it.
It can seem difficult to disagree with Evans when he claims that terror has become a central element of our twenty-first-century reality. Living in an age of utter uncertainty, in which the only thing that has become totally certain is the inevitability of future attacks, terror becomes “a distorted mirror image of the vision of peace it continually haunts. It turns strengths into weaknesses, freedoms into vulnerabilities, optimisms into despair, hopes into fears, and the means of production into the means of destruction” (p. 14). Leaning heavily on a tradition of continental thought, with ample reference to scholars such as Foucault, Deleuze, Bauman, Baudrillard, Hardt and Negri, and Virilio, Evans argues that modern terror has become a “bio-political” system of global security trapped by its own inherent contradictions. The bulk of his critique is directed at the downsides of liberal internationalism, especially liberal interventionism, which, in his view, has its origins in Kant's “onto-theological” framing of the perpetual peace as a constant struggle against evil (p. 110). This neo-Kantian desire for a liberal peace is then interpreted as having created a dangerous thirst for perfect security, which paradoxically alienates others and propagates insecurity and terror.
Part of the formula is the considerable influence posed by the global media, and by the information communication technologies which allow for terror to become, for the first time in both a theoretical and visceral way, truly virtual. Evans proclaims that “we have never been so dangerous” (p. 86), because the actions of a small number of individuals (lone-wolf terrorists for example) have become more visible than ever before (if nothing else, they are likely to be captured by raw cell phone footage and spread widely online to be seen by millions). To borrow a Castellian turn of phrase, the “live, global media moment” (p. 23) described by Evans can create a sort of mass self-communication of terror that makes us all unconscious participants in war and its ilk.
This argument still seems applicable today, largely due to the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS) and its global network of lone-wolves radicalized by the group's sophisticated online presence and fueled by an anger that stems at least in part from a variety of problematic Western interventions, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, the organization has evolved to become a planetary specter, casting its shadow from Jakarta to Jacksonville. It is no longer a problem simply confined to Europe, as government officials in Malaysia and Indonesia would be quick to attest—having had to scramble to halt the flow of fighters trying to leave for Syria, while simultaneously trying to prevent future attacks on their own soil. The case of ISIS demonstrates the mediated nature of the new global terror, the effects of which are highly applicable for the East Asian subcontinent.
Unfortunately, Evans deals with these effects only briefly, and his analysis leaves one wondering if they might not be overstated. Is it not possible that the very same forces which allow for terror to be propagated in the virtual realm, also allow for its refutation? Do images of suffering always create fear, or do they provide opportunities for new forms of global empathy? (One only has to think of the heart-rending image of Alan Kurdi washed up on a beach to see how an image can catalyze a positive emotional response.) Furthermore, what are the implications of a media environment in which instances of terror only capture the attention for a brief second? What are the implications of what one might call the ‘global media non-event,’ any one of the countless tidbits of gossip and other related trivialities which dominate our everyday lives? As we hover our cursors over a link for a moment, and register briefly that another terrorist attack occurred somewhere far away, do we sit transfixed and terrified, or do we turn back to our cat photos and other day-to-day monotonies? While the dark, dystopian style in which Liberal Terror is written makes Evans’ argument powerful and dramatic, the author does not seem to consider the extent to which the average person living in the West is largely insulated from terror.
Where terror is directly felt is places like Yemen, where American drones hover silently and rain death at will; in places like Iraq and Syria, where order has evaporated and people are incessantly bombed by their own government (one which is still haltingly supported by the West); and in places like Palestine, where billions of dollars in Western money have fueled an increasingly intractable conflict. Surprisingly, a book titled Liberal Terror does not engage with these effects, but rather focuses predominantly on the ways in which the apparent follies of Western liberalism are refracted back upon the lives of Western liberals. But by doing so, it provides an incomplete account of twenty-first-century insecurity, and misses its full potential as a work of global relevance—a book as applicable to East Asia or East Africa as it is to North America.
