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Terror as Strategy and Relational Process Charles Tilly* ABSTRACT Common explanations of terrorism, here illustrated by the work of Jessica Stern and of US State Department analysts, have two significant weaknesses. First, they homogenize terror, assuming that one type of person, group, or action accounts for most instances of its use. Second, they focus on dispositions and motives, decision logics, emotions, or cultural templates of terror-producing actors prior to their action. Adequate explanations of terror must repair these defects by a) looking systematically at variation among producers of terror and b) shifting the focus to relations among actors. Terror is a strategy employed by a wide variety of persons and groups, involving a substantial range of actions. Keywords: relational process, terror, violence
Harvard social science lecturer Jessica Stern has written a vivid first-person Iwas-there book called Terror in the Name of God. Stern recounts how after years as an expert on terrorism – the Council on Foreign Relations gave her the resounding title Superterrorism Fellow – she began seeking out religious terrorists and asking them detailed questions about their lives. She first interviewed terrorist Kerry Noble in 1998. Noble had by then served years in prison, convicted of conspiracy to possess unregistered weapons. During the early 1980s, he had risen to secondin-command of a militant Christian cult called the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA). The CSA hoped to speed the Messiah’s return to earth. They thought they could do so by overturning the US government, which had sold itself to the Antichrist in the forms of Jews, blacks, the United Nations, and the International Monetary Fund. CSA members called their enemy the Zionist Occupied Government, or ZOG. On 19 April 1985, federal and state agents laid siege to the weaponpacked 240-acre compound the cult had built in rural Arkansas. Three days later, after negotiations in which a widely known racist preacher mediated, the group’s military home guard surrendered. Kerry Noble became a federal captive. Thirteen years later, Stern met ex-convict Noble and his wife Kay at *
Columbia University, USA.
Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications www.sagepublications.com (London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi) Vol 46(1–2): 11–32. DOI: 10.1177/0020715205054468