“Crime takes the pulse of a culture: it tells us the truth about ourselves”.

Terrorism is the darkened ground where we grow our own monsters. Historically commentators on terrorism have likened it to mythical beasts – the hydra of carnage, the monster from the depths, the serpent of jihadism, the vengeful fire bearing figure who turns everything to ashes or to soulless machines that reflect the emptiness of modern life. Mythic images weave in and out of the clinically detached language of terrorism, counter terrorism, and intelligence operations. Geopolitics and rational actor theories of political violence get overlaid with stories of grievance and revenge, machismo and grief. 

As an analyst and academic with a background in geopolitics and terrorism studies, I have a wealth of data and case studies to draw from when analysing terrorism. It is the way I often write – a detached observer, an invisible presence with a disembodied voice like a spy conducting surveillance for operations I will have no part in. Or like a terrorist planning an attack and checking the exit routes in order to be long gone before the bomb explodes and the glass windows shatter.  

In my post graduate political science classes, I was taught to be detached, to observe the messiness of human behaviours as though they were microbes on a slide in a temperature controlled laboratory.  It is a strange thing to observe humans so that I can write about them for other humans to read about. Even stranger to do it from the perspective of a detached observer, located in some unnamed but academically acceptable distance on the horizon where I can use words like centering, privileging, and foregrounding the narrative as if that was the way human beings spoke to each other.  That is a political science that is starkly unpeopled, and produces linear, detached  explanations for what are profoundly raw human experiences. 

The tendency to swing wildly the other way and stuff personal narratives into everything is a strong one. Everything becomes personal and the events of history fade into the background like some painted stage curtain erased by the stage lights. Living in a time when the personal is so commodified poses its own dilemmas.  Every talk show, our relentless consumption of real lives on social media, the constant grazing for ‘emotions’ in every scenario reinforces the dominance of the personal. We swarm across the digital world consuming human pain with an unrelenting hunger and a pervasive contempt, snacking on trauma porn, replicating what are essentially snuff films into the endless hall of mirrors that lets us post our approval with hieroglyphs.  This is political science by crowd rule and what it produces is a political science that is isolating and disconnected from the architectures of power, belonging and meaning that make up our richly textured human history, 

The truth is I write about terrorism because, in its stories, stripped down and pulsating with human life, is embedded a blueprint for growing monsters and I want to understand where it came from, who created it.  Writers, and especially, teachers of writing, like to talk about the narrative arc or the epiphany in a story as a defining moment. The moment when the components of a story come together and it all makes sense. This is based on a comforting, if untruthful idea – that if we just had enough information we would make better choices. If we understand the whole story, we would be better people and do good things. Epiphanies set us free, except that outside of books and political science theories they rarely do. We might know, as human beings, that violence is wrong but we will still choose it. We might know that people, often people who had no grievance with us will be hurt, but we will go ahead and pick up the weapon, plant the bomb, storm the closed door.

Terrorism stalks political discourse and cultural landscapes like an elongated shadow, slicing through light and safety, generating fear and celebration in equal measures. And yet, could there be something else, an even more secret landscape submerged in the wound cultures and violent geographies that dominate us?  

Film noir movies begin with the scene of the crime, or at the very least, the discovery of the body. The crime is the beginning of a story, not its ending.  Through the story lines the whole sorry business of violence, betrayal and human frailty is illuminated and examined.  This sense of a deeper story, reflecting the darkest motives of the human experience and the crushing pressure of external forces, gives film noir its distinctive presence in cinema.  Terrorism is no different. It begins with an act of violence, explodes into public consciousness through the media, and then fades back into a mysterious shadowy landscape of perpetrators, investigators and hidden subcultures with their own lexicons and iconographies. 

I love film noir. I love its rain drenched streets, its terse dialogue, its relentless cynicism about human nature, and its tender heart for what makes us truly human. At its core, film noir is about the salvation that comes when we come face to face with the monster, in a place that Raymond Chandler described as “hollow and empty as the space between stars” and name it for what it is.

I hope to find that place and that is why I write about terrorism.