Putting Mumbai in the modern era

(I precede these comments with the caveat that I'm still not entirely certain as yet of all the details my argument. So don't blame me if this is nonsense...)

It will be a while before anyone is likely to get to the bottom of the causes of this astonishing attack on residents of Mumbai and the world, a three day siege that has led to bloody and wasteful wreckage at several points across the city, and nearly 200 people dead. Prime Minister Singh has implicitly pointed the finger at Pakistan, but the veiled nature of his comments not only relates to the obvious strategic cost of raising tensions directly with the Pakistani government, but also reveals an awareness that the mechanics of radical Islamism on the other side of the Punjabi-Kashmiri border are murky to even those most intimately involved in them.

President Zardari has rightly condemned the attacks and persuasively argued that this is not something he or his allies would conscion. Yet it seems clear that the Pakistani state is far from unitary in its attitude about such matters. The problem for the new president is more about losing control of his own bureaucracy and military in any effort to clamp down on such activities, as it is about lack of capacity to do anything about radical Islamic fundamentalist teachings in his nation. The army of Pakistan is militarily strong enough to wage war on its border regions and wreak destruction in its wake, as Western governments seem well aware given their chidings and hectoring; but it's not clear that the fragile structure of the nation itself could withstand such action - something the West seems less concerned by, but which is a far more important issue.

But, despite this murky background to events, are there ways that we can start to fit these events into broader patterns of terroristic violence that have come to increasing prominence since the 1980s? Is it, for instance, reasonable to agree with the pessimists who argue that this kind of willful contempt for human life is a sign of the decay of social order and the inability of the modern world to contain the forces it has unleashed, a sign of the ending of the era of peace and stability that most in the West have come to enjoy in the second half of the twentieth century?

Well, a tentative yes to the first question, but I think perhaps a no to the second. Terroristic violence, particularly suicide terrorism, of which this brand of radical Islamism forms a part, is undoubtedly novel and distinctive. It differs from the state-centred violence that was typical of conflict for most of the modern era, and yet also the 'normal' kinds of non-political, non-state violence that unfortunately still remain common in our societies - mugging, murder, raping and so on. One of the great mistakes, I believe, that the Bush administration made in the aftermath of 9/11 was to think about Al Qaeda as a military and technical challenge, rather than a political one (in the belief that according explicit political status to Al Qaeda drew attention to its grievances and therefore somehow implicitly gave them additional credence).

But whilst representing a new form of political violence, terrorism of this kind is far less lethal or destructive than the kinds of violence that can be put into motion by the nation-state. Its power lies in its symbolic impact, not in its ability to directly damage the economies or infrastructure of the intended targets. In fact, as far as such movements have had state support at various points (and it appears that some have and some haven't), this has been in large part because they provide an effective way of states to further their interests without directly provoking the ire of a rival and risking the awesome destructive potential of a modern war.

In that sense, even when it aspires to world power, terroristic violence of this type - from the Baader-Meinhof gang to the Tamil Tigers to Al Qaeda to Lakshar-e-Taiba - operates as a politicised form of conflict at the margins of a world in which the nation state structure has solidified to an extent never seen before in history, a world where it is possible to draw a map of the planet's national borders and largely for them to be considered meaningful divisions rather than arbitrary lines on a piece of paper. The kind of Alsace-Lorraine-type disputes between nations typical of the last few hundred years are now surprisingly rare: even the mapping of the Indian-Pakistan border in Kashmir, which stands at the centre of this particular conflict, has attained an uneasy kind of permanence (due to the nuclear arsenals of both sides) that it didn't have in the first fifty years of South Asian independence. In short, terroristic violence exists at this time today precisely because it operates within a world where the nation-state structure has come to cover the globe, and where violence-oriented groups have to find other ways to express their discontent than taking part in nation-to-nation conflict.

In this sense, there is an interesting parallel between this kind of violence and the forms of social banditry that were endemic in certain kinds of modernising societies in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in Europe, and in the Americas and Asia up to the mid-nineteenth. They are both a politicised expression of group identity that use violence as a means of leverage, where 'outlaws' come to attain a degree of popular support amongst particular groups by combining their extra-legal (and in this case supra-national) activities with a political ideology of protest against the real or perceived injustices perpetrated by the existing authorities.

The biggest difference between the two phenomenon is that bandits were primarily inhabitants of the rural hinterland, the areas geographically distant from state power and therefore capable of supporting endemic protest; whilst this new phenomenon is primarily urban in focus (though rural regions such as Afghanistan and northern Pakistan clearly still provide crucial strategic value), and rely on a distance of political space and social hierarchy rather than geography to keep themselves away from state power. Banditry was a phenomenon that emerged when nations were consolidating control over their own regions. Terrorism comes about when that consolidation has been largely completed and the need instead is to influence stable state structures.

I'm still not entirely sure of all the implications of looking at terrorism in this way, though I think there are many. But for now it should suffice to point out that this view presents such violence not as an example of social disorderliness and the decay of the modern state, but a phenomenon stemming ironically from unparalleled levels of orderliness in our societies. It is a product of lowering the scale of violence from conflicts between powerful national units to groups who operate in the cracks between the nations: cracks that are getting ever smaller over time. Whatever their expectations and aspirations, this makes the political goals of terrorist movements inherently self-defeating. Whilst they may be able to produce meaningful effects through symbolic violence - perhaps breaking the will of one power to exert its dominance over a disputed region or people - they will not manage to collapse the system as a whole. In this sense, terrorists as a phenomenon, if not necessarily as individual groups, are already on the losing side of history.

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