Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush may be dominating the media and our minds at the moment, but September 11, 2001, still has not passed. The danger is increasing, and every day we are a little less safe. What can the world of national governments do against international terrorism? What does it mean for us to live with it? In this month's du, a host of experts and experienced reporters present us with a variety of possible answers to these questions (as well as posing some questions of their own). Erhard Eppler attempts a definition of the phenomenon: What is terrorism? Who is a terrorist? In portraits of some of its best known practitioners, Wolfgang Sofsky and Navid Kermani give a face to terrorism and try to account for the motives and aims of the men and women whose psyches contain such abysmal depths. From within the mind of one of these, meanwhile, comes the testimony of Ahmad Omar Sayed Sheikh, main suspect in the kidnapping and murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Even into the world of narcotics and slave-trading, meanwhile, where political terror finds its economic expression, globalization has extended its tentacles. Jeffrey Goldberg visited the region where the Paraguayan, Brazilian and Argentine borders intersect, and discovered a stronghold of the Lebanese organization Hezbollah. But despite such internationalism, both in terrorism's methods and in its targets (which certainly include the globalized world as such, with its multicultural cosmopolitan citizens), the national state remains terrorism's prime enemy: in his report on security in official Berlin, Lukas Lessing tells us about the committee formed to protect the German nation from the perceived threat of attack following September 11, 2001. Meanwhile, back in Washington, Martin Kilian describes a far more ominous situation: in a flashback to George Orwell's Ministry of Fear, the American government is bowing to pressures to impose considerable restrictions on civil rights. Of course, elsewhere in the world the state has much more experience in the business of terrorism, having for long years been its chief practitioner: Nicholas Shakespeare takes us on a blood-chilling tour of Latin America's history.

In his genealogy of modern terrorism, from Abu Nidal, Carlos and Andreas Baader all the way to Osama bin Laden, the German expert Oliver Schröm gives us a look at the origins of this contemporary Hydra. Florian Rötzer, for his part, has investigated an indispensable component of terrorist activity, the media, into whose workings we are afforded another glimpse with a special du dossier of television stills, from Chechnya and other places nearer to home. Finally, Bruno Stevens gives us a morgue's gallery of portraits of victims from the streets of one of the world's oldest ongoing conflicts, Israel and Palestine. And we take stock of the US government's "war on terrorism" with a specially designed map of the world. There follows here a sample of readings from three of the main articles.

Lay religion, ideology, or method: what is terrorism? Erhard Eppler attempts a definition. Exercise your power to give something a name and you perform an act of interpretation and evaluation. And, once you evaluate, you are on the road to making decisions: indeed, evaluations very often anticipate decisions. Does terrorism exist, the way communism, anarchism, and anti-Semitism have existed - and still exist? The political science understanding of an "ism" involves the notion of an ideology, a construct of approval and rejection, of judgment and condemnation, of prejudice.

Reason tells us, however, that terrorism is not an ideology. It is a method. Terrorists may come from a variety of camps. The ideology of the Baader-Meinhof gang was entirely other than that of the Basque ETA, and bin Laden feels no particular connection with the IRA. So talk of "terrorism" as if it were a singular entity, and thus a unified foe to be confronted and defeated, is already off the mark. Terrorism is a way of exercising power by spreading fear. The twentieth century was unique in its experience of state-sponsored terrorism. When on the 30th of June, 1934, Hitler liquidated not only scores of members of the SA but also people who had nothing to do with this feud within Nazi ranks, such as the former Reichskanzler Schleicher and his wife, it was suddenly clear to Germans at large that no one was safe. And when Stalin had two-thirds of the members of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party executed, he effectively converted the state's monopoly on force into a monopoly on murder.

Individualists of death: Wolfgang Sofsky examines the psyche of the modern terrorist. Surely war has always been a laboratory of destruction, the site where new weapons are tried out and heretofore unknown murderous energies developed. But today's savage guerrilla is distinguished from traditional war among nations in a number of ways. Terrorist "war" does not involve states or cultures, nor is it waged by soldiers or irregulars. It is waged by people who under other circumstances would be known as bandits, or thieves. They know no such thing as a central committee or a chain of command. Many of the bands or militia divisions involved wage war entirely on their own account. They do not receive their pay from a government, but rather from a private warlord. Some are in the thrall of a charismatic leader, while others prefer to operate exclusively with their peers. They are motivated by the lust for booty, by boredom and hunger, occasionally by religious fanaticism, the thirst for revenge or the desire for adventure.This is not a war that takes place on an open battlefield; instead, it is waged in the town square, in the woods, at checkpoints, in front of embassies, at the pizzeria or in the middle of some of the world's greatest cities. The dividing line between war and peace, soldier and civilian, military action and crime has been erased. Violence has been privatized. The rules of engagement have been suspended. There are no conventions in effect. Extending national boundaries and defending ethnic identity do not interest the advance guard of this deregulated warfare. This new war does not aim to topple any particular social order. It is waged for its own sake, and because it feeds those who wage it. Peace would mean bankruptcy. War is life for these warriors, and their life is war.

Instrumentalized violence, or simply violence? Navid Kermani reflects on the latest turn in a savage philosophical tradition. Not only in their dimension, but also in their very essence did the attacks of September 11, 2001, differ from their predecessors in the history of terrorism. Killings carried out by the RAF, the PKK or the ETA, the Tamil Tigers, or the Egyptian Jihad were and always will be part of a political strategy, one that presupposes a certain allegiance before it proceeds to act. The relationship of these groups to violence is instrumental: that is, violence is a means to lend weight to specific demands. The aims of this sort of terrorism are identifiable and almost always correlate with the goal of achieving, defending, or altering some form of statehood. But September 11? Amid all the precipitous talk of a "declaration of war," no one has thought to say just who might have uttered such a declaration, nor at whom it might have been directed. At the USA, as a sovereign state? At the West? At Christianity? At capitalism?

Easily the most remarkable feature of September 11, and one that has yet to receive the study it deserves, is the fact that it dispensed entirely with an acknowledgment on the part of its authors. Indeed, Osama bin Laden, in a now notorious broadcast made on the eve of the first US attack on Afghanistan, ostentatiously avoided taking responsibility for the attacks. Instead he strove to give the impression that airplanes simply fly into American skyscrapers as a matter of course, a force of nature or an ineluctable curse. In one key sentence he predicted that Americans would now never again be able to live in security: and thus rendered himself and his organization, as well as the threat emanating from them, a metaphysical abstraction. Likewise, George W. Bush was to go on to speak of an "enemy without a face," and to orient his entire rhetorical campaign over the following weeks to repositioning himself, not as the representative of a particular state or organization, but rather as the agent of a general will, the will to freedom, the embodiment of good.

Even more acute has been the transformation of Osama bin Laden since the attacks, his negative apotheosis, his metamorphosis into a phantom. Without having published a single book, let alone manifesto, without indeed sketching even the roughest sort of doctrine or teaching, he has risen to become the anointed anti-American, the recipient of the concentrated will to resistance on the part of far more than "simply" the Islamic world.

Rent from its traditional moorings within the familiar logic of political violence, this newest brand of terrorism - that of New York, Djerba and Bali - is virtually impossible to combat because it has made itself as unpredictable as a shooting spree. The identities and biographies of its practitioners no longer provide any means of understanding or rationalizing their actions. These terrorists are no longer radicalized prols or brutalized refugees, but rather the sons and daughters of the assimilated burgeoisie in such places as Buenos Aires or Kuala Lumpur. They are the products of modernity, indeed of a postmodernity notorious for its stylish dismissal of all metanarratives and promises of redemption. And they are intent on restoring sense to their world, by any means necessary.

Published 2003-05-22