Studying Counter-Terrorism through a Comprehensive IR Approach. Interview with Mathias Delori and Christian Olsson

Mathias Delori (CERI, Sciences Po/CNRS) and Christian Olsson (REPI, Université Libre de Bruxelles) have recently coedited a volume entitled The French War on Terror: A Relational Approach to (Counter-)Terrorism (Routledge), in which the various chapters analyse the French war on terror, covering the French contributions to the US-led “war on terror” and the wars in the Sahel Region since 2013. Delori and Olsson answer our questions on what terrorism and counter-terrorism are, and how the book combines both qualitative and quantitative approaches to the study of this dual phenomenon. Read our interview below.

How do you define “terror”, or “terrorism”?

The contributors to this book all share a general skepticism about the notion of terrorism. Far from being a scientific concept describing a set of clearly identifiable empirical phenomena, it is primarily a disqualifying discursive means of accusation. More specifically, it enables punitive and preventive coercive measures against a political adversary via the routinisation of exceptional legislations and other extraordinary means. This usage of the word “terrorist”—often objectified by a plethora of official lists of political groups described as such—leads to tit-for-tat accusations. It is therefore difficult to endorse official terrorist lists in scientific discourse without becoming a willing or unwilling actor of the conflict itself. Reflexivity is thus called for when dealing with terrorism. This implies, amongst other things, showing “epistemological vigilance”, in Gaston Bachelard’s sense.1

A first way to implement this epistemological vigilance consists in following Emile Durkheim’s second rule of the sociological method, namely defining terrorism as objectively as possible by taking into consideration its “external characteristics” and, then, including “without exception or distinction, all the phenomena also having these same characteristics.”2 While this approach to terrorism might be heuristic in the study of domestic (counter)terrorism,3 it falls short in the analysis of transnational (counter)terrorism for a reason exposed by Bigo, Bonnefoy, Delori, Olsson, Tsoukala and Wasinski in Chapter 1 of this edited volume: transnational terrorists and those who wage wars against them often imitate each other. It is the case, typically, when they resort to unlawful war methods because they consider, sometimes rightfully, that the opponent does so. When such mimetic dynamics are at work, definitions of terrorism fall short because, then, everyone resorts to terrorism.

We, therefore, take a nominalistic approach. Following this approach, which pays attention to how social actors conceptualise the world, “terrorism”—with quotation marks—is the political violence defined as such by the hegemonic discourse in a given discursive context. In our case, the context is Europe and North America (as well as the regimes that they support in the Global South, and that they sometimes have themselves instated). “Terrorism”, following this definition, is sometimes in competition with the term “armed resistance”. This approach to “terrorism” does not, of course, mean that we deny the material reality of the clandestine political violence to which the term is often selectively applied. However, the term “terrorism”, and the way it is used, create a seemingly coherent reality from what are in fact heterogeneous practices.
Most reflexive specialists of terrorism have been sceptical about the interest of quantitative data on terrorism such as the famous Global Terrorism Dataset. As Delori, Egger, Magni-Berton and Varaine show in Chapter 2, this skepticism is legitimate if one conceives of terrorism as a set of practices whose contours we could objectively define. Yet there is no reason for such skepticism if one takes a nominalist approach, since those datasets draw upon the same bias as the hegemonic framing of terrorism in Europe and North-America. Hence, one advantage of this nominalistic approach is that it allows a dialogue between reflexive qualitative and quantitative studies of the determinants of terrorism.

So the least we can say is that defining terrorism is not straightforward… What about counter-terrorism?

We call “counter-terrorism” the set of policies which officially aim at fighting “terrorism”. In the context of this book, we are mainly focusing on the military, armed, and international (“interventionist”) modalities of counter-terrorism.

The authors share the view that strategic discernment is necessary to the fight against “terrorism”. Strategic discernment (not to be confused with either “strategic common sense” or “technostrategic language”) entails defining a political objective and reflecting on how best to achieve it. When it comes to counter-terrorism, the vagueness of the term makes strategic discernment difficult. Is the aim to fight against the violence of “terrorism” itself or is violence merely a means to counter (or advance) the political agenda of the groups labelled as “terrorist”? In the latter case, the objective is to counter a political agenda deemed worse than the reciprocal violence implied by the “war on terror”. It is however never admitted by counter-terrorist narratives that “terrorist attacks” in New York, Paris, or London might be but an acceptable consequence of the prior political military decision to counter the political agendas of the groups deemed responsible for these attacks.

One of the arguments of the book is that if the problem is the violence perpetrated by non-state actors rather than the political objectives they might be pursuing (controlling this or that country, applying this or that law, for example Sharia law, in a specific region etc.), then military interventions abroad are not only ineffective, but also counter-productive. Violence can in some cases be a means to a political objective, in spite of the ever-present difficulty of managing its consequences, but it can hardly be a means of conflict de-escalation. This does not mean that one should never intervene militarily abroad. There might be good political, economic, or humanitarian reasons for doing so in some cases. This is however a totally different debate that our book does not engage in.

Is there a specificity of the French war on terror, and if so, can you give us a brief outline of what makes the French contribution to this war on terror singular?

French officials have often suggested that France has avoided the mistakes previously made by the United States during the years 2000s. In Mali in 2013 and Iraq in 2014, for instance, president Hollande repeated that France intervenes at the request of the local governments and that the French forces strictly comply with international humanitarian law. This book challenges this rhetoric. In Iraq (after 2014) and Syria (2015), France did follow the US example, by opting for aerial warfare under US military command. In the Sahel, however, France has sought to reduce political and economic costs in two ways: by pushing regional African armies and governments to take responsibility, and by involving EU partners. This two-pronged policy of including other actors was part of a broader discourse of justification, one that underlined the fact that France wanted to be seen as intervening within a multilateral framework, rather than as a former colonial power. In Chapter 3 of our edited volume, Charbonneau, Debos, Olsson, and Wasinski show that until the recent coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, France continued to hold significant influence over the G5 Sahel Joint Force. However, because the integration of regional African armies proved more difficult than had been foreseen, the G5 Joint Force has largely failed. The French made the mistake of underestimating the fact that the region’s armies are as much part of the security problem as they are part of any possible solution.

It would be easy to conclude that the late militaristic turn of France’s counter-terrorist strategy would at least have saved France from repeating the Bush administration’s worst mistakes—especially in terms of the illiberal practices of torture and extraordinary renditions. However, this is not the case. In 2021, the NGO Disclose showed that France had failed to learn this lesson, by publishing information on the assistance France had provided to Sissi’s policy of extrajudicial assassinations. France had done this under the pretext of fighting Islamic terrorism. Against a backdrop of Rafales sales, French authorities signed a secret cooperation agreement with Egypt in 2016 to help the country track down presumed terrorists. In practice, however, France carried out aerial surveillance missions on behalf of the Egyptian security forces in the area, from the Libyan border to the Nile. French military personnel involved in this operation soon discovered that Egyptian security forces were using images produced by French reconnaissance aircraft to eliminate individuals who had no links whatsoever to clandestine political organisations—including people involved in smuggling operations from Libya. Despite critical voices that emerged from the military itself, the operation continued unabated, in the name of the common fight against terrorism. In Chapter 4, we reproduce an interview with an anonymous Disclose source, along with a commentary by Didier Bigo and Jean-Paul Hanon. All of these elements converge on a single main argument: that the sole significant specificity of the French “war on terror” is its anachronism, given that this military approach to counter-terrorism was adopted after France had been proven right in its criticism toward this very approach when implemented by the US after 2001.

While the main focus of this edited volume is on France’s overseas military interventions, Chapter 5 deals with the transformations of the French counter-terrorist criminal justice system. Can you explain why you considered it was important to include this chapter in the volume?

Indeed, while the focus of the book is on France’s overseas military interventions, Chapter 5, co-written by Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet and Antoine Mégie, deals with the transformations of the French counter-terrorist criminal justice system. We decided to include this aspect in our framework because these transformations are partly a consequence of the militarisation of France’s counter-terrorist and international strategy.
Moreover, the transformation of the French counter-terrorist criminal justice system has impacted the strategy of Jihadists in France. Indeed, the extreme severity of the sentences handed down has in turn influenced the strategy of clandestine violent groups operating in France, which have increasingly opted for suicide attacks.

This serves as a reminder of an important lesson in international political sociology: understanding terrorism and counter-terrorism, and their intrinsic relation, requires accounting for the enmeshment of internal and external dynamics. The transnational dimension cannot be overlooked

You write that “the authors share the conviction that it is possible to shed light on the (counter-)terrorist relationship through the use of various methods”. Would you mind sharing the various methodological approaches used in the contributions, and why they are relevant?

The approaches adopted in this book are both qualitative, based on case studies and narrative approaches, and quantitative, based on “large-N” statistical correlations. We have however not devised a “mixed-methods” approach that would have supposed an agreement of the authors on a specific articulation between its quantitative and qualitative dimensions. This would have implied tightly integrating these two methodological strands, which has not been done in the book. We rather pursue two parallel but not mutually exclusive methodological approaches to the same subject. The reason for the parallel combination rather than the mixing of qualitative and quantitative methods in this book is quite obvious. This is a collective work rather than a single-authored book. It gathers authors who share many things but who do not agree on everything, including from a methodological point of view. Some of our authors working with qualitative case studies remain critical of quantitative analyses and some of our quantitatively oriented scholars are not fully convinced of the possibility of generalisation from particular cases, the possibility of maintaining nomothetic ambitions in spite of the specialisation on one single study case.
Our authors however have more in common than what might oppose them. In particular, four commonalities stand out as crucial from the point of view of the long-term collaboration that made this collective book possible: 1) a critical stance toward contemporary military approaches to terrorism; 2) an agreement that in a world of limited cases of “global wars on terror”, multiple case studies do allow for a certain degree of generalisation; 3) the view that quantitative databases of terrorist attacks do not measure a pre-existing type of political violence, but rather what is considered by the “measurer” as a pre-existing type of political violence, and thus something that is important when trying to think of the relation between “terrorism” and “counter-terrorism”, even when this is done from a reflexive (or even post-structuralist) point of view; and 4) a non-essentialist and reflexive approach toward the concept of terrorism.

Overall, therefore, this book adopts a pluralistic but coherent approach toward the combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, yet it refrains from building a too constraining “mixed-methods approach” that would have required erasing existing epistemological and methodological differences between our authors. To put it differently, we strike a balance between methodological coherence in the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods on the one hand, and the necessary recognition of the methodological pluralism, rather than monolithism, of the collective formed by the authors of this book.

Interview by Miriam Périer, CERI.

Illustrations
Photo 1: Operation Barkhane, Mali, December 2015_by Fred Marie for Shutterstock
Photo 2: Monument in Paris, Texas, United States, October 2024. Photo by  Jeff Morgan for Shutterstock
Photo 3: French Army anti-terrorist patrol in Le Touquet, France, 21 August 2018. Photo by MG White for Shutterstock

• 1. Bachelard G., La formation de l'esprit scientifique. Contribution à une psychanalyse de la connaissance objective, Paris, Vrin, 1938.
• 2. Durkheim E., Les règles de la méthode sociologique, Paris, PUF, 2005 (1895), p. 35.
• 3. Audigier F., X. Crettiez et I. Sommier, Violences politiques en France, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2021.