The politics of “political violence”: terrorism, violence and the political

The relationship between “terrorism” and “politics” is ambiguous and contested. While “terrorism” is almost universally defined as “political” violence, the “terrorism” label is also generating a de-politicisation of the “terrorists” by silencing the underlying causes of their violence and portraying the “terrorists” as “madmen”. As such, “terrorism” seems to both confirm and contest the “political” nature of violence. In this article, I explore how “terrorism” and “politics” co-constitute each other in the act of describing violence. Using the case of colonial Indochina and the labelling of the anti-colonial resistance movement as “terrorist”, I trace the ways in which “terrorism” forges the politically ab/normal. Rather than being purely excluded from politics, the “terrorists” are associated with three categories of abnormal politics: a “savage” form of politics, where violence takes the place of politics itself; a self-interested and opportunistic form of “politics”; and a “diseased” politics that has gone too far beyond the rational. To support these claims, I engage in an in-depth analysis of primary archives from the period. I follow recent interventions showing the long colonial genealogy of “terrorism” by focusing on an under-studied colonial context in order to reveal how “terrorism” shapes the space of the political.