The New ‘New terrorism’?: Continuity and Change in Temporal Constructions of Violence in the US and UK

This article contrasts political discourse on the threat posed by terrorism today from the US and UK. Three arguments are made. First, there is significant overlap in the characterisation of today’s threat as more fragmented, more ideologically plural, less predictable, and potentially more dangerous than that which dominated the immediate post-9/11 period. Second, counterintuitively, this consistent framing of terrorism’s recent transformation is situated within two very different constructions of terrorism’s wider temporalities. In the UK, a model of historical discontinuity dominates in which today’s terrorism is seen as radically different from the violences of the twentieth century and of the post-9/11 period. In the US, in contrast, a model of historical cyclicity sees contemporary terrorism positioned as a return to much older violences including those associated with the Ku Klux Klan. Third, these differences highlight the considerable political significance of constructed temporalities around terrorism, with their capacity to (de-)emphasise ostensibly pertinent similarities and differences, and to legitimise or foreclose policy responses to this threat.