Fear and the future

Citation

Blackman, C. (2005), "Fear and the future", Foresight, Vol. 7 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/fs.2005.27307aaa.001

Fear and the future

A year ago I wrote that the then forthcoming US Presidential election ought to be seen as a referendum on the Republican’s vision of a new American Global Empire (Blackman, 2003). Although it would seem that the majority endorsed this vision, nevertheless after the election, the USA seems to be very much a divided nation. Even so, George W. Bush’s second term is unlikely to be conciliatory. Rather he has spoken about “spending political capital” – which seems like code for stepping up the war on terror and going further in terms of “bringing democracy” to those states seen as threats.

Two articles in this issue take different approaches to the topic of terrorism. Matthew Harrison applies the literature on strategic management to al-Qaeda, analysing it as a learning organisation. Harrison disregards the militant activities of al-Qaeda to focus clearly on the management strategies it employs. He concludes that al-Qaeda exhibits many of the characteristics of conventional transnational organisations – predicated on a vision, reinforced by the organisation’s leaders, which serves to motivate others; an identity built on stories of success in the struggle for furthering its purpose; configured in a way to foster entrepreneurism with a view to devolving decision-making and action-taking; and a multi-cellular structure and use of communications technologies to overcome distance and inhibitive cost barriers.

An alternative approach is proposed by Richard Pech and Bret Slade in their article on “imitative terrorism”. They believe that many acts of terrorism are rooted in mimicry of acts of violence. They argue that terrorist copying behaviours can be reduced through the concept of memetic engineering – the altering of the message that motivates terrorists and the copying of their violent activities.

These are both interesting viewpoints, but they should be contrasted with Jason Burke’s reading of al-Qaeda in his recent book (Burke, 2004). Burke (2004) finds no evidence to support the idea of al-Qaeda as an organisation with a unified command structure operating through a linked international network of cells. The real success of Osama bin Laden, in Burke’s view, is to have changed the perception of Islamic fundamentalism among young Muslims. No longer are the extremists seen as the “lunatic fringe”:

… their language is now the dominant discourse in modern Islamic activism. Their debased, violent, nihilistic, anti-rational millenarianism has become the standard ideology aspired to by angry young Muslim men. This is the genuine victory of bin Laden and our greatest defeat in the “war on terror” (Burke, 2003).

This interpretation resonates with Pech and Slade. However, a recent three-part documentary produced by Adam Curtis, shown on BBC television, went much further in attempting to understand the terrorist threat[1]. Curtis argues that the idea that we are threatened by a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. Instead, the American neo-conservatives and the radical Islamists, both idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world, have created the nightmare vision of an organised network of terror because it suits both groups.

Notes1. The Power of Nightmares, a three part series produced by Adam Curtis was broadcast on BBC2 in October/November 2004. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3755686.stm

Colin Blackman