EMERGING TRENDS IN UNDERSTANDING TERRORISM: POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITS

This paper seeks to look into a host of studies in the realm of literary scholarship and socio-cultural study on violence and terrorism to understand how the contemporary paradigm of terrorism is being constructed. The attack on World Trade Center, New York, USA on September, 2001 and its ten-year anniversary has been used as a point of reference because apart from ushering a new phase in the world politics, it also renewed critical interest about the nature and origin of terror, and the reasons behind acts of terrorism. Most of these studies seek to generate sustainable insights about the phenomenon of terrorism in order to bring about a resolution to the problems that leads to acts of extreme violence. But this paper intends to argue that many of these social – cultural and literary studies are premised on universalizing notions of terrorism. In some of these literary scholarships where a vast array of fictions on terrorism are chosen and careful attention is paid to their authors terrorists and novelists are seen as agents of revolutionary change who actualize and fictionalize spectacular acts of violence to change an unjust social order. Studies in socio-political fields on the other hand are premised on the notion that terrorism manifests an opposition to Western conditions of modernity and originates in failure to communicate in a shared language. While this paper acknowledges the copious information these studies offer on the past and present of terrorism, it also argues that their ultimate assumptions about the nature and origin of terrorism rest on broad universalizing conceptions. The romanticization of terrorists and novelists as agents of change, or categorization of terrorism as the opponent of modernity and contemporary dialogue overlooks the specific contexts and history of conflicts across the globe. This paper intends to foreground that instead of universal grand narrative, attention to emerging micro narratives of conflict would bring about a more sustainable understanding of terrorism and help resolve the conflict in question.