Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson

I'm a political theorist who studies how important phenomena in our political culture are actualized in political practices, movements, and institutions, and what effects they have on these practices, movements, and institutions. For the past two decades, I have primarily written about terrorism—why we talk about it the way we do, what practices and apparatuses of power it enables, and what ways of living it makes possible. 

My first book, Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Terror, Empire (Columbia University Press, 2018), problematized ostensibly obvious assumptions about terrorism in the immediate post-9/11 moment. I was interested in what charges of terrorism did politically, rather than what terrorism really was and how we should best define it. Based on archival research about post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism, French counterterrorism during the Algerian Revolution, the Russian revolutionary movement, and the upheavals of the French Revolution, a pattern emerged which indicated that terrorism has functioned since the late eighteenth century as a mechanism of social defense that justified the use of the sovereign right to kill in the name of human life. 

My current project tries to make sense of the current conceptual and political morass around questions of terrorism. In the last year alone, the U.S. government called for antifa and Black Lives Matter to be treated as terrorist organizations, accused Tesla protestors and students activists of terrorism, and considered designating the Democratic Party a terrorist organization. All the while, masked federal agents in tactical gear and without identification brutalize and kill the people they are sworn to serve. They justify their actions by denouncing protesters against such violence as domestic terrorists. Building on Black insurgent critiques of terrorism, which exposed the political function of official terrorism discourse as a sanitizer and enabler of state terror, the book examines how a way of governing by terror that was long deemed appropriate came to be considered, in the late eighteenth century, a threat to government—and how that change distorts our thinking about terrorism to this day.