Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson

I'm a political theorist whose research focuses on one of the most influential and puzzling concepts in contemporary politics: terrorism. Instead of asking what it is, why it's wrong, and how it can be prevented, my work explores how terrorism acquired its political force and why its meaning has changed so drastically throughout its history.

My first book, Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire (Columbia University Press, 2018), examined how it was possible for terrorism to become a powerful weapon against Muslim and Arab populations in the wake of 9/11. It traced the genealogy of terrorism from the French, Russian, and Algerian Revolutions to the War on Terror to reveal that terrorism has always been a highly flexible polemical concept that can be used as a political weapon in a range of political contexts. 

My current project, The Politics of Terror: Formations of Terrorism in Anglo-America, extends and deepens this argument by shifting the focus from a global genealogy of terrorism to the United States; reconstructing a longer history from the colonization of North America to the present; and placing race, racial formation, and white supremacy at the center of the analysis. The project starts from a historical puzzle: while the term “terrorism” did not enter American political discourse until the end of the eighteenth century, that practices of terror that this term typically names were central to English colonial rule in North America since the sixteenth century. Colonial governments openly endorsed terror as a legitimate and necessary technique to govern Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans. The emergence of terrorism in the eighteenth century does not, therefore, mark the beginning of terror but indicates a shift in how terror was understood, legitimized, and challenged. Drawing on the critique of terrorism articulated by Black radical intellectuals and activists, and based on extensive archival research, I show that the new political category of terrorism enabled the reorganization of distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate violence. As terror became increasingly difficult to defend as a technique of government, the new notion of terrorism provided a means to condemn certain practices of violence while justifying others. As terrorism came to name the violence of political enemies, purportedly dangerous individuals, and perceived racialized threats to the nation, state terror became represented and justified as a necessary defense against terrorism. 

In addition to my work on terrorism, I'm interested in questions of method in political theory, with a special emphasis on archival and interpretive methods. I've also written about various aspects of Michel Foucault's work and about diversity and inclusion in the academy.

At UIUC, I teach courses in modern and contemporary political theory. I also serve on the Advisory Board for the Humanities Research Institute.

I'm the Book Review Editor for Political Theory, a co-editor for Foucault Studies, and serve on the Editorial Boards for Contemporary Political Theory and GENEALOGY+CRITIQUE (formerly Le foucaldien).