Virtually everyone agrees that terrorism is defined by its impact on the public it targets. Yet there seems to be very little open discussion about how society has responded to it and how people are affected by it. This is no small gap in our understanding of 21st century terrorism. "Invitation to Terror" argues that what we really need to worry about is not what terrorists do but our reaction to it. It argues that Western society lacks the cultural and intellectual resources to deal with this threat. Politicians who frequently claim that 'our way of life' faces an existential threat find it difficult to explain just what that way of life is and why it is worth defending - inadvertently invites acts of terrorism. This book details how, as society has become increasingly apprehensive about the future, it has reached the point where it regards itself as a vulnerable target. This defensive response is influenced by many causes the most important of which is the difficulty society has in endowing conflict and the threat it faces with meaning. The words used to describe the threat of terrorism - unimaginable, incomprehensible, beyond meaning - serve to deflect our understanding of the issues at stake. Furedi argues that the problem is not 'them' and does not come from 'there'. It is us and comes from within. The good news is that it is not very difficult to diminish the impact of this threat through changing the way we engage with it.
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"This book is fresh, well written, awash with lightly worn learning and so confident in its perspective that the argument... gathers pace with such vigour as each chapter rolls by that the book's end it seems well-nigh irrefutable" Times Higher Educational Supplement--Sanford Lakoff
About the Author
Frank Furedi is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He is the author of numerous books including Culture of Fear, Politics of Fear and Where Have all the Intellectuals Gone?, all published by Continuum.
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Format:Paperback
In 'Invitation to Terror' Frank Furedi forwards essentially a single thesis: that the War on Terror's politics of fear pushed by governments around the world does not result from a conscious deception in the service of power, state warmongering, and suchlike; but rather from the elite's own loss of self belief and a culture of uncertainty and anxiety. The loss of belief in question is the erosion in the belief in secularism, liberalism, and, more generally, 'Western values'. Thus, despite drawing different conclusions to the 'pro-war left' there is a certain similarity to it's analysis in Furedi's work. The self-hating elite is apparently under the same spell of decrepit belief in Western culture, and if adopting more stridency in standing up for Western values they would not need to peddle the politics of fear.
Whether you agree with his arguments' logic or assumptions, the problem is that the book never really develops it with any specificity. What is the 'political elite', and can all governments around the world be operating in the same fashion? What about non-Western governments who have adopted the same rhetoric? The War on Terror is never put into any form of geopolitical analysis. Furedi's analysis involves poring through official statements and British and American newspaper articles and drawing massively sweeping conclusions from this limited form of discourse analysis. The upshot is that the book is repetitive; when assertion is not substantiated, or at least theoretically deepened, it is simply repeated over and over again for effect.
Whether you agree with his arguments' logic or assumptions, the problem is that the book never really develops it with any specificity. What is the 'political elite', and can all governments around the world be operating in the same fashion? What about non-Western governments who have adopted the same rhetoric? The War on Terror is never put into any form of geopolitical analysis. Furedi's analysis involves poring through official statements and British and American newspaper articles and drawing massively sweeping conclusions from this limited form of discourse analysis. The upshot is that the book is repetitive; when assertion is not substantiated, or at least theoretically deepened, it is simply repeated over and over again for effect.
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