Islamist Terrorism in the Context of Contemporary Hybrid Wars

The article deals with the present-day causes of the reproduction of Islamist terrorism. The concepts of desecularization, hybrid wars, and a system-functional approach form the methodological basis of the research. Recognizing the failure of liberal explanations of the causes of Islamist terrorism, the author criticizes the liberal methodology, which is based on an essentialist explanation of Islam and Muslim civilization and attributes a fixed set of qualities to Islam as an ontological evil, a barbarism hostile to Western civilization. The paper presents a viewpoint based on the approaches proposed by representatives of left-wing radical thought, postmodernism and neo-Marxism. It is concluded that the politicization of Islam, including its radical interpretations, is due not to the militant unchanging nature of Islam, but to the crisis of a number of Muslim societies. The Muslim worlds reaction to Western globalism is also an attempt to implement its own global political projects as a response of Islamic fundamentalism to the challenge of Western democratic fundamentalism. The author analyzes the phenomenon of hybrid wars as a form of armed violence that the Western world uses to restore order in its global empire. The connection between hybrid wars and the concept of a just war is shown, as well as the relevance of Islamist terrorism as an element of the system of hybrid wars. Islamist terrorism and counterterrorism are present in all hybrid wars waged in the Muslim world. This is manifested both in military actions on the ground, and in information warfare, as well as in virtual space. The market for terrorist and counterterrorist services inherent in hybrid wars and the place of Islamist terrorism in it are examined. Financial relations bind the participants in terrorist activities, including the customer, sponsor, mediator, organizer, informant, and performer. It is concluded that Islamist terrorism is not the activity of individual fanatics or a manifestation of the militant nature of Islam, but is produced by the conflict system of contemporary international relations.

Kaplan’s System and Process

In this note Wight critically analyses Morton Kaplan’s System and Process in International Politics. While ‘positivist theorists’ aspiring to scientific rigour have belittled philosophical works on topics such as the just war or natural law as ‘tautologous or platitudinous’, these theorists have themselves constructed ‘new edifices of tautology and platitude’. Kaplan, for example, restates ‘simple and obvious truths, in the impressive special language of his theory’. Wight lists other shortcomings. Kaplan’s ‘historical limitedness’ reflects his ‘small range of historical reference’. Kaplan’s reliance on the abstractions of game theory leads to ‘the unintentional effect’ of ‘trivialization’ of ‘the awful issues of peace and war’. Furthermore, Kaplan’s ‘analytical jargon atomises and disintegrates reality’, and this results in ‘dehumanization’ and ‘hypostatization’ of the abstractions. Finally, ‘Objectivity becomes moral neutrality’, with ‘moral content … drained off, and then added again to the stew in pinches of recognition as “parameters” or “values”’.

Intention and Wrongdoing

According to the principle of double effect, there is a strict moral constraint against bringing about serious harm to the innocent intentionally, but it is permissible in a wider range of circumstances to act in a way that brings about harm as a foreseen but non-intended side effect. This idea plays an important role in just war theory and international law, and in the twentieth century Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot invoked it as a way of resisting consequentialism. However, many moral philosophers now regard the principle with hostility or suspicion. Challenging the philosophical orthodoxy, Joshua Stuchlik defends the principle of double effect, situating it within a moral framework of human solidarity and responding to philosophical objections to it. His study uncovers links between ethics, philosophy of action, and moral psychology, and will be of interest to anyone seeking to understand the moral relevance of intention.