Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson

I'm a political theorist who studies why we talk about terrorism the way we do, what practices 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 terrorism in the United States. The U.S. government has 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 those who protest 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 persistent politics of terror is enabled and simultaneously challenged by shifting discourses and practices of terrorism.