Western states reframed non-state political violence as psychopathology to strip it of legitimacy

Evidence

US officials’ attribution of terrorism committed by Muslims to Islam was facilitated by a shift in Western states’ treatment of political violence. Prior to the 1970s, Western policy makers and intellectuals treated non-state political violence as insurgency grounded in material grievances. But as Palestinian liberation groups’ violence against the Israeli occupation crossed borders into Europe, Western countries considered terrorism a form of psychopathology that violated universal norms. In turn, terrorists were characterized as evil, irrational, pathological, and fundamentally different from the United States and its state allies whose violence was morally justified. The idea that political violence arose out of legitimate, resolvable grievances was rejected outright. Instead, all violence by non-state actors against the United States and Europe was condemned as terrorism equivalent to an illegitimate act of war. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 660

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader literature on securitization and the political use of ‘terrorism’ labels (e.g., ‘On Sacrifice’ realm where the state monopolizes legitimate violence). — connects to: US officials pathologized anti-Western nationalists as psychologically or racially unfit.
• DEFINE: Articulates the conceptual shift from ‘insurgency grounded in grievances’ to ‘terrorism as psychopathology’.