Terror und Anti-Terror. Politische Gewalt, Sicherheitspolitik und die strategische Kultur der Terrorismusbekämpfung in Deutschland

Given the recent and profound paradigm shift in global security, the thesis concentrates on two interrelated topics. First, terrorism as a form of political violence as well as the discourses of combating it will be comprehensively illuminated. In the process, I shall elaborate on terrorist reasoning as well as on functional dissociation from similar but not identical strategies of political change. There is no terrorism “per se”, for which reason there is no terrorist archetype. In order to differentiate terrorist actors and agendas, one therefore has to discern secondary and primary terrorist objectives. Meanwhile, literature on terrorism has originated a multitude of categories and definitions, most of whom suffer from either oversimplification or overly scholastic richness in detail. Also, this literature has occasionally drawn wrong, that is: empirically disprovable conclusions, for instance the claim that terrorism is in principle a promising strategy for weak substate actors. This fundamental blur in the notion of terrorism is consistent with a blur in state strategies to confront terrorist threats. Following two basic conceptions of combating terrorism (“terrorism as a crime” and “terrorism as war”) the thesis points out the political, strategic and tactical reference points of a general model of combating terrorism. With a view to the second part of the text, current German counter- and anti-terrorism policy is differentiated according to rules and actors. It is in this regard essential to locate its material contents into the field of state functions. This however proves to be challenging as counter-terrorism can no longer be allocated to the traditional duality of external and internal security as a result of a process of functional de-differentiation in the production of state security. Second, the thesis attempts to validate the frequently uttered but as of yet neither empirically nor theoretically very well supported assumption of a shift towards realpolitik in German counter- and anti-terrorism since 9/11. To provide an answer to the question whether there is in fact a change in the normative foundations of German policy up to the point of a realpolitik-paradigm, an altered model of strategic-cultural analysis is employed. Given the specific scope and the intrinsic constraints of any theoretical model, from a strategic-cultural perspective it can effectively be shown, that a shift towards realpolitik in German counter- and anti-terrorism policy is in fact evident in the aftermath of 9/11.