‘Iron Fists in Iron Gloves’: The Political Economy of US Terrorocracy Promotion in Colombia 1
Most analysts of US post-cold war policy in Colombia argue that the US has switched from targeting Communist guerrillas to a war on drugs and a new war on terror. Contrary to these claims this article shows that the US continues to back Colombian counter-insurgency efforts which essentially amount to a strategy of state terrorism under a democratic façade (terrorocracy). Moreover, this policy continues to be pursued because the US has long employed counter-insurgency warfare to stabilise social formations conducive to US political and economic interests. In short, counter-insurgency warfare is the military strategy par excellence for the policing and reproduction of global capitalism via localised proxy forces throughout the third world. In Colombia this strategy continues to have profound consequences for human rights, social justice and democracy.
Critical realism and historical materialism as resources for critical terrorism studies
Critical Terrorism Studies can be strengthened by scholarship that draws on a combination of critical realism (CR) and historical materialism (HM). CR relates epistemological relativism (we can know the social only indirectly through our interpretation of it) to ontological realism (there is a powerfully influential social reality that includes but is much more than our knowledge claims about it) through judgemental rationalism (knowledge claims can be tested against social reality, although always in an indirect, interpreted and fallible way). We illustrate CR-informed HM's value in relation to analysing capitalism's constant remaking of the world, terrorism as an instrument of capitalist class rule and the reified thinking involved in the use of terrorism that it is inherently anti-emancipatory.
Analysis: The Agenda 2007 Proposals: Evolution or Revolution?
On 10 February 2004 the Commission published its proposal for the financial perspective 2007-2013. A week later it adopted the third report on economic and social cohesion. These two documents form the basis of the so-called ‘Agenda 2007 reforms’. They will be the greatest challenge for the enlarged EU after the intergovernmental conference, since they will determine the financial basis for EU policy-making until the middle of the next decade. The Agenda 2007 proposals certainly hint at courageous reforms, because they place a previously unheard-of emphasis on performance and quality. Under the proposals, structural operations should generate value for money, and the funds should focus on projects which generate added value at a European level. Overall the Commission’s proposals point in the right direction, because they balance, on the one hand, solidarity for the new Member States and weak regions in the old Member States with, on the other hand, investments in future tasks. Moreover, they constitute a paradigm shift. For the first time, the Common Agricultural Policy will not be the dominant expenditure category. Now it is up to the Member States to examine the proposals politically and find a compromise between sometimes very divergent interests. It is to be hoped that, during the debate over expenditure limits and division of funds, national interests do not outweigh European interests.