Browsing by Author "Lahnalammi, Tuukka"

The concept of terrorism has been used widely in discussion about those actors who threaten the state. In this study I try to clarify how terrorism has been located in databases from the United States and compare those results to the Uppsala university's databases considering battle related deaths and one-sided violence. I try to find out which kind of differences there are among databases considering the number of deaths, the type of the targets and the actors who perform the strikes. The theoretical base of this study lies in the theory of critical geopolitics. Critical geopolitics moves the focus from the existing areas to that how areas are produced. The focus is on that what kind of processes there are influencing when areas and our perspective about them becomes to exist to us. Often there are purposeful intentions to enforce certain images about areas in order to achieve political goals. During the years of the war on terror the United States has changed its foreign politics more to the direction where it considers that it has the right to defend itself from threats even when it means using force outside the US borders without international approval. The threat has been often described as terrorism in the media and in political speeches. In this study I use databases from three different sources. The department of homeland security and the national counterterrorism center are created as results of the war on terror to help the government to deal with the threat. The university of Uppsala has produced its own database for decades about different factors considering conflicts. To the original American databases the material has been accepted with more subjective criteria than to the original Uppsala databases. From the information of these databases I produce several cartographic presentations which have an essential meaning in the production of the results. The most important locations of the terrorism are in the Middle East and in the South Asia. In these areas there are also great numbers of battle related deaths. In the Sub-Saharan Africa one-sided violence is often even more common reason of death than battles. Most of the most important actors of the countries are same ones in the different databases. Al'Queda is the only truly global terrorist organization. In the countries where one-sided violence is most severe the targets are usually civilians and in the countries where the battles are more severe the target is usually the government. Terrorist organizations seem to strike only in few countries in most cases. This indicates that even today most of the organizations have quite local goals. Also only few states are using force outside their own or neighboring country. Especially United states and al'Queda are actors who clearly use force globally. This study suggests that this is a process that enforces the global nature of terrorism and counterterrorism and that this is part of the larger process of globalization. One of the most important conclusions of this study is that terrorism seems to relate more to the battles than to one-sided violence. This is the most important reason for the observation that there is little terrorism in same parts of the world compared to violence. The main example of this is Sub-Saharan Africa. This study suggests that the reasons for this might be the weak role of the States in many countries in the area which appears as one-sided violence done by government and as large number of other groups practicing one-sided violence on the continent.