Trivializing Terrorists: How Counterterrorism Knowledge Undermines Local Resistance to Terrorism

Abstract

This article explores how counterterrorism knowledge practices affect the groups they study. We argue that these practices typically construct terrorist groups as ontologically stable and organizationally rational, which makes them appear familiar to, and so governable by, counterterrorism organizations. We show that by excluding prevalent local knowledge, Western counterterrorism policy discourses assign the power to construct the category of “terrorist” to those without daily lived experience of the “terrorists” in question. This undermines different ways of knowing what sustains these groups, what might eradicate them and, more importantly, what might make their ability to pose a serious threat seem unlikely, or even absurd, to those whose support they purportedly need to survive as terrorists. Using evidence from Yemen, we show that groups labelled as “terrorists” do not fit into the stable categories that counterterrorism organizations require to produce actionable targets. We argue that while imposing such categories helps counterterrorists find targets that reflect their assumptions, it also generates pathways for violent actors to evolve and reproduce.

It’s easier to tell a kid that Santa Claus isn’t real than to get foreigners to see what al-Qa’ida in Yemen really is.¹

The field of Terrorism Studies faces a problem: the subject of its inquiry resists a broad consensus definition.² Many scholars argue that a “‘good enough’ definition” should remain the goal because it is “the first step to defeating [terrorism].”³ Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) scholars have generally responded, however, that a stable definition is impossible because terrorism is defined according to subjective political criteria.⁴ Taking the ontological instability of terrorism that is central to CTS as our starting point, this article moves beyond arguments about its politicization to explore instead what stabilizing the category of “terrorism” does to those labelled as “terrorists”. We argue that stabilizing terrorism as an analytical category constructs terrorist groups in the image of bureaucracies—as legible, ontologically stable, and organizationally rational—and that this makes them appear familiar to, and so governable by, the counterterrorism bureaucracies that oppose them. However, constructing terrorist organizations as bureaucracies also erases possibilities for resisting or preventing terrorism that are “beyond the realm” of the stable categories imagined by bureaucracies.⁵ The consequences of this erasure are the subject of this article.

We argue that a stable definition of terrorism rests on a firm distinction between terrorists/non-terrorists (or counterterrorists), supporters/opponents of terrorists, violent state/non-state actors, and revolutionary/establishment violence.⁶ However, these binary distinctions reflect administrative convenience more than empirical reality.⁷ The convenience derives from that fact that counterterrorism bureaucracies (and the legal and military frameworks they enact) require stable, legible categories to produce actionable targets. For example, bureaucrats cannot define actionable targets as both terrorists and non-terrorists, or supporters and opponents of terrorists, at the same time. They must define them as one or the other. If counterterrorism bureaucracies cannot produce actionable targets, they cease to be sustainable as counterterrorism bureaucracies. We will return to the implications of this shortly but, in brief, we argue that the practice of counterterrorism depends on the stability of terrorism as an analytical category and that its stability is far from self-evident.

We build this argument on empirical evidence from Yemen, where al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is one of the most active and established branches of the organization worldwide. “Islamic State” is also active in the country, though its presence is relatively recent, and is far more tenuous than that of al-Qa’ida. While the tenor of Yemeni discourses about al-Qa’ida and Islamic State are strikingly similar, it is al-Qa’ida that dominates the conversation and, as such, it is our primary focus. We show how Yemeni discourses suggest that both al-Qa’ida and Islamic State collude with the country’s political elite and that, as a result, each inhabits seemingly contradictory positions simultaneously, particularly across stable categories like terrorists/non-terrorists, supporters/opponents of terrorists, violent state/non-state actors, and revolutionary/establishment violence. As such, they are incompatible with the mutually exclusive categories on which counterterrorism frameworks and procedures are predicated. We suggest that resisting these discrete categories—as popular Yemeni discourses do—opens new possibilities for resisting or preventing the kinds of violence that is typically labelled as terrorism.

Trivialization as Resistance

We argue that Yemenis resist groups like al-Qa’ida and Islamic State by trivializing them as relatively mundane expressions of violent elite competition. This trivialization is also a form of resistance against those elites, even if our interlocutors did not use the term “resistance” themselves to describe their actions. This framing challenges counterterrorism scholars and practitioners’ assumptions by portraying terrorist groups not as rebellious actors but as actors that, wittingly or unwittingly, help to sustain the political establishment. Al-Qa’ida and Islamic State are thus constructed as “useful tool[s]” that help incumbent elites to maintain power.⁸ This denudes both groups by subsuming them under the more significant threat of establishment violence.

Trivializing terrorist groups in this way destabilizes the categories that are foundational to counterterrorism knowledge and practices. The “revolutionary” violence of the “non-state” terrorist becomes a tool to maintain the power of the statist and “non-terrorist” elite. With that move, each of the discrete categories above cease to be mutually exclusive and instead become constitutive. Therefore, just as revolutionary violence becomes part of the establishment, counterterrorism practices become part of what makes terrorism possible because these practices bolster one actor against its perceived binary “other” while failing to account for their existential co-dependence.

This article builds its arguments on the knowledge that informs Yemeni political discourses. We argue that by excluding prevalent Yemeni views, counterterrorism discourses assign the power to construct the category of “terrorist” (and by extension, the mandate of counterterrorism) to those without daily lived experience of the “terrorists” in question. This exclusion undermines different ways of knowing what sustains terrorist groups, what might eradicate them and, more importantly, what might make their ability to pose a serious threat seem unlikely or even absurd to those whose support they purportedly need to survive as terrorists. We therefore take seriously the widespread Yemeni belief that al-Qa’ida and Islamic State emerged and survive, at least in part, because they are a reasonably mundane expression of elite power that serve the interests of the establishment.

A constitutive logic is essential to our concept of trivialization because this logic makes the concept illegible to binary counterterrorism logics. The logic is constitutive in the sense that the entities being investigated are not entirely separate from one another because each makes up, and helps to organize, the other.⁹ This means that competing elites may indeed have a rational self-interest in maintaining the threat of terrorism (to garner external support and combat opposing elites) but by doing so those elites also co-constitute that threat. Therefore, it is analytically incorrect to classify competing elites or terrorist groups as either terrorists/non-terrorists, supporters/opponents of terrorists, or revolutionary/establishment actors, because each makes the other possible. The presumption of mutual exclusivity, which underpins the logic of counterterrorism, has tangible effects because it is used to determine who may legitimately be killed, and who may hold legitimate authority. This presumption also establishes a common-sense view of what resistance to terrorism looks like. It looks like active opposition to those on the wrong side of the line, rather than an appreciation that each reproduces the other and that terrorist groups do not, therefore, represent a radical force for change.

Running throughout this paper is a core question: what is al-Qa’ida (or Islamic State)? Whereas Sarah Phillips previously explored the illegible, ephemeral, and even allegorical ontologies of al-Qai’da that are embedded within Yemeni discourses, here we inquire into the political work that these discourses do.¹⁰ We argue that they constitute a form of resistance to terrorist groups (and the elites that enable them), and that this resistance is erased by counterterrorism knowledge that instead frames terrorist groups as singular entities. We also examine the political work that this erasure does. We propose that it endorses the effectiveness of familiar counterterrorism interventions. These interventions include measures like the assassination of individuals, the destruction of assets, and a raft of support measures for “host” states through military and political assistance packages, intelligence sharing, security sector reform, police training, poverty reduction initiatives, and institutional capacity-building.

This article is divided into five sections. The first offers a brief background to Yemeni discourses about al-Qa’ida and is followed by an account of the methods we used to discern what constitutes a dominant Yemeni discourse about terrorism. The second section, a literature review, shows how a dominant strain of counterterrorism-focused literature, and the counterterrorism bureaucracies that it helps to inform, construct terrorist groups as bureaucrats. This review then turns to literature on the sociology of knowledge categories to examine the erasures that are performed by constructing terrorists in ways that are legible to counterterrorism bureaucracies. Our empirical support for these arguments comes from a fuller account of the Yemeni discourses that trivialize al-Qa’ida and Islamic State in the third section. There we argue that trivialization should be understood as a form of resistance not only to al-Qa’ida and Islamic State, but also to the counterterrorism interventions that, trivialization implies, have helped authoritarian elites to survive and reproduce. This is followed by a fourth section, which offers an account of how Yemeni resistance is made invisible by counterterrorism discourses that apply mutually exclusive categories to the objects of their analysis. We argue that this erases the possibility that al-Qa’ida and Islamic State may, in fact, be part of the established order rather than only a disruptive force for radical change. We conclude by arguing that mainstream counterterrorism knowledge is less likely to lead to the eradication of “terrorist” violence than to the reorganization of the forms that such violence takes.

Background: al-Qa’ida in Yemen

Yemenis have long accused the country’s political elite, particularly former president Ali Abdullah Saleh and his allies of maintaining relationships with violent jihadists. More recently, this includes an expanding universe of political actors, such as Ali Abdullah Saleh’s family, former Vice President Ali Muhsin, former President Abd-Rabbu Mansoor Hadi, the Islah Party, the Houthis/Ansar Allah, and various militias that are supported by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

These accusations draw plausibility from the historical links between northern Yemeni elites, including Saleh, and the Yemeni mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan alongside Osama bin Laden in the 1980s—many of whom returned to Yemen and supported those elites in the 1994 civil war.¹¹ Indeed, many Yemenis believe that these relationships endured throughout the 2000s, and that the regime sustained a “tacit non-aggression pact” with al-Qa’ida and either turned a blind eye to, or actively facilitated, its efforts to establish a foothold in the country.¹²

While the historical links between Yemeni elites and al-Qa’ida are reasonably well documented, the scholarship about AQAP typically focuses on other reasons for the group’s resurgence from around 2006 onwards. Most common are the weakness of the Yemeni state, AQAP’s organizational capacity and ability to absorb counterterrorism measures, and its ability to craft a message that appealed to a subset of Yemenis.¹³ In other words, scholars seldom credit these relationships for the resurgence or resilience of al-Qa’ida to the degree that Yemenis do.¹⁴

Examples of the quotidian nature of these beliefs are seen in the way that Yemenis sometimes refer to al-Qa’ida using a plural noun rather than a singular noun (al-Qawa’id, or “al-Qa’idas”).¹⁵ This may be to signify the multiplicity of forms that the group takes, or simply to maintain, as Yemeni Researcher (E) did, that “there is more than one al-Qa’ida.”¹⁶ Speakers may also introduce al-Qa’ida or Islamic State with the derisive prefix of “the so-called”—ma yosamma—presumably to indicate either their symbiotic relationship with elite power, or the speaker’s doubt that the group actually poses the level of threat attributed to it by counterterrorism discourses.¹⁷

Whether in private conversations, qat chews, social media posts, local news reports, or widely shared cartoons depicting elites and al-Qa’ida or Islamic State as two-headed monsters, it is unusual for either group to be presented as fully independent of elite power.¹⁸ The mention of al-Qa’ida in conversation also frequently generates a request for clarification: “which al-Qa’ida” or “whose al-Qa’ida” you are referring to? That is, the terms “al-Qa’ida” and “Islamic State” require qualification, and speakers are often expected to specify the other actor/s that they believe are facilitating them. This is a profoundly different way of understanding how these groups survive to the one that typically animates Western counterterrorism discourses about them.

Methodology

We use popular Yemeni discourses about the terrorist groups that affect their lives as the basis of our theorizing. Despite the Yemenis’ observations being based on lived experiences, contextual expertise and, sometimes, insider knowledge, they are widely disregarded by external observers and, as a result, public and expert debates seldom discuss these observations in any detail. Where these observations are acknowledged, the emphasis tends to be on their partisan origins, “conspiracy minded[ness],” or apparent “outlandish[ness],” rather than their potential as a place from which to theorize about terrorism.¹⁹

We attempt to capture the contours of the Yemeni conversation about the emergence and reproduction of terrorist groups using a variety of source material. Making judgements about the representativeness of sources is a core component of discourse analysis, and therefore invites questions about how those judgements are made. We follow Jennifer Milliken’s observation that the validity of discourse analysis rests on the level of coherence and consistency that emerges from its sources. She argues that a piece of analysis can be considered valid “when upon adding new texts… the researcher finds consistently that the theoretical categories she has generated work for those [new] texts.”²⁰ Therefore, the validity of our argument about Yemeni discourses trivializing al-Qa’ida rests on our ability to demonstrate that there is strong internal consistency between our sources. We have triangulated our sources in multiple ways. First, we conducted semi-structured interviews with ten Yemeni researchers who specialize in local armed groups, some of whom we spoke with on multiple occasions.²¹ We asked them whether they believe that al-Qa’ida always acts independently of powerful elites—and how they believe other Yemenis feel about this issue. All agreed that Yemenis widely believe al-Qa’ida to act at the behest of various political actors. In fact, Yemeni Researcher (H) noted that al-Qa’ida members discuss this issue among themselves:

Through my work I have met and spoken with many members of [al-Qa’ida], including the leadership, and many times the issue of this accusation comes up. It is a common accusation made by different parties to the current conflict… [al-Qa’ida members] often take it as something to laugh about [but] it bothers them sometimes because it puts them in a bad light.²²

In addition to our individual interviews, we conducted several group discussions with Yemeni researchers. This provided information about views that researchers are comfortable articulating in front of other subject matter experts. We also benefited from feedback to an earlier version of this research by five Yemeni researchers at a conference in Beirut in 2019.²³ This, along with the other group discussions, confirmed that such beliefs are both widely held and openly discussed, and that trivialization is done openly, and as a matter of common sense, rather than as a “hidden transcript” of resistance that operates covertly.²⁴

Our evidence was also drawn from participant observations of Yemeni discussions about the nature of al-Qa’ida over many years. We have used these prior observations to calibrate our understandings and do not cite them directly.

Participant observation offers a useful way of detecting quotidian details and common sensibilities but requires a note about the authors’ positionality. We are one Yemeni (Nadwa al-Dawsari) and one non-Yemeni (Sarah Phillips), who spent several years living, working, and researching throughout the country between 2004-2013. Some of our observations were obtained prior to this collaboration. Indeed, part of the reason for our collaboration is that the trivialization of al-Qa’ida as an establishment actor was such a consistent feature of discussions with Yemeni interlocutors in our other research projects over the past two decades. Our research topics have included political contestation, authoritarian power, tribal politics, and peacebuilding. Trivialization was not a topic that we initially set out to investigate but is one that we came to feel was unavoidable because of its prevalence in our other work. It is a story that grew organically from our observations of recurrent, though unsolicited, references to the ontological instability of al-Qa’ida and its purported role in upholding an authoritarian establishment.²⁵

Like other ethnographic methods, those working within more positivist traditions sometimes criticize participant observation for being narrow and non-replicable. We are not seeking to prove any of the empirical claims about al-Qa’ida or Islamic State that we present, nor do we suggest that any individual actor either has, or has not, facilitated violent attacks. We merely intend to demonstrate that these claims constitute widespread articulations of how these groups are understood by Yemenis. Our goal is to contrast counterterrorism knowledge about terrorist groups with locally situated perspectives as a way of exploring how knowledge practices affect the terrorist groups that they purport to know.

Constructing Terrorists as Bureaucrats for Bureaucrats

This article offers a novel theoretical contribution to debates about the resilience and ontology of terrorist groups by bringing together two distinct bodies of literature. The first sits within Counter/Terrorism Studies, and the other within the sociology of knowledge categories.²⁶

Counter/Terrorism Studies include a scholarly and policy-focused literature about the organizational capacity of terrorist groups. It is this literature that is most concerned with solving the problems faced by Western counterterrorism policy makers and practitioners. While some of the scholars that we cite might categorize their work simply as “Terrorism Studies,” this is a diverse literature that spans psychology, criminology, and sociology, among other fields. Studies on terrorists’ organizational capacity, however, constitute a narrower subset of this literature, and implicitly (though often explicitly) frame terrorism as a problem to be solved through better knowledge of terrorists’ organizational dynamics and dilemmas. It is a problem-solving literature in the sense that Robert Cox famously explained, which:

takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organized, as the given framework for action. The general aim of problem-solving is to make these relationships and institutions work smoothly by dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble.²⁷

More importantly, what we refer to as the “organizational terrorism studies” literature expresses the ontology of terrorism that Yemeni discourses about terrorist groups are implicitly responding to. We recognize, however, that no literature sits entirely within the labels we assign to it. This body of work is predominantly concerned with large insurgent groups based in the Global South, like al-Qa’ida, Islamic State, and the Taliban. In addition to peer reviewed scholarship, we include research by prominent think tanks, the most noteworthy of which—RAND Corporation, and the West Point Combatting Terrorism Center—are affiliated with the United States Department of Defense. This literature is often explicit about its intention to make “counterterror policies… more targeted, more efficient, and therefore more effective” by identifying vulnerabilities within terrorist organizations, and “craft[ing] effective tactics, techniques, and procedures to defeat the movement and its followers.”²⁸ Because of its focus on solving counterterrorism problems, this literature is particularly influential within policy communities which, combined with the pressures on scholars to be policy-relevant, further entrenches incentives to generate actionable findings.²⁹ We thus consider this segment of the wider Counter/Terrorism Studies literature as central to establishing and reproducing Western counterterrorism policies and practices, particularly in relation to the Global South.

One prevalent feature of the literature about the organizational capacity of terrorist groups is the influence of rational choice theories.³⁰ A study by the RAND Corporation clearly articulates why the logic of a rational-choice model is appealing for the study of terrorism:

The main argument favoring a rational-choice model is that, if terrorists and terror organizations behave rationally, knowledge of their beliefs and preferences should help us understand and predict their behavior.³¹

The ascription of rational-choice motives to terrorist groups is further evident in the way that the organizational terrorism studies literature typically constructs terrorist groups as both organizationally and methodologically rational. They are thus constructed as legible entities with stable and discernible boundaries, and that make purposeful, self-maximizing decisions, the success of which depends on their capacity to manage a clandestine organization.³² The prevailing logic is that if a group survives for long enough to pose a serious terrorism threat, it is because it has developed mechanisms that can attract and manage operatives while maintaining enough secrecy to avoid destruction.³³ From an organizational perspective, it follows that disrupting these mechanisms will increase a group’s “organizational dysfunction” which should, in turn, reduce its ability to both conduct attacks and have a political impact.³⁴

This scholarship provides valuable insights about the internal drivers of terrorist groups’ survival or decline, and our aim is not to critique these assessments. Rather, we are interested in how the presumption of ontological stability and organizational rationality—understood as group decision making that occurs in “identifiable, regularized, and hence predictable ways”—affects the entities being so described.³⁵ According to prominent Terrorism Studies scholar, Jacob Shapiro, they become “surprisingly mundane and normal, at least from an organizational perspective.”³⁶ Groups labelled as terrorists are thus widely conceptualized as bureaucrats, or corporate firms, dealing with the mundane issues of strategic planning, resource management, and performance monitoring, albeit under conditions of secrecy.³⁷ Jenna Jordan summarizes these tendencies succinctly when she argues that a terrorist organization’s ability to withstand attacks is a function of three factors: bureaucratization, communal support, and an ideology that is not dependent upon an individual leader for its articulation.³⁸ That is, terrorist groups survive because of their own internal organizational capacity, not because they are embedded in, and mutually produced by, opaque nodes of internationally sanctioned power, as Yemeni discourses contend.

Scholars further frame the potency or resilience of terrorist groups as a function of their organizational capacity to implement their political, military, social, or ideological program. The organizational Terrorism Studies literature analyzes organizational capacity by studying several key indicators, such as organizational structures, bureaucratic efficiency, interorganizational relationships, the production of internal documentation, ideological coherence, strategic planning, ability to garner community support, communications strategies, member/leadership/social networks, and resource management.³⁹

These indicators are important, but they offer only a partial perspective, and focusing on these organizational traits, or these versions of a group, requires that other versions are blurred out or suppressed. Those versions inhabit both sides of standard binary classifications like terrorist/non-terrorist, state/non-state, supporter/opponent, revolutionary/establishment. As a result, they are less obviously governable than those operating on the analytically cleaner lines of stable categories. Moreover, if terrorist organizations do not sit within stable categories, or behave according to the expectations of rational-choice models, these analysts can neither predict their behavior, nor pre-empt it by disrupting their organizational capacity. Consequently, they can no longer claim to predict or pre-empt terrorists, which destabilizes the foundation for their existence as terrorism analysts or counterterrorism professionals.⁴⁰

We bring this literature about terrorist groups into conversation with scholarship about the sociology of standardized knowledge categories, which explores how the entities we study are constituted through processes that we consider objective, but that always rest on “views from somewhere,” and so are inevitably partial.⁴¹ This literature therefore moves from epistemology (theories of knowledge) to ontology (characteristics of reality) by proposing that realities are not stable or given.⁴² That is, reality is not entirely detached from people’s varying perspectives and is “manipulated” by the knowledge practices and discourses that people use to make reality legible.⁴³

We are particularly influenced by John Law and Sally Engle Merry’s research on ostensibly neutral political categories and indicators, and have used their work to inform our approach to the categories that counterterrorism organizations use to produce targets.⁴⁴ Merry writes: “rather than revealing truth, indicators create it. However, the result is not simply a fiction but a particular way of dividing up and making known one reality among many possibilities.”⁴⁵ That is, if one reality is made to be more accessible, and so more knowable, than others, there is an implicit process of negotiation behind the appearance of objective, stable knowledge. As one version of reality is repeatedly inscribed, it becomes the more legible version, while less inscribed versions become less legible, less invested in, and ultimately, less plausible as components of reality.⁴⁶ As Boaventura de Sousa Santos, puts it, knowledge that sits on “‘the other side of the line’… vanishes as reality, [and] becomes nonexistent… [as a] relevant or comprehensible way of being.”⁴⁷

This literature proposes, therefore, that realities themselves are co-constituted by the knowledge practices applied to them. This insight helps us to gain purchase on how the construction of terrorist groups as bureaucrats affects the terrorist groups it describes. In his article Seeing Like a Survey, John Law draws from James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, to show how knowledge produced by institutions simultaneously, and “not coincidentally,” enacts the need for those institutions to fix the problems identified.⁴⁸ We make a similar suggestion for terrorist organizations: the organizational Terrorism Studies literature constructs terrorist groups as violent bureaucratic organizations that violent bureaucratic organizations ought to respond to.

Bureaucracies regularly arrange constructions of terrorists as ontologically stable into the formats that bureaucracies use to compare and disseminate knowledge “to officials working in the field.”⁴⁹ These formats include maps, graphs, network diagrams, organizational charts, spreadsheets, slide decks, incident databases, “high value target” lists, terrorist typologies, and geographic coordinates. Josef Ansorge comments that the knowledge practices “used to quantify and analyse threats are… not only significant in the kind of policies they engender, but also in the very ‘ontology of the enemy’ they construct.”⁵⁰ Applied to our case, this means that constructing terrorists as violent bureaucrats formats them for an ontologically stable world in which actors are legible through discrete analytical categories. Such categories render constitutive constructions of terrorism illogical, or even unthinkable. This makes other ways of knowing or engaging with them invisible.

Trivialization and the “permission to narrate.”

As briefly noted at the outset, Yemeni discourses about al-Qa’ida routinely trivialize, or render banal, the level of political threat that the group poses as an autonomous actor, and instead connect its survival to various elites’ efforts to maintain their own power. Yemenis see external counterterrorist organizations as assisting state elites, as Yemeni Researcher (K) explained:

[Then-President] Ali Abdullah Saleh wanted to tell the Americans that “if I’m gone, terrorists will take over the country”… For some reason the Americans bought it for a long time. When [US President] Obama’s counterterrorism chief came to Yemen, he only wanted to talk about al-Qa’ida… We kept telling him that Saleh was playing him.⁵¹

The idea that President Saleh instrumentalized the threat of al-Qa’ida to garner external support is widespread, but we now use the words of two interlocutors to explain how this view also trivializes al-Qa’ida as an autonomous and, therefore, revolutionary actor. One of the authors asked Yemeni Researcher (B), who specializes in Yemeni armed groups, about al-Qa’ida’s (2015) seizure of Mukalla, a city of around 250,000 people. Researcher (B) referred to a “series of [elite] agreements” that, he believed, preceded the takeover:

I think there is a misconception of al-Qa’ida from outside of Yemen—it could be true in Iraq or in Syria, I don’t know—but they say that before cities fall there will be assassinations, and that they will take over cities using terror. What we have seen is that they haven’t used these tactics much in Yemen… They have also used a series of [elite] agreements… Everyone in Mukalla knew that al-Qa’ida would attack. Al-Qa’ida members were even sending messages to their families in Mukalla… [The authorities] knew Mukalla was under attack, and they didn’t make a decision [to fight them]. That’s not just mismanagement.⁵²

Researcher (B) suggested that these agreements occurred because al-Qa’ida is “a useful tool for a lot of the elites. These black flags are still very useful.” Later in the conversation, Yemeni Researcher (J) expanded on that logic:

When we read an article and it says that this armed group, or al-Qa’ida, or whoever [was responsible for an attack], we would ask each other: “who told the author to write this article? Do you think this is a message from [then-General] Ali Muhsin to [former-President Saleh’s son] Ahmed Ali? Or do you think it’s a message from [southern secessionist] Tariq al-Fadhli to [former President] Saleh?” We would always do this when we would write our reports. We would try to read between the lines; try to analyze the article. We know who the writer is, but we’d want to know… where have they been this past two weeks?… That’s how we see it. It’s not straightforward.⁵³

Neither of these statements are uncommon and, as discussed in the methodology section, we have both witnessed many similar exchanges. We argue that these views are so prevalent that they would constitute a common-sense appraisal of power politics for many Yemenis. Those familiar with the Yemeni context will know that al-Qa’ida is often described conversationally as being “friends”—ashaab—with various elites, though the identity of the elite/s is not fixed, and different people hold different beliefs about which elites are involved. These views may also change over time.⁵⁴

We consider trivialization to constitute a form of everyday resistance to al-Qa’ida, understood as a “practice… not a certain consciousness, intent or outcome”.⁵⁵ As a form of resistance, trivialization is not about directly opposing al-Qa’ida. It is a practice that dismisses the very possibility that al-Qa’ida is what it says it is—a group of ideologically motivated rebels fighting to overturn the established order—and that thereby denies the group the “permission to narrate” its existence.⁵⁶ Trivialization is an act of erasure by Yemenis against al-Qa’ida.

We propose, therefore, that Yemenis have resisted al-Qa’ida and Islamic State (though the latter group is far less significant) by denying them the permission to narrate their politics, through an unwillingness to accept that either group is entirely anti-establishment, or is sustained by their organizational capacity alone. This unwillingness not only remakes both groups as less threatening than counterterrorism discourses about them contend, but also emphasizes that they are just another instantiation of something more mundane: oppressive elite power that is fueled by external intervention, whether by Western states, or various Gulf states. As a form of resistance, the denial of agency operates in a very different register to practices that seek direct outcomes, or that work within stable categories.⁵⁷ It simply classifies terrorist groups as unworthy of the attention and resources they receive from external actors and frames that attention and those resources as a source of their ongoing survival. In other words, these groups are seen to reproduce through, and alongside state power, rather than in strict opposition to it. This means that the re/assertion of state power—the explicit goal of many counterterrorism and counterinsurgency programs—may simply generate new pathways for these groups to evolve.

The logic of trivialization has considerable implications for the survival of groups labelled as terrorists. First, without the permission to narrate its actions as straightforwardly rebellious, al-Qa’ida’s ability to radicalize, recruit, or gain traction in local communities, may be considerably less than presumed in counterterrorism discourses.⁵⁸ Second, when these discourses insist that terrorist groups pose a grave threat to the established order, they reassign power to those groups. By emphasizing organizational capacity and thus potency, counterterrorism discourses undermine Yemenis’ ability to dismiss al-Qa’ida and Islamic State as unwanted outposts of the political establishment.

Finally, by insisting that the threat posed by al-Qa’ida is exaggerated (or at least deeply misunderstood), trivialization dismisses the suggestion, per US Army Counterinsurgency doctrine, that local positions on insurgent groups fall into three distinct groups: support, opposition, or neutrality.⁵⁹ If the assumption underpinning this doctrine is correct, then the dominant policy response—essentially to persuade or coerce the supporters and fence-sitters to change their minds—is reasonably self-evident. But it is far from self-evident where al-Qa’ida or Islamic State are widely believed to be facilitated by their erstwhile opponents, particularly when those opponents receive external counterterrorism support. If these groups are understood as existing to reinforce, rather than overturn, the political establishment then furnishing powerful elites with legitimacy or resources is more likely to alter forms of violence rather than to diminish them.

For example, when discussing the survival of al-Qa’ida in Yemen, Yemeni Researcher (D), who specializes in local armed groups, told one of the authors: “every power in Yemen uses al-Qa’ida to increase their own power… it’s not a group that plays by itself.”⁶⁰ Researcher (F) commented on the same issue: “we can’t deny that the ideology exists in Yemen… but al-Qa’ida is also a tool to advance the political agenda of the ruling elite, so we have many versions of al-Qa’ida in Yemen.”⁶¹ Extending the point further, Nabil al-Bukairi, a Yemeni researcher who also specializes in Islamist groups, wrote for the influential Yemeni newspaper, al-Ayyam: “the phenomenon of ‘al-Qa’ida’ is gelatinous in form and content, and is nothing more than a [political] card used from time to time by international, regional, and local parties.”⁶² Al-Bukairi seems to be suggesting that al-Qa’ida does not cooperate with elite power as an autonomous entity, but rather that it takes the shape that elite power requires of it. The suggestion is that whatever else al-Qa’ida may be, it is also a vehicle through which elite subterfuge plausibly occurs.

Researcher (C) provided a useful description of how different local media outlets framed the role of al-Qa’ida in the current war in Yemen:

The first [media] source said that the UAE [United Arab Emirates] sent al-Qa’ida to Ta’izz to support Abu al-Abas against Islah, while the other said that al-Qa’ida was sent to support Islah and fight against Abu al-Abas. Logically speaking, how does this work? How can al-Qa’ida fight al-Qa’ida, when al-Qa’ida is present in both parties? It means that each party has its al-Qa’ida [and that] each party protects and strengthens itself through al-Qa’ida.⁶³

To him, al-Qa’ida is refracted through existing conflicts, and to see it as otherwise is to misunderstand it. Moreover, it is through its contradictions—through “its presence in both parties,” as Researcher (C) put it—that al-Qa’ida reproduces. In a later exchange, the same researcher wrote: “al-Qa’ida needs state power, but state power [also] needs al-Qa’ida to impose its control… The division inside the state reflects itself inside al-Qa’ida.”⁶⁴ Counterterrorist organizations cannot logically support or oppose one side against the other within the scenario described by Researcher (C). They cannot act. Al-Qa’ida is not simply an autonomous terrorist group, it is also a reflection of the state elites that counterterrorism classifies as opponents to “non-state” “terrorists,” by virtue of their position as state actors. This makes al-Qa’ida a symptom of the security threat posed by the ruling elite, rather than the exclusive cause of that threat.

Yemeni Researcher (A) applied a similar logic to Researcher (C) when he explained the story of Abdul-Latif al-Sayyid. Al-Sayyid was an al-Qa’ida leader involved in the 2011 capture of the Abyan governorate and al-Qa’ida’s declaration of the “Emirate of Waqar.”⁶⁵ Later that year, he stopped fighting for al-Qa’ida and instead led the “Abyan Popular Committees” in the fight against the group. English language sources tend to refer to this as a “defection,” that is, a move from one category (terrorist) to the other (non-terrorist or, perhaps, counterterrorist), but Researcher (A) resisted this characterization.⁶⁶ He explained al-Sayyid’s status in 2020 as follows: “He’s not al-Qa’ida [pauses] but he’s also not not-al-Qa’ida.”⁶⁷

What may seem a difference in semantics in fact indicates a different ontology of what al-Qa’ida is: al-Qa’ida is multiple; a cross pollination between al-Qa’ida and those fighting it. Al-Qa’ida is unstable because it accommodates political agendas beyond, and even averse to, its stated ideology. Therefore, opposing al-Qa’ida by placing it into stable categories is part of what organizes and constitutes the threat that the group poses.

This emphasis on the co-constitution of terrorists and counterterrorists resonates with work published by other Yemeni researchers as well. Baraa Shiban interviewed the families of al-Qa’ida convicts in Yemen, who told him that many al-Qa’ida detainees were released from prison when the uprising began in 2011, in an apparent effort “to tinge the [protest] movement with extremism.”⁶⁸ Shiban says that Yemen’s intelligence agency, the National Security Bureau (NSB), then demanded that some of those released travel to Abyan to fight alongside al-Qa’ida.⁶⁹ Shiban refers to this as “the NSB policy of ‘feeding the beast in order to control it.’”⁷⁰ This is another example of al-Qa’ida being framed as co-constituted with the forces mandated to destroy it.

Likewise, Yemeni Researcher (F) captured this co-constitution when he tied the growth of al-Qa’ida not to its internal capacity, but the counterterrorism practices applied to it: “Al-Qa’ida just became one more [elite] tool that gained ground through the facilitation of counterterrorism institutions.”⁷¹ Yemeni Researcher (G) echoed: “There was a lot of effort to combat violent extremism that just increased violent extremism.”⁷² Yemeni Researcher (L) summarized this position when he referred to the widely presumed collaboration between al-Qa’ida and some of the country’s wartime elites in 2019: “It is hard to believe that it could be otherwise considering the history.”⁷³ That is, he did not doubt that state-affiliated elites and al-Qa’ida members were colluding, he doubted that they could do otherwise because that is how both survive and reproduce.

Erasing Establishment al-Qa’ida

An obvious counterargument to our argument is that al-Qa’ida (or Islamic State) are simply pragmatic organizations that make short-term arrangements with their opponents as a way of achieving broader organizational goals.⁷⁴ If their behavior is contradictory, inconsistent, or they sometimes collaborate with erstwhile enemies, it is because they are flexible in the methods that they use to achieve their desired ends. It could also be that they make mistakes or fall victim to the mundane problems that confront all hierarchical organizations. It is necessary to consider this possibility, because if the combination of pragmatism and human error offers a sufficient explanation for the contradictory interactions between terrorist groups and their ostensible opponents, then attending to their ontological instability or co-constitution may be an unnecessary step. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Panel of Experts adopts this position in its explanation for al-Qa’ida’s apparent inconsistencies:

As a terrorist group, AQAP is opposed to nearly every other side in the conflict: the Houthis, Saleh’s forces, the legitimate Government and the coalition. This typically means that AQAP opposes whichever group has the most control in a region, while at times making common cause with the enemy of that group. This explains why in some areas AQAP is targeting forces loyal to the current President, while in others it is fighting alongside groups broadly affiliated with the legitimate Government.⁷⁵

Al-Qa’ida is therefore rendered as an opponent to all (or, curiously, “nearly” all) by virtue of being classified “as a terrorist group.” This is a self-sealing proposition in which the prospect of terrorist groups being anything other than inevitable opponents to all other groups is presumed to be so illogical that it is impossible. This is a clear example of the distinct categories—in which one is either a terrorist, or the opponent of a terrorist—that are so pervasive throughout counterterrorism discourses.

Writing for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Elana DeLozier applies a similar logic in a “matrix” of relationships between the most important actors in the Yemeni war. Like the UNSC Panel of Experts, DeLozier explains that she excluded both al-Qa’ida and Islamic State from the matrix precisely because of their status as terrorists. She states that their classification as terrorists renders them, by definition, as opponents to the war’s other belligerents:

Terrorist groups such as AQAP and [Islamic State] are not included [in the matrix], in large part because they are broadly opposed by every other actor and thus do not make for an informative relationship map. Certain groups in Yemen face regular allegations of cooperating with terrorist elements, but all actors in this project condemn terrorism in their public statements.⁷⁶

It is noteworthy that both the Panel of Experts and DeLozier leave the door ajar to the possibility of cooperation between al-Qa’ida or Islamic State and other actors while simultaneously declining to examine that possibility further.⁷⁷ That is, they tacitly acknowledge the prevalent Yemeni views about both groups while also acknowledging that these views were excluded so that their analysis of each actor is, as DeLozier says, “informative” or, presumably, actionable within the existing parameters of counterterrorism governance.⁷⁸ Because constitutive relationships cannot be formatted into mutually exclusive categories, they cannot be processed by, and so simply are excluded from, both reports. As we have shown, however, being implicated in elite political subterfuge is not just an optional extra for these groups within Yemeni discourses: it is how they were made, and how they survive.

Similarly, the International Crisis Group’s Senior Yemen Analyst, Peter Salisbury, made the following comment about the emergence of al-Qa’ida in Yemen:

Many thought the regime elements were using the [al-Qa’ida] “beards” to rid themselves of [factional] rivals while keeping the U.S. engaged in the pursuit of jihadists. No one has ever produced conclusive proof of such collusion. But the Saleh regime had certainly been happy to use the Afghan Arabs in a similar fashion in the 1990s. Whatever the case, AQAP was real, and it did have a measure of popular support.⁷⁹

Al-Qa’ida is thus either singularly real or singularly not-real, and if it is real, it is the autonomous and anti-establishment entity that it proclaims itself to be. There is no room left for al-Qa’ida to inhabit something other than those mutually exclusive positions.

The implications for unmaking terrorist groups through counterterrorism interventions that target ontologically stable and anti-state entities are substantial. A comment by Elisabeth Kendall, one of the foremost scholars of AQAP, shows that what is at stake with the incompatibility of these two competing discourses is the perceived efficacy of counterterrorism practices. She writes:

Defining who or what constitutes AQAP is more challenging today than it was a decade ago… Broadly speaking…so-called AQAP militants now fall into one of six categories: spurious, fake, former, pragmatic, committed, and active… active AQAP are those jihadis who continue to operate as themselves but who may at times forge alliances of convenience with other conflict parties.⁸⁰

Kendall’s analysis attributes the changes she observes within al-Qa’ida to “the considerable pressures they have faced from counterterrorism efforts, particularly from 2016 onward, [which] have forced them to adapt. Decapitated by relentless drone strikes, they have become increasingly guided by political and financial rather than religious considerations.”⁸¹ Crucially, she suggests that there is a difference between “active AQAP,” on the one hand, and the “splinter groups” on the other, some of which “have likely blended with the various Saudi-backed Islahi militias and UAE-backed salafi militias” after the drone strike campaign intensified.⁸² Therefore, al-Qa’ida was “instrumentalized by… warring parties to further their agendas” as a direct result of counterterrorism operations.⁸³ What this means, however, is that the splintering of al-Qa’ida that was caused by counterterrorism operations also created a place for al-Qa’ida within multiple new and powerful militias that maintain a similar ideology and are endowed with substantial international support. Viewed in this way, the distinction between al-Qa’ida and these other militias feels less stark.

Moreover, applying a linear chronology—in which al-Qa’ida initially capitalized on “perennial problems of political instability, formidable topography, weak state control, endemic corruption, marginalized regions, growing poverty, and a youth explosion,”⁸⁴ before being pushed back by counterterrorism practices—has significant implications for how we understand al-Qa’ida’s reproduction. First, it is important to note that this chronology coheres with mainstream counterterrorism ontologies of al-Qa’ida. Second, and more significantly, it affirms the effectiveness of mainstream terrorism knowledge, and the counterterrorism practices it informs.

Meanwhile, the logic of the popular Yemeni view suggests that al-Qa’ida in Yemen did not fundamentally change in 2016 because al-Qa’ida always consisted of co-optable and statist elements—and was always at least partly a reflection of elite conflicts. This raises questions: did counterterrorism operations downgrade al-Qa’ida, or did they merely help to amplify some of its tendencies while de-amplifying others? If it is the latter, then al-Qa’ida may be continuing to exist as it was made, as an avenue for elites to compete for power, in co-evolution with external counterterrorist practices. After all, both the UAE and Saudi Arabia frame their engagement with the militias they support as counterterrorism. The implication is that counterterrorism does not lead to the eradication of the violence that is labelled “terrorism” but simply organizes and structures the forms that such violence takes. Here, that violence has been restructured into well-armed and battle-tested militias that are ideologically “salafi” and supported by wealthy neighboring states.⁸⁵

The logic of trivialization suggests, on the other hand, that terrorist groups like al-Qa’ida co-evolve with the counterterrorism forces that seek to manage terrorist groups by imposing stable categories on them. In this, counterterrorism follows many imperial interventions before it from the colonial period through to the Cold War. Colonial knowledge, for example, constructed those it sought to subjugate through various stable categories (including ethnicities, clans, religions, or location), which made them legible to, and so governable by, colonizers.⁸⁶ These categories did not just passively report people’s existing identities but were active in producing them, bringing some identities into being while marginalizing others.⁸⁷ Similarly, during the Cold War, US policymakers designated individuals and entities as either communists or non/anti-communists, which created strong incentives for “non-communists” to generate or overstate a communist threat in exchange for US assistance.⁸⁸ In both examples, when imperial intervenors governed through mutually exclusive categories they enacted new parameters for privilege, dispossession, and legitimate authority, and thereby created a constitutive relationship between the governors and those they sought to govern.

Conclusion

We have argued that violence does not sit neatly within the categories that make it legible. There are no inevitable lines that partition violent state from violent non-state actors, terrorists from non-terrorists, revolutionary violence from establishment violence, or the supporters of terrorists from their opponents. We showed that managing terrorism by imposing such partitions has helped “terrorist” groups in Yemen to endure. While Western counterterrorism practices may have caused al-Qa’ida to “splinter,” those splinters also “likely blended with the various Saudi-backed Islahi militias and UAE-backed salafi militias” that are now spread throughout the country—reportedly involving far more people than ever.⁸⁹ Therefore, al-Qa’ida may have become more factionalized, more criminal, and less capable of administering territory. Yet, it remains a violent entity that evolves and reproduces through its connections to internationally sanctioned structures of power, whether Yemeni state-affiliated elites, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or their Western partners. When seen through the logic of trivializing discourses, this does not constitute a fundamental change to the ontology of al-Qa’ida because al-Qa’ida emerged and is sustained, at least in part, as a tool of political competition.

Rather than confronting al-Qa’ida or Islamic State directly, many Yemenis simply deny that either group is much more than an extension of oppressive power—hardly the rallying cry of a viable insurgency. Not only does trivialization deny groups labelled as terrorists the permission to narrate their activities as anti-establishment, but it also credits some of their survival to counterterrorism’s desire for quick fixes to complex power struggles. However, trivialization is not seen as a form of resistance in mainstream discourses about terrorism. Instead, it is framed as conspiracism, the expression of partisan biases or, sometimes, an empirical niggle in an otherwise tight conceptual framework, and excluded from analysis. Yemeni discourses reveal that while it is more comfortable to think of terrorist groups as revolutionary actors, it may be more fruitful to explore the ways that they also help uphold the established order.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank everyone who generously gave their time and insights in interviews, colleagues at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies for intellectual and logistical support (particularly Yasmeen al-Eryani, Abdul-Ghani al-Iryani, and Fare’a al-Muslimi), and those who discussed the project or commented on previous drafts (in alphabetical order): Dylan Constantine, Eda Gunaydin, Tess Lea, Susan Park, Laura J. Shepherd, Daniel J. Tower, and Nicole Wegner. We would also like to thank M and SN (who reside in Yemen and will not be further identified). Sarah and Nadwa are very grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers at Security Studies for their insightful comments, though we are responsible for any remaining errors.

Disclosure Statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

Sarah G. Phillips’s research was funded by the Australian Research Council (FT200100539) and, previously by a Sydney University Research Accelerator (SOAR) Prize.

Notes on contributors

Sarah G. Phillips

Sarah G. Phillips is professor of Global Conflict and Development Studies in the Discipline of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Nadwa al-Dawsari

Nadwa al-Dawsari is a Non-Resident Scholar at the Middle East Institute.

Notes

1 Comment made by a Yemeni conference participant (Yemeni Researcher A, under Chatham House rule) about the nature of al-Qa’ida’s presence in Yemen. Beirut: October 2019.

2 See Andrew Silke, “The Devil You Know: Continuing Problems with Research on Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 13, no. 4 (2017): 1-14; John Horgan and Michael J. Boyle, “A Case Against ‘Critical Terrorism Studies,’” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1, no. 1 (2008): 57.

3 Alex P. Schmid, “The Definition of Terrorism,” in Alex P. Schmid (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research. (London: Routledge, 2011), 42; Diana Dascalu and Ben Wilkinson, “Defining ‘Terrorism’ Is the First Step to Defeating It” The National Interest, November 7, 2021. https://nationalinterest.org/feature/defining-‘terrorism’-first-step-defeating-it-195815

4 Richard Jackson, “The Core Commitments of Critical Terrorism Studies,” European Political Science 6, no. 3 (2007): 246; Lisa Stampnitzky, Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism”. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Lisa Stampnitzky. “Can Terrorism Be Defined?” in Michael Stohl, Richard Burchill and Scott Howard Englund (eds). Constructions of Terrorism. (University of California Press, 2017), 11-20; Anna Meier, “The Idea of Terror: Institutional Reproduction in Government Responses to Political Violence” International Studies Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2020): 499–509.

5 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. (London: Routledge: 2016), 118.

6 More broadly, it rests on the assumption that terrorist violence is substantively different to non-terrorist violence. It is beyond the scope of this article to pursue this argument directly, but Helen Dexter provides an excellent articulation of it in Helen Dexter, “Terrorism and Violence: Another Violence is Possible?” Critical Studies on Terrorism 5, no. 1 (2012): 121-137.

7 By referring to the administrative convenience of information, we borrow from James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 3.

8 Yemeni researcher (B) in a Zoom discussion between several Yemeni researchers and Sarah Phillips about the nature of armed groups in Yemen. Yemen: 9 March 2021.

9 See Alexander Wendt, “On Constitution and Causation in International Relations” Review of International Studies 24 (1998): 101-117; Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War. (London: Routledge, 2006); Tarak Barkawi, “Decolonising War.” European Journal of International Security 1, no. 2 (2016): 199–214.

10 Sarah G. Phillips, “Making al-Qa’ida Legible: Counter-Terrorism and the Reproduction of Terrorism” European Journal of International Relations 25, no. 4 (2019): 1132–1156.

11 Phillips, “Making al-Qa’ida Legible,” 1144; Stephen W. Day, Regionalism and Rebellion in Yemen: A Troubled National Union. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 113; 133; Gregory D. Johnsen, The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda and the Battle for Arabia. (London: Oneworld Publications: 2013). For a sophisticated contextualization of this relationship see Laurent Bonnefoy, Yemen and the World: Beyond Insecurity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), Chapter 3.

12 Gregory D. Johnsen, Testimony of Gregory D. Johnsen Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, January 20, 2010: https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/JohnsenTestimony100120a1.pdf, 13; Sarah Phillips, “The Norm of State-Monopolised Violence from a Yemeni Perspective,” in Charlotte Epstein (ed.) Against International Relations Norms: Postcolonial Perspectives. (London: Routledge, 2017).

13 For the weakness of the Yemeni state, see: ICG (International Crisis Group), “Yemen: Coping With Terrorism and Violence in a Fragile State.” (2003): https://icg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/08-yemen-coping-with-terrorism-and-violence-in-a-fragile-state.pdf; Elisabeth Kendall, “Twenty Years After 9/11: The Jihadi Threat in the Arabian Peninsula” CTC Sentinel 14, no. 7 (2021): 63. For AQAP’s response to counterterrorism measures, see: Gabriel Koehler-Derrick (ed.) “A False Foundation? AQAP, Tribes, and Ungoverned Spaces in Yemen” Combatting Terrorism Center at Westpoint. October 3, 2011: 11. https://ctc.usma.edu/a-false-foundation-aqap-tribes-and-ungoverned-spaces-in-yemen/; Barak Barfi, “Yemen on the Brink? The Resurgence of Al-Qaeda in Yemen,” New America Foundation (January 2010) 2; ICG (International Crisis Group), “Yemen’s al-Qaeda: Expanding the base.” February 2 (2017): 6. https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/yemen/174-yemen-s-al-qaeda-expanding-base. For AQAP’s messaging see: Alistair Harris, “Exploiting Grievances: Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (May 2010): https://carnegieendowment.org/files/exploiting_grievances.pdf; Elisabeth Kendall, “Contemporary Jihadi Militancy in Yemen” Middle East Institute, (July 2018): https://www.mei.edu/sites/default/files/publications/MEI%20Policy%20Paper_Kendall_7.pdf

14 For exceptions, see Phillips, “The Norm of State-Monopolised Violence”; Phillips, “Making al-Qa’ida Legible”; Martin Jerrett, and Mohammed al-Haddar, “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula: From Global Insurgent to State Enforcer.” Hate Speech International (2017): https://www.hate-speech.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/From-Global-Insurgent-to-State-Enforcer.pdf; Maria-Louise Clausen, “Exploring the Agency of the Affiliates of Transnational Jihadist Organizations: The Case of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (2022, in press), 6; 8.

15 Yafi’a News. “Delving deep reveals a close relationship between a faction of al-Qa’ida and the Houthis,” (Arabic) March 12, 2015: http://www.yafa-news.net/archives/141798; Abdul-Kareem al-Khaiwani, “There is a real bet that Yemen recovers its will, strength, and morality” (Arabic). Al-Masar Newspaper, April 16, 2016: 8–9. For further commentary see Phillips, “Making al-Qa’ida Legible.”

16 Yemeni researcher (E) in a Zoom discussion between several Yemeni researchers and Sarah Phillips about the nature of armed groups in Yemen: 10 December 2020.

17 Yasser al-Yafei, “Assassinations in South Yemen: Al-Qaeda or Settling Scores?” (Arabic) al-Akhbar, January 5, 2012; al-Masdar, “Human Rights Report: This is how the Houthis and ISIS cooperated…” (Arabic). January 7, 2021: https://web.archive.org/web/20210107112048/https://almasdaronline.com/articles/212403

18 Qat is a mild stimulant that is chewed briefly and then stored in the cheek. The gathering at which this usually occurs—the qat chew—is an integral part of Yemeni social and political life.

19 For partisan origins, see: Norman Cigar, The Enemy is Us: How Allied and US Strategy in Yemen Contributes to AQAPs Survival (Tampa, FL: Joint Special Operations University, 2018), 7. For conspiracy mindedness, see: Time, “Yemen’s Mysterious Militants: Are they Really Al-Qaeda?” July 8, 2011: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2082153,00.html. For outlandishness, see: David Romney, Amaney A. Jamal, Robert O. Keohane, and Dustin Tingley, “The Enemy of My Enemy Is Not My Friend: Arabic Twitter Sentiment toward ISIS and the United States,” International Studies Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2021): 1176-1184, 3.

20 Jennifer Milliken, “The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Methods,” European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 2 (1999): 234.

21 The interviews for this project were conducted by Sarah Phillips. Our interlocutors provided their informed consent verbally and have been deidentified, per our approved human research ethics protocol at The University of Sydney (2019/684).

22 Interview with Yemeni researcher (H) over Zoom. Yemen: 9 February 2022.

23 The conference was held under Chatham House Rule.

24 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

25 It also builds on foundations that were established in our previous work: Phillips, “The Norm of State-Monopolised Violence”; “Making al-Qa’ida Legible,” and Nadwa al-Dawsari, “Our Common Enemy: Ambiguous Ties Between al-Qaeda and Yemen’s Tribes,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 11, 2018: https://carnegie-mec.org/2018/01/11/our-common-enemy-ambiguous-ties-between-al-qaeda-and-yemen-s-tribes-pub-75225

26 Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Scott, Seeing Like a State; Evelyn S. Ruppert, “‘I Is; Therefore I Am’: The Census as Practice of Double Identification,” Sociological Research Online 13, no. 4 (2008): 69-81; Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star (eds), Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); John Law, “Seeing Like a Survey” Cultural Sociology, 3, no. 2 (2009): 239–256; John Law, “What’s Wrong with a One-World World?” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 16, no. 1 (2015): 126-139; Sally Engle Merry, The Seductions of Quantification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). For work that brings these two fields together (albeit with a greater emphasis on insurgencies than terrorist groups, per se), see Josef Teboho Ansorge and Tarak Barkawi, “Utile Forms: Power and Knowledge in Small War,” Review of International Studies 40, no. 1 (2014): 3-24; Jon R. Lindsay, “Target Practice: Counterterrorism and the Amplification of Data Friction” Science, Technology, & Human Values 42, no 6 (2017): 1061-1099.

27 Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory.” Millennium 10 (1981): 128-129.

28 See Jacob. N. Shapiro, The Terrorist’s Dilemma. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 2; James J. F. Forrest, “Exploiting the Fears of Al-Qa’ida’s Leadership” CTC Sentinel 2, no. 2 (2009): https://ctc.westpoint.edu/exploiting-the-fears-of-al-qaidas-leadership/; Clint Watts, “Deciphering Competition Between al-Qàida and the Islamic State” CTC Sentinel 9, no. 7 (2016): https://ctc.usma.edu/deciphering-competition-between-al-qaida-and-the-islamic-state/; Jarret Brachman and William McCants “Stealing Al Qaeda’s Playbook” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29, no. 4 (2006): 309.

29 Ido Oren, “International Relations Ideas as Reflections and Weapons of US Foreign Policy,” in Andreas Gofas, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, and Nicholas Onuf (eds) Sage Handbook of the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of International Relations (London: Sage, 2018).

30 There are debates within the literature cited in the section that follows over which form of rationality – unitary, strategic, instrumental, or procedural – best explains terrorist choices but this is not directly relevant to the arguments that we wish to make here. While some scholars argue that terrorism is nihilist, fundamentally illogical or irrational, and disorganized (for example Peter R. Neumann and M.L.R. Smith, “Strategic Terrorism: The Framework and its Fallacies,” Journal of Strategic Studies 28, no. 4 (2005): 572; Robert Nalbandov, “Irrational Rationality of Terrorism,” Journal of Strategic Security, 6, no. 4 (2013): 92-102), this view constitutes a small minority within the field.

31 Claude Berrebi, “The Economics of Terrorism and Counterterrorism: What Matters and Is Rational-Choice Theory Helpful?” in Paul K. Davis and Kim Cragin (eds). Social Science for Counterterrorism: Putting the Pieces Together. (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2009): 170. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG849.pdf Emphasis added.

32 For self-maximising decisions, see: Bryan Caplan, “Terrorism: The Relevance of the Rational Choice Model,” Public Choice 128, no. 1/2 (2006): 91-107; Andrew H. Kydd and Barbara F Walter, “The Strategies of Terrorism,” International Security 31, no.1 (2006): 49-79; Eric van Um, “Discussing Concepts of Terrorist Rationality: Implications for Counterterrorism Policy,” Defence and Peace Economics 22, no. 2 (2011): 161-179; Isaac Kfir, “Innovating to Survive, a Look at How Extremists Adapt to Counterterrorism” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 46, no. 7 (2021): 1264. For the ability to manage a clandestine organization, see: Martha Crenshaw, “An Organizational Approach to the Analysis of Political Terrorism,” Orbis XXXIX (1985): 19–21; Brachman and McCants “Stealing Al Qaeda’s Playbook”; Brian Fishman, Dysfunction and Decline: Lessons Learned from Inside Al Qa’ida in Iraq. West Point Counter Terrorism Center, Harmony Project, March 16, 2009; Shapiro, The Terrorist’s Dilemma.

33 Donatella Della Porta, “Recruitment Processes in Clandestine Political Organizations,” International Social Movement Research 1 (1988): 155-169; Eli Berman, Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2009); Miles Kahler, “Collective Action and Clandestine Networks: The Case of Al Qaeda” in Miles Kahler (ed). Networked Politics: Agency, Power and Governance. (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 103-124; Joshua Kilberg, “A Basic Model Explaining Terrorist Group Organizational Structure” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 35, no. 11 (2012): 810-830.

34 James Forrest, Jarret Brachman, and Joseph Felter, “Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting Al-Qa’ida’s Organizational Vulnerabilities,” West Point Counter Terrorism Center, Harmony Project. February 14 (2006): 3. https://ctc.usma.edu/harmony-and-disharmony-exploiting-al-qaidas-organizational-vulnerabilities/

35 Gordon H. McCormick, “Terrorist Decision Making,” Annual Review of Political Science 6 (2003): 500; Peter Abell, “Rational choice theory and the analysis of organizations,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory, and Organization Studies: Contemporary Currents. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 319

36 Shapiro, The Terrorist’s Dilemma, 15.

37 See Jessica Stern and Amit Modi, “Producing Terror: Organizational Dynamics of Survival” in Thomas J. Biersteker, Sue E. Eckert, and Nikos Passas (eds.) Countering the financing of terrorism. (London: Routledge, 2008),19; Benjamin Bahney, Howard J. Shatz, Carroll Ganier, Renny McPherson, and Barbara Sude, “An Economic Analysis of the Financial Records of al-Qa’ida in Iraq.” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010). https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG1026.html; Aymenn al-Tamimi, “The Evolution in Islamic State Administration: The Documentary Evidence.” Perspectives on Terrorism 9, no. 4 (2015): 117-129; Vera Mironova, From Freedom Fighters to Jihadists: Human resources of Non-State Armed Groups. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Rahmatullah Amiri and Ashley Jackson, “Insurgent Bureaucracy: How the Taliban Makes Policy” United States Institute of Peace, November 19, 2019: https://www.usip.org/publications/2019/11/insurgent-bureaucracy-how-taliban-makes-policy; Gina Vale, “Piety is in the Eye of the Bureaucrat: The Islamic State’s Strategy of Civilian Control” CTC Sentinel 13, no. 1 (January 2020): https://ctc.usma.edu/piety-eye-bureaucrat-islamic-states-strategy-civilian-control/

38 Jenna Jordan, Leadership Decapitation: Strategic Targeting of Terrorist Organizations. (Stanford University Press: 2019), 23; 44; Austin Long, “Whack-a-Mole or Coup de Grace? Institutionalization and Leadership Targeting in Iraq and Afghanistan” Security Studies 23, no. 3 (2014): 471-512; see also Bryan C. Price, Targeting Top Terrorists: Understanding Leadership Removal in Counterterrorism Strategy. (New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2019).

39 For organizational structures see: Martha Crenshaw, “Theories of terrorism: Instrumental and organizational approaches,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 10, no. 4 (1987): 13-31; Victor Asal and R. Karl Rethemeyer, “The Nature of the Beast: Organizational Structures and the Lethality of Terrorist Attacks,” The Journal of Politics 70, no. 2 (2008): 437-449; Daniel Milton, Structure of a State: Captured Documents and the Islamic State’s Organizational Structure. June 28, 2021: https://ctc.usma.edu/structure-of-a-state-captured-documents-and-the-islamic-states-organizational-structure/. For bureaucratic efficiency see: Jordan, Leadership Decapitation; Shapiro, The Terrorist’s Dilemma; Patrick B. Johnston, Jacob N. Shapiro, Howard J. Shatz, Benjamin Bahney, Danielle F. Jung, Patrick Ryan, and Jonathan Wallace, Foundations of the Islamic State: Management, Money, and Terror in Iraq, 2005–2010. (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation: 2016): https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1192.html; Beatrice A. de Graaf, and Ahmet Yayla, “Policing as Rebel Governance. The Islamic State Police.” The ISIS Files: The George Washington University Program on Extremism. April 2021: https://isisfiles.gwu.edu/downloads/j6731378s?locale=en. For interorganizational relationships see: Brian J. Phillips, “Terrorist Group Cooperation and Longevity,” International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2014): 336–47. For internal documentation see: Fishman, Dysfunction and Decline; Haroro J. Ingram, Craig Whiteside, and Charlie Winter, The ISIS Reader: Milestone Texts of the Islamic State Movement. (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2020). For ideological coherence, see: Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” The Atlantic 315, no. 2 (2015): 78-94; Cole Bunzel, “The Islamic State’s Ideology: History of a Rift,” The ISIS Files: The George Washington University Program on Extremism. June 2020: https://isisfiles.gwu.edu/concern/reports/70795765b. For strategic planning, see: Brian Fishman, The Master Plan: ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory. (New Haven: Yale University Press: 2016). For community support, see: Elisabeth Kendall, “Contemporary Jihadi Militancy”; Jenna Jordan, “Attacking the Leader, Missing the Mark: Why Terrorist Groups Survive Decapitation Strikes” International Security 38.4: 8. For communications strategies, see: Elisabeth Kendall, “Contemporary Jihadi Militancy”; Jenna Jordan, “Attacking the Leader, Missing the Mark: Why Terrorist Groups Survive Decapitation Strikes” International Security 38.4: 8. For networks, see Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Walter Enders, and Xuejuan Su, “Rational Terrorists and Optimal Network Structure,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 51, no.1 (2007): 33-57. For resource management, see: Bahney, et al. “An Economic Analysis”; Mironova, From Freedom Fighters.

40 See Lisa Stampnitzky, Disciplining Terror.

41 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” Feminist Studies 14, no.3 (Autumn 1988): 590.

42 Law, “On Sociology,” 629.

43 Annemarie Mol, “Ontological Politics: A Word and Some Questions,” The Sociological Review 47, no. 1 (1999): 77.

44 John Law, “Seeing Like a Survey” Cultural Sociology, 3, no. 2 (2009): 239–256; John Law, “What’s Wrong”; Merry, The Seductions of Quantification.

45 Merry, The Seductions of Quantification, 20; Law, “Seeing Like a Survey,” 243.

46 Law, “What’s Wrong”; 130; Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Lindsay, “Target Practice,” 1079.

47 de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South, 118.

48 Scott Seeing Like a State; Law, “Seeing Like a Survey,” 247.

49 Ansorge and Barkawi, “Utile Forms,” 3.

50 Josef Teboho Ansorge, “Digital Power in World Politics: Databases, Panopticons and Erwin Cuntz,” Millennium 40 no.1 (2011): 70.

51 Interview with Yemeni Researcher (K) over Zoom. 7 July 2021.

52 Yemeni researcher (B) in a Zoom discussion between several Yemeni researchers and Sarah Phillips about the nature of armed groups in Yemen. Yemen: 9 March 2021.

53 Yemeni researcher (J) in a Zoom discussion between several Yemeni researchers and Sarah Phillips about the nature of armed groups in Yemen. Yemen: 9 March 2021.

54 See Phillips “Making al-Qa’ida Legible,” 1140-1144.

55 Anna Johansson and Stellan Vinthagen, “Dimensions of Everyday Resistance: An Analytical Framework,” Critical Sociology 42, no. 3 (2016): 418. Emphasis in original.

56 Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 13, no. 3 (Spring, 1984): 27-48.

57 See also Abid, Mujib. Forthcoming. Resurgent Histories of Afghanistan: Political Encounters with Modernity. Unpublished PhD Thesis: University of Queensland.

58 See USAID, “Yemen Country Strategy 2010–2012: Stabilization Through Development” (2010): http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDACP572.pdf; Eric, P. Robinson, Kathleen Frier, Kim Cragin, Melissa A. Bradley, Daniel Egel, Bryce Loidolt, and Paul S. Steinberg, What Factors Cause Individuals to Reject Violent Extremism in Yemen? (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2017) https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1727.html; Kendall, “Contemporary Jihadi Militancy.” The refrain that Yemen is “the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden” remains common in Western media commentary about the country (for analysis see Phillips, “The Norm of State-Monopolised Violence,” 143-144).

59 United States Army/Marine Corps, FM3-24 Counterinsurgency Field Manual. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1-20; see also Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 224-236.

60 Yemeni researcher D – 26 June 2021.

61 Yemeni researcher F – 30 June 2021.

62 Nabil al-Bukairi, “al-Qa’ida: The International Terrorism Game in Yemen” (Arabic) al-Ayyam. March 3, 2020: https://www.alayyam.info/news/84E9ZWL1-99QWDE-9024

63 Email correspondence with Sana’a-based Yemeni Researcher (C): October 2019 (lightly edited to clarify the researcher’s language). Emphasis added.

64 Email correspondence with Sana’a-based Yemeni Researcher (C): July 2022 (lightly edited to clarify the researcher’s language).

65 See Jerrett and al-Haddar, “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”

66 Casey Coombs, “Yemen’s Use of Militias to Maintain Stability in Abyan Province” CTC Sentinel 6, no 2 (2013) https://ctc.usma.edu/yemens-use-of-militias-to-maintain-stability-in-abyan-province/, 6; Cigar, The Enemy is Us, 56.

67 Interview with Yemeni Researcher (A): 29 October 2020.

68 Baraa Shiban, “Why Yemenis are Still Joining al-Qaeda” Middle East Eye. 26 April 2016. http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/why-yemenis-are-still-joining-al-qaeda-1931213295. Likewise, Sarah Phillips shows that 70 prisoners convicted of affiliation with al-Qa’ida were released just one week before the government began massacring peaceful protestors on 18 March 2011. Sarah Phillips, Yemen and the Politics of Permanent Crisis. (London: Routledge, 2011), 14.

69 Baraa Shiban, “A Short History of Counter-Terrorism in Yemen” in Marie-Christine Heinze (ed). Addressing Security Sector Reform in Yemen, (2017): 22-26. https://carpo-bonn.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/carpo_policy_report_04_2017_printerfriendly.pdf

70 Shiban, “Why Yemenis are Still Joining al-Qaeda.”

71 Interview with Yemeni Researcher F: 30 June 2021.

72 Interview with Yemeni Researcher G: 12 July 2021.

73 Comment made by a Yemeni conference participant (Yemeni Researcher L, under Chatham House rule) about the nature of al-Qa’ida’s presence in Yemen. Beirut: October 2019.

74 See Charles Lister, The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Emeka Thaddues Njoku, “Merchants of Terror: Neo-Patrimonialism, Counterterrorism Economy, and Expansion of Terrorism in Nigeria,” African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review 10, no. 2 (2020): 83-107; Cigar, The Enemy is Us, 5; 15; 70; Barak Mendelsohn, “The Limits of Ideologically-Unlikely Partnerships: Syria’s Support for Jihadi Terrorist Groups” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (January 2021): 1-22.

75 UNSC, “Letter dated 27 January 2017 from the Panel of Experts on Yemen addressed to the President of the Security Council”. S/2018/193. 27 January (2017): 22, footnote 60. See also Cigar, The Enemy is Us, 5. Emphasis added.

76 Elana DeLozier, “Yemen Matrix: Allies & Adversaries” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy September 17, 2020: 6. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/yemen-matrix-allies-adversaries. Emphasis added.

77 The Panel of Experts does this when it says that “AQAP is opposed to nearly every other side in the conflict” without elaborating on which side/s it does not oppose, while DeLozier acknowledges that “Certain groups in Yemen face regular allegations of cooperating with terrorist elements.”

78 DeLozier, “Yemen Matrix,” 6.

79 Peter Salisbury, “Misunderstanding Yemen.” International Crisis Group. September 20, 2021: 4, https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/yemen/misunderstanding-yemen. Emphasis added.

80 Kendall, “Twenty Years After 9/11,” 63; 66. For a similar argument about Islamic State also splintering because of counterterrorism practices, see Elisabeth Kendall, “ISIS in Yemen: Caught in a Regional Power Game” Newlines Institute. 21 July, 2020. https://newlinesinstitute.org/isis/isis-in-yemen-caught-in-a-regional-power-game-2/.

81 Kendall, “Twenty Years After 9/11,” 63.

82 Kendall, “Twenty Years After 9/11,” 66.

83 Kendall, “Twenty Years After 9/11,” 73.

84 Kendall, “Twenty Years After 9/11,” 63.

85 Kendall, “Twenty Years After 9/11,” 66.

86 Thanks to one of our anonymous reviewers for highlighting the comparison in this paragraph.

87 See Ruppert, “I Is; Therefore I Am,” 76; Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princetown University Press, 1996); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. (Princeton, N.J.: Princetown University Press: 2002).

88 See David Keen, Useful Enemies: When Waging Wars is More Important Than Winning Them. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 118.

89 Kendall, “Twenty Years After 9/11,” 63. In 2020, the UNSC estimated AQAP to have “approximately 7,000 fighters,” though it was unclear how many, if any, this estimate presumes to be involved with the militias that Kendall discusses. UNSC, “Letter dated 16 July 2020 from the Chair of the Security Council Committee pursuant to resolutions 1267 (1999), 1989 (2011) and 2253 (2015) concerning Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Da’esh), Al-Qaida and associated individuals, groups, undertakings and entities addressed to the President of the Security Council” S/2020/717: 8/24. https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/s_2020_717.pdf.