About Article

This article recovers states’ discursive practices regarding “international terrorism” in the 1930s. It examines the internal conditions of the discourse of terrorism among states in this period with a particular focus on its conspiratorial elements and suggests external conditions for this discourse’s emergence and order. Furthermore, it points to continuities and discontinuities between the 1930s discursive series and the constituent discursive forms of the contemporary global terrorism dispositif – an assemblage of power practices which bear on individual human bodies, populations or (rogue or fragile) states and which are all strategically oriented through the concept of terrorism. The purpose of such a genealogical history is to expand the space of dissent to power practices in the dominant structures of (terrorism) knowledge by problematising their object and the ways in which these formations are productive of human subjectivity.