Dissertation Defense: Michael Loadenthal -The politics of the attack: a discourse of insurrectionary communiqués

Dissertation Defense: Michael Loadenthal
The politics of the attack: a discourse of insurrectionary communiqués

Wednesday, April 1st
2:00pm - 4:00pm
Conference Room 5183

Committee Members:
Professor Rich Rubenstein
Professor Leslie Dwyer
Professor John Dale

Following the new millennium, and the massive discursive shifts witnessed as a reaction to the 9/11 attacks, an era of globalized protest culture emerged. Around the world, individuals and collectives empowered by transnational shifts in political culture facilitated a newly invigorated challenge to state authority. These post-millennial assemblages reimagined resistance beyond older modes of sectarianism, Soviet socialism, and vanguardist cadres. Beginning with the decline of the international anti-globalization movement (~1999-2006) was a corresponding rise in networked, clandestine movements adopting political violence vandalism, sabotage, arson and explosives—for an anti-capitalist and anti-state agenda. These networks have rapidly deteritorialized through the exporting of moniker “brands” and adoptable calling cards. This project focuses on these emergent networks of anti-state attack through a detailed examination of their textual ephemera. For these thousands of individuals, cells and networks, each time a window is broken, tire slashed, bank burned or bomb placed, a communiqué is issued, translated and sent to a global audience. Utilizing an ‘open source intelligence’ approach, a corpus of communiqués was developed comprised on claims issued by clandestine, rhizomatic networks. These 1,000+ texts have been collectively analyzed through a number of intersecting frames including Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics. These methodological toolsets are buttressed by the core argumentation of Critical Terrorism Studies and Critical Security Studies, which seeks to locate emancipatory, non-securitization motives for the analysis of political, non-state violence. This insurrectionary corpus is assembled to answer a number of key questions: What does the collective theory, as developed though the object of the communiqué, contribute to our understanding of violence, power and authority? What can we conclude about the adoptable moniker and the anonymous communiqué in terms of form? What does an internationalized movement mean for our understanding of space and place?