The Exceptional Everyday: Terrorism and the Weaponization of Daily Life


James Walsh, Ontario Tech University

There was a bright light , A shattering of shop windows , The bomb in the baby carriage, Was wired to the radio - Paul Simon, The Boy in the Bubble Despite being overshadowed by several less spectacular, but considerably more lethal, risks (e.g. dog attacks, bee stings, traffic accidents, medical malpractice), terrorism remains a leading source of anxiety within Western societies. It, therefore, constitutes an imagined or phantom menace with perceptions of existential danger stemming more from hot cognitions and apocalyptic assessments than the objective extent of harm. While scholars have meticulously detailed how powerful actors and institutions (e.g. media outlets, security experts, elected officials) feed and profit from overblown reactions and moral panic, terrorists’ role in this process has received less attention. This neglect is unfortunate because, by allowing insurgents to punch above their weight and haunt citizens’ private thoughts and public lives, hyperbolic, if not entirely hallucinatory, fear represents terrorism’s primary engine and facilitator. This paper offers new insight into the stark disjuncture between terrorism’s material reality and subjective experience, and presents a conceptual framework that helps account for how otherwise diminutive actors are capable of generating seismic shifts in national and global politics. In building this understanding, the assembly and deployment of explosive devices – the leading method of insurgent violence – are assessed to underscore terrorism’s status as a form of quotidian violence. Drawing on exemplary actors, events and campaigns from throughout the modern era, it is argued that terrorists’ ability to roil societies and evoke overwhelming awareness of precarity stems from techniques of masking and improvisation grounded in the weaponization of the familiar and everyday. Specifically, by repurposing ubiquitous, banal artifacts to mask or manufacture lethal force – when, for instance, a bomb is ensconced within seemingly unremarkable things (e.g. cars, backpacks, parcels, rubbish bins, perambulators), cobbled together from domestic products or triggered by electrical appliances like radios and cell phones - terrorists succeed in orchestrating attacks that are disorienting, unpredictable andthwart effective countermeasures. Beyond being merely an instrumental effort to evade detection and fly under the proverbial radar, the fashioning of explosives from ordinary items and materials is interpreted as a symbolic onslaught and important means by which terrorists foster dark insecurity and amplify their crepuscular, anxiety-inducing character. In infiltrating the minutia of daily life and injecting the monstrous into the mundane, insurgents nurture vulnerability and produce confounding conditions of ontological and social entropy where the surrounding environment appears unstable, corrupted and on the brink of rupture. Owing to profound uncertainty surrounding the what, where, how and who of violent atrocity, such methods succeed unleashing primal fear of the unmarked and unknown, creating more anxiety than manifestly greater threats possessing comprehensible form. As a result, accentuating the tactical and expressive role of routine objects and infrastructures within terrorism’s organising logic highlights its ability to instil unremitting fear by destroying citizens’ “taken-for-granted confidence” in the sociomaterial orders that facilitate and sustain their “personal and collective projects” (Goold et al 2013, 993). While it is somewhat cliché to acknowledge terrorism’s psychic and social disruptiveness and the extent to which it violently disturbs everyday reality, the defining contours, functions and effects of terrorists’ weaponization of daily life remain insufficiently plumbed. Engaging with these consequential, yet less noticed, dynamics assists in contextualizing the phenomenon’s propensity to beget alarm and implant deleterious thoughts about oneself, others and the world writ large. In the final instance, the ability to penetrate the familiar, deceive the senses and propagate perceptions of a parlous, unstable atmosphere presents an important means through which insurgents’ reach, influence and enigmatic presence are exponentially augmented. As an exploratory study, this paper’s findings are illustrative and suggestive, not definitive. Nonetheless, it is hoped that elevating such dynamics to a site of meaningful analytic engagement can provide new vistas and sightlines from which to evaluate terrorism’s disproportionate footprint and impact.

This paper will be presented at the following session: