Preliminary Programme

Terrorism as such pertains to a relatively recent narrative in China, an official discourse which applies to phenomena which are not new. This presentation will show how changing names of similar phenomena of resistance, occurring in different historical periods, is a way to cope with political struggle and maintain the status quo in the remote and restive region of Xinjiang. Resistance to Beijing's rule will be analysed and understood through how it has been represented, from a terminological and discursive angle, in the official narrative, in a period of time spanning from the empire to Communist China.  Resistance - through both violent and not violent means - to Beijing's rule has deep historical roots in Xinjiang, starting from the times of the Han Dynasty (206 b.C. - 220 AD) and continuing up to now. Since 9/11, the Chinese government feels legitimated to use the concept of "terrorist" to define that part of the Uyghur population critical of Beijing's policies and agenda towards Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), the territory where Uyghurs, a Turkish Muslim minority in China, live. (Show less)

The paper focuses on the official representation of anti-colonial violence in British India relying on British parliamentary sources. The parliamentary debate on the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act of 1919 (better known as the Rawlatt Act) provides the starting point to reconstruct how, over the years, anti-colonial violence in Bengal and the Punjab caused not only the implementation of a series of special and preventive emergency measures, but the emergence of an official discourse on anti-colonial movements, as well, mainly based on a plain juxtaposition of words like “terrorism”, “sedition” and “revolution”. This preliminary exploration will assess how the official narrative of terrorism in India in the interwar years affected the colonial rhetoric of the British Raj. (Show less)

The paper will address how Shiftaism in Eritrea became a tactic that recurred to violence as a strategy to produce either fear and political intimidation, thus turning to be a tool for liberation during Eritrea’s transition to the post-colonial period.
To provide a critical appraisal, the study uses a combination of pre-existing literature from the fields of history, anthropology, sociology and political science, and archival research, through hitherto unpublished sources.
The paper attempts to put this issue in historical perspective within either the framework of the Horn of Africa regional studies, to make clear that it was not an isolated phenomenon, and with the more broadly African studies, to further examine the ways in which the European powers involved in Eritrea have responded to the challenge, with a focus on the narratives of counter-terrorism. (Show less)

The paper focuses on the perceptions of “terrorism” that Mexican politicians developed in the initial decades of the XX century, and which definitions did emerge in the Congressional debates. The aim is to assess which events were crucial in shaping an official narrative of the phenomenon, and, in doing so, I will make use of the Foucauldian theory, looking at the issue of discontinuity, which provides an analytical key to assess the whens and whys for the emergence of a State-centered discourse on terrorism. (Show less)