[snip] Of the several specialised journals focusing on terrorism and low intensity warfare published in English, there had only been an occasional paper that referred to or focused on terrorism in India during this period. Relatively minor movements in Africa and the Middle East received far greater attention, and, of course, any terrorist movement or action that had an impact on Europe or the United States receives overwhelming attention.
The situation has changed radically over the past two years, and a substantial volume of literature on conflict in this region has subsequently burgeoned, particularly after India and Pakistan were imprinted on Western consciousness, by the Pokhran and Chagai blasts in 1998, as the new theatres of a possible nuclear confrontation. The trend intensified even further after the US State Department declared in 2000 - with little startling or new evidence - that there had been a "geographical shift of the locus of terror from the Middle East to South Asia."3 On May 1, 2000, the then Secretary of State, Madeline Albright had also noted a sudden "eastward shift in terrorism's center of gravity" towards South Asia. It is unsurprising, consequently, that this idea of a 'geographical shift' is now being increasingly and vigorously propounded, identifying Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir as the new loci and primary sources of extremist Islamic militancy. There are, however, some difficulties with this notion. The first and more obvious is the fact that there is no evidence of any sudden or abrupt 'shift', or a radical discontinuity in the situation at or around the time this thesis was propounded - Afghanistan's spiral into chaos has been an inexorable fact for over a decade, as has Pakistan's complicity in the activities of Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups, and the steady decline of its polity; even a cursory glance at fatalities in Kashmir would confirm, moreover, that terrorism has been at comparable levels in this theatre for over a decade.4
To those familiar with the course of terrorist movements in the region, there was no radical discontinuity between the situation at any time in 1999-2000, and it is interesting to see how an arbitrary shift in American perceptions (or perhaps the US agenda) has dramatic reverberations throughout the intellectual community across the world.
The surfeit of literature on 'Islam as a threat' that currently abounds in Western academia - characteristically dominated by the American paradigm - misses a crucial point. It is hazardous to focus inordinately on the transient geographical location or concentrations of terrorist activity, to the exclusion of its ideological moorings and state sponsors, or their intended targets and proclaimed goals. The error here is the belief that the threat of Islamic terrorism is contained within the regions of its most visible manifestation. But extremist Islam must be recognized for its essential character as an ideology and terrorism as a method that it accepts and justifies. A method will be adopted wherever it is perceived to have acceptable probabilities of success. An ideology extends wherever it has believers. These are the actual limits or 'foci' of extremist Islamic terrorism.
The upswing in scholarship on the 'Islamic threat' needs to be assessed within the context of the influence of the American research paradigm on security studies across the world. It is a shift in geographical loci of perceived US 'strategic interests' that has substantially created the impetus for much of this research. Within the context of a fundamentally altered international polity, the unipolar 'New World Order', this is an expected development. However, South Asia, and indeed India, are presently uniquely placed, and would need to challenge such exclusive and dominating frames of reference. A plurality of approaches towards terrorism and internal conflict, dictated by hard data on the ground situation, and not by an externally imposed 'dominant paradigm', is necessary to produce a valid, efficacious and practical understanding of the complex threat in this region. The totalizing Western framework needs to be questioned, and research priorities must increasingly be focused on the study of the actual theatres of conflict. [snip]