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Terrorism's cause and cure: the rhetorical regime of democracy in the US and UK

Political actors and commentators in the global ‘West’ have often used two key rhetorical approaches to explain terrorism. On the one hand, they ascribe attacks to terrorists' violent hatred and resentment of democracy. On the other hand, they assert that democracy is the essential panacea for terrorism. These two approaches are linked through a process of discursive ‘articulation’ that inhibits public debate and disagreement. Specifically, the ideological power and unassailable goodness of ‘democracy’ become the simultaneous, self-evident cause of and cure for terrorism. Using five major terrorist events from 1993 to 2005, the article illustrates how political leaders and news outlets advanced a ‘rhetorical regime’ that suppressed oppositional discourse and rationalised innately anti-democratic policies. One result of this rhetorical regime is the hegemonic maintenance of power through new representations of global terrorism.