Leaderless Resistance and the Loneliness of Lone Wolves: Exploring the Rhetorical Dynamics of Lone Actor Violence

Paul Joosse

Terrorism and Political Violence, 2017, vol. 29, issue 1, 52-78

Abstract: “Leaderless resistance” and “lone wolf terrorism” are concepts that have steadily gained importance in the study of oppositional subcultures and terrorist groups, being used to describe the operational realities of a variety of terrorisms, from groups like Al Qaeda to Anders Breivik. In this article, I seek to describe leaderless resistance as a rhetorical construct, a meaning-conferring “ideology of effervescence” that lifts the spirits of both movement progenitors who advocate the strategy as well as incipient lone wolves who consider responding to their exhortations. Through an examination of the case of Wiebo Ludwig and the EnCana pipeline bombings of 2008–2009, I show how these rhetorics emerge in the interactions between activists and their political enemies. With this conception, we can (a) understand more fully the discursive/rhetorical dynamics involved in asymmetrical struggle, (b) problematize the acceptance of the organizational reality of leaderless resistance in the terrorism literature, and (c) question the assertion of some terrorism scholarship that refers to leaderless resistance and other ideologies of effervescence as hallmarks of the “new terrorism.”

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09546553.2014.987866 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ftpvxx:v:29:y:2017:i:1:p:52-78

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ftpv20

DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2014.987866

Access Statistics for this article

Terrorism and Political Violence is currently edited by James Forest

More articles in Terrorism and Political Violence from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().