How Does Violence Threaten the State? Four Narratives on Piracy

Mark Shirk

Terrorism and Political Violence, 2017, vol. 29, issue 4, 656-673

Abstract: Violence characterized by similar actions, actor motivations, group structures, or level of damage still poses qualitatively distinct genera of threats to states. For instance, “terrorism” can threaten a particular state, be used by a state, or threaten the entire state system. Building on the threat construction literature, this study argues that threat is best understood through narratives on the relationship between violence and the boundary-producing practices that construct the state. Four ideal-typical basic narratives on this relationship are produced—entrant, resource, revisionist, and criminal. Each narrative is then demonstrated by looking at how it was used in a historical case of piracy. The action (piracy as raiding at sea) is held constant while the threat in each varies with the narrative. Understanding how threat is narratively constructed can help us to understand particular historical episodes of violence and state responses to them.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09546553.2015.1058789 (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:4:p:656-673

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

DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2015.1058789

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 ().