International Journal on Criminology Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 61

Alain Bauer A
International Journal on Criminology - Spring 2015, Volume 3, Number 1
At the Risk of Repeating Myself, Lumpenterrorism is
Now with Us
It will come as no surprise to my regular readers to find here an idea I have been
advancing for several years, and on which I have written at greater length in the
recently published Terrorisme pour les Nuls [Terrorism for Dummies]. Repetition
being a key element of pedagogical technique, I offer a further new account of this
work.
Karl Marx invented the concept of the lumpenproletariat (the “raggedtrousered”
proletariat, the underclass) in his German Ideology, published in 1845.
For a long time, terrorism was an affair of state. You needed to obtain support,
aid, assistance, training camps, weapons, finance, passports, and the other means of
survival from a state in order to be able to operate. The great empires thus had “pushbutton”
access to an apparatus that allowed them to launch, or to pause, a campaign
of terror depending on their needs, or on their changing alliances.
Since 1979 and after the fall of the Shah of Iran, and the 1989 fall of the Soviet
Union, the appearance of a new form of terrorism, unlike previous versions, has
changed the game. Besides the issue of what we thought we should call Al Qaeda, we
have seen the return of more or less independent actors to the terrorism mix.
This has been intensified by the way the Internet can act as an incubator,
accelerating the process of radicalization, and by the fact that some of the new actors
are no longer imported from outside, but are in fact born inside the Western target
countries. Embedded terrorists have gradually replaced imported agents—when they
are not simply converts from within the circles of Islamic radicalism, which is far
from being the main perpetrator of terrorist acts, at least in the West.
With Khaled Kelkal in 1995, and then the Roubaix Gang in 1996, France has
had a painful experience of these hybrids—part gangsters, part terrorists—who slip
between the administrative cracks and escape the attention of the various organizations
of the state, which seem incapable of mounting a coherent response. Sixteen years
later, Mohammed Merah reminded us that the same process was still going on.
Indeed, a lengthy reminder had already appeared in a study into Radicalization in the
West, the Homegrown Threat, carried out for the NYPD in 2006 by Mitch Silber, and
supervised by Alain Bauer:
While the threat from overseas remains, many of the terrorist attacks or
thwarted plots against cities in Europe, Canada, Australia and the United
States have been conceptualized and planned by local residents/citizens
A
Professor of criminology at the National Conservatory for Arts and Crafts, New York and Beijing.
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