International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 68

Crises and Attacks: Some Avenues to Be Explored and Guidelines for Action
and plunged, without any preparation, into a world without reference points. The
capacity for decision, which has to be rapid, is limited by the psychological shock
and the amazement induced by perceiving the gravity of the situation and the
scale of the problems generated by the crisis. The perception of increased negative
tensions, the absence of adequate responses for limiting these tensions, and the
time pressure on decision units (micro) all contribute to destabilizing the system
(macro) that, in return, will produce new negative tensions or amplify those already
existing.
In a global context that is seeing an increase in threat levels, and more fluidity
in relationships, information, and communication, crises are more frequent
and their effects greater. They may result from the actions of states or of collective
non-state actors of very diverse nature (multinational companies, banks, terrorist
groups, and so on) or individuals (key political, religious, or economic figures, individuals
issuing alerts, hackers, etc.). They may be the consequence of accidental
or deliberately engineered events. 4 Whatever the case, these crises—because, most
of the time, the effectiveness of the systems for dealing with them is limited or
non-existent—succeed in destabilizing the state’s structures.
While terrorism, nowadays, is generally presented as one of the main causes
of crisis for states, only in certain cases does it provoke major crises. As a form of
political violence and method of operating, terrorism is not something new. 5 What
does seem completely new is the use made by terrorist groups of all the opportunities
offered by globalization and the vulnerabilities of democratic societies. The
combination of several factors bestows a particular character upon the threat.
The transnational organization of these groups’ human resources, the recruitment
of combatants and the diversity of the processes and places of radicalization—whether
in a particular country (prisons, schools, etc.) or in cyberspace
(social networks)—, their training (on national territory or abroad) is a first factor.
Their methods of action—that is to say the capacity of these groups to prepare
operations from abroad or directly within the countries concerned; their recourse
both to civil methods (airplanes, ram-raiding vehicles) and to military ones (war
weapons and explosives), most often acquired thanks to delinquent networks that
are themselves transnational—are a second factor.
breakdown that marks the transition from a normal situation to an exceptional situation. Other
approaches, such as “the continuity hypothesis” put forward by Michel Dobry in his sociology of
political crises—which focuses on the removal of boundaries in the social sphere and on multi-sectoral
mobilization—offers a different study of crises (Dobry 1986; Aït-Aoudia and Roger 2015;
Meszaros and Morier 2015).
4 The reference here is to the distinction made by Uriel Rosenthal and Jean-Louis Dufour between
engineered crises, provoked deliberately by one or several actors (intentional, desired, planned, well
planned, or badly planned) and chance, or accidental crises.
5 I am defining terrorism as the threat to use, or the illegitimate and illegal use of violence—a fighting
method, be it widespread or more localized, used by groups of individuals or non-state actors
(whether or not they are state-backed) in situations of asymmetry, who commit acts of violence
or attacks against innocent targets and/or symbolic targets, for the purpose of fulfilling political
objectives.
65