In this lecture, Professor Scott Poynting will present arguments and some case study evidence from the book he recently co-edited with David Whyte, 'Counter-Terrorism and State Political Violence' (Routledge, 2012). The following questions will be explored, especially in relation to the ‘war on terror’.
•    To what extent can counter-terror strategies be read as a form of state terror?
•    What are the features of counter-terrorism that render it so easily reducible to state terror?
•    How is state terror implicated in the maintenance of a neo-liberal global and social order?
The cases examined will show a crucial asymmetry between state and substate political violence: state political violence deployed in the name of counter-terrorism is hugely disproportionate to the sub-state political violence that the state names as terrorism and often calls forth with its repression.

A series of ‘themes’ emerge:
1.  support for sub-state or covert groups for political ends;
2.  political violence as a strategy to neutralise political opposition; and
3.  political violence as a strategy to neutralise potential resistance in general populations.
4.  political and legal conditions for continuing state political violence: state political violence is sustained by institutionalised impunity.

Scott Poynting is currently a Visiting Fellow at the ANU Centre for Arab & Islamic Studies and holds the position of Adjunct Professor in the School of Justice at Queensland University of Technology. His position prior to this was at Manchester Metropolitan University where he was Professor in Sociology (May 2007-January 2013). He is co-author of 'On Being Lebanese in Australia: Identity, Racism and the Ethnic Field' (LAU Press, Beirut, 2010) and 'Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other' (Sydney Institute of Criminology, 2004), and co-editor of the recent volumes 'Counter-Terrorism and State Political Violence' (Routledge, 2012),  'Global Islamophobia: Muslims and Moral Panic in the West' (Ashgate, 2012) and 'Contemporary State Terrorism: Theory and Practice' (Routledge, 2010).

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