The Rationality/Irrationality Nexus in Post-9/11 Framing of Terrorism in Australia

Abstract

There is a significant body of work on post-9/11 terrorism discourse in the West, however this has focused primarily on the use of fear-inducing rhetoric and its effects on policy outcomes. In this thesis, I present a theoretical logic and empirical support for the existence of a relationship between perceptions of terrorist rationality and counterterrorism policy preferences. This is important because the dominant frame in post-9/11 Australian political rhetoric and media discourse on terrorism consistently depicted terrorists as irrational, motivated by blind hatred of nebulous concepts like “freedom” or identity-based antipathy towards “who we are” and “our way of life”. This stands in direct contradiction to the dominant view in the academic literature, which maintained a significantly weaker presence in the discourse as the countervailing frame. The bulk of the academic literature is predicated on the empirically grounded premise of terrorist rationality and illustrates the strategic logic governing the timing, types, and targets of terrorism according to the organisational goals and capabilities of its perpetrators. This near dichotomous discord between the academic literature and the mainstream discourse on the point of terrorist rationality has the potential to have major policy implications according to the proposed logic that the perception that terrorists are irrational significantly curtails the perceived effectiveness of counterterrorism policies other than elimination and target hardening. The results of an Australian-first survey-experiment demonstrated that: (1) the Australian public conceives of terrorism as being predominantly irrational; (2) exposure to content from existing political rhetoric and media discourse had weak effects, indicating powerful priming for the discursive depiction of terrorists as irrational; (3) despite this priming, exposure to the countervailing frame of the academic literature significantly increased perceptions of terrorist rationality; and (4) lower perceptions of terrorist rationality correlated significantly with preferences for militaristic elimination strategies over diplomacy and negotiation.