The French War on Terror: A Relational Approach to (Counter-)Terrorism

This book analyses the French war on terror, covering the French contributions to the US-led ‘war on terror’ and the wars in the Sahel Region since 2013.

This book argues that ‘terrorism’ and offensive counter-'terrorism' are not separate phenomena but, rather, need to be analyzed as two segments of one common violent relation. This leads the work to deconstruct the argument made by state officials that the French approaches to counter-'terrorism' have been more humane and more efficient than the Anglo-Saxons'. France has not avoided the mistakes previously committed by the US and Britain. The only originality of France's war on terror is in fact its anachronistic character. Indeed, France embraced this warlike approach to counter-'terrorism' in mid-2010, at a moment when the US and Britain had already recognized the shortcomings of this approach and started to abandon it.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies, French politics, and International Relations.

Mathias Delori is CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) researcher at CERI (Center for International Studies) of Sciences Po Paris, France.

Christian Olsson is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium, and Director of its Research Centre in International Relations (REPI – Recherche et Etudes en Politique Internationale).