Terrorist Finance and International Relations

This chapter situates this book into existing discourse on terrorist financing in particular and International Relations in general. In the first section, I argue that this book has shown that terrorist financing can be represented most generically as an issue of individual-level political-economic interactions which carry meaning for international or national security, meaning that terrorist financing relates to the dynamics of power and the everyday individual exchange of value within given political economies contexts. This finding indicates that, discursively, terrorist financing is best located within international security discourse, but which at various times can also touch on those of political economy, anthropology, politics, culture, psychology, and history. The second section argues that as such the analytic perspective constructed in this book addresses many of the deficiencies in what can be called orthodox representations of the terrorist financing activity, which (incorrectly) hold that “terrorist financing” is a significant, discrete, and politically unproblematic (albeit empirically complex) international security threat that must be uncovered, confronted, and as much as possible stopped, and therefore analysis of it should focus on uncovering the dark mysteries of who finances terrorism and how they do it. The significance of this advancement, I argue, is twofold.