Embedded Expertise and the New Terrorism

Abstract

When Donald Rumsfeld made his famous remarks on knowns and unknowns they were widely ridiculed and dismissed as absurd White House rhetoric. Yet Rumsfeld’s turn of phrase reveals more about US military strategy than it has been given credit for. In the contemporary ‘war on terror’ the claims generally made by state servants, politicians and ‘experts’ about something called ‘al Qaeda’, often reveal an important tension between the intangibility of the ‘terrorists’ and the extent to which they can be identified and indeed ‘known’.