Thesis title: Carabinieri Corps Approach to Counterterrorism: Among Interculturality and Military Praxis
The research mainly aims to analyse anti-terrorism / counter-terrorism by exploiting a bottom up rather than top down perspective, starting from the ethnographic contribution of the researcher, a former Italian counter-terrorism officer. Furthermore, it is intended to represent an attempt to bring communication studies back to the tactical approach to terrorism.
In Weber’s perspective, the attributions of meaning, as an essential element of communication processes, would provide us with a key to understanding the activities carried out and the attitudes assumed by the anti-terrorism of the Carabinieri Corps in the context of this research.
Starting from the attributions of meaning, the development of the analysis makes possible to understand the implications, and consequent meanings, that the action of counter-terrorism operators has in the social context of reference, which can certainly produce a clash, especially if it generates misunderstandings or develops preconceptions. Especially when interlocutors’ attitude generates a sort of counter-world that, on the one hand, protects and separates them collectively from external society but, on the other, constitutes a handicap for everyone also in terms of communication and reaction.
In this context, we have first developed an exhaustive work of phenomenon framing according to its contemporary evolutions. So we faced terrorism transformation from its tactical stage to its global strategic dimension, before moving on to the heart of the research, focused on the definition of the subjective perspective of the operators. Therefore, we analyzed the phenomenon's cognition of the Italian anti-terrorism and counter-terrorism operators. In the "field work" we analyzed them in the context of the attribution of sense of their own experience and of the activities carried out in specific positions.
After a reconstruction of the filed in which the research is conceived, the special counter-terrorism operations, and after an examination of the government structures involved, a questionnaire was developed to be submitted to the Italian counter-terrorism operators aimed at investigating respondents’ approach to the other.
The empirical aspect of this work consists of three distinct moments of research. There are two autonomous works aimed at providing descriptive elements of the cultural and emotional context of the “alterity” with which the counter-terrorism operators must confront. After the aforementioned empirical passages and therefore after a definition of the “alterity”, this study proposed a third and main empirical activity which provided an objective answer to the research question which can be summarized in the following question: To what extent exist an Italian inter-cultural approach to the terrorist threat intended as a hybrid act of war?