This is an excerpt from Critical Terrorism Studies: A Dictionary by Lee Jarvis and Alice Martini. Available in all good book stores, and via free download from E-International Relations.
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Bush Doctrine
The ‘Bush Doctrine’ was the foreign policy framework adopted by the United States under George W. Bush: the 43rd president of the United States of America. This doctrine became the foundation for the US’ approach to the war on terror. As with other doctrines, it is a label applied to Bush’s foreign policy priorities, rather than one used by Bush himself to describe or justify his actions. Some scholars argue it marked a significant shift in American foreign policy, while others highlight its continuities with the past – for example in relation to previous US ‘wars on terror’ (see Winkler 2006) – and with the foreign policy of subsequent presidents such as Barack Obama.
The Bush doctrine was based on a series of ‘pillars’. These included the legitimacy of unilateral action where necessary, a willingness to resort to pre- emptive war, a commitment to internationalising democracy and liberalism, and a determination to maintain American hegemony in the international system (see Jervis 2016). Although there are tensions between some of these aspirations, these pillars became the foundations of the post-9/11 war on terror. The military interventions in Afghanistan (2001–) and Iraq (2003–), for instance, were justified both through the existential threat posed by terrorists and their state sponsors, and through a need for new governing regimes therein, however poor the planning for regime change was in practice.
The Bush doctrine is interesting in part because it sat between realist approaches to foreign policy (with their emphasis on military capabilities, relative power, and international anarchy) and idealist or liberal approaches (which emphasise the importance of domestic political systems and regimes for a state’s ‘outward’ foreign policy behaviour). The doctrine is sometimes characterised as neoconservative in order to capture this combination of ideological positions and the belief in the ‘good’ that can be done by American power internationally. This label is a helpful one for understanding the values of key figures in Bush’s administration, although the extent to which President Bush himself was a ‘neocon’ remains debated.
War on Terror
The war on terror refers to the vast counterterrorism paradigm initiated by the George W. Bush administration in the aftermath of the Al-Qaeda attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 (9/11). Although often associated with the military interventions in Afghanistan (from 2001) and Iraq (from 2003), it is more helpful to think about this ‘war’ as a much wider security paradigm comprising a whole set of ideas, institutions and actions relating to the threat of terrorism and how it should be countered.
The US-led response to the 9/11 attacks became known as a ‘war’ on ‘terrorism’ and subsequently as the more expansive ‘war on terror’ very quickly after those events. The phrase was widely used in political speech and news media coverage, including by those who were critical of the response. Although this is rarely remembered today, this was not the first time the phrase ‘war on terror’ had been used. Former US President Ronald Reagan had declared his own ‘war on terrorism’ in the mid–1980s following attacks on US interests by Colonel Qaddafi’s Libyan state. And ‘wars’ against other social problems or ills – crime, drugs, obesity, poverty, and so on – are also familiar within US and other political rhetoric. With this in mind, it is important to remember that the framing of counterterrorism as a ‘war’ is both a choice (other language could be used) and productive rather than reflective of reality. In other words, declaring war on terror helps to frame the threat of terrorism as a military one – rather than say a criminal threat – at the same time as it helps to legitimise the use of military tools and technologies as counterterrorist tools.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the war on terror, with hindsight, is the sheer scale of this enterprise. According to data collected by the Watson Institute’s (2025) Costs of War project, the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and beyond have cost the US over $8 trillion, and resulted in more than 900,000 lives lost; over 400,000 of whom were civilians. Over 3.6 million people have died due to the indirect consequences of these conflicts, with the United States having conducted counterterrorism operations in at least 78 different countries: over 40% of those in the world. The war on terror led to the reorganisation and reprioritisation of policing and intelligence systems in countries such as the US and UK, and generated United Nations Security Council resolutions alongside swathes of new counterterrorism legislation internationally. The war saw programmes of extraordinary rendition; the indefinite detention and torture of terrorist suspects at sites like Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay; the emergence of new military technologies such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or drones; and the profiling of minority community groups as potential security threats.
Critical scholarship on terrorism has been at the forefront of criticism of the war on terror. Much of this work has engaged with the enormous ethical problems of the post-9/11 wars and the scale of harm and suffering brought about through the torture of terrorist suspects (Adelaiye and Fadason 2024); the killing and displacement of civilians (Blakeley 2018); incursions on long- held human rights including to association, trial, privacy, and free speech (Ojanen 2010); and beyond. Other critical work has focused on the ineffectiveness of counterterrorism actions within the war on terror. Although the immediate target – Al-Qaeda – has diminished in international relevance in the past twenty years, its existence continues long after the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden. On top of this, the war on terror was directly responsible for the rise of one of history’s most deadly non-state terrorist organisations – the ‘Islamic State’ or ISIS – an organisation responsible for thousands of deaths in Iraq, Syria and beyond either directly or through its affiliates. Countries relatively unaffected by non-state terrorism – such as Iraq – became hotspots of terrorism under the war on terror. And Afghanistan is now back under the control of the Taliban regime, despite suffering twenty years of war and military occupation.
Once we factor in the financial expense of the war on terror noted above – and the opportunity costs of not spending this money on other priorities – it is hard to conclude that this conflict has been anything short of disastrous. Indeed, arguments around the war on terror’s ineffectiveness that were once largely confined to the writings of critical scholars have now become commonplace in more ‘traditional’ sites of media or political debate, particularly in the aftermath of the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 (Jarvis and Lister 2024).
Recent debate within and beyond critical terrorism studies has begun to ask whether the war on terror has now, finally, come to an end or whether it continues even if the phrase ‘war on terror’ is less common than it was during the George W. Bush presidency (Toros et al 2024). This is important, because for some critics the war on terror has now become so normalised that we no longer question how terrorism is understood or addressed: it is simply ‘the way things are’ (e.g. Jusué 2021; Guéguin 2023).
Further Reading
Fukuyama, Francis. 2006. After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads. London: Profile Books.
Jackson, Richard. 2005. Writing the War on Terrorism. Language, Politics and Counter-Terrorism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Jervis, Robert. 2016. ‘Understanding the Bush Doctrine: Preventive Wars and Regime Change’. Political Science Quarterly 131 (2): 285–311.
Thomson, Andrew, and Rubrick Biegon. 2025. The War on Terror. Short Histoires. Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda publishing.
Lee Jarvis is a Professor of Security and Society at Adelaide University, and holds honorary professorships at the Loughborough University and the University of East Anglia. He is author or editor of 17 books and over 60 articles on the politics of terrorism and security. He is co-editor of Critical Studies on Terrorism, and his research has been funded by the ESRC, the AHRC, the Australian Research Council and NATO among others.
Alice Martini is a Lecturer of International Relations at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, and holds an honorary professorship at the Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of The UN and Counter- Terrorism: Global Hegemonies, Power, and Identities (Routledge 2021), and co-editor of Encountering Extremism: Theoretical Issues and Local Challenges (Manchester University Press 2020) and Contemporary Reflections on Critical Terrorism Studies (Routledge 2023). Her work has been published in journals including Security Dialogue and Third World Quarterly.
An important contribution to Critical Terrorism Studies is its attention to how concepts of terrorism are constructed through power, discourse, and political context. From a field perspective, however, there is another layer that deserves equal attention: how these conceptual categories perform when confronted with actual violence, local actors, and changing operational environments.
Definitions shape policy, but the field tests whether those definitions can explain behaviour, distinguish threats, and support effective decisions. The gap between conceptual framing and operational reality is therefore not merely academic—it can become a strategic problem.
— Wahidullah Noorzai