Citation

Cohen EBO. Soc. Anthropol. 2010; 18(3): 267-288.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, European Association of Social Anthropologists, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1469-8676.2010.00111.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Participants from all around the world come to train in Israeli Krav Maga (close combat) with the ‘Tour and Train’ programme. They perform exercises that aim to control close-range violence and are devised within a certain logic, and this logic is subsequently disseminated to become part of the globalised view of the war on terror. Whereas the understanding of globalised terror and its counteraction is often drawn from political statements and their interpretation, in Tour and Train ‘universal’ understandings of terror and the war on terror are constructed through practice in its own right. Krav Maga cosmology views violence as sudden, unexpected alterations in intensity. This view eliminates any specificities and replaces content with intensity, sheer somatic sensation, with relentless fighting activity within an active–passive frame that presumes that there is always a course of action to be taken, while the fighter is also a passive passenger of the flow of violence. According to this view, the ideologies behind and reasons for belligerent situations, as well as the intentions of attacker and defender, are null and void, and terror itself is the result of fortuity.