Here, the ordering structure threatened by the possibility of transgression is that of the modern state system. At the level of the spectacle, the act of terror presents a highly visible threat to the precepts of international society, challenging the norms of state sovereignty, territorial inviolability, and bracketed warfare.
On the theoretical level, these norms and principles are read as having had their origin in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which drew a line under ‘the “religious cleansing” and material and psychological devastation of the Thirty Years’ War. (link, p. 31)
Condemned by Blaney and Inayatullah as less a substantive resolution than ‘an acknowledgement that the attempt to eradicate the religious “other” had reached an impasse’ (ibid), the Peace of Westphalia has come to signal the ‘eclipse of the Medieval world by modernity; a movement from the religious to the secular … and from a web of overlapping and competing authorities to a modern state system based on the demarcation of exclusive territorial jurisdictions.’ (ibid)
