Listing, non-state agency, and stigma in world politics

Listing should be understood as ‘societal exclusion and symbolic banishment of the affected persons’.Footnote ⁴ As de Goede describes in the case of individuals listed, it is a form of ‘modern day exile’.Footnote ⁵ This is intrinsically linked to stigma: ‘The symbolic effect of proscription can lead to stigma – the shame and the exclusion of the targeted entity.’Footnote ⁶ Lists assemble names, and, side by side, the stigma creates a new reality. Previous work on proscription has already shown that beyond the very direct material effects of proscription such as asset freezes and travel bans, the symbolic delegitimisation itself engenders other material realities such as military aid and intelligence support in bolstering the government’s fight against terrorists.Footnote ⁷ It also facilitates the treatment of listed terrorists and communities associated with them that would otherwise be considered unacceptable, leading to human rights violation such as extra-judicial executions, for example.Footnote ⁸

Most studies looking at the impact of sanctions or listing in world politics are interested in how they come about, their effectiveness, or their effects.Footnote ⁹ Rarely is the focus of the inquiry the recipient of these policies and their reactions. In her work on states, Rebecca Adler-Nissen made the point that the objects of stigmatisation also had agency:

The typology Adler-Nissen develops on stigma reaction for states is a helpful framework to understand the range of reactions even in cases of non-state armed groups. She outlines three principal reactions: stigma recognition, stigma rejection, and counter-stigmatisation. Adler-Nissen draws on Goffman’s seminal sociological work of the 1960s. He showed how the construction of deviance is not just discursive but also material and embodied. Goffman described two types of reactions to stigma: stigma recognition and counter-stigmatisation. Adler-Nissen adds stigma rejection to create her typology. She applies them to the cases of three states that have been internationally stigmatised during different time periods: Germany, Austria, and Cuba. The case of Germany is focused on the post–Second World War, the period during which the country was stigmatised for its Nazi past and could not be trusted to have a foreign and defence policy. The Austrian example is more recent and focused on the EU’s reaction to Jörg Haider and his Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) electoral victory when they became coalition partners in Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel’s government. In a first for the EU, sanctions against a member state were implemented, and member states froze bilateral relationships based on the idea that the FPÖ had fascist tendencies not in line with the EU’s core values. The Austrian government never accepted being labelled transgressive. The Cuban case is probably the most well known, with the reactions of the United States (US) to Fidel Castro’s socialist revolution establishing an embargo from 1960.

In the case of stigma recognition, Adler-Nissen shows the deviant state working to reintegrate itself in ‘international society’, eventually succeeding, as in the case of Germany. According to Adler-Nissen ‘international society’ is to be understood as the ‘audience of normal’. She concludes that cases of stigma recognition will make ‘international society more cohesive’.Footnote ¹¹ Stigma rejection is the category she adds to Goffman’s work. While stigma in world politics involves asymmetric power relationships, she puts forward the idea that stigmatisation can be ‘restored and coped with’.Footnote ¹² Using the case of Austria to illustrate this, she shows how stigma can lead to a mutual embarrassment of the stigmatiser and the stigmatised. With counter-stigmatisation, the stigma is turned into a virtue, and the stigmatiser is the one perceived as the transgressor. This can happen when there are ‘competing visions of “international society”’, as in the case of Cuba and the US,Footnote ¹³ where Cuba was able to remain linked to an alternative ‘international society’ through its connections with other communist nations and groups. In that case, the US stigma became an emblem of pride.

Extrapolating from states to non-state actors, one could assume a similar range of responses to the ‘terrorist’ stigma. Stigma has an international and a domestic audience. In the stigmatised states, according to Adler-Nissen, there will be a domestic debate, people will ask themselves: ‘Are we ashamed?’; ‘Have we been misunderstood?’; ‘Should we resist?’.Footnote ¹⁴ These questions will be discussed, but the elected representatives of the state (or their authoritarian rulers) will be the ones taking the decision, managing the diplomacy, and choosing how to react strategically to the stigma. When it comes to non-state armed groups, how does that relationship play out? Do they even care? How do they deal with the ‘intersubjective processes of negotiating stigma’?Footnote ¹⁵

Unlike many states, non-state armed groups do not have democratically elected representatives. Their reaction to the stigma, who reacts, and how this internal and domestic debate will take place, will be different from in a state context. Here, we need to tap into literature that has explored non-state actors’ behaviour and reactions. Scholars working on legitimacy and non-state armed groups have pointed out that there is a direct link between a group’s international relationships and its ‘domestic legitimacy’.Footnote ¹⁶ Domestic and international support are seen as complementary.Footnote ¹⁷ So one central question is: which stigma reaction would foster internal legitimacy for the group?

We know from the now-prolific literature on rebel governance that an important focus for the armed groups will be the role of the communities they claim to represent.Footnote ¹⁸ So we can consider how these communities might be affected by the stigma. How do they react to it? This relationship with their constituency will be important and will lead to different strategic assessments. One could imagine that, in cases where the population is deeply affected by the stigma, it will push the groups to shift strategies, potentially even towards stigma recognition. If the communities are less affected or if they see it as irrelevant to their daily lives, it might have little effect. For instance, if a non-state armed group is listed as a terrorist but their key constituencies consider the label to be unjustified or ludicrous, would the stigma have any effect?

Labelling and stigmatisation is a two-way process and may lead to different reactions towards listing ‘depending on who is doing the listing and their relationship with them, but also how the listing will affect its own community or relationship towards them’.Footnote ¹⁹ Similar to a state classified as ‘rogue’, a number of non-state armed groups will be unbothered by the framing or discourse coming from the West.

The question is: how hegemonic is the stigma? As Jabri argued, ‘singular subjectivities and monolithic identities are … always constructed through hegemonic discourses which contributes to a dominant form of identity’.Footnote ²⁰ If the group has an alternative network and a range of other contacts and relationships, another form of identity emerges that is defiant, and they will push back. The stigma will be carried as a badge of honour.

The following three case studies illustrate the range of reactions to the ‘terrorist’ stigma as well as a range of outcomes as the listed groups try to escape their condition. The theoretical contribution will be further developed in the case studies sections through an iteration between theory and empirics.

Stigma rejection: Colombia and the FARC’s peace negotiations

In the case of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia–Ejército del Pueblo, FARC–EP or FARC), the terrorist stigma was deeply associated with 9/11. The armed group had been listed as a terrorist organisation by the US since 1997, but it did not have a substantial effect. They were not stigmatised or sidelined. In fact, in the late 1990s the FARC were busy negotiating a peace deal with the Colombian government in a demilitarised zone the size of Switzerland, with an array of foreign dignitaries visiting them, including Queen Rania of Jordan.

A number of epithets have been used to describe the FARC over the years, such as insurgents, guerrilleros, narco-guerrilleros, and narco-traffickers, but it is only after 9/11 that the listing of the FARC as ‘terrorists’ took hold and the stigma took on a whole new meaning. The FARC were subsumed as an enemy in the global war on terror. In the words of Colin Powell: ‘There’s no difficulty in identifying [Bin Laden] as a terrorist, and getting everybody to rally against him. Now there are organizations that probably meet a similar standard. The FARC in Colombia comes to mind, the Real IRA comes to mind, all of which, both of which are on our terrorist list down at the State Department.’Footnote ²¹

As then president of Colombia Andrés Pastrana took on the office, he also encouraged the EU to list the FARC as a terrorist organisation in 2002. This then picked up unprecedented momentum with President Álvaro Uribe Velez, who anchored his strategy on the stigmatisation of the FARC as terrorists. The FARC disappeared from public discourse in Colombia, and the armed conflict became simplified as a war against terrorists.Footnote ²²

In multiple statements over the years, the FARC rejected the label.Footnote ²³ They wanted the state to ‘exclude from the language of official epithets of “terrorists and narco-terrorists” to refer to our organisation of political-military opposition against the state’.Footnote ²⁴ This was corroborated in interviews with the FARC. In response to the question of how the group reacted to the stigma, a representative said: ‘It is totally opposite to what we are. It is a political struggle’ and added: ‘It was about delegitimising us, they wanted to show us as an organisation without political objectives.’Footnote ²⁵

Similarly, in her example of Austria, Adler-Nissen showed how the Austrian government never accepted being labelled as transgressive. The Austrian representatives rejected the stigma, they ‘never fully accepted the stigma imposed upon them, insisting on belonging to the European community of values and rejecting stigmatization’.Footnote ²⁶ The imposition by the EU of sanctions on one of its own member states was unprecedented. European governments started to freeze their bilateral relationships with the Austrian government.

The stigma was immediately rejected by the Austrian government and broader Austrian society. Then, over time, some EU member states – Denmark, for example – also started contesting the stigma. The situation started becoming embarrassing for the EU according to Adler-Nissen; they nominated a committee of three ‘wise men’ to untangle the situation. The committee concluded that the sanctions had ‘offended Austrian voters’, and sanctions were subsequently lifted. The Austrian case shows that ‘stigma needs moral resonance’ to work.Footnote ²⁷ In this case, the stigma did not have enough moral resonance, it led to mutual embarrassment, and the Austrian government succeeded in rejecting the stigma and getting the EU to reverse it.

Unlike in Austria, broader Colombian society had taken on the ‘terrorist’ stigma with enthusiasm. This is not unusual considering it was the FARC that was targeted, an illegal non-state armed group that had taken up arms since the 1960s. What was different, however, in the case of a non-state armed group is that the stigma was perceived differently by local communities associated with the FARC. As Idler and Paladini Adell argued, people at the local level were not so focused on the ‘terrorism/counter-terrorism dynamics’ in Colombia but rather on everyday necessities.Footnote ²⁸ So, while the stigma dominated the narrative and framing at the national level, it also made the FARC much more isolated, which restricted their interactions to the very local level and with like-minded actors, none of whom recognised the terrorist stigma.Footnote ²⁹ So, the FARC’s self-perception was not particularly affected.

The group certainly did not see itself as terrorist. In an interview with Marco Calarcá, who led the group’s international relations for a time, he explained how the group emerged as a result of broader violence: ‘Our origin is legitimate – it is our right to rebellion.’ He added that they have always held on to their political nature and that ‘we have nothing to do with terrorism’.Footnote ³⁰ Similarly, another FARC combatant representing the group during the peace negotiations added: ‘We have always had a political project … we took arms because there are no guarantees for the opposition, but our objective is political.’Footnote ³¹

The road to the Havana negotiations (2012–16) with the Colombian government was fraught and complex, and not the focus of this article. But the point of relevance here is that the FARC, having rejected and resisted the stigma, ended up in a formal negotiation process, with the government giving them recognition. In the words of Marco Calarcá: ‘Ever since the early 1980s with [President] Betancur – every time the government sat with the FARC there was a recognition de facto.’Footnote ³² For the FARC, the decision to enter into a negotiation was largely to do with an attempt at regaining a form of recognition and salvaging their political identity: ‘Now with the opening of the table we can do that [talking politics] … Iván Márquez [then leader of the FARC] is no terrorist, no criminal. He is a fighter, a rebel and rebellion is a right.’Footnote ³³

The FARC rejected and resisted the stigma and, in the end, were successful in removing it to a large degree. First, symbolically, the Colombian government shifted the discourse used to describe the FARC, dropping the terrorist label, in a move characterised as a ‘linguistic ceasefire’.Footnote ³⁴ Second, materially, having signed a peace agreement with the Colombian government in 2016 and transitioned into a political party, Comunes, the group was also removed from the EU list in 2017 and from the US Foreign Terrorist Organizations list in 2021.

But, unlike in the case of Austria where the stigmatised government was easily reintegrated into the EU family, in the case of a stigmatised non-state armed group, even with this radical transformation, the stigma is still hard to shake off. Between 2016, when the peace agreement was signed, and April 2021, 271 former FARC members were killed, according to the investigative unit of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) tribunal. The JEP feared that up to 1,600 former rebels could be killed between 2016 and 2024 if the current levels of killings were to continue. During a ‘pilgrimage for life and peace’ in 2020, bringing together 2,000 former members of the FARC in Bogotá, Pastor Alape, former commander of the FARC, denounced the stigmatisation and killings the group was continuing to suffer and the ‘responsibility of the State in these crimes … intolerance in the speeches of government officials and the president of the republic himself’.Footnote ³⁵ The association between being considered an (ex-)terrorist, thus dehumanised, and considered fair game for killing is still deeply entrenched in Colombia. While some of the killings might be explained by other factors, this still has to be ‘understood in a context where the labelling of individuals as “terrorists” or “terrorist sympathizers” has been used as a justification by paramilitary groups for targeted assassinations’ in Colombia.Footnote ³⁶

So, while the FARC is the only case of a listed armed group being de-listed internationally after a successful peace negotiation, the label still sticks, with clear material consequences. The difference between state and non-state actors here is stark and can be understood in the context of the deep asymmetries of the international system based on state power. Looking back at examples of non-state armed groups that were able to leave the stigma behind, we can think of Nelson Mandela and the ANC in South Africa or Menachem Begin and Irgun in Israel. Both of these later became the state and thus had the ability to challenge the stigma. Both also happened before 9/11 and the embeddedness of the war on terror bureaucracy.

Stigma recognition: Spain, the Basque country, and ETA’s unilateral transition

The terrorist label was nothing new for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (‘Basque Homeland and Liberty’, ETA) in the Basque country. Ever since its inception, the group had been considered a terrorist organisation by the Spanish government. What changed post-9/11 was that this label was given international legitimacy. As then prime minister José Maria Aznar recalls in his memoir: ‘We’d been fighting for years to make changes internationally on things like police co-operation, legislation and classifying terrorist groups, and just a few months after September 11th, we achieved more than we had over the course of all those years.’Footnote ³⁷

ETA was included in the new EU list of terrorist organisations in 2001. Significantly, it was not just the armed group that was listed as a terrorist, but also socio-political organisations associated with the group – all considered part of ‘the terrorist group ETA’.Footnote ³⁸ This opened the way for the banning of Batasuna as a political party in Spain in 2002; the party was later added to US and EU terrorist lists in 2003. It was unprecedented for a political party, not an armed organisation, to be listed as terrorists.

Stigma recognition can be associated with Germany. In the case of post–Second World War Germany explored by Adler-Nissen, the country was stigmatised to such a degree that it was completely demilitarised and could have no defence policy. She noted that, not only did the German leadership accept the stigma, there were also popular anti-war movements in the country during the 1960s and 1970s that reinforced this view. In the case of the Basque country, over time, the broader Izquierda Abertzale (IA) movement and ETA recognised the stigma and chose to distance themselves from the ‘terrorist’ label. But the cases differ in terms of how the change took place, giving some indication as to the different effect stigma has on state and non-state actors. In Germany, it was the German chancellors and high-level politicians who accepted the stigma and led to a gradual rehabilitation of the country over the following decades. In the Basque country, it first took hold at the community level.

While there was a recognition of the stigma that led to a significant shift in strategy for the armed group, the shift did not initially happen within the leadership of ETA. If anything, they rejected it, resisted, and fought on. It was their social base and broader Basque society that acknowledged the stigma and encouraged a change in strategy within its political organisation. As one military and political leader of the IA described: ‘ETA had always had social support, for about 60 years. But a large majority of Basque society starts turning against it. It was more and more evident that they did not agree with the political-military strategy and wanted a pacific-democratic strategy.’Footnote ³⁹

The international listing of ETA and the broader IA movement came soon after the end of the failed Estella-Lizarra Declaration in September 1998, which had brought together a broad range of nationalist parties in the Basque country and after which ETA had declared a ceasefire. After ETA ended its ceasefire in late 1999 and with the international labelling of the IA as terrorists, the strategies were being questioned by some parts of the Basque nationalist movement. According to one civil society activist, ‘this sparked much debate within the movement. The debates about violence were very much alive.’Footnote ⁴⁰

One major turning point was the Madrid bombings of 11 March 2004, when 10 bombs exploded practically simultaneously on 4 commuter trains during the morning rush hour, killing over 190 people and injuring around 2,000. The coordinated attacks had initially been pinned on ETA by the then Aznar government vying for re-election three days later. After thousands marched in the streets demanding the truth, the government admitted it was not ETA. The bombs were later claimed by Al-Qaeda, who saw it as a response to Spanish involvement in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

The Madrid bombing had the net effect of showing that tactics and strategies associated with terrorism were over because of their association with Islamist terrorist violence. The association with other groups such as Al-Qaeda (after the Madrid bombings) did make them reflect and want to distance themselves from that type of violence, though theirs was not ‘the same random violence’.Footnote ⁴¹ The leadership within the IA ‘realized their social base was shifting’Footnote ⁴² and wanted to separate themselves more actively from the terrorist stigma.

This was further compounded after ETA broke its ceasefire with a bomb attack in the parking lot of Terminal 4, Madrid-Barajas Airport in late December 2006 after the collapse of the next negotiation attempt. In the words of a leader of the IA: ‘Our social base was convinced much earlier. After the collapse of Estella-Lizarra there is a shift in perception. The collapse of the next process was a confirmation of what they already suspected.’Footnote ⁴³

This is when certain key individuals within the political leadership of the group acknowledged the stigma. They needed to shift strategies more radically. After the 2006 Barajas airport attack, the possibility of an ETA ceasefire was considered to be ‘no longer useful, nor credible’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Key individuals within the leadership started to embrace the stigma and decided they needed a shift in strategy that was not reversible. In the words of Arnoldo Otegi, former negotiator in Geneva, ‘that strategy was exhausted’.Footnote ⁴⁵

These individuals started making the point within the broader movement that the ‘non-use of the armed struggle could also become a way of initiating negotiations’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The idea of a unilateral transition started to emerge, and it sparked a process of dialogue within the IA and ETA. But not everyone in the movement was convinced, particularly within ETA itself and among prisoners who had sacrificed years in detention and who saw giving up the armed struggle as surrendering. A senior IA figure involved in the unilateral transition reflected back on this period: ‘For some people it was going too quickly, it created anxiety for those who envisioned a different structure to the process.’ He went on to add that ‘our clocks weren’t synchronised, ETA was late and had to accelerate its steps’.Footnote ⁴⁷

When the political branch managed to contest local elections in an alliance with other nationalist forces under the name of Bildu in 2011, they received 25 per cent of the vote. This was a momentous support for the strategic shift away from violence. In the words of one IA leader, it was ‘like an oil leak in the sea’.Footnote ⁴⁸ As one member of the group recalled: ‘The first time I could vote legally for my party was in prison in 2011. This is a characteristic of my generation.’Footnote ⁴⁹ The movement became increasingly convinced that this was the right thing to do. ETA declared a permanent end to its violence in October 2011 and eventually handed in its weapons in 2017.

ETA illustrates how the international ‘terrorist’ stigma was recognised in the Basque country and then digested by the non-state armed group. The stigma was translated locally, as it was their social base that recognised the label and wanted to disassociate from it, realising it no longer helped and in fact hindered their political objectives. This was a successful transition because, in the words of one civil society activist, ‘they are actually much more likely to achieve their political objectives now than in 2007’.Footnote ⁵⁰

But, similarly to the FARC, in the case of non-state armed groups, the stigma is hard to shake off. The group remains stuck on the international terrorist lists, even though they have fully transitioned away from violence, have given up their weapons, and disbanded in 2018. The Spanish government has not engaged in any form of political negotiations with the group, and there has been little acknowledgement of the group giving up violence. ETA members are still scattered across the country in jails far from their families, as part of a so-called dispersion policy. In our state-centric international system, it is obvious that the EU and the US will not take ETA off the lists unless the Spanish government gives them a green light. Moreover, criminal proceedings are still hanging over former militants, which is the reason why no names of interviewees can be used in this article. This illustrates how the bureaucratic and legal embeddedness of listing regimes freezes the possibility of the ‘terrorists’ escaping their condition when a government has little incentive to change or transform the relationship. Even when the government tries to shift tack, such as the Sánchez Socialist government’s recent political deals with Bildu, they have come under attack for ‘forming an “indecent” pact’ with terrorists.Footnote ⁵¹

What is striking in the case of ETA is the differences across the levels of analysis – from the local to the national. While the stigmatisation continues at the national level, with Spain still associating ETA with broader terrorist threats, at the regional level, in the Basque country, there has been a much more radical transformation. The transition of ETA and the broader IA has been broadly acknowledged, they have been recontextualised in the Basque country, and the idea of Basque independence has never been stronger. During the last Basque regional election, in April 2024, Bildu won 27 mandates, compared to 21 previously in the 75-seat Basque parliament, giving it the same number of seats as the centrist Basque Nationalist Party (PNV). Bildu’s candidate Pello Otxandiano said to cheering crowds: ‘This is the best result the separatist left has ever had in its history.’Footnote ⁵²

Counter-stigmatisation: Hezbollah’s Islamic resistance against the Great Satan

Hezbollah was seen in the 1980s as the epitome of an international terrorist organisation according to the US, engaging in international hostage-taking and suicide bombings. Two notable attacks against American embassies led to listing by the US as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997. But the US struggled to get their vision accepted by others. The EU, for example, long resisted including Hezbollah in its list of terrorist organisations; it was only in 2013, with the group’s involvement in Syria, that the EU ended up listing the armed wing of Hezbollah, not the whole organisation.

Hezbollah has always claimed to be the representatives of the socio-economically deprived Shiite community and a resistance group against the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. The organisation has had a dynamic trajectory, from being involved in a number of terrorist attacks in the first decade of its existenceFootnote ⁵³ to becoming the main representative of Shiites in parliament since 1992 and holding cabinet positions in Lebanon since 2005. Hezbollah also gained legitimacy not just from Shiites but also other Lebanese who rejected the presence of the Israeli forces. Israel’s withdrawal from Southern Lebanon in 2000, ending its 22-year occupation, bolstered their position.

Adler-Nissen looks at Cuba as an example of counter-stigmatisation when US sanctions were established in 1960 against Fidel Castro’s socialist revolution. The stigma became an emblem of pride, and Adler-Nissen shows how the leadership responded to the US stigma with their own strategies, turning it from a ‘vice into virtue’. For example, she refers to the tactical use of images of Abu Ghraib torture next to the US embassy to embarrass their stigmatiser. This interactive nature of stigma is also present in the case of Hezbollah. Hezbollah responded to the terrorist stigma with a counter-discourse, through maximalist diatribes characterising the US as the ‘Great Satan’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Sheikh Nai’m Qâssem, former Vice Secretary General of Hezbollah and considered the historian of Hezbollah, says the American-Western attempts to denounce them as fundamentalist, extremist, or terrorist are attempts at dominating the Muslim world ideologically. They question who is extreme and who is moderate, pointing out that ‘refusing oppression, the right to resist through refusing occupation, Hezbollah is moderate’.Footnote ⁵⁵ This language is picked up by Hezbollah’s allies and affiliates. The Iraqi ‘Hezbollah’ Brigades denounced in a statement the inclusion of the Chief of Staff of the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, Abdul Aziz Al-Muhammadawi, known as Abu Fadak, on the US sanctions list, blaming the ‘Great Satan’, the ‘Evil America’, claiming that it is terrified and confused by the free men of the resistance, and that its decisions are an admission of defeat and weakness.Footnote ⁵⁶

Hezbollah sets itself up as a leader of a distinct camp, in the resistance against the US and its allies:

This is similar to the case of Cuba, which by proposing a ‘separate system of honour’ manages to push back and stay outside of the US’s sphere of influence through their communist allies.Footnote ⁵⁸ Stigmatisation of states and non-state actors does not necessarily lead to loss of status or exclusion. The Cuban case illustrates the difficulties of stigmatising when there is no hegemonic discourse or no agreed understanding of what should be considered a threat internationally: ‘When the United States cannot produce an understanding of normality that can mobilize a broader group of countries, various forms of resistance become possible. This raises the question of who is stigmatizing whom.’Footnote ⁵⁹

In that context, it is worth looking at the EU’s decision to add the military wing of Hezbollah to their list of banned terrorist organisations in July 2013, having long resisted the move, and with Hezbollah itself having considered the EU an actor they could deal with and engage in dialogue with.Footnote ⁶⁰ Secretary-General of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah rejected the EU’s decision as an ‘aggressive and unjust decision which is not based on any proof or evidence’. His statement described the declaration as ‘written by American hands, in Zionist ink’.Footnote ⁶¹

Hezbollah has taken on the stigma as a badge of honour. Nasrallah said in another speech in 2013: ‘For the terrorist designation lists, if Europe considers us as a game changer in the region, that is great. We are proud of that. Your terrorist list, keep it to yourself.’Footnote ⁶² Nasrallah is pitting Hezbollah as the winners, the true patriots: ‘They are designating us as terrorists because we defeated them and we are defending our nation and our country. Hezbollah will face these sanctions with patience, stamina.’Footnote ⁶³

Hezbollah has been defiant. It has embraced the stigma and has used it domestically to bolster its legitimacy. ‘For Hezbollah, as for quite a few other political actors, its foreign policy is above all a domestic policy.’Footnote ⁶⁴ The group is unbothered by the US or EU listing, their audience is not Western governments. Their allies operate in a different ‘system of honour’. Russia, for instance, made the specific point in 2015, in the context of the Syrian conflict, to state that Hezbollah is not a terrorist organisation.Footnote ⁶⁵ More recently, in June 2024, in the context of the tensions between Israel and Hezbollah over the war in Gaza, the deputy head of the Arab League, Hossam Zaki, made the point that the League would no longer refer to Hezbollah as terrorists in their statements.Footnote ⁶⁶ This illustrates that, whether the stigmatised actor is a state or a non-state actor, they are capable of reacting strategically especially if they have allies outside of the stigmatiser’s spheres of influence. In the case of non-state armed groups, particularly the Islamic kind, it might actually bolster the group.

This case highlights the challenge for listing regimes in a context were these groups have alternative networks; the stigma appears to strengthen them by shoring up their legitimacy. This will only become more pronounced as the world heads towards increased multipolarity. But while groups like Hezbollah are able to use the stigma strategically to shore up their local legitimacy, they are still experiencing the material reality of being on international terrorist lists. In the aftermath of the 7 October Hamas attack in Israel, the lists have allowed Israel to receive little international criticism for the assassinations of Hezbollah leaders and airstrikes in Lebanon.