Social resilience through pluralism as Singapore's centre of gravity against the impact of terrorism.

Abstract

The very nature of Terrorism, as defined by the UN Declaration on Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism (1994), alludes to the lack of definitiveness of terrorism acts which by its objective of eliciting terror, necessitates the element of surprise. Thus, rather than attempt to prevent what cannot be prevented, it could be more fruitful to pre-empt the more definitive consequence of terrorism – terror, and the downstream repercussions if this terror escalates into irrational behaviour that ultimately serve the political aim of the perpetrators. In this case of Singapore, this paper argues that Singapore’s real weapon against terrorism, and the terror it seeks to inflict, is its social resilience. It is posited here that given the Singapore government’s emphasis on building the social resilience of its people, especially in promoting pluralism, this center of gravity (COG) would even have prevented, or at the very least, withstood another violent reaction between the races as intended by the JI, even if the plot had succeeded, as alluded to in the article at the beginning of this paper.