False dawns or new horizons? Further issues and challenges for Critical Terrorism Studies

Abstract

While welcoming Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) as an interesting and valuable addition to the discourse on terrorism studies, this article argues that CTS has some serious shortcomings, particularly in those accounts that draw explicitly on a Frankfurt School approach. The article will mainly engage with three areas: the notion and conceptualisation of ‘critique’, the role of emancipation, and the overstatement of the novelty of CTS. It will argue that the way in which Critical Theory has been incorporated into the study of terrorism does not take sufficient account of the wider philosophical implications and shortcomings inherent in Critical Theory. It then suggests that while the concept of emancipation (which drives the normative agenda of CTS) has been advocated, it is very unclear as to its practical application. CTS scholars, it is argued, cannot simply take ‘emancipation’ out of the different contestations surrounding it by either claiming a (somewhat deceptive) transparency of meaning manifested in ‘liberating the oppressed’ or by retreating into an anti-foundationalist stand in which ‘the concrete content of emancipation cannot and need not be determined in the beginning’. Finally, and in relation to the definition of terrorism in particular, the article argues that the novelty of CTS has been overstated.

Keywords:

• terrorism
• Critical Terrorism Studies
• emancipation
• Frankfurt School
• truth
• epistemology

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Michael Boyle, John Morrison, and Nick Rengger for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. They also thank the three anonymous reviewers and the Editors for their constructive and engaging remarks. All remaining shortcomings are, of course, our own.

Notes

1. See European Political Science, 6 (3) (2007) and the first two issues of the new journal Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1 (1/2).

2. The only instance in which such a conceptual plurality in respect to the notion of emancipation is recognised is in McDonald (2007, p. 257). His treatment, however, is far from satisfactory as he only alludes to these different ways of understanding and achieving emancipation within the Critical Theory tradition in one sentence.