A critical study of space in the geopolitics of terrorism

ABSTRACT

This article theorises epistemologies of ‘space’ in critical studies on terrorism, expanding the research agenda beyond the straitjacket of historicism and discourse-centrism. It traces two theoretical approaches: 1) rescaling terrorism as mundane, situated and private, and 2) treating the ‘space’ of terrorism as a liminal zone between potentiality and anticipatory space-making. This critical spatial lens offers new insights to CTS. In terms of securitisation, this perspective is attentive to the ‘space of securitisation’, the dynamics of space, or space as a discursive process and a subject constitutive of securitisation. In the study of radicalisation, it can help us understand how space and the psychological interpretation of material conditions are co-constituted to shape the process of radicalisation. Finally, it also creates new possibilities for CTS practitioners to employ the embodied, embodying and sensory dimensions of violence, involving not only visual and material dimensions but also sound and hearing, to form an individualised form of resistance against state terrorism. This article attempts to systematically map the permutations of new theoretical and conceptual developments in the critical studies on the spatiality of terrorism.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical Terrorism Studies
• space
• geopolitics
• material
• feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A more systematic review of the pre-9/11 literature on space, security and terrorism can be found in Coaffee’s (2016).

2. Documented in Weizman’s Forensic Architecture (2018). In 2016, his team was ‘commissioned by Amnesty international to help reconstruct the architecture of Saydnaya, a secret Syria detention center, from the memory of several of its survivors’ (p.85).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund Youth Project [20CZZ014]; The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [2020SK013].

Notes on contributors

Tianru Guan

Tianyang Liu is an associate professor at School of Politics and Public Administration in Wuhan University. He received his PhD at Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne. He has written articles on politics, security and terrorism in China. His current research focuses on international politics and the geopolitics of China, with special interests in political sociology, critical security studies, and critical geography. His recent publications appear on Terrorism and Political Violence, Political Geography, The Pacific Review, Critical Asian Studies, Asian Studies Review, Political Studies Review, International Communication Gazette, Communist, Post-Communist Studies, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific and beyond.

Tianru Guan (corresponding author) is an associate professor at School of Journalism and Communication in Wuhan University. She received her PhD at Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne. Her academic interest lies in networked political communication spaces in various social contexts, more specifically, the social and political consequences of digital communication in China. Her recent publications appear on Information Society, Media, Culture and Society, International Political Science Review, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Social Science Quarterly, Asian Studies Review, Political Studies Review, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, International Communication Gazette, Journal of Contemporary China and beyond.