Critical Terrorism Studies–an introduction

Abstract

‘Terrorism’ is a growth industry. Books, courses and conferences on terrorism have proliferated since 11 September 2001. But, more fundamentally, few dimensions of contemporary life remain untouched by its diffused effects. National elections have been influenced by terrorism, most notably in the USA, Spain and Australia. Under direction from the United Nations, most countries in the world have introduced new laws whilst strengthening their military and security capacity for dealing with terrorism. Three major wars have been launched in response to recent terrorist acts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, as well as several covert military operations, numerous military assistance programmes, and a global terrorist capture and rendition programme. Most of the world's major international organizations have adopted new procedures to deal with the terrorist threat. Cooperation in counter-terrorism has become an important criterion for determining international aid and development assistance. Commercial actors now offer a vast range of anti-terrorism products and services to the general public, corporate actors and governments, including parachutes for high-rise office workers, home chemical weapon decontamination kits, personal protection for executives, bio-terrorism vaccines, and many more. New domestic anti-terrorism security measures, including intensive surveillance, have become an integral part of air travel, public events, building security, and banking, among others. Terrorism has become a major cultural phenomenon that is the subject of tens of thousands of novels, movies, television programmes, news items, comics, plays, academic studies, websites, blogs, and the like. It has become an important subject of interpersonal discourse on a daily basis. In addition, terrorism has had important effects on human rights, law, policing, immigration, media, culture, gender, identity, psychology, the academy, community relations, science, technology, and many other aspects of life.

As such, ‘terrorism’ has now become one of the most powerful signifiers in contemporary discourse. It is a term that generates vast amounts of social and political activity, induces powerful emotions and, through a vast array of social practices, constitutes a legal and political subject, a cultural taboo, a myth and an object of fear, hatred, surprise, admiration, ‘entertainment’ and identity. However, one of the main puzzles at the heart of these processes is the yawning gap between the ‘terrorism’ signifier and the actual acts signified by the term. That is, virtually all of this activity refers to the response to acts of political violence and not the violence itself. Notwithstanding the exceptional and anomalous events of 2001, acts of clandestine non-state terrorism are committed by a tiny number of individuals and result in between a few hundred and few thousand casualties per year over the entire world. Moreover, most terrorism occurs in relatively few symbolic locations; many of the world's cities, communities, and individuals have not experienced a terrorist attack by a non-state clandestine group, nor are likely to. ¹ A central analytical task, therefore, lies in explaining how such a small set of behaviours by such small numbers of individuals generates such a pervasive, intrusive and complex series of effects across the world.

The contemporary study of terrorism therefore takes place in a particular kind of political, legal, cultural, and academic context. It is a context in which literally thousands of new books and articles are published on terrorism every year, ² along with an even greater corpus of cultural texts in the form of novels, media articles, and movies (Croft 2006). At the same time, it is a context in which primary research on terrorism remains something of a taboo, with (still) relatively few endeavouring to interview or engage with those involved in ‘terrorist’ activity (Zulaika and Douglass 1996). It is a context in which the threat of terrorism has often been overplayed by politicians for political gain (Mueller 2006, Kassimeris 2007), and terrorism has become a negative ideograph of Western identity, making self-reflective, probing research difficult (Winkler 2006, pp. 11–16). It is a context in which fascination with terrorism encourages moral panics and an excessive focus on violence, to the neglect of the wider social, historical, and often mundane milieu in which it is situated. It is also a context in which the much greater and more pervasive terror employed by states, including directly or indirectly by liberal-democratic states (Sluka 2000), has been ignored and silenced from the public and, to a significant degree, academic discourse.

It is against this backdrop that a decision has been made by the Editors to launch a new terrorism studies journal as one small part of a much broader attempt to foster a more self-reflective, critical approach to the study of terrorism, and bring in those who study aspects of ‘terrorism’, but are uncomfortable with or hostile to the (perceived) ontological, epistemological, and ideological commitments of existing terrorism studies (Gunning 2007, also several papers in Symposium 2007). We conceive of such an approach, which could be broadly labelled ‘critical terrorism studies’ – although one is wary of creating a bifurcation between ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ terrorism studies since all research on terrorism is in need of greater self-reflexivity – as both a general attitude towards terrorism-related research and a strategic attempt to provoke debate and draw in a wider range of scholars. In the first case, critical terrorism studies is understood as a research orientation that is willing to challenge dominant knowledge and understandings of terrorism, is sensitive to the politics of labelling in the terrorism field, is transparent about its own values and political standpoints, adheres to a set of responsible research ethics, and is committed to a broadly defined notion of emancipation. Although there are a great many outstanding examples of such research within the existing terrorism studies field, ³ a number of noted reviews have suggested that too much terrorism-related research falls below these standards (Schmid and Jongman 1988, George 1991, Silke 2004, Burnett and Whyte 2005, Ranstorp 2006). This journal is an attempt to encourage more self-reflexivity. Second, the term ‘critical’ is deliberately employed as a means of provoking debate, signalling one's dissatisfaction with some of the biases and practices currently present in the field, and indicating a series of normatively derived research priorities, many of which still need de/refining. Third, in doing so, it is the specific hope to draw in new and existing researchers from outside the terrorism studies field who would otherwise feel uncomfortable associating with the field as it is currently constituted, yet whose research speaks to precisely the concerns raised by the debate surrounding critical terrorism studies.

The specific goals of this journal include, among others, to encourage rigorous research on terrorism-related topics which conforms to the broad criteria outlined above. It aims to engage in and encourage debate on disciplinary issues such as the kinds of research ethics appropriate to the field, the relationship between scholars and security officials, the politics of defining the terrorism subject, the ethics of responsibility towards the ‘terrorist other’, and the responsibilities of the researcher towards the end-users of their research. A particularly important purpose of the journal is to provide a forum where scholars can publish their work who would otherwise feel uncomfortable publishing in what are often seen as ‘terrorism industry’ journals, and to encourage research on subjects that have thus far received scant attention in the literature, such as state terrorism, the social, ethnographic context of terrorism, gender, the effects of the war on terror on the global South, the effectiveness of counter-terrorism strategies, the cultural construction of terrorism, the ideographic qualities of the terrorism label, and many others. Another aim of the journal is to publish research from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives outside of international relations and security studies, and to engage in conversations with actors who have important and interesting points of view on terrorism-related issues, but who might otherwise be marginalized in public debate, including policy-makers and those designated as ‘terrorists’. Lastly, it aims to review important works in the field.

It was decided to launch the journal with a symposium entitled ‘Critical Terrorism Studies: Foundations, Issues, Challenges’. The purpose of the symposium is to allow a diverse set of highly respected scholars to explore, comment upon and challenge the broader project of fostering a more self-reflective, critical approach to the study of terrorism. The breadth of disciplines represented signals the journal's commitment to disciplinary pluralism and inclusivity, although the Editors are all too aware that as a field there is still a long way to go to make it truly interdisciplinary. The breadth of perspectives, including, importantly, those that are critical of the broader project outlined above, signals the journal's commitment to vigorous and open debate and its aversion to imposing a new orthodoxy or bifurcating the field into ‘critical’ and ‘traditional’ sections. It is the Editors' hope that the papers presented herein, and those to come in future issues, will stimulate the kind of rigorous intellectual debate that will advance theoretical understandings, open new avenues of research, stimulate new kinds of collaborations, and more broadly reinvigorate what is a rapidly expanding and extremely important field of inquiry.

Notes

1. Of course, millions of people around the world, and entire communities and countries, experience state terrorism on a daily basis. However, such experiences are rarely acknowledged or systematically examined within the discursive field of terrorism studies (Jackson 2007).

2. Research by Andrew Silke suggests that a new book on terrorism is published every six hours in the English language, and that on current trends it will soon be the case that over 90 per cent of all terrorism studies literature will have been published since 2001 (quoted in Shepherd 2007).

3. See John Horgan and Michael Boyle in this issue.