Critical realism and historical materialism as resources for critical terrorism studies

Abstract

Critical Terrorism Studies can be strengthened by scholarship that draws on a combination of critical realism (CR) and historical materialism (HM). CR relates epistemological relativism (we can know the social only indirectly through our interpretation of it) to ontological realism (there is a powerfully influential social reality that includes but is much more than our knowledge claims about it) through judgemental rationalism (knowledge claims can be tested against social reality, although always in an indirect, interpreted and fallible way). We illustrate CR-informed HM's value in relation to analysing capitalism's constant remaking of the world, terrorism as an instrument of capitalist class rule and the reified thinking involved in the use of terrorism that it is inherently anti-emancipatory.

Keywords:

• war on terror
• critical realism
• historical materialism
• capitalism
• class

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Jonathan Joseph, Richard Jackson, Terrell Carver, the Critical Security Studies Reading Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

1.We have no reason to think that the balance of CTS-type pieces that have been published in other journals and in other forms will be dramatically different from that indicated in that table.

2.We use the labels HM and Marxism broadly interchangeably, but mostly use the former as the latter label tends to focus the discussion more specifically on the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. For an overview of what HM has to offer security studies generally, see Herring 2010. For more on CR and HM/Marxism, see Brown et al. 2002.

3.Paul Wilkinson (forthcoming), a key figure in MTS, has also taken up the issue of state terrorism recently. His cases are Saddam Hussein's policies towards the Iraqi Kurds; Indonesia's policies towards the East Timorese; former Yugoslavia; and Rwanda in 1994. In writing about Indonesia and East Timor, he shows himself to be willing to discuss the state terrorism of an ally of the West. How exactly he handles that case, and whether and how he engages with the idea of use and sponsorship of terrorism by liberal democratic states, or with their relationship to capitalist globalisation, remains to be seen when his book is published.

4.Marx himself can be quoted as speaking and writing both for and against the use of terrorism. He wrote approvingly in 1848 of ‘Revolutionary Terrorism’ and in 1849 of ‘red terror’ as the only means of accelerating the overthrow of the old order, but in 1870 wrote approvingly of the non-resort to violence by the proletariat. See Kautsky 1919, ch. 6.