The critical terrorism studies–cultural criminology nexus: some thoughts on how to ‘toughen up’ the critical studies approach

Abstract

This article adopts the perspective of cultural criminology to engage with some of the recent criticisms that have surfaced regarding critical terrorism studies (CTS). In particular, this article responds to a number of commentators who have implored CTS to move away from discursive and constructivist accounts of terrorism and to concentrate instead on more tangible social relations linked to politico-economic interests and historical conditions. This article proceeds in two parts. First, it outlines the many intellectual and epistemological commonalities that exist between CTS and cultural criminology. It then takes a more critical turn by offering up a series of examples drawn from cultural criminology that could be useful in making the ‘critical’ in CTS less ambiguous.

Keywords:

• critical terrorism studies
• cultural criminology
• critical ontology

Notes

1. Although I have edited collections that have included chapters on terrorism, written the odd piece on the subject (e.g. Hayward and Morrison 2002) and taught a course entitled Terrorism and Modern Society for nearly a decade, I do not consider myself a terrorist scholar per se. Rather I am a criminologist whose interests overlap with the field of terrorism studies and increasingly international relations.

2. See Ferrell et al. (2008), Ferrell and Hayward (2011) and Hayward and Young (2007) for general introductions.

3. Although the specific goal of this article is to build a bridge between cultural criminology and CTS, it is important to stress that criminology generally can also be a useful aid to terrorist scholars (something already acknowledged by some CTS scholars, e.g. Blakeley 2008, p. 156). Consider the amount of overlap that exists in areas such as security, surveillance, transnational policing, border/cyber crime, money/drug trafficking and so on. Indeed, recently there has been an eruption of criminological research on terrorism, much of which (for any number of reasons) has not crossed over into the established field of terrorism studies.

4. Once exclusively a postgraduate subject, since the early 1990s, criminology has grown to the point where there are now 934 criminology and ‘applied criminology’ courses on offer in 98 UK institutions.

5. As an aside, it is interesting that both sub-disciplines are at pains to highlight other modes of problematic knowledge production within their fields. CTS is naturally frustrated about the preponderance of ‘pseudo-academic’ and ‘instant’ terrorism experts (Jackson et al. 2009b, p. 219, Ranstorp 2009, pp. 14, 26). Cultural criminologists meanwhile have recently expressed their dismay at the rise of the ‘celebrity criminologist’, a development that has brought forth such experts as Brad Pitt on the death penalty and Lilly Allen on knife crime.

6. This being the case, CTS should avoid burning up its theoretical jets trying to resolve the irresolvable issue of the lack of an agreed-upon definition of the term terrorism within terrorism studies. As Horgan and Boyle (2008, p. 55) made clear, the definitional problem is CTS's bête noire, and as such ‘serves as the starting point of most CTS critiques’. From here it is a short step to getting mired in the broken-record debate between ‘problem-solving’ and critical modes of terrorism research. Rather, CTS should rise above intra-disciplinary scuffles and train its sights instead on real world targets in specific social and political contexts.

7. This shared interest is apparent in a whole host of recent studies that seek to interrogate the image of the terrorist and the portrayal of terrorism within the late modern cultural script (e.g. Jenkins 2002, Jackson 2005, Altheide 2006, Campbell 2009). Clearly, one could say much more about this shared interest in media representation, but given the specific focus of this special edition, this will have to be dealt with on another occasion.

8. Consider, for example, Penglase's (2007) ethnography of crime and ethnicity in urban Rio de Janeiro; the Dutch anthropologist and cultural criminologist Frank Bovenkerk's (Bovenkerk and Yesilgoz 2004) work on the ambiguous interplay of crime, law and everyday experience in multicultural societies; Boekhout van Solinge's (2008) ethnography of the illegal Tropical timber trade; the anthropological fieldwork of Stephanie Kane (1998a, 1998b, 2004), who has imported the sensibilities of cultural criminology back into anthropology; and the work of David Brotherton on the transcontinental hybridity and legal marginality of contemporary street gangs. Brotherton and his collaborators (Brotherton and Barrios 2004, Brotherton 2007) have developed ethnographic approaches (in the community, the prison and the growing archipelago of international deportation and immigration facilities) that are as nuanced in their cultural understanding as they are global in their scope. Immersing themselves in the cultural and political practices of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation and other street gangs, they document the ways in which these groups in fact move beyond crime to intermingle political resistance, community empowerment and religious practice in their collective identities.

9. This is precisely the point of early work in cultural criminology, such as Stephen Lyng's (1990) ‘edgework’ concept, embodying both Marx and Mead in an attempt to account for the interplay between structural context and illicit sensuality. Likewise, Jack Katz's (1988) ‘seductions of crime’ are meant as provocative engagements with, and correctives to, ‘criminological macro-theories of causality’.

10. It is interesting to note (especially given the subtitle of Katz's Seductions of Crime is ‘The moral and sensual attractions of doing evil’) that CTS has on occasion expressed an interest in emotions relating to terrorism – for example, see Sluka on both ‘evil’ and ‘love’ (2009, pp. 141, 148).

11. See relatedly Young (2007, chapter 8) for a more developed cultural criminological analysis of terrorism, the dialectics of ‘othering’, and life ‘inside and outside the First World’.

12. CTS scholars have tried to give this emancipatory aim some practical ballast by promoting ‘participative action research’ (Jackson et al. 2009b, p. 226, Toros and Gunning 2009, p. 105). Jackson et al. stated that participative action research is about working with ‘suspect communities’ and ‘sharing one's power as a researcher and an academic’. However, even if one believes that academics actually have any real power, participative action research is a broad church that encompasses everything from developing conflict resolution processes to applying for funding for community arts projects. Such diversity is not likely to erode the supposed confusion surrounding CTS's critical ontology.