Misjudging Islamic Terrorism: The Academic Community's Failure to Predict 9/11

Abstract

Most academic experts within the International Relations (IR) community and other, more specialized disciplines, failed to predict or warn government policymakers and the public of the possibility that events of 9/11 magnitude could take place on the U.S. homeland. Given that long-term investigation of trends in world affairs is one of the sources that has always informed policy analysis, this represents an interesting question to examine. The analysis contained in this assessment suggests that the ontological, methodological, and conceptual problems within and between the disciplines, combined with a skewed absorption with the prospect of developments in Asia, created a gap in the knowledge about Islamic terrorism and groups like Al Qaeda, which in turn caught most of the academic community unaware on 9/11. This article performs a quantitative study to determine the nature and scope of this apparent analytical failure on the part of academics in IR and other specialized disciplines to predict 9/11 and aims to address why this failure took place.

Introduction: Charting a Contested Transformation*

“…In contrast to practitioners, hardly anyone in the academic community wrote about the emergence of Islamist international terrorism or anticipated 9/11‐type attacks (Czwarno, 2006). Today, however, the literature on terrorism and counter‐terrorism in general has become vast.…”

Forecasting Terrorism: The Need for a More Systematic Approach

“…13 In some cases these approaches are unsystematic and many seem to lack a theoretical foundation. Two exceptions to this trend are found in the articles of Czwarno and Monaghan and Shirlow, 14,15 who extensively describe their methodology and the related pros and cons. In addition, many authors make reference to their data sources, although not all of them describe how the data was analyzed.…”

“…70 dict or warn government policymakers and the public of the possibility that events with the magnitude of 9/11 could take place on the United States homeland." 1 She argues that methodological and conceptual problems both within and between academic disciplines created a gap in the knowledge about Islamic terrorism and groups like al-Qaida. In fact, the rise of al-Qaida caught most of the academic community by surprise on 9/ 11.…”

Topics in terrorism research: reviewing trends and gaps, 2007-2016

“…The inability to prevent the 9/11 attacks has famously been blamed in part on a failure to imagine such an attack from occurring (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States 2004). Moreover, while some (government) analysts certainly were aware of the growing danger posed by al-Qaeda, researchers' interests were largely elsewhere (Czwarno 2006). In the top-10 most researched terrorist groups during the 1990s, Hezbollah was the only group that might be considered a largely religiously-inspired one, although the applicability of that label is a contentious one (Gunning and Jackson 2011).…”