Research note: The quantitative results of a questionnaire on state terrorism

Sproat, Peter A.

doi:10.1080/09546559608427364

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 17 publications

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“…While many of the accounts found in such "first order" histories of the field (e.g. Laqueur 1999) tend to assume that the rise of a specialty in terrorism expertise was a direct response to events, and thus do not see the question of expertise itself as in need of explanation, some fairly sophisticated histories of have been produced by those working in, or alongside the field (Crelinsten 1989a(Crelinsten , b, 1993(Crelinsten , 1998Gordon 1998Gordon , 2001Gordon , 2004aGordon , b, 2005Reid 1983Reid , 1993Reid , 1997Reid et al 2004;Sproat 1996). Schmid's work, including his surveys of experts, is of particular note (Schmid 1993;Schmid and Jongman 1988), as are qualitative reflections on the field and its history including Ranstorp (2007), Silke (2004), and Zulaika and Douglass (1996).…”

Section: Previous Work On Terrorism and Terrorism Expertsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Disciplining an Unruly Field: Terrorism Experts and Theories of Scientific/Intellectual Production

Stampnitzky¹

2010

Qual Sociol

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Terrorism" has proved to be a highly problematic object of expertise. Terrorism studies fails to conform to the most common sociological notions of what a field of intellectual production ought to look like, and has been described by participants and observers alike as a failure. Yet the study of terrorism is a booming field, whether measured in terms of funding, publications, or numbers of aspiring experts. This paper aims to explain, first, the disjuncture between terrorism studies in practice and the sociological literature on fields of intellectual production, and, second, the reasons for experts' "rhetoric of failure" about their field. I suggest that terrorism studies, rather than conforming to the notion of an ideal-typical profession, discipline, or bounded "intellectual field," instead represents an interstitial space of knowledge production. I further argue that the "rhetoric of failure" can be understood as a strategy through which terrorism researchers mobilize sociological theories of scientific/cultural fields as both an interpretive resource in their attempts to make sense of the apparent oddness of their field and their situation, and as schemas, or models, in their attempts to reshape the field. I conclude that sociologists ought to expand our vision to incorporate the many arenas of expertise that occupy interstitial spaces, moving and travelling between multiple fields.

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