The Spaces and Faces of Critical Terrorism Studies

Abstract

This article explores the burgeoning academic interest in establishing a critical terrorism studies research programme. It begins by reviewing the debates over definition, causation and response that still dominate mainstream discussions of terrorism. The analytical and normative limitations of these debates, it argues, open considerable space for the emergence of a critically oriented body of literature. A second section then explores two distinct efforts at overcoming these limitations: the broadening and interpretivist faces of critical terrorism studies. The broadening face refers to attempts to expand our understanding of terrorism beyond non-state violence alone, while the interpretivist face comprises critical explorations of terror in image and narrative. Although each of these approaches offers scholars a more engaged role than the problem-solving orientation of the mainstream debates, the article argues that only the interpretivist face is capable of addressing their analytical limitations. The article concludes by calling for further attention to the notion of critique within the relevant critical literature

The social construction of terrorism: media, metaphors and policy implications

“…In particular, after 9/11 and with the rise of Critical Terrorism Studies, a discourse-centred terrorism studies has emerged. Here terrorism is not understood as a physical fact, but as a social construction (Jackson 2005;Gunning 2007;Jarvis 2009). The central notion on which this article is based is that terrorism is constituted through discourse.…”

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

“…A relationship that is promulgated in part because states are among the principal funders of research on terrorism (Silke 2004a). Critiques of such "state centrism" in terrorism research have been at the heart of critical-theory based approaches to the subject (Blakeley 2007;Cox 1981;Gunning 2007aGunning , 2007bHeath-Kelly 2010;Jarvis 2009;Stokes 2009). These criticism were more recently echoed at the 2018 Society for Terrorism Research conference, where a panel on radicalization research lamented the field's inability to advance its own "bottom-up" research agenda (Marsden et al 2018).…”

No emancipatory alternative, no critical security studies

“…Bearing in mind that as Columba Peoples and Nicholas Vaughan-Williams note (2010, 2), this straw man never existed; that security was always an 'essentially contested concept' and that even allegedly 'timeless' concepts such as 'national interests' were always shifting, contingent and ambiguous we seek to go beyond the analytical narratives and descriptive mapping which constitute the stock acceptance of an academic world in which security theorising or focuses beyond inter-state military conflict become part of the living cannon of 'CSS' (see, e.g. CASE Richmond 2010a;Newman 2010;Bourne 2012;Jarvis 2009;Jackson 2012;Merlingen 2010;Pugh, Cooper, and Turner 2011).…”