Routledge Handbook of Critical Terrorism Studies

Richard Jackson, Richard Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317801610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This new handbook is a comprehensive collection of cutting-edge essays that investigate the contribution of Critical Terrorism Studies to our understanding of contemporary terrorism and counterterrorism.

Terrorism remains one of the most important security and political issues of our time. After 9/11, Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) emerged as an alternative approach to the mainstream study of terrorism and counterterrorism, one which combined innovative methods with a searching critique of the abuses of the war on terror. This volume explores the unique contribution of CTS to our understanding of contemporary non-state violence and the state's response to it. It draws together contributions from key thinkers in the field who explore critical questions around the nature and study of terrorism, the causes of terrorism, state terrorism, responses to terrorism, the war on terror, and emerging issues in terrorism research. Covering a wide range of topics including key debates in the field and emerging issues, the Routledge Handbook of Critical Terrorism Studies will set a benchmark for future research on terrorism and the response to it.

This handbook will be of great interest to students of terrorism studies, political violence, critical security studies and IR in general.

1
Introduction

A decade of critical terrorism studies

Richard Jackson

A series of high-profile terrorism attacks, as well as international concern about the military successes and social media activities of Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq, means that fourteen years after the beginning of the global “war on terror,” academic, media, and political interest in terrorism and counterterrorism remain as high as they have ever been. Since that momentous day in September 2001, terrorism – and the global response to it – has taken on a prominent role in foreign and security policy, policing, intelligence gathering, lawmaking, immigration, banking, homeland security, the news media, art, literature and movies, international relations, and academic research, among a multitude of other aspects of social, economic, political, and cultural life. In fact, in many respects, terrorism – or more accurately, the response to it – has become the fulcrum for a series of deep and profound transformations in the processes of international relations, the conduct of the state, culture and society, and the subjectivity of the citizen-subject. The rise and consolidation of the new academic field of critical terrorism studies (CTS) have been parts of this social history since 2001.

As I have analysed elsewhere (Jackson 2015a), serious discussions about developing an explicitly “critical” academic approach to terrorism research similar to what occurred in critical security studies (CSS) began in late 2004. Motivated in part by deep dismay at the Abu Ghraib scandal in April 2004 and what it revealed about the nature of the war on terror and counterterrorism more generally, and based on an earlier literature critical of the so-called terrorism industry (see Chomsky 1979; Herman 1982; Herman and O’Sullivan 1989; George 1991) which seemed particularly relevant in the post-9/11 context, discussions between myself, Marie Breen Smyth, Jeroen Gunning, and others led to the organisation of a small conference at the University of Manchester in 2006 titled “Is it time for a critical terrorism studies?” From this humble beginning, an expanding group of scholars went on to establish the BISA Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group (CSTWG); a new peer-reviewed academic journal titled Critical Studies on Terrorism; a series of publications outlining what we thought the CTS approach was and what it ought to focus on (see Jackson 2007; Gunning 2007a; Jackson, Breen Smyth, and Gunning 2009); a dedicated CTS book series published by Routledge; numerous conference panels, papers, seminars, and workshops; the establishment of an annual CSTWG conference; and eventually, a CTS textbook for teaching purposes (Jackson, Jarvis, Gunning, and Breen Smyth 2011), among other related activities.

In the first decade of its existence as an identifiable subfield, CTS has chalked up a number of quite important achievements, a few of which I will mention here. First, building on a number of other previous and contemporaneous assessments (see Stohl 1979; Schmid and Jongman 1988; Zulaika and Douglass 1996; Reid 1997; Silke 2004; Ranstorp 2006), the CTS project has witnessed an expanded and deepened discussion about terrorism studies as a field of research, teaching, and public engagement – including discussions about its conditions of possibility, its ontology and epistemology, its knowledge-production and disciplinary practices, its relationship to political power, its experts and expertise, and so on. In this respect, it can be argued that CTS has strengthened the wider field’s reflexivity and heightened its self-consciousness about the labels, definitions, categories, assumptions, values, theories, approaches, institutional relationships, and media biases which are central to its knowledge practices and institutions.

Second, CTS has succeeded in opening up, and in other cases widening and deepening, key debates in the field about the nature and definition of terrorism, the use of the “terrorist” label and the language of terrorism, the terrorism taboo and the need for more primary research, the silence on state terrorism, the exaggeration of the terrorism threat, the evaluation of counter-terrorism and the war on terror, the normative dimension of terrorism research, the gendered aspect of terrorism research, and other key issues (see Jackson and Sinclair 2012). It is reasonable to suggest that many of these subjects would have remained relatively unacknowledged or underdiscussed in the field’s journals, publications, and meetings without their highlighting by CTS scholars and activities.

Third, CTS scholarship has played an important role in bringing the kinds of social theory and foundational debates which international relations and other social science fields engaged in much earlier into the terrorism studies field. Before the emergence of CTS, with only a few exceptions (see, for example, Zulaika and Douglass 1996), it was nearly impossible to find within terrorism studies journals, publications, or conferences any serious discussion of ontology, epistemology, methodology, and praxis, and the vast majority of terrorism scholars did not engage with, or utilise in any systematic way, any alternative theoretical approaches such as constructivism, critical theory, post-structuralism, feminist theory, post-colonialism, and the like. It is in part due to CTS that increasing numbers of publications within the field now engage seriously with social theory and exhibit a pluralisation of methodological and epistemological approaches in their research (see Jackson 2012).

Fourth, CTS has succeeded in establishing itself as a unique and recognisable approach within the broader security and terrorism studies fields. That is, CTS is now recognised for its particular critical theory-influenced ontology, its epistemological concerns, its methodological pluralism, its scepticism towards official counterterrorism culture and practice, and its sustained normative critique of the war on terror and Western counterterrorism practices. This distinctive approach has provided a vocabulary and a set of theoretical tools and assumptions for scholars wanting to study terrorism and counterterrorism from a post-positivist, normatively inspired perspective. It has proved to be particularly inspirational for many young scholars who have come to terrorism studies in the years after 9/11 when the war on terror had already been embedded and normalised in politics, academia, and society.

Fifth, CTS has played a not unsubstantial role in reinvigorating the serious academic study of state terrorism (see Blakeley 2007, 2009; Jackson, Murphy, and Poynting 2010; Jarvis and Lister 2014). Prior to the emergence of CTS, with only a few notable exceptions that were in any case largely ignored by the orthodox terrorism studies field (see Stohl and Lopez 1984, 1986; George 1991; Oliverio 1998), state terrorism was notable by its absence in the field’s journals, publications, and conferences (see Silke 2004; Jackson 2008; Raphael 2009, 2010). As a consequence, it was generally taken for granted that any discussion of “terrorism” referred exclusively to non-state actors. Today, partly as a result of CTS, it is normal to specify whether one is referring to state or non-state terrorism and to refer to the growing literature on state terrorism.

Finally, as it has been institutionalised and established through the BISA working group, the journal, book series, textbook, and so on, CTS has provided a recognised and legitimate intellectual “home” for critically oriented scholars who wish to engage in terrorism-related research but who perhaps feel uncomfortable being associated with what they perceive as the orthodox, state-centric, and state-supportive “terrorism industry.” The word critical in front of terrorism studies therefore provides a psychologically reassuring and professionally legitimate identity with an identifiable community of scholars and an accompanying set of activities. It also provides a set of resources for both teaching and research and a pathway for professional development and advancement.

The aim of this volume is to provide an overview and assessment of some of the main areas of interest and concern to CTS and scholars associated with the CTS project and to outline some of the key findings and issues identified thus far in research on these topics. In addition to providing a kind of state-of-the-art snapshot, the volume highlights some key areas and topics for research in the coming decades of CTS.

Outline of the volume

Critical approaches to the study of terrorism

The number and scope of the issues examined in this volume preclude a comprehensive description of each chapter in this brief introduction. Instead, I will seek to provide a general overview and discussion of the main themes, issues, approaches, findings, and lines of debate in each main section. Part I of the volume examines some of the central themes and issues raised within CTS over the past ten years about how we study terrorism. Rooted in the critical theory-inspired axiom that all theory is from somewhere and for someone (see Cox 1986), and that we ought to therefore be reflexive about both the context in which our research emerges and the impact that it can have on people and society, this section first of all explores where terrorism studies – and later, critical terrorism studies – came from and how this has affected its subsequent development. These early chapters reveal that the material and discursive origins of terrorism studies in cold war counter-insurgency research, as well as the impact of 9/11, continue to influence the focus and direction of the broader field, particularly in terms of its state centricity and its thorny relationship to state security, its struggle to create a bounded academic field with accepted professional standards for expertise, and its ongoing crisis of knowledge (see Zulaika 2012; Stampnitzky 2013; Frank 2014; Jackson 2015b).

The other chapters in this section focus on some of the perennial concerns of CTS about ontology, epistemology, methodology, and approach within terrorism studies. They reveal first of all that, building on important earlier literature (see, for example, Gold-Biss 1994; Zulaika and Douglass 1996), CTS scholars have made some significant interventions in clearly articulating the different ways in which terrorism is a socially constructed category or signifier without any essential ontological content and some of the implications this has for gathering knowledge about it and for responding to acts of violence which have been labelled as terrorism. They also reveal that a much clearer picture is starting to emerge about the value and advantages of employing different methodological approaches based on different ontologies and epistemologies – such as neo-positivist, reflexivist, relational, and critical realist approaches – in terrorism-related research (see Dixit and Stump 2016; Stump, this volume). These chapters also explain why it is so important to pay close attention to issues of ontology, epistemology, and methodology, namely because different approaches determine what can be known about terrorism and how we can know them.

Importantly, the chapters in this section highlight some of the ways in which there are useful complementarities in the knowledge produced by different approaches, deep differences in ontology notwithstanding. For example, constructivist and post-structuralist-based studies on the discourse of the war on terror have revealed a great deal about the ideational and discursive structures and mechanisms of contemporary counterterrorism. These studies, far from being antithetical to, are complemented by critical theory-inspired and historical-materialist analyses of the geo-political and economic interests and processes which are evident in the war on terror. Putting these different critical analyses together reveals the war on terror to be a historical phase of neoliberal capitalist expansion led by the hegemonic geostrategic impulses of the United States which, in a dialectical process, both reflects and co-constructs a broader legitimising discourse of counterterrorism based on notions of Western exceptionalism, civilisational struggle, and risk management. In this way, positivist and post-positivist critical approaches work together to paint a rich picture of the historical epoch we inhabit and provide us with something of a “history of the present.”

However, in addition to the achievements of CTS thus far, the chapters in this section also remind us that there remains a great deal left for critically oriented scholars to do. For example, much of the discourse analytic research in CTS has focused on Western states – their leaders, media, public, experts, and so on – while much less research has focused on the discourses of the “terrorist” groups and their supporters. In terms of methodology, this speaks to the frequently noted need for more research directly with terrorists and militants, in order to better understand their subjectivity and worldviews. Although extremely challenging, particularly in the current global context, such research is eminently possible, as some notable studies demonstrate (see, for example, Mahmood 1996; Gunning 2007b). Similarly, from a normative perspective, while critical theory-inspired research has focused on the critique of counterterrorism and the state’s responses to terrorism, much less effort has been put into exploring how ethics and emancipation apply to the actions and intentions of terrorist groups.

The nature and causes of terrorism

Part II on the nature and causes of terrorism includes chapters on the perennial question of how to define terrorism, the reality and assessment of the terrorist threat, the question of whether there is a “new” kind of terrorism, the related question of whether religion is a cause of contemporary forms of terrorism, and the perennially underexamined gender dimension to terrorism and how we understand it. On these issues, CTS has made a number of important interventions in the field, not least in relentlessly critiquing the way in which political leaders and the media have described and exaggerated the threat of terrorism in Western societies and, more importantly, how they have manipulated public fear for political (and material) gain (see Mueller and Stewart 2011, 2012; Jackson 2013). There is little question any more that as a threat to the individual safety of citizens, the Western way of life, or the integrity of the state as an institution, the danger posed by terrorism has been vastly overexaggerated. As a consequence, the response to the threat of terrorism since 9/11 has been one of unnecessary and counterproductive overreaction (Mueller 2006; Zulaika 2009). CTS has been at the forefront of detailing the nature, extent, and consequences of this exaggeration and overreaction, providing important analysis of how it has been leveraged for much more profound and invasive processes of surveillance, securitisation, border management, social control, democratic constriction, neoliberalisation, legal transformation, and exceptional politics.

These chapters also highlight the contribution made by CTS to exposing not only the fallacies of the “new terrorism” thesis, but also the way in which this particular narrative functions to legitimise new, more violent counterterrorism practices such as torture, extrajudicial killings, rendition, and the like, as well as new and more intrusive approaches to policing, militarism, risk management, surveillance, and so on. The chapters also disturb common-sense understandings of the role of religion in contemporary terrorism, again highlighting both the fallacies at the heart of a great deal of academic and political discourse about terrorism, as well as the discursive functions of the religion-terrorism association. For example, one of the main functions of the “religious terrorism” narrative is to de-politicise, as well as de-legitimise and dem...