Critical Terrorism Studies

A New Research Agenda

Richard Jackson, Marie Breen Smyth, Jeroen Gunning

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415574150
• eBook ISBN: 9781134050505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

In response to the growth of a critical perspective on contemporary issues of terrorism, this edited volume brings together a number of leading scholars to debate the new subfield of 'critical terrorism studies'.

In the years since the 9/11 attacks, terrorism studies has undergone a major transformation from minor subfield of security studies into a large stand-alone field, and is probably one of the fastest expanding areas of research in the Western academic world. However, much of the literature is beset by a number of problems, limiting its potential for producing rigorous empirical findings and genuine theoretical advancement. In response to these weaknesses in the broader field, a small but increasing number of scholars have begun to articulate a critical perspective on contemporary issues of terrorism. This volume brings together a number of leading scholars to debate the need for and the shape of this exciting new subfield.The first part of the volume examines some of the main shortcomings and limitations of orthodox terrorism studies, while the second examines exactly what a 'critical' terrorism studies would look like. Contributors from a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives give this volume diversity, and it will lay the foundations for, and provoke debate about, the future research agenda of this new field.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, terrorism studies and IR theory in general.

Richard Jackson is Reader in the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, where he is also Senior Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Contemporary Political Violence (CSRV). He is the founding editor of the journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism. Marie Breen Smyth is Director of the Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Contemporary Political Violence (CSRV) at Aberystwyth University. She is a Reader in International Politics and co-editor of the journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism. Jeroen Gunning is Lecturer in International Politics at Aberystwyth University, Deputy Director of the Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Contemporary Political Violence and co-editor of the journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism.

Part I
The contemporary study of political terrorism

1 Mapping terrorism studies after 9/11

An academic field of old problems and new prospects

Magnus Ranstorp

Introduction

For almost thirty years the terrorism studies field occupied a marginal position within mainstream academic circles. Only a handful of academics toiled away individually to provide some social scientific meaning and order out of a catalogue of acute terrorism crisis events as they unfolded across time and contexts. This intellectual effort was largely preoccupied with immediate events, academics being engulfed in making sense of evolving trends and in trying to predict what new waves of terrorism would appear on the horizon. Towards these ends, researchers developed various theories of terrorism. They focused principally on the causes of the phenomenon, the evolution and dynamics of terrorist groups, and how to deal with it from a state perspective (Maskaliunaite, 2004). Some argued that ‘the very fact that the subject of terrorism is studied from so many different angles may well be an advantage and not a shortcoming of the field’ (ibid.). It requires increasingly interdisciplinary collaboration, as terrorism in the age of globalization and increased complexity can be characterized, in the words of Nancy Hayden, as a ‘wicked problem’ (Hayden, 2006). As such, it requires knitting together a range of disciplinary approaches outside of international relations and security studies. This social and behavioral research is inherently difficult to conduct as it is ‘socially constructed, culturally specific and changing’ (Stohl, 2005: 28). Others scathingly ‘characterized the field of terrorism studies as stagnant, poorly conceptualized, lacking in rigor, and devoid of adequate theory, data, and methods’ (Stampnitzky, 2007a). As Alex Schmid and Berto Jongman lamented back in 1988: ‘there are probably few areas in the social science literature in which so much is written on the basis of so little research’ (Schmid and Jongman, 1988).

A principal cause for this critique is the surprisingly few research inventories conducted over the years designed to fundamentally question theories, assumptions, and knowledge production. This type of state-of-the-art research inventory is necessary for preparing the next wave of research. My own anthology, Mapping Terrorism Research (2006a), convinced me that every new researcher entering the field of terrorism studies ought to produce their own critique and research inventory as a precursor for any further research – to fundamentally question established epistemological and methodological approaches. Far too few self-reflexive books, chapters, or journal articles actually exist taking stock in a unifying sense of the terrorism studies field to account for what we know; how we know what we know; and what research questions we ought to focus on in terms of individual and collective research efforts. Even fewer exist which address the theory and methods of studying terrorism. One explanation for this absence pertains to the relative absence of debate among the orthodox terrorism scholars. This ‘invisible college’ of terrorism researchers often recycled empirical information, some with questionable credibility and precision, and interchanged contexts, frequently without sufficient regard for situational, political, social or security specificity. As argued by Martha Crenshaw, researchers should try to avoid ‘constructing general categories of terrorist actors that lump together dissimilar motivations, organizations, resources and contexts’ (Crenshaw, 2000: 405). Often disparate evidence is woven together selectively to suit the case without regard for specific context. Relying on each others’ work alongside government and media reports produced an ever-expanding intellectual quilt that had a tendency to grow in size, but less in layered intellectual depth. The same mantras or analogies – as exemplified by Brian Jenkins’ ‘terrorism likes a lot of people watching not a lot of people dead’ (see Jenkins, 1998) – appeared across the terrorism studies literature without anyone ever critically questioning what it really meant and the social scientific basis or qualitative/quantitative method for getting to this conclusion. This problem has been underscored by Michael Stohl who accurately pointed towards what:

Popper (1934) might caustically designate as ‘wisdom’ rather than ‘science’. Thus, the assembled wisdom might be correct but the demarcation between wisdom and science that would allow proposing the necessary conjectures, collecting the appropriate data and subjecting these conjectures and data to tests which might arguably demonstrate their falsifiability has not yet met the standards of social science epistemology.

(Stohl, 2005)

As complained by Schmid and Jongman, much of the writing in terrorism studies is ‘impressionistic, superficial, and at the same time often also pretentious, venturing far-reaching generalizations on the basis of episodal evidence’ (Schmid and Jongman, 1988).

Another exceptionally perceptive explanation offered to account for the absence of introspective critiques within the terrorism studies field is made by Lisa Stampnitzky. Convincingly, she argues that this absence is due to the fact there are no barriers of entry to the terrorism studies field and ‘that a high proportion of those writing on the topic have no significant background in the topic’ (Stampnitzky, 2007a). Unlike area studies or more professionally specialized social scientific disciplines where there is greater rigor in peer-review practices and professionalized barriers of entry, any retrained Soviet specialist or international relations generalist can in theory and practice become a specialized terrorism ‘expert’ overnight. As outlined by Andrew Silke, there were 490 articles in the two core terrorism studies journals in the period 1990–9 with 83 percent written by one-time authors (Silke, 2003).

The transitory nature of the field of terrorism studies can provide the seeds of intellectual vitality. However, it can also be a major drawback as very few one-time contributors are ambitious enough to critique the field of study or command enough knowledge to do so. The case made by Stampnitzky about no or low barriers of entry into terrorism studies is supported by Avishai Gordon’s study that suggests that ‘core journals in terrorism studies had significantly higher rates of contributions from non-academic authors than journals in political science or communication studies’ (Gordon, 2001). Hence, even journalists, like Peter Bergen, without PhD or social scientific training in methodology or theory but with privileged access from the terror frontlines, have become the new form of ‘pseudo-academic’ terrorism expert. As noted by Stampnitzky,

terrorism expertise is constructed and negotiated in an interstitial space between academia, the state, and the media. The boundaries of legitimate knowledge and expertise are particularly open to challenges from self-proclaimed experts from the media and political fields, and this has had significant consequences for the sort of expert discourses that tend to be produced and disseminated.

(Stampnitzky, 2007b)

The terrorism studies field relies on peer-review as a means of quality control, but suffers from the very absence that drives academic knowledge forward – against-the-grain theories and rigorous intellectual debates and critiques among scholars. Much of the literature does not engage with alternative schools of thought or theory-building. The majority of debate is currently occurring in book review sections and rarely encompasses rigorous critique of the validity of theories or methodology. However, even where articles are peer-reviewed, the peers reviewing may lack the expertise, as so much ‘terrorism knowledge’ is fragmented. Few terrorism experts are really qualified to authoritatively comment on the internal structures of different terrorist groups across different contexts. However, as pointed out by Ken Booth: ‘diversity and debate is not therefore a problem for Terrorism Studies, but a sign of life’ (Booth, 2008: 67). It is essentially in the post-9/11 era that these types of essential and major academic debates have been surfacing with widely different schools of thought. Many of these debates have been sparked as a response to the construction of databases and from these have emerged analyses that go against the grain of widely-held assumptions and challenge the main orthodoxy.

Debates and databases: challenging the orthodoxy of terrorism theories

Among the first major debates in the post-9/11 period was that sparked by Robert Pape’s Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005). Originally an expert on airpower (again reinforcing Stampnitzky’s point about no barriers to entry of the field), Pape argues in his book that rather than religious motivation, ‘what nearly all suicide attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorist consider to be their homeland’ (Pape, 2005: 4). Pape based this analysis from examining every known case of suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2005, which encompassed 315 attacks from eighteen different campaigns. Modestly referring to his database as ‘the first complete universe of suicide attacks worldwide, one that includes every attack in which at least one terrorist killed himself or herself while attempting to kill others’ (ibid.), Pape’s theory on suicide terrorism was critiqued in some quarters on methodological grounds in terms of ‘artificially setting suicide terrorism apart from other forms of political violence’ (Kiras, 2007: 227); data collection and codification procedures; and for not distinguishing between ‘traditional (localized) and contemporary (globalized) patterns of suicide attacks’ – the causes of the globalization of martyrdom (Moghadam, 2006: 707–729; Atran, 2006: 127–147; Crenshaw, 2007: 133–162). Nevertheless, Pape’s contribution was important evidence-based research amassed in his own database, though there was wide disagreement about what conclusions could be drawn from the data. As Pape underscored, ‘knowledge alone will not win the war on terrorism but solid, reliable knowledge is indispensable’ (Murphy, 2005).

Interestingly, the second major debate erupting among terrorism scholars came in the aftermath of the publication of Marc Sageman’s second book, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (2008). A follow-up to his groundbreaking book, Understanding Terror Networks (2004), in which he constructed a detailed biographical database of 172 terrorists and advanced the ‘bunch of guys’ theory where people became terrorists by joining groups and influencing each other to commit terrorism, Leaderless Jihad was scathingly attacked by Bruce Hoffman who suggested that it could be ‘more scientifically rigorous had he employed essential and basic tools of social science research and built on the core theories of social and terrorist networks’ (B. Hoffman, 2008: 133–138). Although Hoffman’s critique centered on the fallacy of grassroots terrorism (as al-Qaeda was ‘on the march’), the debate was primarily motivated by Sageman’s chapter on methodology in which he dismissed much of the existing literature as unscientific because it ‘relies too much on narrowly explanatory case studies and profiles of leading terrorist figures, is too heavily dependent on information gleaned from government sources’, and amounts to ‘nothing more than arguments made for the sake of scoring political points’ (ibid.).

Furthermore, Hoffman criticized Sageman for not explaining ‘how his collection of data conforms to the scientific standards of academic inquiry that he finds so lacking in the work of most terrorism scholars’ (ibid.). Responding to Hoffman’s charge that he ‘has a surprisingly curt discussion on methodology’, Sageman shot back that he could not find any methodology at all in Hoffman’s own book, Inside Terrorism (B. Hoffman, 1998). Notwithstanding what the New York Times described as ‘a bitter personal struggle between two powerful figures in the world of terrorism, forcing their followers to choose sides’ (Sciolino and Schmitt, 2008), Sageman makes a salient point, in that ‘disagreements among experts are the driving force of the scientific enterprise’ (Sageman and Hoffman, 2008).

Evidence-based research should be at the core of terrorism research. As argued by Sageman: ‘there is no substitute for careful scrutiny of primary sources, field research, and analysis of court documents (in which suspected terrorists challenge government claims)’ (ibid.). The pre-9/11 literature on terrorism has been criticized for its over-reliance on recycled secondary sources and for academics being ensconced in ivory towers, instead of field research and talking to actual terrorists. As Andrew Silke showed, only roughly eleven percent of articles published in the period 1990–9 contained significant amounts of primary source interviews; the majority of articles relied exclusively on secondary sources (Silke, 2003). A principal problem with relying only on secondary material is naturally that no new information is generated, thereby complementing existing knowledge rather than pushing the research envelope in new directions. At the same time, terrorism researchers ought to be cautious about the scientific limits of relying on, and drawing over-generalised conclusions from, interviews with terrorists or former terrorists, especially when matched from different contexts, different degrees of involvement, and under different interview conditions. Some useful and limited insights can be made as long as the methodology is sound, as illustrated by John Horgan’s interviews (since 2006) with twenty-eight former terrorists spanning thirteen organizations (including five extremist Islamist groups) about why they left the groups (Ripley, 2008). Similarly, Jeroen Gunning’s use of interviews in shedding further light on Hamas’s inner workings and the ideological framework of its members is another useful illustration of where primary research can unearth new and significant knowledge (Gunning, 2007c).

Since 9/11, the terrorism studies field has entered into what some observers have called a golden age (Shepherd, 2007). An explosion of academic and other literature addressing terrorism has appeared worldwide. In 2001, according to the social science index, little more than 100 articles were published in the main journals and ‘that figure had almost trebled by the following year and has carried on rising ever since, with more than 2,300 citations recorded last year (2007)’ (Crace, 2008). Andrew Silke has ‘indicated that a new book appears nearly every six hours, and Richard Jackson notes that, during this period, peer-reviewed papers have increased by approximately 300%’ (Lentini, 2008: 133). New, innovative and interdisciplinary journals dealing with terrorism-related issues and research have appeared that promise to provide new theoretical and interdisciplinary insights and perspectives on the phenomenon, from Critical Studies on Terrorism to Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict. An array of new, exciting research centers, focusing on terrorism and political violence, have eclipsed older and more established university centers whose programs are seen to be stagnant and even decaying. For example, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center and the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) are staffed with regional area specialists and Arabic-speakers, and regularly provide the latest cutting-edge in-depth analysis and highly granulated documents on various dimensions of extremist Islamist groups.

Equally, the Centre for the study of Radicalisation and Contemporary Political Violence (CSRV) at Aberystwyth University constitutes an important intellectual platform creating space for critical research on terrorism, while the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terror (START) collaboration spearheaded by the University of Maryland is ploughing new ground in quantitative analysis, as well as contributing to new pathways in understanding the ways in which radicalization can lead to terrorism. Web-based portals knitting together expertise are also usefully contributing to on-line journals on the subject of terrorism, and expanding the universe for old and new students of terrorism studies to exchange analysis and perspectives more quickly and with greater frequency.

After 9/11, the shift of terrorism studies to center stage is visible in many ways. Scattered disciplinary expertise across departments in universities is often knitted together to create new centers of terrorism expertise, degree programs, or on-line degrees (Attwood, 2007). This trend, however, is problematic since there are few evaluation mechanisms or comparative reviews about the quality and methods of teaching terrorism studies within the field itself. As such, the orthodoxy of terrorism studies often prevails, as students are consuming a digest of the same standard introductory texts that rarely challenge conventional wisdom or provide new analytical angles or challenging perspectives. In the long-term, this paucity will stymie the intellectual vibrancy of the terrorism studies field. In short, there is no ‘gold standard’ of what constitutes the appropriate pathway to terrorism studies.

The steady proliferation of terrorism publications after 9/11 has not necessarily increased a balanced analytical focus. According to Andrew Silke, excessive focus on suicide terrorism has contributed to skewing the research focus on certain issues at the peril of ignoring other forms of terrorism and in different historical, political, and social contexts other than the contemporary Arab world or south Asia (Silke, 2004c). Conceptual issues such as the definitional debate and the history of terrorism continue to be largely ignored. A key problem is that current terrorism research efforts can be compared to a game of children’s football where all the players are rushing after the ball (the latest terrorism trends) without a strategy, rather than marking different players or utilizing different areas of the pitch.

Although recent years have seen some major leaps in the quantity, and to some extent, quality of research output, terrorism studies research suffers from serious shortcomings as it needs to further develop theoretically and methodologically. As authoritatively argued by terrorism studies doyenne Martha Crenshaw, the problem is that the field

is probably still plagued by the enduring challenges posed by a lack of definition (what terrorism constitutes); the inability to build a cohesive integrated and cumulative theory (built around larger data-sets and over longer time periods) and the event-driven character of much research.

(Crenshaw, 2000: 405)

There are some signs that terrorism studies has attracted scholars intellectually capable of bridging adjacent social science disciplines and breaking new ground in terrorism research. Technological developments also offer some considerable promise in providing new avenues to break down disciplinary boundaries. However, much of the criticism levied at the terrorism studies area prior to 9/11 remains relevant today, principally a symptom of the legacy of how the terrorism studies field was created thirty years ago and how it has developed over time.

The emergence and legacy of the field of terrorism studies

The field of terrorism studies has been largely the confines of a rather varied collegiate of scholars hailing from diverse disciplinary backgrounds since its emergence as a specialization in the mid-to-late 1970s. Largely atomized and peripheral to the major disciplinary debates within the social and behavioral sciences, and confined to a few dozen core scholars worldwide, it is not surprising that there has been a relative absence of core debates and critical challenges of assumptions necessary to intellectually push the field forward with new waves of innovative research. This is not to belittle the Herculean efforts made by a few core academic specialists who steadily ploughed forward along the a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the case for critical terrorism studies
• PART I The contemporary study of political terrorism
• PART II Critical approaches to the study of political terrorism
• Bibliography