Critical Methods in Terrorism Studies

Priya Dixit, Jacob L. Stump

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317692942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Terrorismus

This book shows how to use a range of critical approaches to conduct research on terrorism.

Featuring the work of researchers who have already utilized these methods to study terrorism, it includes a diverse range of critical methodological approaches – including discourse analysis, feminist, postcolonial, ethnographic, critical theory, and visual analysis of terrorism. The main objectives of the book are to assist researchers in adopting and applying various critical approaches to the study of terrorism. This goal is achieved by bringing together a number of different scholars working on the topic of terrorism from a range of non-variables-based approaches. Their individual chapters discuss explicitly the research methods used and methodological commitments made by the authors, while also illustrating the application of their particular critical perspective to the topic of terrorism. The authors of each chapter will discuss (1) why they chose their specific critical method; (2) how they justified their methodological stance; (3) how they conduct their research; (4) and, finally, an example of the research.

This book will be essential reading for students of terrorism studies and critical terrorism studies, and highly recommended for students of political violence, security studies and IR.

1 Introduction

1 STUDYING TERRORISM AND PRACTICING CRITICISM

Jacob L. Stump and Priya Dixit

DOI: 10.4324/9781315777269-1

This introductory chapter accomplishes three basic tasks. The first is to locate this book in the context of the literature on terrorism, particularly what we call dissident literature that later became Critical Terrorism Studies. The second accomplishment of this introductory chapter is to briefly describe the contents of the book, focusing on the various ways that the chapters approach the topic of terrorism, what they argue, and the perspective they adopt. Third, this introductory chapter sketches out some of the implications of a number of themes raised by our authors for the production and dissemination of knowledge about terrorism.

The emergence of a dissident literature in the study of terrorism

The study of terrorism is one of the fastest growing areas of research with thousands of dissertations, reports, books, and articles published annually (Gordon 2004: 109). Yet the study of terrorism has been disparagingly called ‘counterinsurgency masquerading as political science’ (Schmid and Jongman, quoted by Jackson 2007b: 245). As a field of study, basic and largely unquestioned knowledge about terrorism is ‘highly contestable and open to debate’ and, Richard Jackson says, knowledge about terrorism ‘functions ideologically to reinforce and reify existing structures of power in society’ – such as the state (2009: 67).

Much of the knowledge about terrorism has been generated by a comparatively small group of scholars mostly in Western Europe and the United States. Ranstorp referred to this cluster of disciplinarily diverse researchers as an ‘invisible college’ of ‘experts.’ Since the mid-1970s, they have been pivotal in circulating information about terrorism, advising government officials and policy-makers, and speaking in the media. ‘[I]t is not surprising,’ Ranstorp says, ‘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’ (Ranstorp 2009: 19). The invisible college, which has constituted the defining boundaries of the study of terrorism, has effectively limited the possibility for more critically inclined research to develop (Stump and Dixit 2013: 18).

At the same time, even as the field of terrorism studies as a whole has remained less than innovative when it comes to theoretical development, we argue that a theoretically, methodologically, and empirically diverse array of dissident literature began to emerge in the 1980s. This dissident literature in the study of terrorism mirrors other developments in other related disciplines such as international relations (IR) (see, for example, the 1990 special issue of International Studies Quarterly, ‘Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies’). While IR and the study of terrorism have largely remained estranged from each other, which can ‘probably be attributed to the fact that many non-specialists are turned off by the political bias and analytical shallowness on offer’ (Ranstorp 2009: 24), a dissident literature did arise nonetheless. It was far less formally institutionalized than in IR. Just the opposite – alternative voices in the study of terrorism mirrored the dispersed and multi-disciplinary background of the invisible college. While the invisible college limited the knowledge about terrorism – both what counted as important for research and how to go about doing the research – this emerging dissident scholarship diversified research concerns and methods. However, dissident studies of terrorism were peripheral to significant debates taking place within the study of terrorism defined by the invisible college and peripheral to debates taking place in IR, the social sciences, or humanities more generally. Unlike the invisible college, which became increasingly institutionalized in think tanks, academic positions, and peer reviewed and professional journals, the various dissident studies on terrorism remained atomized and exiled.

Despite this, a series of publications began to appear. These studies primarily focused on various aspects of state-based terrorism – that is, a focus on state violence targeting certain non-state groups and populations. This refocusing effectively challenged the predominant focus on non-state acts of violence carried out against sovereign states. Take Herman’s book, The Real Terror Network (1982), as one early and important example of a dissident voice. Herman shifted his focus to state violence against populations. In empirically rich detail, he depicted a US foreign policy called Operation Condor: a set of military and economic linkages between the US and various National Security States in Latin America – such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The state terrorism that Herman discusses consists of a coordinated system of surveillance and assassination carried out by domestic security services against groups deemed dissident and dangerous, especially domestic groups advocating Marxist, socialist, and democratic agendas.

Along similar lines, Lopez and Stohl’s (1984: i) analysis of The State as Terrorist focused on the ‘causes, consequences, and dynamics of that style of governance by force that has come to be known as state terror,’ especially as it related to Latin America, the Philippines, and South Africa. A few years later, Herman and O’Sullivan (1989) analyzed the linkages between the US government, media corporations, and the growing number of ‘terrorism experts.’ They argued that this configuration of government agencies, individuals and media sites effectively shaped public opinion and knowledge related to terrorism, creating and sustaining a propagandistic cover or mask for US state terrorism. Around the same time, Perdue (1989) located state terrorism in a global political-economic-media context of domination and subjugation. He focused on a number of different modes of state terror: the terror of nuclear weapon states, racial terror in apartheid South Africa, settler terrorism in Israel and the Palestinian occupied territories, US supported state terrorism in Nicaragua, and so on.

Our point here is to highlight the burgeoning dissident literature taking shape in the 1980s, especially work focused on state-based terror targeting domestic and international populations. This vein of research remains rich and diverse, still focusing on a range of contexts, people, groups, and governmental institutions and policies (see, for example, George 1991; Sluka 1999; McSherry 2002; Selden and So 2004; Blakeley 2009; Jackson and Murphy 2011). In this book, one particularly fine example is Maher and Thomson’s investigation of class antagonisms in Colombia, particularly the role of state terrorism in making possible and sustaining economic development that marginalizes the poor and working classes. Other chapters in this book that in different ways focus on state policies that terrorize certain populations of people include Joseph and Jackson’s respective chapters illustrating Critical Discourse Analysis and Caitlin Ryan’s chapter on women in the occupied Palestinian Territories.

During the 1980s, dissident voices developed in a variety of ways beyond the focus on state-based terrorism. Take for instance Wagner-Pacifici’s (1986) book. She examines a wide range of public texts surrounding the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro (the former prime minister of Italy) by the Red Brigades in 1978. Notably, Wagner-Pacifici studies a non-state group’s act of violence against former political leaders of a prominent Western state, which is a hallmark of the invisible college, but, alternatively, her study approaches the topic from an interesting new, theoretically and methodologically sophisticated angle. She conducts a dramaturgical analysis. To do this, Wagner-Pacifici drew from disciplines largely outside the regular repertoire of methods and methodological commitments sustained by the invisible college. Wagner-Pacifici cited work in sociology, symbolic anthropology, and literary criticism and she conceptualized terrorism – the actions depicted in the media, by political leaders, by members of the Red Brigades – as a social drama produced through the various public texts and their performance in social contexts.

Following in this interpretivist and effectively critical vein of analysis of terrorism were texts like Michael Taussig’s (1991) seminal work on the terror associated with colonialism, shamanism and the violence connected with the use of indigenous labor to extract rubber from South America in the 1800s. Or books like Feldman’s Formations of Violence (1991), which closely examined the relationship between political terror and the body in the context of Northern Ireland by drawing from political theorists like Lacan, Foucault, and Nietzsche. Similarly in the vein of dissident literature emerging in the 1990s were books like Oliverio’s The State of Terror (1998). In it, she examines the mutually constitutive relationship between the state and terrorism, and how the discourse of terrorism can be deployed by political leaders and media sources to mask state-based violence and to highlight non-state violence. Other significant interpretive pieces that appeared in this vein include Sangarasivam’s (2001) excellent discussion of her experiences as an ethnographer in Sri Lanka, both in relation to her colleagues and to the state; Aretxaga’s (2002) insightful analysis of terror as a militarily and discursively constructed national thrill that resolves domestic instability and doubt about US identity and purpose; and Gunning’s (2004) analysis of the transformative and emancipatory possibilities of peace with Hamas.

In other words, along with the developing focus on state-based violence, there was also another strain of dissident literature. This strain drew from Continental social and political philosophy, postcolonialism, symbolic interactionism, and materialism, as well as ethnographic field work and interpretive reading approaches. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, dissident voices deployed a rich field of methodological commitments, theoretical lenses, and methods of analysis to study the topic of terrorism.

The world political events that collectively came to be known as ‘9/11’ or ‘September 11’ marked an important shift in the development of the dissident study of terrorism. The topic of terrorism became a ‘growth industry’ (Smyth et al. 2008: 1) for writers, researchers, and university teachers; this includes the more critically inclined approaches to the topic. By 2008, it was clear to several analysts studying the topic of terrorism that it had

become one of the most powerful signifiers in contemporary discourse. It is a term that generates vast amounts of social and political activity, induces powerful emotions and, though a vast array of social practices, constitutes a legal and political subject, a cultural taboo, a myth and an object of fear, hatred, surprise, administration, ‘entertainment’ and identity. (Smyth et al. 2008: 1)

It was out of this post-‘September 11’ context that Jackson (2005) published his book, Writing the War on Terrorism. In it, he closely examines the public language deployed by the Bush administration to justify the ‘war on terrorism’ to an American audience. He convincingly explains how rhetoric worked to normalize and institutionalize a violent and militaristic foreign policy – entailing multiple wars, military interventions, and torture.

Shortly thereafter, by 2006, the first gestures toward a more defined and reflexively aware critical study of terrorism became institutionally sedimented – especially with the establishment of a Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group within the British International Studies Association, the organization of a conference (‘Is It Time For a Critical Terrorism Studies?’) and a published symposium in the journal European Political Science. This symposium made the case for a critical approach to terrorism (Jackson 2007a: 225–7), emphasized the role of state terror (Blakeley 2007: 228–35), identified the core commitments of such a research project (Jackson 2007a: 244–51), sketched out a critical research agenda (Smyth 2007: 260–7), highlighted the significance of emancipatory politics (McDonald 2007: 252–9), and reflected on the limits and problems associated with a critical approach (2007: 236–43). A new peer review academic journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism, came online in 2007. Richard Jackson, a founding editor of the journal, also published a short online piece that further justified the need for a critical approach to terrorism (2008) and he was also the lead editor of Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda (Jackson et al. 2009), which outlines and critiques the predominant and orthodox approaches to terrorism and begins to sketch out what research in this new critical vein could look like.

Since then, a number of books, articles, and debates have been published that expand on various areas of the rather new and quickly developing area of study. Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS), a Routledge press series, for instance, started in 2009 and by the end of 2014 will have published nearly 20 books. These texts have primarily focused on introducing the field, conceptual and theoretical development, and empirical investigations of terrorism and terrorism-related issues in a variety of different contexts.

With all of this activity, comparatively little ink has focused on the methods of CTS, or how to systematically do this kind of research. Stump and Dixit (2013), seeing this gap in the literature, introduced students to the nuts and bolts of methods for studying terrorism from a more critical persuasion. This volume connects in with that endeavor: to have accomplished researchers describe how they came to adopt a critical mode of inquiry into terrorism, to describe their particular method and perspective, and to illustrate their approach with empirical examples. Our initial attempt was to provide a review of critical methodologies and outline critical tools that exist in the study of terrorism; this volume gives space to a diverse range of scholars who have used critical tools and outlines their ways of studying terrorism critically.

This book is about doing critical terrorism studies, about researchers putting methodologies and methods to work, applying them to some set of texts, some bits of data, some field site or field of inquiry. In this vein, there is a wide spectrum of approaches that, in a variety of ways, critically study terrorism. These authors’ works are informed by different places, different histories, different experiences, and different ways of relating to and making sense of the world. As such, the chapters in this volume draw on different logics and they use different methods to gather up information and to analyze, explain, understand, critique, and interpret that information – and perhaps aligning with others to emancipate some person or group, or intervene in some way in some political matter relating to their study of terrorism. This book gestures toward a plurality of critical approaches studying terrorism and, moreover, it creates a space for the authors to explicitly reflect on their methodologies and methods.

Doing critical terrorism studies

In different ways, these chapters e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• PART 1 Introduction
• PART 2 Critical Realism/Materialism
• PART 3 Ethnography
• PART 4 Discourse Analysis
• PART 5 Postcolonialism/Decolonialism
• PART 6 Feminism
• PART 7 Visual Analysis
• PART 8 Conclusion
• Index