An Introduction to Critical Terrorism Studies – E-International Relations

This is an excerpt from Critical Terrorism Studies: A Dictionary by Lee Jarvis and Alice Martini. Available in all good book stores, and via free download from E-International Relations.

Critical terrorism studies (CTS) has been with us for around twenty years now as a broad framework for thinking differently about terrorism and counterterrorism. However we understand CTS – and there is much more on this throughout the book – its origins can be traced to the first decade of the twenty-first century. This was a time of growing discontent with the George W. Bush administration’s ongoing ‘war on terror’ both within the United States (US) and beyond. The contours of that ‘war’ (if, indeed, that’s what it was) quickly expanded beyond its early concern with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban as the architects of the 9/11 attacks, stretching this new security paradigm beyond its geographical focus on Afghanistan. The move towards a major military intervention in Iraq, most notably, attracted condemnation and record numbers of protestors, with an estimated 1.5 million people taking to the streets of London alone (Adams 2023). Such protests chimed with declining global sympathy for the US – prominent in the aftermath of 9/11 – as the war on terror’s death toll grew ever larger. Important and powerful allies such as France withheld diplomatic and legal support for America’s military ambitions, and President Bush’s approval rating began to fall dramatically from the peak it had reached in late 2001.

But the war on terror was never, only, about its most visible military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. This was a war fought through legislatures and criminal justice systems, in ‘black sites’ around the world, in classrooms and lecture theatres, at airports and railway stations, and in countless other places. The war’s moral standing came under intense scrutiny in the early 2000s as people began to read about human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and beyond. Investigative journalists like Jane Mayer revealed the workings of the US’ extraordinary rendition programme involving the abduction, transfer and abuse of terrorist suspects, memorably described as ‘outsourcing torture’ (Mayer 2005). This decade saw growing concern, too, with the stigmatisation of racialised communities and faiths as ‘suspect’ or ‘risky’ in political speeches, tabloid headlines, television shows, government policies, security initiatives and police practices. The racial profiling of Muslims for counterterrorism purposes, for instance, was apparent long before Donald Trump’s so-called ‘Muslim Ban’ of 2017, not least in the US Department of Homeland Security’s Special Registration programme which required ‘foreign nationals from predominantly Arab or Muslim countries to report to immigration offices for fingerprinting, photographing, and interviews on pain of deportation’ (Cole 2008, 1336).

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century concerns such as these were increasingly prominent amongst academic researchers. Although not surprising – for all their criticism, universities remain an important place of debate and dissent – three dynamics of this period made these concerns more salient than they might otherwise have been. First, was the changing nature of academia itself. New incentives were put upon researchers to contribute to, or have an impact upon, social and political life beyond the university. For our purposes, this helped facilitate new connections and partnerships between academics and the policymakers, police and intelligence officials, journalists, human rights lawyers, advocacy groups, community organisations, and ‘ordinary’ citizens caught up in the war on terror. A second feature of this time was an opening up of social scientific disciplines such as Terrorism Studies to a much wider menu of conceptual and methodological frameworks including from traditional Humanities subjects such as Anthropology, Gender Studies, and Sociology. These frameworks offered new inspiration and tools for researchers interested in working on terrorism, but who found themselves dispirited by terrorism studies’ traditional ambitions or methods. Third, and perhaps most important, was a concerted effort by researchers to build something collective: to create a research community for critical scholarship on terrorism and counterterrorism that might speak uncomfortable truths to policymakers and thereby shake up the concerns and ambitions of what was sometimes known as ‘traditional’, ‘mainstream’ or ‘orthodox’ terrorism research (Jackson 2015).

These political and academic dynamics together provide the backdrop for the emergence of critical terrorism studies. The failings and horrors of the post- 9/11 period – the violences of terrorists and those seeking to counter them – added urgency to the need to rethink the politics of terrorism. The changing social role of academics encouraged direct engagement with such dynamics, as well as the impetus to resist co-option into controversial initiatives such as counter-radicalisation programmes. Growing familiarity with theories and methods beyond the mainstream of terrorism research opened new ways of thinking about how and why ‘terrorism’ might be studied. And, an increasing appetite for, and willingness to invest in, collaborative and collective research helped consolidate this momentum into something much greater than a series of isolated or disconnected critical research projects (Jackson et al. 2011).

A great deal has, of course, changed since those early years of CTS. We have witnessed, amongst other things: the demise (although not death) of Al- Qaeda; the rise, fall, and transformation of ISIS – which remains one of the world’s most dangerous non-state terrorist organisations; the proliferation of violences by affiliate organisations and lone actors disconnected from formal groups; and, the (re-)emergence of new forms of violence associated with the far-right, white supremacism, misogynistic ‘inceldom’, and beyond. We have seen, too, in this period, the expansion and embedding of counter- radicalisation and counter-extremism initiatives across the world such as the UK’s Prevent Strategy or UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon’s Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism. And, we have witnessed the introduction of innumerable new policies, laws, technologies, programmes, and international resolutions aimed at countering the threat of terrorism. Even when the politics of terrorism seems to have taken a back seat to other events – such as the Russo-Ukraine War and the risk of great power conflict – we have rarely had to wait long for terrorism to recentre itself in media and political agendas. The violences of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack in Israel – and the violences since in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and beyond – offer dramatic and tragic illustration of terrorism’s seeming ubiquity. Indeed, we write this introduction in the aftermath of several recent high-profile attacks in Munich (Germany), Mastung (Pakistan), and New Orleans (US).

The years since the events of 9/11 have also seen dramatic changes take place within the field of terrorism research. New conceptual frameworks for grappling with (counter-)terrorism have emerged – for instance in relation to ‘stochastic terrorism’. Existing models – such as David Rapoport’s (2012) well-known ‘waves of terrorism’ thesis – have been updated and challenged by those looking to account for new developments. Formerly prominent theses – such as around ‘religious terrorism’ or ‘new terrorism’ – have seen their popularity wax and wane. Hitherto under-emphasised types of terrorism – such as associated with the far-right – have seen a burgeoning of literature. And, researchers have been quick to grapple with the impact of wider social contexts and dynamics on the politics of terrorism, for instance in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g. Ackerman and Peterson 2020), and the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (Martini 2025).

Keeping track of such important changes can seem overwhelming and difficult. Even more difficult, perhaps, is thinking through their significance for those of us who are interested in approaching terrorism and counterterrorism critically. This is why we set out to write this book, which we hope provides a useful critical introduction to some of the key ideas relating to terrorism. Our aim, in so doing, is to provide students, teachers, lecturers, and general readers with an overview of how research associated with CTS engages with key concepts, in order to provide an accessible way into this research area. Critical projects – like CTS – often stand accused of using very difficult concepts or unnecessarily complicated vocabulary to communicate their ideas (Jones and Smith 2009). Our aim in this dictionary is to demonstrate that this need not be the case. CTS, as we will show you, gives us an analytically useful, and politically powerful, set of tools that can be made widely accessible to students, to teachers, to researchers, and to interested readers.

What is critical terrorism studies?

Defining ‘critical terrorism studies’ is a challenging task, not least because the term can mean quite different things to different researchers. A very quick summary might be to describe it as something like a shared commitment to interrogating the politics of terrorism and counterterrorism. This commitment derives from a series of intellectual, political and moral concerns that are grounded in the political and academic contexts discussed above, and that many researchers in this area share. Six of these are particularly important.

First, is a concern that dominant understandings of terrorism are, at best, partial. They are partial because they serve certain interests – that is, they benefit certain individuals and groups. And they are partial, too, because they offer, at most, an incomplete understanding of what terrorism is. Of particular interest to many critical terrorism researchers is the tendency to understand terrorism solely in relation to acts of violence that are conducted by non-state groups, and not, therefore, in relation to violences conducted by states and their proxies. Another focus within critical terrorism research is on the politics of race, and the ways in which labels such as ‘terrorism’ are more frequently applied to particular groups or individuals – often from minoritised communities – in academic work, media commentary, and even legal systems. Some critical scholars even argue that ‘terrorism’ as such does not exist as an ontological phenomenon ‘out there’ in the world. Rather, terrorism only exists as a label that is applied – selectively – to some acts of violence (Jackson et al. 2011). From this perspective, the research focus shifts toward studying how processes of labelling take place, and understanding the political consequences that follow the description of certain individuals, groups, or actions as ‘terrorist’.

A second concern shared by many critical terrorism researchers is the problematic nature of dominant explanations for why terrorism happens. There are many frameworks that try to identify the causes of terrorism. This is, in part, because terrorism researchers come from different academic backgrounds, and therefore have different conceptions of what is important in the world. Someone trained in psychology, for instance, may be inclined to look at the ideas or psychological profiles of terrorists. A political scientist, on the other hand, may emphasise the role of political systems and the incentives or constraints they put upon violent groups. Some of the most

prominent explanatory frameworks today include concepts such as ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’, theories such as ‘religious terrorism’, or claims that derive from wider conceptual frameworks such as the ‘new terrorism’ thesis. Frameworks such as these have proved influential within and beyond academic research, impacting the ideas and actions of policymakers and others. Many critical terrorism researchers, however, fear that such explanations are often misleading, inaccurate, and politically problematic not least because they bring suspicion upon particular communities, religions, or groups (e.g. Gunning and Jackson 2011; Stohl 2012; Kundnani 2012). Other scholars highlight how these explanations are typically gendered, racialised, and classist, and thus reify and reproduce existing power dynamics. There is, however, no single CTS response to such concerns. Some researchers try to shift focus from explaining terrorism scientifically to understanding it. Others look for alternative explanatory frameworks derived from disciplines beyond terrorism studies such as sociology. Many have spent time interrogating the assumptions and biases of dominant causal frameworks such as ‘radicalisation theory’, while some go so far as to argue that we should avoid even engaging with the question of causation altogether.

A third concern is with the ways in which the threat of non-state terrorism tends to be exaggerated. This exaggeration can be found in the mainstream news media which may be incentivised to produce dramatic headlines and coverage. It is apparent, too, in fictional depictions of terrorism which often tend toward crude and simplistic portrayals of terrorist ‘others’ and their motivations. Government policy and strategy often amplify the terrorist threat, which may help to justify significant counterterrorism activities. Think tanks, militaries, and the wider defence industries may also contribute to this process, many of which have material incentives in highlighting the risk posed by terrorism. We might also find this dynamic in academic work within the field of terrorism studies, not least where authors have connections to, or alignments with, some of the other above institutions. One of the difficulties in assessing the validity of this concern is that the threat of terrorism is hard to accurately estimate: researchers may not have access to reliable intelligence, and terrorist organisations – by their very nature – have incentives to work clandestinely. One strategy critical terrorism researchers can employ, therefore, is to compare today’s terrorist threat to the history of past violences. Doing this, however, raises challenges around data collection and the labelling of violent actions which may not always be historically consistent. Another strategy is to compare the harm caused by terrorism to other dangers – deaths from disease or poverty, perhaps – which cause far greater casualties and fatalities, even if they appear less dramatic or newsworthy. Such strategies raise important questions around the discursive and political power of numbers and the value of statistical methods in terrorism research.

A fourth concern is that counterterrorism initiatives are rarely proportionate, or even effective, in reducing the threat posed by terrorism, and are frequently very expensive and often wasteful. To illustrate, one influential project – the Watson Institute’s Costs of War project (Watson Institute 2025) – estimates that the post-9/11 wars cost the United States over $8 trillion between 2001 and 2022 alone: a figure that is greater than the annual GDP of every country in the world apart from China and the United States. Excesses such as these may be due to government misunderstanding of the nature or motivations of terrorism, leading to inappropriate or unnecessary forms of counterterrorism response. Alternatively, such excesses may emerge because counterterrorism initiatives or decisions serve purposes other than diminishing the threat posed by terrorism, whether intentionally or otherwise. Here, it is important to note that counterterrorism policy can serve multiple ends beyond reducing the terrorist threat – such as reassuring publics and responding to the overtures of allies in the international system. Indeed, some critical scholars question whether counterterrorism reduces the threat of violence at all, asking – if it does – for whom this is the case.

A fifth, and perhaps more profound concern, is a belief that efforts to counter terrorism often – perhaps always – generate harms of their own. These harms stretch from the ‘collateral damage’ of civilian deaths in military interventions, police operations, drone strikes and so forth, to the diminishment of civil liberties through counterterrorism laws and policies, and the securitisation and criminalisation of individuals and groups as potential terrorists within already disadvantaged or marginalised communities. To give one example, the Costs of War project mentioned above estimates the total number of indirect deaths from the post-9/11 conflicts (so: deaths caused by factors such as continuing violence, economic collapse, and the destruction of public health infrastructures) at over 3.6 million (Watson Institute 2023). The consequences of such violences will endure for decades, perhaps generations, causing continuing insecurity and harm to communities around the world. Beyond physical violences such as these, counterterrorism can also be thought of as inherently violent at a deeper level. It builds on and reproduces categories of subjects – that derive from wider power structures in relation to race, gender, and class, and others – that in turn reproduce and strengthen the marginalisation, criminalisation, and exploitation of some and not others. Approached in this way, counterterrorism policy does not simply respond to threatening others. Counterterrorism policy helps to create others as threatening by understanding, measuring and responding to risk in particular ways that reify existing power structures and imbalances.

A sixth concern, finally, is with the purposes of terrorism research itself. Many critical scholars are sceptical of the view that the primary reason for studying and researching terrorism is to help policymakers better counter this threat.

Although helping to reduce the threat of terrorism sounds like a reasonable goal, perhaps even a moral goal, for researchers, it does bring with it risks. One risk is that the priorities of researchers will be shaped by the priorities of policymakers. This means that what gets researched, when, and how can be heavily politicised. In such a scenario, important questions or topics without immediate political value may end up neglected, underfunded, or even forgotten. A second risk is that working too closely with policymakers may diminish the objectivity of terrorism researchers, as their explanations of the world may become shaped by the ideas and discourses of national security and other elites. Third, working too closely with policymakers may reduce the access of terrorism researchers to particular groups including members of violent organisations or the members of communities who have been targeted by counterterrorism policy. Groups such as these may have very genuine fears of speaking to researchers connected to governments or state actors, and failing to hear them may diminish our understanding of the politics of violence. Fourth, working with policymakers may help legitimise harm done in the name of counterterrorism. This may contribute to a wider legitimisation of the state and its security institutions, and the violences for which they are responsible. Fifth, is a wider risk that pursuing narrowly instrumental research may mean diminishing one of the core purposes of scholarship which is speaking truth to power.

These six broad concerns offer valuable starting points for understanding critical terrorism studies, but it is important to remember that they are also very broad, leaving much scope for disagreement and debate. In response to concerns around the meaning of terrorism, for instance, should critical researchers simply abandon the term altogether and refuse to use it? Alternatively, should we concentrate our efforts on calling out prejudiced uses of this language and thereby help work toward a more accurate understanding of terrorism in all of its guises? Similarly, in response to some of the above problems around counterterrorism policy, should critical terrorism researchers work with policymakers or others to try to improve how this threat is countered, perhaps by paying greater attention to the harm that it causes? Or, should we concentrate our efforts on working with those who are most harmed by existing counterterrorism frameworks, to avoid legitimising such harms? In terms of the research that we do, should we focus our efforts on analysing and critiquing what politicians and others say about terrorism in particular contexts, as many CTS researchers have done? Or, is there a danger that focusing too heavily on spoken or written language means we miss important underlying dynamics in the politics of terrorism? Indeed, how can we, as researchers, but also individuals embedded in our societies, try to escape the power structures mentioned above and mitigate or reduce the harms that they cause?

As you read through this dictionary, you will encounter examples of critical terrorism research that take quite different approaches to these and other important questions. You will also, we hope, see how the ideas and aspirations of CTS have developed across the past twenty years or so, with many contemporary researchers offering valuable critical engagement with earlier work in this field (Jarvis 2024). Because of these developments, it may be that CTS is more easily understood by its scepticisms and rejections than by any shared set of positive commitments or values. To illustrate what we mean by this, the table below sets out some positions critical terrorism researchers have taken in relation to the above concerns. This is far from exhaustive, precisely because the field of CTS continues to evolve.

Criticisms of critical terrorism studies

This dictionary, as you can see, is explicitly and unapologetically rooted within critical work on terrorism and counterterrorism. As the authors of this book, this is the area of research in which we tend to research and teach, and we hope to communicate the breadth and depth of some of this scholarship in the pages that follow. Before embarking on that task, however, let us quickly highlight some criticisms of this work – friendly and unfriendly – in order to further flesh out the contexts in which CTS has evolved.

First, some authors argue that CTS has developed around a ‘straw person’ understanding of traditional or mainstream terrorism research that is either simplistic or misleading. Important here is the claim that traditional forms of terrorism research have been much more diverse and plural than critical terrorism researchers have sometimes claimed, and that a false dichotomy is therefore created between the two. As Horgan and Boyle (2008, 57) argue:

Among terrorism scholars, there are wide disagreements about, among other things, the definition of terrorism, the causes of terrorism, the role and value of the concept of ‘radicalization’ and ‘extremism’, the role of state terror, the role that foreign policy plays in motivating or facilitating terrorism, the ethics of terrorism, and the proper way to conduct ‘counterterrorism’.

Second, linked to this, is the suggestion that CTS has overstated or exaggerated its own novelty, with many of its core arguments already appearing within earlier work on terrorism. The importance of state terrorism is a good example of this line of criticism, with CTS appeals to ‘bring the state back’ into terrorism research (Blakeley 2007b) being accused, by some, of restating arguments that already existed (Horgan and Boyle 2008, 56–57). As with the ‘straw person’ argument, this criticism attempts to soften the distinction between ‘critical’ and ‘orthodox’ or ‘mainstream’ forms of terrorism research, recognising that the boundary between the two might be less concrete than often asserted or implied.

Third, there are criticisms around the purposes of CTS and its shift away from policy-relevant research. Deliberately conducting research that does not have immediate policy relevance can lead to accusations that such work is trivial, frivolous, unnecessary, disloyal, and even harmful by those who would prefer terrorism researchers to contribute more directly to national security efforts. Related to this are methodological arguments that CTS has focused too heavily on attempting to deconstruct language, discourse or ideas, and, because of this, has neglected important material realities within the politics of (counter)terrorism.

Fourth, are suggestions that CTS has focused too heavily upon the Global North. This sort of argument appears from those who are suspicious of CTS’ emphasis on counter-terrorist and other violences conducted by Western states: an emphasis seen by some as neglecting the violences of other states, and of non-state terrorist organisations. A related argument emerges – with very different political sentiment – from those who suggest that CTS research and researchers remain too Western-centric or Eurocentric in their approach. This can involve taking the experiences and concerns of states like the US and UK as the starting point for analysis and generalising outward from them. This also speaks to concerns around the sociology of critical terrorism studies, which has emerged within the Global North and has suffered from over-representation of white, male, economically privileged, researchers producing knowledge from within a hegemonic English-speaking academia.

Fifth, related to this, are arguments that CTS has not done enough to engage with the politics of race and gender in its attempts to challenge or deconstruct terrorism discourse and policy. A number of researchers (e.g. Chukwuma 2024; Wright 2024) have begun to address this by drawing on ideas from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship and critical race theory as part of a recent ‘third wave’ of critical terrorism research (Jarvis 2024). Amongst other things, such work helps us to situate the contemporary politics of terrorism within wider histories of colonialism, imperialism, and racism. Related to this, feminist scholars have criticised CTS for not engaging sufficiently with gender and other feminist concerns such as different kinds of violences and their everyday manifestations (Weber 2017; Gentry 2020). A keener attention to gender may, for instance, further help situate the contemporary politics of terrorism within wider histories of heteropatriarchy, colonialism and imperialism, as these were gendered as well as racialised.

Critical terrorism studies, like any academic field, evolves and progresses through engagement with criticism. And, there are many who will, and who do, reject the premises and ambitions of ideas like those contained in this book. Bear in mind, too, that as authors of this book, our own understanding of the world – and of terrorism, counter-terrorism, violence and so forth – is neither impartial nor objective: our ideas, like yours, will have been shaped by our lived experiences and so on. We encourage you, therefore, to think critically about the arguments and assumptions contained in the remainder of this book whether you are a student, a teacher, a researcher, or someone reading for general interest. This sort of critical reflection is vital to the future of critical terrorism studies, and we hope you will be part of it.

Using this dictionary

Before jumping into the various entries contained below, we want to address a couple of questions to help you get the most out of this book. The first of these is: why have we decided to present this material in the form of a dictionary, rather than a more familiar type of academic overview such as a textbook? The reasons for this decision are threefold.

First, as the field of critical terrorism studies has grown, so too have the research questions and topics on which it focuses. Because of this, we recognise that newcomers to the field will likely have very different interests of their own – geographical, thematic, theoretical, and so on. A dictionary format allows readers to dip in and out of critical terrorism studies as most appropriate and useful to their own purposes. To facilitate this, entries are enriched with citations and accompanied by suggestions for further reading, which – together with an extensive reference list – we hope will provide useful next steps for readers.

Second, the dictionary format allows readers to draw their own links and connections within critical terrorism research: to read creatively across different entries, and to follow up on ideas and authors of interest. This is not a book that needs to be read from start to finish, and our hope is that the dictionary style encourages readers to forge new questions, connections, and ideas by jumping between entries. This sort of creative reading across topics is vital for the generation of new knowledge, and a foundation of interdisciplinary work. To help with this, we have cross-referenced other terms in this dictionary using bold font to help you move between entries.

Third, we hope the entries offered in this dictionary serve as a useful complement to the longer chapters and articles found in other introductory texts on terrorism and critical terrorism studies (e.g. Jackson et al 2011). This might help to introduce ideas and arguments that are covered at greater length elsewhere, and to make other discussions of critical terrorism studies more accessible – or, perhaps, less daunting.

The other important question is how and why we have decided to include – and therefore also to exclude – particular authors, arguments, and literature. From the start, we want to be clear that we have taken a deliberately broad approach to critical terrorism research throughout this book. Many of the authors upon whom we draw explicitly identify with critical terrorism studies as a political project or set of research commitments. What that project, or those commitments involve, however, may vary considerably – not least because of the field’s continuing evolution. Other work discussed in this book comes from a far wider set of disciplines and fields, and may include authors who are unaware of CTS or even unsympathetic to its aspirations. We have chosen to include work such as this because we believe it contains insights for those looking to engage critically with the politics of terrorism and counterterrorism. Such work may – we hope – help shape CTS’ future directions and trajectories, inspiring researchers and students to read far and wide. The potentialities here – as we have seen from recent CTS engagements with critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonialism and beyond – are considerable.

It is important to note that a dictionary like this will never be able to cover everything – or even everything important – and will always (and rightly) be open to criticism of its omissions or silences. Readers looking for a much more comprehensive list of terrorist organisations than we are able to provide here, for example, might find it helpful to read this dictionary alongside more descriptive resources such as the lists of terrorist organisations available on open-source encyclopaedias or government websites. Those seeking understanding of additional concepts and theories may also benefit from reading this book alongside other sources such as dedicated handbooks.

None of this is to dismiss criticism of omissions and silences which should be welcomed as essential for debate and the development of knowledge and understanding – including, of course, our own. This is, perhaps, particularly true of a dictionary set up as an explicitly ‘critical’ introduction (and there is much more on what we might mean by this in the pages that follow). We have tried throughout the book to give an accurate overview of the development, standing, and future directions of critical research around terrorism. Fundamentally, our aim is to provide you with tools rather than knowledge: to encourage you to think – differently, critically – about the politics of terrorism and counterterrorism, and to point you toward the work of authors who might be useful to you in this. We hope that this dictionary will therefore be of help to researchers and students navigating some of these concepts and topics, and thus contribute a helpful – if inevitably imperfect – guide to critical terrorism studies.

That is probably all we really need to say at this point! We hope you find this dictionary engaging and useful, and we hope, too, that it conveys some of the richness within critical terrorism studies as it stands today.

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