Abstract
For over a decade, scholars of Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) – a subset of terrorism studies identifying with the widening and deepening era of International Relations (IR) – have persuaded scholars of political sociology to push the disciplinary boundaries imposed by Orthodox Terrorism Studies (OTS). OTS academics reify a positivist conceptualization of terrorism that is exclusively theorized using an institutionalized problem-solving approach that wholly perceives perpetrators of terrorism as being non-state actors and (almost) never Northern democratic sovereign state actors. Adopting a critical and reflexive lens to the study of terrorism allows us to highlight the danger of ignoring the increased sanctioning of state sponsored terrorism identified in the militarization of law enforcement agencies after the events of 9/11. The militarized and terroristic pedagogy adopted by law enforcement and other representatives to secure the homeland is noticed in law enforcement agencies re-writing the social contract by presuming civilians as threats to national security thus ejecting them from the body politic. The paper concludes by proposing that we identify university institutions as educational spaces that provide an opportune site to develop an oppositional critical pedagogy (OCP) ushering a demilitarized culture and social emancipation. The development of an OCP to militarization works in tandem with CTS contesting and immanently critiquing societal militarization by opposing educational spaces becoming sites that (re)produce and sanctify terroristic/warfare state actions which impede on the rights of citizens enshrined in the democratic experience of modern northern liberal states.
Highlights
Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) is a relatively new subset of terrorism studies, borne out of a collective concern over the shortcomings of Orthodox Terrorism Studies (OTS)
It considers the advantages of broadening terrorism studies as it serves in opening up the “black box” of the state and reconceptualizing it from a non-realist approach in debates of terrorism, no longer perceiving research questions related to state-sanctioned domestic terrorism as off-limits
Since the securitization of terrorism was catalyzed with terrorist attacks conducted by non-state actors in September 2001, U.S state security agencies have blurred the line between civilian police and the armed forces to counter terrorism by militarizing law enforcement agencies and transforming them into an active central agent in securing domestic homeland security
Summary
Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) is a relatively new subset of terrorism studies, borne out of a collective concern over the shortcomings of Orthodox Terrorism Studies (OTS). OTS scholars take the world as they find it, rather than critically approaching the status-quo by asking questions of power abuse, injustice and relations of power/knowledge that reproduce it (Cox, 1981; Peoples and Williams, 2014) This continued limited orthodox approach to researching terrorism is the subject of the first section of this manuscript. The section highlights the contours of OTS and suggests the importance of the discipline becoming methodologically eclectic and conceptually flexible by injecting the state in terrorism studies as an actor that perpetuates terrorism To do so, it considers the advantages of broadening terrorism studies as it serves in opening up the “black box” of the state and reconceptualizing it from a non-realist approach in debates of terrorism, no longer perceiving research questions related to state-sanctioned domestic terrorism as off-limits. Approaching terrorism studies by considering immanent critiques enables scholars to comfortably pose research questions that were traditionally ignored and overlooked because the dominant institutionalized definition of terrorism only perceived nonstate actors as perpetrators of terrorism violence and under no circumstances (Weberian) AngloSaxon democratic states
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