Don't confuse me with the facts: knowledge claims and terrorism

Abstract

It became commonplace after 11 September 2001 to declare that the events changed ‘everything’ and that the world would never again be as it was before that date. Many spoke of the dividing line of the pre-9/11 and post-9/11 world, and it became commonplace to assert that the events conclusively demonstrated the validity of the thesis that there was a ‘new’ terrorism, at base religious and apocalyptic, more networked rather than hierarchical and very different from the ‘old’ terrorism. This article reflects upon and evaluates the development of knowledge claims about insurgent terrorism and measures them against the standard of how well these claims have advanced the formulation of theories of terrorism that can be subjected to observational testing. The article examines changes in the lethality of terrorism, the characterisations, boundaries and control structures of the network claims and differences amongst the old and new terrorists and concludes that claims of a ‘new terrorism’ are vastly misleading.