Terrorism Studies beyond counter-counterterrorism: opening the door to Jenseits

Abstract

This paper offers some lines of flight away from stagnant features of Terrorism Studies. I largely reiterate the critiques made by field leaders like Lee Jarvis, but I frame the field in a way that eases the tensions between different forms of critical scholarship which have frustrated other writers. Where others split the field into ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ strands and admonish the ‘critical’ strand for its reticence to reflexively critique its referent objects, I suggest that Terrorism Studies can be read as a convergence of ‘Counterterrorism Studies’, ‘Critical Terrorism Studies’ and ‘The Beyond’. While the second category exists primarily to grapple with the first, relying heavily on the language and theoretical frameworks of the first, the third category troubles the very constitution of concepts like the state and the figure of the terrorist, which are the sine qua non of the first two categories.