Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. See M. L. R. Smith, “Holding Fire: The Missing Military Dimension in the Academic Study of Northern Ireland,” in Alan O’Day, ed., Terrorism's Laboratory: The Case of Northern Ireland (Aldershot: Dartmouth Press, 1995), pp. 225–240; David Martin Jones and M. L. R. Smith, “The Commentariat and Discourse Failure: Language and Atrocity in Cool Britannia,” International Affairs 82(6) (November 2006), pp. 1077–1100. It is notable that the leading lights of critical terrorism studies seem to believe that a critical voice appeared only when they emerged on the scene in the mid-2000s. This is a belief that Dixit and Stump also appear to share. 2. The five major institutions (Buckingham, Dundee, Leicester, Liverpool, and Nottingham) where critical approaches cannot be discerned, does not indicate that such approaches are absent, simply that they cannot be detected from available information. Among the 88 percent of those institutions that do indicate the presence of critical and poststructualist scholarship does not imply that such approaches constitute the predominate line of thought in any one department or school but does demonstrate such approaches are neither excluded nor marginalized. The basic findings that critical/poststructuralist scholarship comprises a significant part of mainstream and orthodox study of the subject in the United Kingdom is corroborated by other sources, notably the 2009 Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) report: See Richard Jordan, Danial Maliniak, Amy Oaks, Susan Peterson, and Michael Tierney, One Discipline or Many? TRIP Survey of International Relations Faculties in Ten Countries (Williamsburg, VA: Institute of the Theory and Practice of International Relations, February 2009), pp. 31–32. Elsewhere, an initial survey of the major Australian universities, the so-called Great Eight (Adelaide, Australian National University, Melbourne, Monash, New South Wales, Queensland, Sydney, and Western Australia) indicate that critically orientated approaches are present across the teaching of the disciplines of politics and international relations. Readers are welcome to contact the authors for a copy of our investigation and findings. 3. Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson and Raymond Duvall, “Introduction: Constructing Insecurity,” Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson and Raymond Duvall, eds., Cultures of Insecurity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 9. 4. Dixit Priya and Jacob L. Stump, “It's Not as Bad as It Seems; Or, Five Ways to Move Critical Terrorism Studies Forward,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 34(6) (2011), pp. 501–511; as Jorge Luis Borges observes in a different context, “such monism … invalidates all science.” Labyrinths (London: Penguin, 1964), p. 34. 5. One of the reservations we have about Dixit and Stump's methodology is that they treat fairly basic philosophical insights as if they were recent discoveries of constructivist/critical theory investigation. Hence, in note 5, they declare that: “There is no presuppositionless social science,” citing a 2008 text by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson who, the authors aver, “argues that all social science speaks from an ontologically distinct perspective that makes certain presuppositions.” Dixit and Stump appear unaware that this is the ground for scientific understanding that pre-dates Patrick Thaddeus Jackson by a good couple of thousand years. Elsewhere, the authors seem to treat Alexander Wendt's 1999 tract, Social Theory of International Relations as the Year Zero for international relations theory. 6. See inter alia Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964). Somewhat differently, Borges remarked of David Hume's view of George Berkeley's idealist arguments that they admitted “not the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction.” Borges, Labryrinths, p. 32. 7. John Anderson, Studies in Empirical Philosophy (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1962), p. 279. 8. Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Ficciones (New York: Grove Press, 1962), p. 34. 9. Ibid., p. 25. 10. Dale C. Copeland, “The Constructivist Challenge to Structural Realism,” International Security, 25(2) (Fall 2000), p. 209. 11. Ken Booth, “The Human Faces of Terror: Reflections in a Cracked Looking Glass,” Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1(1) (2008), p. 78. 12. Priya and Stump, “It's Not as Bad as It Seems,” pp. 501–511. 13. Ibid. 14. We own up to a mistake here. In making light of Booth's promulgation of “fifteen commandments” or “higher navigation aids” to use his terminology, our original review referred to a comment made by Premier Clemenceau at the Paris Conference in 1919, who we claimed “remarked of Woodrow Wilson's nineteen points” “God Almighty only gave us ten.” This should, of course, have been a reference to Wilson's “Fourteen Points for Peace.” Booth thus has the distinction of handing down more commandments than both President Wilson and God. 15. Michael Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (ed. Timothy Fuller) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 45–67. 16. Eric Voegelin, Political Religions (trans. T. J. DiNapoli and E. S. Easterly) (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen Press, 1985). 17. Booth, “The Human Faces of Terror,” pp. 67–68. 18. Anthony Burke, “The End of Terrorism Studies,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1(1) (2008), p. 47. 19. Eugene Webb, Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), p. 282. 20. Priya and Stump, “It's Not as Bad as It Seems,” pp. 501–511. 21. David Martin Jones and M. L. R. Smith, “We Are All Terrorists Now: Critical—or Hypocritical—Studies ‘on’ Terrorism,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 32(4) (April 2008), p. 299. 22. Priya and Stump, “It's Not as Bad as It Seems,” pp. 501–511. 23. See for example, M. L. R. Smith, “Hear the Silence: Investigating Exclusion in Cold War International Relations,” Cold War History 1(3) (April 2001), pp. 62–64. 24. Jones and Smith, “We Are All Terrorists Now,” pp. 297–299. This is something we elaborate on elsewhere, David Martin Jones and M. L. R. Smith, “Beyond Belief: Islamist Strategic Thinking and International Relations Theory,” Terrorism and Political Violence 22(2) (March 2010), pp. 242–266. 25. Karin Fierke, Changing Games, Changing Strategies: Critical Investigations in Security (New York: St Martin's Press, 1998), p. 13. 26. In another work in the critical oeuvre a number of the editors of Critical Studies on Terrorism assert that critical scholars like themselves are a persecuted minority, subject to “political attack and intimidation … marginalization, exclusion and loss of place in scholarly and policy circles,” Richard Jackson, Marie Breen-Smyth and Jeroen Gunning, “Introduction: The Case for Critical Terrorism,” in Richard Jackson, Marie Breen-Smyth, and Jeroen Gunning, Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 8. As Professor Henry Patterson, the respected historian of Irish Republican political thought pointed out in a review of this volume, these delusions of persecution are deeply solipsistic if not “faintly comical.” Patterson comments: “All three editors have tenured positions in a good British university, do not report any problems running ‘critically-oriented’ modules and courses and seem to have no problems in convening conferences and seminars and organizing panels at international conferences.” See Henry Patterson, “Book Review,” Democracy and Security 5(3) (September 2009), p. 308. It might also be noted that in the “Acknowledgements” to this volume, the editors opine that “the pursuit of a ‘critical’ approach to the study of terrorism can be a lonely, and at times precarious undertaking.” In the next paragraph they proceed to thank 54 fairly mainstream academics for their fulsome support. 27. Bent Flyvberg, Making Social Science Matter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 99; Priya and Stump, “It's Not as Bad as It Seems,” pp. 501–511. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. J. L. Mackie, “The Philosophy of John Anderson,” Australian Journal of Philosophy 40(3) (1962), p. 273. 31. A message from one of the editors of Critical Studies on Terrorism (we do not know their name) and passed on from the editor of this journal on 20 April 2009 reads: “As Chief Editor, I presume you saw the latest offerings of Smith and Jones in Studies on [sic] Conflict and Terrorism. Given their personal histories with Aberystwyth, it reads like a rather bad case of sour grapes and does little to advance scholarly debate—which is a pity as, hidden under the diatribe, there were some good points, which would have come out much better if couched in a less emotive way. I must admit I was a bit disappointed that SCT [sic] had allowed itself to become a platform for such sub-scholarly polemic, and, judging by what I hear, it hasn't reflected very well on the journal over here in the UK. Thought you might want to know.” A “narrative” is obviously being promulgated that questions our motives in order to avoid taking on the issues we raise. At one level of course this merely reflects the usual immature provincialism at work in some British and most Australian tertiary institutions. More disturbing, however, is the attempt to reduce an intellectual disagreement to personalities by the attribution of baser motives to our review (dark references to “personal histories,” “sour grapes,” etc.). Such recourse to the reductive politics of personality fits critical theory's propensity to paranoia and its reluctance to accept open debate (any criticism being redescribed as “emotive” and “sub-scholarly”). Since our anonymous detractor raised the matter, our “personal histories with Aberystwyth” extend to the following: one of us attended Aberystwyth some three decades ago where he spent three largely unremarkable years as an undergraduate, is a lifetime member of the Alumnus Association, and contributes to the university's student hardship fund. The other's father hails from the vicinity, but apart from spending a number of family holidays in Dolgellau has rarely entered the small, and small-minded, Ceredigion town. In other words, neither have had anything except the most insignificant contacts with the Department of International Politics and the Aber jabber, which would make the basis for a reworking of the classic Kingsley Amis satire on provincial Welsh humanities departments Lucky Jim.