This article contributes to an ‘historical turn’ in security scholarship. It addresses imbalance in security studies’ attention to historical empirics, and argues against notions of temporal disjunct prevalent within the discipline. I employ a genealogical framework to clarify the interpellation of past and present; and I introduce the ‘conceptual archive’ as a lens for pursuing that interpellation in research. My thesis on the ‘conceptual archive’ represents a twofold contribution. Firstly, a conceptual contribution: I advance the ‘conceptual archive’ as a way of thinking about past-present interpellation (specifically, existing conceptual logics’ remodelling in arguments justifying new practice). Secondly, an analytical contribution: I propose the ‘conceptual archive’ as a tool for doing genealogy (a research programme with historicising promise, but one suffering nebulous operationalisation at present). I use the field of terrorism studies as an entry-point to these contributions: adopting a mixed-methods research design to trace British counterterrorism practices’ roots within an ‘archive’ of logics on Northern Ireland. I find 1970s British governments remodelled long-standing ‘archival’ vocabularies in their arguments for new security provisions: framing exceptional practices according to an accepted fabric of concepts.

Temporality and critical terrorism studiesThe argument for integrating temporality into the critical study of "terrorism" is well established. As early as 2003, Maja Zehfuss called for critical researchers to "forget 9/11" (2003, 520). Zehfuss' argument proceeded on the understanding that singularising 9/11, as an exceptional event in the birth of "terrorism", came at the cost of deeper analyses of power. Subsequent scholars have sustained this critique: calling for a "rediscovery of knowledge" (Walker 2015, 603) about terrorism's discursive histories, beyond the "almost exclusive focus on the post-9/11 era" (Erlenbusch-Anderson 2012, 161). Most pertinently, Harmonie Toros (2017) invited readers of this journal to revise 9/11's framing as a temporal discontinuity. Toros found that, in nine years of Critical Studies on Terrorism, 60% of articles had addressed 9/11 as a "moment of temporal rupture" (2017, 207).Critical scholars need to move beyond the orbit of 9/11 and address the fullness of terrorism's historicity. Per Zehfuss and Toros, that means situating 9/11 in the context of terrorism's wider genealogy -paying closer attention to terrorism's evolution in periods other than the War on Terror. What is less clear is what benefits might accrue from this historicising programme, and how we might undertake it. In this reflection, I consider one pathway for bringing temporal depth to critical terrorism studies (CTS), and suggest theoretical opportunities which arise from such an exercise.