Historicising “terrorism”: how, and why?

Abstract

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.