Here be dragons : navigating the problems of researching ‘terrorism’ and critical terrorism studies

Abstract

This chapter will explore the methodological limitations of contemporary study of “terrorism”, particularly focussing on answering how and why the researcher – and academia as a whole – has been unable or unwilling to adequately address long-standing issues surrounding research ethics. It will suggest that the researcher has become both an accomplice and a hostage to mechanisms of governmental power within the long “War on Terror”, becoming thus implicated in, and acting to perpetuate, processes of societal securitisation. Whilst a critical terrorism approach, rooted in post-Frankfurt School analyses of power and Gramscian traditions of emancipation, offers means for mapping the mechanisms that compromise the researcher, this chapter finds that critical terrorism approaches are limited by their theoretical entanglements, methodological paucity and their ultimate inability to adequately dislodge the current security paradigm. Such problems ultimately risk entrenching the current impasse and impoverishing contemporary research of ”terrorist” groups. However, the battle has moved on, and whilst critical terrorism studies may be fading in achieving its stated aims of breaking the securitising dynamic, it has created new means of viewing the field of “terrorism” research, with its effects to be felt long into the future.