ABSTRACT
My own exposure to the value of fi eld research came right from the outset of my academic career, when as a fascinated student of the history of terrorism I began to engage in what could be described as “terrorism tourism”. Quite simply, whichever country I was visiting, 2 I would make trips to sites of historical terrorist attacks, and would attempt to meet people with personal experiences and insights into the respective events, whether victims, witnesses, perpetrators or investigators. Quite early on, it became clear that although unsystematic, these informal inquiries had enriched my understanding of the respective events in a way that no secondary source alone ever could. I became further involved in the process of more formalized fi eld research following the hostage crises in the Moscow Theatre (2002) 3 and later the Beslan school 4 (2004), the Red Mosque 5 (2007) and Mumbai 6 (2008). Having studied these events from the hostage negotiation perspective, 7 I quickly found that the devil was indeed in the detail, and it was simply impossible to conduct a meaningful analysis of these events without being able to accurately reconstruct them. And when it comes to assessing the potential of using crisis negotiation approaches to successfully infl uence the outcome of barricade or hostage incidents, detailed knowledge of the specifi cs of the interactions between the hostage takers and the hostages, such as the changes in the terrorists’ behavior over time, the specifi c language used in conversations, the content of the hostage taker’s backpacks etc., can rapidly change one’s assessment. I found that I could study tens of thousands of pages of news reports and interviews, court transcripts and accounts from all different sources in multiple languages, and still only end up with multiple contradictory versions of events, which due to the commonly misplaced focus on laying blame for the outcome (or in contrast defending government action), rarely provided accurate information regarding negotiations. As a result, I ended up spending many months making multiple research trips to each location and
interviewing the hostages, perpetrators and their families, negotiators, investigators, and tactical elements of each of these crises, learning details that I simply could not have learned anywhere else. This experience underscored my perception that while good research on terrorism does not necessarily require fi eld research, there are some projects for which it is absolutely essential.
