ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses the question of what a ‘critical terrorism studies’ research agenda defined in terms of a concern with emancipation might look like. For some, the role of emancipatory concerns is self-evidently central, given the association of ‘critical’ with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. For others, defining ‘critical terrorism studies’ in terms of a concern with the promotion or realisation of emancipation is problematic, excluding some who would support a move away from traditional/orthodox approaches to the study of terror but stop short of defining their research in emancipatory terms. Most obviously, the traditional post-structural objection to emancipation has been that as a modernist, cosmopolitan political agenda (particularly one with philosophical linkages to Marx and invoked historically to justify violent action to ‘free’ others), the grand narrative of emancipation risks creating new forms of violence and exclusion in the process of removing others. Such an account would be closer to embracing a definition of ‘critical terrorism studies’ closer in orientation to Robert Cox’s (1981: 129-130) definition of critical theory as a broad orientation that encourages questions about how the world came to be constituted as it is and whose interests these arrangements serve. In international relations and security studies, the distinction between this broader definition and a more explicit concern with emancipation is evident in Chris Brown’s (1994) elaboration of the differences between upper case and lower case Critical Theory/critical theory, and in the different definitions of critical security studies elaborated by Keith Krause and Michael Williams (1997b) on the one hand and Ken Booth (1991, 1997) and Richard Wyn Jones (1999) on the other.