ABSTRACT
Introduction The study of terrorism as a serious academic enterprise has been active for approximately 40 years. The period involved coincides, more or less, with what David Rapoport describes as the Third and Fourth Waves of modern terrorism. These waves have been driven respectively by revolutionary and religious concerns. Throughout these episodes critics have claimed studies of terrorism have suffered from major flaws, not least of them the difficulty in achieving consensus over the definition of the term. This chapter reviews the various criticisms of terrorism studies made over the years with attention to critical terrorism studies (CTS), which is the most recent critique of the mainstream study of terrorist violence. This chapter describes the backlash against contemporary studies of terrorist violence. It seeks to evaluate the criticisms directed against this body of work over the past several decades. Because these mainstream studies coincided with the emergence of David Rapoport’s Third Wave of terrorism, and continued into his current Fourth Wave period, the critiques reflect the same periodicity. Rapoport believes that modern terrorism should be divided into four waves, each dominated by a particular political perspective. The Third Wave represents the terrorism of the 1960s and 1970s whose perpetrators typically claimed to be acting on behalf of left-wing revolutionary principles. The Fourth Wave, or the “new terrorism” of the current period, was inspired by extreme religious beliefs. Critiques of terrorist studies are intertwined with changing approaches to the subject and are both ideological and methodological in nature. Our commentary follows this linked chronology of terrorist waves, modes of analysis, and accompanying critiques (Rapoport 2004: 46-73; Rasler and Thompson 2009: 28-42; Simon 2010). While our perspective is that of researchers belonging to the mainstream of social science inquiry who approach the study of terrorism with curiosity about its causes and consequences, our own commentary is not part of a war of words often fought in the media between defenders and opponents of terrorist violence. Rather, it is about the reaction or backlash against terrorism studies by academics principally in the United States and Great Britain which has intensified in
recent years. Originally, the critics tended to rationalize the activities of what governments in the United States and United Kingdom labeled terrorism, as the legitimate struggle of the “wretched of the earth” to wage armed struggles against the rich and powerful. Marxists, neo-Marxists, and those engaged in post-colonial studies became ardent critics of terrorism as a concept. In recent years, a new school of thought has emerged, critical terrorism studies (CTS), which applies the lessons of critical theory in general to the problem of terrorism. For reasons we outline below, we think CTS really represents the continuation of a broadly conceived ideological critique of the mainstream study of terrorism as it was developed over the years by many American and British scholars and is not a novel critique. There is, in fact, nothing particularly unusual in accusations that the work of mainstream terrorism scholars reflects a bias in favor of state authority in Britain and the United States. This view has been articulated by many critics over the years (Ahmed 2003: 123-137; Bjorgo 2003). What does seem new about CTS is the absence of virtually any sympathy for the insurgent groups involved in conducting terrorist attacks. In effect, for CTS advocates epistemological considerations combined with normative observations have replaced ideology as the basis for criticism of conventional terrorism studies since the mid-1990s. Almost from the beginning of what Walter Laqueur labeled the Age of Terrorism in the late 1960s, the concept of terrorism has been the subject of intense criticism. For the most part, the first wave of criticism came from the terrorists themselves and their state supporters, usually from the Third World. These criticisms included the complaint that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” In other words, the very idea of terrorism was subjective; its meaning varied depending on the political perspectives of those using it. The matter of terrorism went beyond epistemological questions because of the highly negative connotation the term carried with it. Thus those who skyjacked airliners, set off bombs in public places, seized hostages, etc., typically claimed that the other side, often various state agencies, really provoked the violence in the first place. Spokespersons for governments in the Middle East and elsewhere often reacted by invoking the legacy of colonialism: those engaged in terrorism were simply waging struggles of national liberation against the forces of racism, colonialism, and national oppression. The term terrorism then was being used by oppressor states, Israel especially, to mask the just struggles of the oppressed. Third Wave terrorism, the revolutionary terrorist violence of the 1960s and 1970s, emerged in different parts of the world. In Latin American urban guerrilla bands sought to promote revolution in Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Colombia. In the Middle East, following the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, various secular – often Marxist – Palestinian factions, notably the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, staged terrorist attacks on Israeli targets both in the Middle East and Western Europe as a means of calling worldwide attention to the Palestinian cause. In Western Europe and North America a number of violent
New Left organizations in Italy, West Germany, France, Belgium, Turkey, and Greece, and the United States staged terrorist attacks in the major cities in the hope that these events would serve the cause of the proletariat, either domestic or international. In Northern Ireland, the Basque region of Spain, and in Croatia (then part of Yugoslavia) nationalist groups, often using Marxist rhetoric, sought to achieve the groups’ nationalist or separatist objectives. These groups were represented by the Red Brigades, Red Army Faction, November 17, the Weather Underground, the IRA, the PKK, and ETA. Curious about the reasons for these violent developments, scholars – David Rapoport, Ehud Sprinzak, Brian Jenkins, Martha Crenshaw, Walter Laqueur, Paul Wilkinson, Bruce Hoffman, and Jerrold Post – began to study the terrorist phenomenon on a systematic basis. Their work was frequently subject to criticism from New Left scholars on both substantive and methodological grounds. Substantively, New Left critics of the 1960s and 1970s reacted by adopting the point of view of Frantz Fanon (1963), i.e., by articulating what we might call the “wretched of the earth” argument. These critics claimed terrorism studies focused almost exclusively on efforts of groups that championed the poor, desperate, and weak to challenge the status quo (Zulaika and Douglass 1996). If these groups used unconventional violence against non-traditional targets, such as skyjacking airline passengers and attacking passersby, the critics argued that the amount of violence involved, although dramatic, was rarely very great, with minimal property damage and usually a small number of casualties. According to these critics, the number of victims was especially limited when it was compared to state terrorism (Herman and O’Sullivan 1989: 3-51). These early critics cited the apartheid regime in South Africa as an example of state terrorism, which was willing to use exceptionally brutal forms of violence in order to maintain the system of racial supremacy (see Schutz, Chapter 12). In Latin America during the 1970s, military dictatorships or bureaucratic authoritarian regimes commonly employed torture, murder, and fatal disappearances to defeat the forces opposed to the existing distribution of wealth, power, and status in society (Duvall and Stohl 1983: 179-210). Furthermore, the critics singled out the United States for criticism. Critics pointed out that under the Johnson and Nixon administrations America participated in state terror, as illustrated by America’s active role in establishing, for example, the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA, and in training and equipping the forces of repression throughout Latin America. The New Left critics also claimed conventional terrorism studies were ideologically biased. In Italy, Northern Ireland, and throughout Latin America there was an abundance of right-wing death squads or neo-fascist bands (e.g., the antiCommunist Hunting Club (Brazil), the New Order and the National Youth Vanguard (Italy)), which employed terrorism against their usually left-wing opponents. According to the critics, those scholars who developed the field of terrorism studies chose to ignore or deliberately downplay the terrorism of the far Right, which showed the mainstream scholars to be conservatively biased. Such critical selectivity, the critics believe, continues to this day. In making
these observations these critics ignored the research by the conventional scholars into state terror, new Right or neo-fascist terrorism and the like (Gurr 1986: 47-71). These same early critics of terrorism studies also scrutinized the sources of support for what came to be called the “terrorism industry.” Many of those drawn to terrorism studies had ties, direct or indirect, to various government agencies, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Department in particular. Critics also noted the role of the Rand Corporation in studying terrorism on behalf of these and other government agencies. In Israel the Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) also came under fire for its allegedly analogous complicity. In short, according to the critics, terrorism studies were an enterprise whose practitioners derived their intellectual and financial sustenance from the powers-that-be in the United States and, increasingly, Israel as well. These critiques anticipated Silke’s observation, some 20 years on: “Research on terrorism is almost entirely funded by one side in the terrorism equation: the government’s . . . most research on terrorism its causes, its manifestations and its treatment – are paid by the government” (Silke 2004: 18). In addition to anticipating the terrorism industry, the early critics anticipated complaints of Fourth Wave critics about quantitative approaches to the study of terrorism. The methods employed by scholars studying Third Wave terrorism came in for serious, diverse, and inconsistent criticism. Critics of Third Wave terrorism studies complained about the anecdotal nature of much of the work. It was claimed that instead of conducting systematic interviews with terrorists and those around them, scholars imposed sweeping generalizations about terrorists and terrorism based on a handful of illustrations heightened by the scholars’ often vivid imaginations. Likewise, some journalists, clinical psychologists, and public intellectuals generally claimed to possess special knowledge of terrorism based on their own subjective insights into human behavior (Hacker 1976, Sterling 1981). On the other hand, terrorism scholars who developed datasets by collecting information about terrorist events, including the backgrounds of terrorists, their tactics, and the number of casualties they inflicted, were criticized for relying on newspaper accounts and government sources. This was a common complaint of early dataset construction. In both instances the claim was one of selection bias. Newspaper accounts, the critics argued, tended to ignore terrorist events that took place in obscure places and obscure countries. Data concerning terrorist events provided by the government were also claimed to have built-in biases, generally political. For example, the critics claimed that few government agencies responsible for combating terrorism had an incentive to minimize the severity of the threat and that an element of selectivity was involved. Not surprisingly, the State Department and other government agencies used their annual lists of terrorist events to highlight only developments to which the relevant agencies wished to call attention. Those who relied on these lists to build databases inevitably included the biases, with obvious effects on scholarship. A variant of this complaint surfaces during the end of the Fourth Wave as “open source bias.”
