ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that terrorism and counterterrorism are fundamentally temporal activities. Taking this seriously enriches our understanding of the dynamics, contexts, actors, and events we study within critical terrorism studies (CTS), while opening important and exciting areas for interdisciplinary engagement with other fields. Doing this, the chapter argues, helps to enable a broadening of CTS to potentially neglected topics and a deepening to account for potentially unrecognised relations and dynamics of power. The chapter begins with a brief introduction setting out this overarching argument and pointing to the growing interest in issues around temporality and critical terrorism studies. The second section – “Engaging the past” – explores the relationship between memory and terrorism, before sketching the importance of terrorism’s histories, including in relation to colonial violences. A third section – “Anticipating the future” – then turns our attention to that which is to come, discussing the anticipation of future violences and the work this does in legitimising counterterrorism actions. The chapter concludes by arguing for further work on temporality within CTS, including via greater engagement with feminist and postcolonial literatures.
