ABSTRACT
While CTS has focused on the everyday politics of terrorism, less has been said about the way in which the dead body lingers as the implicit referent for terrorism studies. This chapter argues that CTS should pay more attention to the politics of dead bodies. Specifically, CTS would benefit in two ways: by allowing us to think differently with regard to civilian casualties and their relationship to terrorism, and by forcing a reckoning with how military counterterrorism in the form of targeted killing has become an assumed response. While both of these are critiques that have been taken up by CTS in the past, the chapter argues that paying attention to dead bodies allows for a more substantive micro-level examination of these ideas. To do so, it focuses on how dead bodies are counted in the context of terrorism scholarship and policy and advances a theory of critical accounting. The chapter advocates rethinking the role quantification plays in how we understand terrorism itself and specifically how death tolls come to occupy a privileged status as a means of defining, measuring, and accounting for terrorism. As counting has become increasingly an end in itself, equated with the truth of what happened or even with achieving security, more work is needed on the ethnography of these numbers and the politics of representing them.
