ABSTRACT
Looking at security expertise from a broad perspective, it can be argued that critical terrorism studies (CTS), similar to critical security studies before it, emerged as a reaction to the particular way in which the terrorism studies field and accompanying so-called ‘terror experts’ have evolved since the early 1970s (see Stampnitzky 2013). At that time, ‘terrorism’ was discursively reconstructed by terror experts from a rational-political form of insurgency into a kind of irrational, nihilistic and morally ‘evil’ kind of violence (see Stampnitzky, this volume). Consequently, the terrorism studies field operated according to a taboo on engaging directly with terrorists (Zulaika and Douglass 1996), which has since resulted in terror expertise becoming entangled in ‘the politics of anti-knowledge’ (Stampnitzky 2013; see also Ferguson 1994) and based on media attribution rather than the acquisition of scientific skills or knowledge (Ranstorp 2009). At the same time, terror experts have become ‘embedded’ within the security and counter-terrorism establishment (Burnett and Whyte 2005; Miller and Mills 2009), as well as influential mediators of knowledge between academia, the media, policy and the public. In direct response, CTS arose as a counter-expertise movement aimed in part at exposing, resisting and deconstructing these knowledge–power flows and relationships, and generating alternative forms of knowledge and counter-expertise about terrorism.
