Problematic knowledge

Since 9/11, Americans have been told that terrorists are pathological evildoers, beyond comprehension. ¹ Consequently, as President George W. Bush put it, our response must take the form of ‘a very long struggle against evil’. But although this conceptualization of terrorism has been naturalized in contemporary American political discourse, this problematization of political violence as inexplicable evil is a relatively recent invention. This chapter traces the emergence of the problematization ² of ‘terrorism’ as the dominant mode of making sense of political violence, and the ways in which this shift fundamentally transformed Americans’ understandings of political violence, the scope of possibilities for practical response to the problem of political violence and the possibilities for the production of expert knowledge about it. As a case study in the production of knowledge about problems of ‘security’, this chapter illustrates the importance of paying attention to ruptures in the conceptualization of security problems, and the ways in which particular problematizations constrain possible positions from which to produce expert knowledge about them.