ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the conceptual and definitional debates surrounding terrorism. This will include attention to the pejorative, politicised and selective definitions of terrorism and terrorism’s similarities and differences to more ‘conventional’ forms of criminality. The chapter examines some of the ways in which terrorist activity has been understood before analysing the practice of counter-terrorism and the role of criminology in understanding these activities. The radical criminology of the early 1970s thus began to shift the focus of academic criminology in part to crimes of the powerful, and recently, this tradition has been picked up in criminological analyses of political violence, particularly with relation to state crime. Since 9/11 the landscape of counter-terrorism practice has become ever more crowded. In the US, the ‘Homeland Security’ model has seen the creation of new and potent centralised counter-terrorism organisations. There have been a number of explanations of this shift towards the diversification of counter-terrorism practice.
