ABSTRACT
To talk, or write, of 9/11 is to speak of temporal rupture. It is surely an event in the truest sense – an era-defining incision that marked the “real” end of the 20th century and projected forward a series of geopolitical and human catastrophes that ripple anew. Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, Iraq, the so-called “Islamic State” and on, and on; these umbilical signifiers reconstitute 9/11’s original trauma and we (choose to) keep it alive. In memorialising 9/11, the authors also recreate an artificial inflection point, as if there were a terrorism “before 9/11” and a terrorism after. This is wrong. The success of the attack was unprecedented. The logic and structural allowances that lay behind it were not. If this is so, what does CTS’ tendency to memorialise 9/11 tell us about the field’s emancipatory kernel? Recall that the emancipatory core at the heart of Critical Terrorism Studies is twofold.
