Introduction

The editors of the respected peer-reviewed journal Critical Studies on Terrorism describe Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) as primarily “a research orientation that is willing to challenge dominant knowledge and understandings of terrorism, is sensitive to the politics of labelling in the terrorism field, is transparent about its own values and political standpoints, adheres to a set of responsible research ethics, and is committed to a broadly defined notion of emancipation”. It perhaps cannot be overstated that a key contribution of CTS has been to remind all and sundry that the “terrorism scholar can try to be as independently minded as possible and test for the robustness of findings based on different definition of the data, but the basic problem – that terrorism studies is ineluctably political – remains”. Hence it should be acknowledged at the outset that without a doubt CTS has raised scholarly awareness of the importance of understanding and unpacking how Mainstream Terrorism Studies (MTS) scholars define important terms like for instance, “terrorism” and “extremism”, the extent to which they employ scholarly rigor in employing such concepts and essentially how objectively – that is, free from undue state interference for instance – they are able to conduct their research. Hence CTS, because of its strong normative commitments, can certainly help keep MTS “honest”, so to speak, while offering a series of “labels and narratives” that “could provide a more flexible and ethically responsible alternative to the oppressive confines of the discourse of “Islamic Terrorism”’ that has dominated MTS scholarship in the more than two decades following the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States and the ensuing Global War on Terror.

This paper seeks to employ the CTS method to an extent in unpacking CTS itself. In revisiting the key contours of CTS as a disciplinary field, it asks the basic question of whether CTS does indeed offer a genuinely alternative paradigm to MTS. It does so in three main steps. First, the paper examines the inextricable rootedness of CTS in the wider Critical Security Studies discipline, before tracing the ways in which CTS is said to offer an alternative perspective to MTS. The paper then interrogates the extent to which the assertion is valid, before concluding with an assessment as to how best to consider CTS in relation to MTS. But first, as mentioned, it is important to examine how CTS is itself an inescapable outgrowth of wider Critical Security Studies.