Critical Studies on Terrorism, and a Review

Michael Innes, over at ComplexTerrainLab (where I have been participating in a very interesting discussion with a bunch of historians and political scientists on PW Singer’s Wired for War), posts up a comment on a new journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism, and a review of it in another journal, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism.  (My own favorite journal on terrorism, The Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, has yet to weigh in, but perhaps I will encourage it to do so.)  Here is Innes describing the dustup:

***  (This is Mike’s commentary below, not mine.)

In the latest issue of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism,  David Martin Jones (University of Queensland) and M.L.R. Smith (King’s College London), write in “We’re All Terrorists Now: Critical – Or Hypocritical – Studies “On” Terrorism“, about the new school of “critical terrorism studies” based out of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth:

ABSTRACT: This article reviews the new journal Critical Studies on Terrorism. The fashionable approach that this journal adopts towards the contemporary phenomenon of terrorism maintains that a “critical” and “self-reflexive” approach to the study of terrorism reveals a variety of shortcomings in the discipline. These range from a distorting overidentification with the Western democratic state perspective on terrorism to a failure to empathize with the misunderstood, non-Western, “other.” This review examines whether the claims of the critical approach adds anything, other than pedantry and obscurity, to our understanding of the phenomenon. It concludes that it does not.

I was wondering when this might happen. The authors go on to describe the “congealed prose, obscure jargon, philosophical posturing, and concentrated anti-Western self-loathing that comprise the core of this journal’s first edition.” Ouch. The article’s behind a pay firewall, but here’s the conclusion:

In the looking glass world of critical terror studies the conventional analysis of terrorism is ontologically challenged, lacks self-reflexivity, and is policy oriented. By contrast, critical theory’s ethicist, yet relativist, and deconstructive gaze reveals that we are all terrorists now and must empathize with those sub-state actors who have recourse to violence for whatever motive. Despite their intolerable othering by media and governments, terrorists are really no different from us. In fact, there is terror as the weapon of the weak and the far worse economic and coercive terror of the liberal state. Terrorists therefore deserve empathy and they must be discursively engaged.

At the core of this understanding sits a radical pacifism and an idealism that requires not the status quo but communication and “human emancipation.” Until this radical postnational utopia arrives both force and the discourse of evil must be abandoned and instead therapy and un-coerced conversation must be practiced. In the popular ABC drama Boston Legal Judge Brown perennially referred to the vague, irrelevant, jargon-ridden statements of lawyers as “jibber jabber.” The Aberystwyth-based school of critical internationalist utopianism that increasingly dominates the study of international relations in Britain and Australia has refined a higher order incoherence that may be termed Aber jabber. The pages of the journal ofCritical Studies on Terrorism are its natural home.