In our last class, I chose to focus on the various core characteristics of critical terrorism studies, without going too depply into any of them. As you may have noticed, the key commitments of this approach revolved around a few key issues – methodological (greater sensitivity to bias, and emphasis on primary research), ethical (better research ethics, focus on the notion of emancipation) and epistemological. In the latter, two issues are central to a critical research agenda: on the one hand, the importance of language and discourse; on the other hand, there has been a lot of interest in borrowing from social movement theory to analyse terrorism. (You should keep in mind that CTS is NOT a theory itself, but rather a broad approach that includes several theoretical perspectives).
Last year I tried to focus the session on CTS around a discussion of social movement theory, and what it means for studying terrorism in a more critical manner – but that didn’t go too well with your predecessors, who thought the theory was perhaps a bit too abstract. That is partly why this time around I did not focus too much on it.
However, I wanted to take the opportunity here in the blog to raise the issue once again, in a lighter manner. Basically speaking, social movement theory is very relevant to the study of terrorism because almost without exception (as we already hinted at during our session of definitions), terrorism is a form of collective action, i.e. terrorist acts are the product of terrorist organizations. Therefore, it stands to reason that any theory that gives us a better insight into how groups of people can be mobilized for collective action in the political field is a good thing, and we should learn it. As a result, some authors have for years been proposing that we look at terrorist groups – and their ways of mobilizing individuals for collective political action, in this case through violent means – through the lens of social movement theory.
The approach itself is very well established in the social sciences for a few decades now, and has produced some very interesting research insights, helping us to understand various other forms of collective social and political action. Last year, I tried my best to summarize the central features of SMT in a blog post, as well as suggest some readings on both SMT in general, and SMT approaches to political violence. You can read that post here. If you find the approach interesting, feel free to raise it up in class – there will be plenty of opportunities, especially when we discuss the organizational aspects of terrorist groups.
