Three waves of critical terrorism studies: agenda-setting, elaboration, problematisation

ABSTRACT

The past twenty years have witnessed critical terrorism studies (CTS) become an increasingly influential body of work. In this article, I offer the first sustained effort to chart CTS’ development and transformation by positing three successive waves in its evolution. CTS’ first wave, I argue, was characterised by agenda-setting efforts to map the prospects of a distinctively critical approach to terrorism research. Second wave literature elaborated on this nascent project’s scope, strengthening and broadening its empirical, conceptual, and methodological ambitions. More recent third wave work seeks to problematise the underpinning assumptions and commitments of earlier CTS literature, especially in relation to its engagement with race and colonialism. Mapping CTS’ development in this way, I argue, offers three contributions to knowledge. First, it helps historicise CTS research by detailing the academic and wider contexts of its development. Second, it enables engagement with CTS’ pluralism, foregrounding the importance of internal disagreements for its past and future trajectories. And, third, it enables new reflection on the political and normative stakes of differing approaches to, and aspirations for, critical terrorism research.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical terrorism studies
• terrorism studies
• terrorism research
• critical theory
• waves

Introduction

In the twenty years or so since its emergence, critical terrorism studies (CTS) has become an increasingly influential body of work. A self-conscious, and explicitly political, alternative to earlier forms of terrorism research, CTS set out to both broaden and deepen the study of political violence, not least by asking which violences get designated “terrorist”, and by whom. Although measuring the success of academic projects is seldom easy – and we might, indeed, query the value of “success” as evaluative criterion here (Sjoberg 2019) – CTS has unquestionably secured its standing within wider fields of terrorism and security research. Indeed, although its positioning as an urgent analytical and normative corrective to antecedent research paradigms will likely remain divisive (Rodrigues 2023, 24), CTS has now acquired many of the institutional trappings of an established research field, including a dedicated academic journal, book series, and professional association (Martini and Da Silva 2023b, 1).

In this article, I offer the first sustained effort to map the historical evolution of CTS research which has always, I argue, been marked by internal differences and dispute (see also Jarvis 2019). My underpinning claim is that critical terrorism studies is – or, perhaps better, should be – a shorthand for what is actually (and importantly) a markedly diverse body of work. CTS, I will suggest, is a body of work with porous and imprecise borders that is impacted by events and developments in cognate academic fields, as well as in wider socio-political contexts. It is a body of work, moreover, that is internally heterogeneous and characterised by theoretical, normative, and methodological dissensus as much as by any consistency of focus, approach, or ambition. And, it is a body of work, too, that has been shaped by considerable dynamism and change since its emergence. These complexities, I suggest, are as desirable as they were foreseeable. This is, not least, because they have rendered critical terrorism research at once more interesting and less vulnerable to atrophy than would have been possible within more homogeneous imaginations of this work. Recognising the existence of these contexts, controversies, and pluralities is important, moreover, because doing so offers a more reliable impression of this research and its directions of travel than might be imputed from a more static understanding of what CTS is, or what it should be.

To make this argument, this article narrates the story of critical terrorism studies around three identifiable, if overlapping, “waves”. First, CTS emerged, I suggest, with a series of explicitly agenda-setting contributions mapping the project’s opportunities and likely prospects. A second wave then focused on elaborating CTS’ ambitions and contributions. Propelled by an expansive energy, this work served to broaden critical terrorism research, taking it into new empirical and conceptual directions while also helping to strengthen and nuance its core analytical and normative claims. A more recent third wave, finally, has concentrated more firmly on problematising earlier work within CTS and its underpinning assumptions and commitments. Drawing on wider social scientific debate, especially in relation to postcolonial and decolonial thinking, this latest work departs from the conceptual and methodological incrementalism characteristic of second wave work, appealing instead for a more profound engagement with CTS’ political and normative attachments. As outlined below, a key, and at times explicit, fear within relevant third wave work is that CTS may now be contributing to the types of harm it set out initially to address.

Conceptualising the evolution of critical terrorism studies in the context of these three waves offers three contributions to knowledge. First, it helps to historicise CTS research by engaging with the academic and non-academic contexts of its development, and by highlighting dynamism within CTS over time. In so doing, it moves beyond an artificially static conception of this work that risks reifying something that has always been fluid. Second, the article also helps foreground pluralism within critical terrorism research, reflecting on a history of important internal disagreements and differences. Such disagreements are, of course, commonplace in academic fields, and their significance in advancing CTS’ agenda means engaging them here may help us think through this work’s potential futures. Third, the article also makes an evaluative contribution by encouraging reflection on the stakes of debate within critical terrorism research. As argued below, these stakes are political as much as analytical, and therefore crucial to CTS’ identity as well as its interests. In order to make these arguments, the remainder of the article proceeds via sections on CTS’ three waves, preceded by a brief discussion on my use of the “wave” metaphor to describe stages in its development.

On the wave metaphor

The use of a wave metaphor to take stock of historical change is a popular one within and outwith academia. The metaphor is widely used to capture the clustering of broadly contemporaneous research activity in disciplines across and beyond the social sciences, including within sociology (Riley 2006), geography (Philo and Wolch 2001), political science (Gronke and Newman 2003), public relations (Page and Capizzo 2021), and criminology (Zatz 1987). Punctuated historical processes in diverse empirical contexts get described through this lens, too, including political resistance (Untalan 2020, 52–53), immigration (Foner 2008), crime (Sacco 2005), democratisation (Gunitsky 2018), or the evolution of pandemics (El-Shabasy et al. 2022). Feminism is famously frequently narrated around three or four waves, even if this construction risks exclusion and omission (Springer 2002), given there exists, “little consensus as to how to characterise these … waves or what to do with women’s movements before the late nineteenth century” (Rampton 2015, 1).¹ And, within terrorism research more specifically, the wave metaphor is familiar from David Rapoport’s (2012) well-known account of the four phases of modern terrorism: anarchist, anti-colonial, new left, and religious. Waves, in Rapoport’s (2012, 42) usage, denote time-bound cycles of international terrorism driven by a distinctive ideational energy and characterised by a process of expansion then contraction.

The appeal of the wave metaphor to capture complex dynamics of historical change might be attributed to the vividness and familiarity of its source. Waves offer a striking and readily conjurable image through which to capture the dynamism of something in motion. The metaphor has an elegance, too, in its simplification of complex processes of change into successive stages travelling in ostensibly uniform direction. Parsimony over complexity, however, brings with it risk, generating obvious opportunity for critique (as experienced by many of the examples noted above). The “waves of terrorism” thesis alone, for instance, has been criticised, inter alia, for its inability to incorporate outliers (Parker and Sitter 2016), for de-emphasising continuities across waves (Radil and Castan Pinos 2022), and for privileging ideology as the relevant cause of specific waves (Sedgwick 2007).² Such disputes are familiar territory within efforts at, and contestation over, historical periodisation (e.g. Newman 2004). More than this, they matter because they highlight the limitations of metaphorical frameworks for typologising complex phenomena. All categorisations – temporal and otherwise – risk artificial, or at least contestable, imposition of coherence on the “inside” of categories and of difference across them (Jackson et al. 2011, 161–163).

My use of the wave metaphor to organise CTS research in this article risks similar criticism. It is, therefore, important to emphasise its heuristic and provisional status for my argument. At the same time, the metaphor is, I believe, a useful one here for two reasons. First is its emphasis on a shared energy that becomes identifiable or prominent at – although is not exclusive to – particular historical moments; an energy, in this case, captured in the aspirations and orientations of particular (critical terrorism) researchers. Second, particularly helpful from Rapoport’s framing, is the emphasis on the wider contexts of those “waves” that comprise his own object of study: “terrorist” campaigns. Waves, as we know, have external drivers: the wind’s passage over surface water, seismic activity, the climate crisis, and so forth. So, for Rapoport (2012), do terrorist campaigns in the form of wider ideological debate and technological transformations, amongst other things. And, so too, I will argue, does critical terrorism research. CTS, I will demonstrate below, has been fundamentally shaped by wider academic developments such as the growing prominence of postcolonialism. It has also been impacted by historical events in the world beyond the academy: not least the consequences of 9/11 and ensuing wars on terror. Thus, although there are, inevitably, exceptions and outliers to the framework posited below, and although there are – also, inevitably – contiguities between my three posited waves, the metaphor remains a useful one for capturing changes in the focus and ambitions of CTS.

First wave: agenda setting

Although a small number of influential earlier works can be identified (Sluka 2000; Zulaika and Douglass 1996), critical terrorism studies as a coherent academic project came to prominence in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Richard Jackson (2016a, 1) – the field’s most visible author – dates “serious discussions about developing an explicitly ‘critical’ academic approach to terrorism research” to late 2004. Jarvis (2016, 28) points to a growing momentum from 2006 onwards (see also Jackson, Breen Smyth, and Gunning 2009b, 2), while Martini and Da Silva (2023b, 1) highlight the project’s institutionalisation through a series of key moments between 2005 and 2010. These minor differences aside, this early period was a productive one for CTS, not least because it witnessed publication of influential agenda-setting scholarship that helped establish the foundations and impetus for subsequent critical terrorism research. In the following, I concentrate on three prominent themes in this first wave work: (i) differentiation of CTS from earlier terrorism research; (ii) conceptual delineation; and, (iii) articulation of CTS’ political and normative commitments.

Differentiation

The timing of critical terrorism studies’ emergence in the early twenty-first century has both academic and (geo-)political contexts. The early years of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” generated considerable alarm amongst research communities, demonstrating, for many, the need to engage with the hitherto- (and, from today’s vantage point, surprisingly) neglected phenomenon of (counter-)terrorism. This historical context coincided with a growing dissatisfaction with the state of terrorism research, especially in relation to this field’s proximity to counter-terrorism practitioners – a dissatisfaction usefully situated within a wider and pointed academic debate around aspirations for policy relevance. Similar concerns had helped pave the way for critical security studies’ emergence in the late 1990s (e.g. Krause and Williams 1997), set in motion via an increasingly voluble questioning of that field’s state-centric, militaristic, and positivist moorings.

Set against this background, an unsurprising first focus of CTS’ agenda-setting phase was the meta-theoretical critique of what became labelled (not uncontroversially) “traditional”, “orthodox” or “mainstream” terrorism studies. This critique contained several related claims. First, terrorism research had conventionally worked with a problematically objectivist conception of “terrorism” and “terrorists”, approaching these as material realities rather than social constructions (Gunning 2007, 371; Jackson 2007, 247–248). Second, this essentialised understanding was either constraining or inconsistent in its overwhelming application to non-state organisations (Blakeley 2008; Jarvis 2009a, 16–18). Third, the positivist ambitions of traditional terrorism research had foreclosed discussion of the political and contingent nature of terrorism knowledge (Heath-Kelly 2010, 250; Jackson 2007, 246–247). And, fourth, the field's reliance on secondary data, a circumscribed methodological toolkit, and limited case studies were indicative of its wider methodological shortcomings (Ranstorp 2009; Silke 2009). Although suspicious of CTS’s own coherence, a contemporaneous piece by Hülsse and Spencer (2008, 572) tied these criticisms together, in their argument that:

research needs to focus on the discourse by which the terrorist actor and his or her actions are constituted. … This is why we suggest a shift of perspective in terrorism studies, from the terrorist to terrorism discourse. Instead of asking what terrorism is like (what structures, strategies and motivations it has), we need to ask how it is constituted in discourse.

With criticisms such as these targeting the very foundations of terrorism research, their reception was, unsurprisingly, mixed. Some claims, such as terrorism studies’ historical neglect of “state terrorism”, were disputed as “straw person” criticisms with precarious reliability (e.g. Horgan and Boyle 2008) – a debate that echoed earlier commentary around the emergence of critical security research (Hynek and Chandler 2013, 46–47). Others took CTS’ novelty and utility to task (Michel and Richards 2009, 409–410), asserting the enduring relevance of more conventional terrorism research (Jones and Smith 2009), and highlighting synergies between earlier and more recent work (e.g. Jones and Smith 2011, 513). As Michel and Richards (2009, 411) summarised:

A further challenge for CTS is to convince that it has something significantly new to offer terrorism studies. It is not a revelation to discover that states have been responsible for committing the worst acts of “terror” or indeed that democratic states are culpable when it comes to sponsoring terrorism. We are all engaged in trying to understand the phenomenon of terrorism and its causes.

What was distinctive about CTS, though – and what rendered it attractive for advocates, and problematic for critics – was its articulation of these criticisms within a wider claim about the purposes of terrorism research. Gunning (2007), drawing on critical IR scholar Robert W. Cox (1981), offered the first sustained exposition of this argument, suggesting terrorism research had to date been marked by many of the characteristics associated with “problem-solving” research, including a failure to “not question its framework of reference, its categories, its origins or the power relations that enable the production of these categories” (Gunning 2007, 371). These general tendencies, in the context of terrorism research specifically, were seen to enable a prioritisation of the state as security’s subject; an inclination towards ahistorical or presentist research; a preference for positivist epistemologies; and a refusal to engage with those designated “terrorist” (Gunning 2007, 371). As Gunning (2007, 372) summarised:

these “problem-solving” characteristics can also be shown to contribute directly to [terrorism studies’] observed shortcomings. The reported lack of primary data, the dearth of interviews with “terrorists” and the field’s typical unwillingness to “engage subjectively with [the terrorist’s] motives”, is in part fuelled by the field’s over-identification with the state, and by the adoption of dichotomies that depict “terrorism” as “an unredeemable atrocity like no other”, that can only be approached “with a heavy dose of moral indignation”, although other factors, such as security concerns, play a role too.

Richard Jackson (2009, 77) developing this theme, argued that the “problem-solving character of the field is illustrated most prosaically by the ubiquitous efforts of virtually every terrorism studies scholar to provide research that is ‘policy relevant’”,³ an argument echoing Burnett and Whyte’s (2005, 11–12) earlier claim that this emphasis reflects the field’s counterinsurgency origins. Booth (2008, 71) argued similarly that, “most of what has been done in Terrorism Studies in the form of ‘counter-terrorism’ represents classical problem-solving theory”, and that, “helping governments … practise counter-terrorism should not be the priority business of academics”. For Toros and Gunning (2009, 91), too, “traditional terrorism studies has essentially served to sustain the status quo, reducing politics to the management of social order”. In one, slightly later, summary of “traditional” terrorism studies:

the field’s origins in cold war counter-insurgency efforts, as well as the impact of 9/11, have left a lasting legacy of state-centrism and Eurocentrism in which the study of terrorism functions largely as an effort to find effective means for countering perceived anti-Western terrorism.

(Jackson et al. 2011, 27)

The starkness of this critical/problem-solving distinction was, of course, questioned by some (see Weinberg and Eubank 2008, 193). Others cautioned that CTS might become “too bogged down” in its differentiating ambitions, fearing this could “become a rather stale debate” (Stokes 2009, 88). This ground-clearing impetus, nevertheless, was clearly vital for this opening wave, not least in setting out the need for a radical alternative to more traditional terrorism research (see also Joseph 2009).

Conceptual delineation

A second, complementary, aspiration was to delineate this emerging project’s core theoretical commitments. Jackson et al. (2009a, 222) concluded their book which is frequently located amongst CTS’ founding moments by arguing, amongst other things, that CTS “entails a particular ontological position which accepts that ‘terrorism’ is fundamentally a social fact rather than a brute fact”, and that this, “involves a shift from state-centrism and making state security the central concern” of research’ (Jackson, Breen Smyth, and Gunning 2009a, 223). In so doing, they built on one of Jackson’s (2007) earlier pieces highlighting CTS’ scepticism towards universalising arguments around terrorism, and, indeed, the “terrorism” label itself (Jackson 2007). Toros and Gunning (2009, 92–93) argued for a minimal foundationalism that would be adequate to the recognition of extra-discursive violences without sacrificing a critical stance towards the language through which such violences are comprehended. Their argument developed Gunning’s (2007, 376–377) earlier suggestion that CTS should contextualise political violences, including via reflection on the politics of terrorism discourse. Foreshadowing CTS’ second wave, other contributions highlighted how this new project might find interdisciplinary assistance from related scholarship similarly determined to problematise established conceptions of violence and coercion (Sylvester and Parashar 2009, 191).

There was, to be clear, important conceptual disagreement in this earliest work, particularly, though not exclusively, in relation to the meaning of “critical” within CTS. Most prominent, and still most closely associated with the approach, was scholarship appealing for a Frankfurt School-inspired version of Critical Theory (see Heath-Kelly 2010). Toros and Gunning’s (2009, 88–89) vision for CTS, for instance, drew inspiration from that tradition and the later “Welsh School” of critical security studies to position CTS as a deepening and broadening of terrorism research. Such an approach, they argued, would help expand CTS’ research agenda, while facilitating reflection on its own political assumptions, interests, and implications. With similar ambitions, and working within a shared Marxian heritage, was Joseph’s (2009, 97) intervention which argued, “it is necessary for CTS to be critical of three things if it is to maintain coherence”: the study of terrorism, the discourse of terrorism, and the extra-discursive realm around terrorism discourse.

These broadly Marxian articulations departed from the more pluralist route taken by Jackson et al. (2009a, 222) in which CTS was positioned as a “critical orientation” akin to a “very broad church” comprising Frankfurt School, but also Foucauldian, Derridean and other work. This emphasis on a plurality of critical resources was put into practice, moreover, in Jackson’s (2009) own embrace of first and second order critique.⁴ Anthony Burke (2008, 38, original emphasis), took a broader view still, likening critique to an “attitude” or “style” that “questions the question”, arguing, “it questions the ontological status of a ‘problem’ before any attempt to study, map out or resolve it”. Jarvis (2009a, 21), in contrast, argued for a specific “approach to critique as a practice of destabilisation or discursive intervention … encouraging us to expose and contest constructions of (counter-)terrorism along with their political functions and outcomes”. Such an approach, for Jarvis (2009a, 21) might help overcome the shortcomings of “juxtapositional critique” within CTS work on state terrorism, in particular its tendency to substitute “one conception of terrorism for an alternative – more accurate – account” (see also Jarvis 2022).

Political and normative articulation

A third prominent theme within CTS’ first wave concerned its appropriate political and normative commitments. Given the distrust of problem-solving work aimed at rendering counterterrorism more effective (see Toros 2016a, 71) – and given the frequent turn to Critical Theory for inspiration – notions of emancipation were especially conspicuous here. For Toros and Gunning (2009, 107), for instance, CTS’ “normative emancipatory commitment” is one that “calls for engaging the silenced and the suffering (though not without critical distancing), sustaining counter-hegemonic discourses and communities, and working with both suspect communities and policy-makers contributing to the transformation of both (and expecting to be transformed oneself in the process”. Matt McDonald’s (2009, 120) sketch of an emancipatory CTS provided a similar vision in which CTS should be, “concerned with amplifying voices silenced by dominant discourses advocating violence; … committed to opening up space for political dialogue and debate to a wider range of voices; … [and mindful of] the importance of locating possibilities for change within particular contexts rather than imposing them from the outside”. As McDonald (2009, 121) continued, such a vision is, crucially, a cosmopolitan one that risks universalism and utopianism, but remains willing to do so because it relies upon, and is “ultimately suggestive of shared membership in a global community” (McDonald 2009, 120).

A similar cosmopolitan ethics was evident in Herring’s (2008) hope that CTS might contribute to “emancipatory practice in world politics” that could include, amongst other things, emphasising the equal worth of all human victims of violence regardless of nationality or oppressor. Ken Booth (2008) – an important advocate of emancipatory scholarship in critical security studies (especially Booth 1991, 2007) – was also amongst those expounding the importance of universal commitments within critical terrorism research. Emancipation, for Booth (2008), could play multiple roles in this field, helping CTS to conceptualise security in a broad and inclusive sense, and guiding counter-terrorism action. In his summary:

Let us therefore remember that the word “university” derives from “universitas”, meaning “universal”, and that this should inject a particular anti-ethnocentric perspective into the project of Critical Terrorism Studies. We must dare to embrace cosmopolitan ethics, and resist the ways in which humans are exiled from each other by the dynamics of power – the outcome of the twists and turns of history.

(Booth 2008, 78)

Although, as discussed in relation to third wave work below, an attachment to emancipation remains identifiable in recent scholarship (see Jackson 2023), explicit statements of cosmopolitan ethics appear rarer today than they were at CTS' emergence. This contemporary caution reflects the influence of post-structural and postcolonial thinking upon CTS (Toros 2016a, 75), as well as wider concerns that universalist constructions of emancipation and so forth strip away the importance of local contexts, experiences, and their differences (Dixit and Stump 2011, 506). As with earlier debate in critical security studies, such concerns generate fear that CTS’ commitment to emancipation was either superficial and unrealised, or that it helped reproduce the (violent) certainties of liberal and colonial projects (Schotten 2024b, 18, discussing; Chukwuma forthcoming). In this first wave, though, such claims were foundational for a radically different vision of what terrorism studies might look like and do (Lindahl 2020, 80–84), offering, for many, an expanded referent and conception of security (Gunning 2007, 376).

Summary

To summarise, briefly, work within the first wave of CTS was relatively consistent in its attempt to: (i) distance itself from more traditional forms of terrorism research; (ii) delineate conceptually its meta-theoretical commitment to a broadly constructivist and critical framework; and (iii) articulate its political and normative vision around emancipatory and cosmopolitan ideals. There were, as we have seen, differences of emphasis in this work, and some explicit disagreement too, especially in relation to the nature and purposes of critique. But taken collectively, this work was vital in establishing CTS as a viable alternative to previous (counter-)terrorism scholarship.

With hindsight, some of this earliest work may appear programmatic, even essentialist, in its sketching out common (ontological, epistemological, normative, political) properties necessary for scholarship to warrant the CTS moniker (see Sayer 1997, 456–457). Indeed, this temptation towards essentialism was, I suspect, responsible for much of the immediate criticism received by this first wave. Criticism of CTS’ claim to a distinctively critical orientation (see Horgan and Boyle 2008, 51), for instance, implied an unsophisticated engagement with sameness and difference that is often levelled against essentialist arguments with their attribution of particular characteristics to all parts of a whole (Phillips 2010, 50–53). Accusations of CTS’ simplistic characterisation of earlier terrorism research, relatedly, echo wider anti-essentialist concerns with boundary policing and the normative implications thereof (Phillips 2010, 57–58).

A sympathetic reading of this first wave, however, might emphasise two things. First, is the work’s immediate contexts noted above, and the effort that was needed to clear ground for new ways to research, study, and teach (counter-)terrorism. Here, the confident articulation of a new research programme with specific commitments no doubt helped generate momentum within, and enthusiasm for, CTS – a strategic decision, perhaps, to satisfy (political) goals (Eide 2010, 66). Such a reading certainly fits with Jackson’s (2015, 186) subsequent reflections on CTS’ origins as a “counter-expertise movement aimed in part at exposing, resisting and deconstructing these knowledge-power flows [within traditional terrorism research], and generating alternative forms of knowledge and counter-expertise about terrorism”.

Second, one might also highlight the frequency with which this earliest work appealed explicitly for pluralism and intellectual diversity in critical terrorism research. Jackson et al. (2009a, 233), for instance, were enthusiastic about the engagement of scholars “from cognate disciplines who [had] thus far shunned the world of terrorism studies because of its reputation for being overly state-centric, ideologically biased, and under-theorised”, noting that the “challenge remains to increase their number and the methodological and disciplinary diversity of the field”. Indeed, the opening article of Critical Studies on Terrorism identified one important new aim of the journal as being “to publish research from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives outside of international relations and security studies, and to engage in conversations with actors who have important and interesting points of view on terrorism-related issues” (Breen Smyth et al. 2008, 3). Although such appeals occasionally cautioned on the risks of eclecticism (Jackson, Breen Smyth, and Gunning 2009a, 233), the first wave of CTS was, in principle at least, open to a wide range of scholarship. And, if ground-clearing in preparation for a new style of (counter)terrorism scholarship constituted the first ambition of this new research programme, this was tied, as we have seen, to a desire for a broadening and deepening of terrorism research in order to open up new directions for study.

Second wave: elaboration

The first wave of CTS, I argued above, focused its efforts on differentiation, conceptual delineation, and political/normative articulation. The sheer extent of that work, and the reception it generated, is alone indicative of CTS’ emergence as an important and impactful orientation within terrorism research. In the following, I turn now to subsequent elaborations of this scholarship in a second wave of CTS literature that helped expand the agenda’s key contributions. This wave, I suggest, was characterised by three primary ambitions of its own: dissemination; theoretical and empirical expansion; and interdisciplinary learning.

Dissemination

First, and perhaps most important for CTS’ endurance, were a series of efforts to disseminate this emerging project to wider audiences such as students and researchers beyond terrorism studies. Jackson et al. (2011), for instance, did this via the first explicitly critical textbook on terrorism, one that deliberately eschewed the focus and organisation of more “traditional” introductions to the field (e.g. Hoffman 2017; Martin 2017). The degree of departure from its “competitors” here is evident in the book’s two opening chapters – “The Orthodox Study of Terrorism” and “Critical Approaches to Terrorism Studies” – as well as in its extensive early foregrounding of hitherto-neglected concerns within terrorism research such as gender (Chapter 4) and popular culture (Chapter 3). In all of this, indeed, the book adopts an unapologetically critical tone established at its introduction’s end:

It is precisely because of terrorism’s – and counter-terrorism’s – increasing influence over our lives that we have a responsibility to try and understand it, to ask difficult questions and to challenge dominant and embedded forms of knowledge about the subject.

(Jackson et al. 2011, 5)

Such explicit reflection on the politics of (here, terrorism) knowledge remains relatively unusual in introductory textbooks, even today (for an exception, see Weber 2021). It also helps highlight the importance of those earlier efforts at differentiation within CTS work, and an enduring appetite for distinguishing this paradigm from its antecedents. Although likely appealing to some readers, this departure from a posture of neutrality customary within introductory texts did also occasion wariness. In one review article listing the “Top 150 books on terrorism and counter-terrorism” (Sinai 2012), for instance, this was the only “textbook or general history” on the topic mentioned as having any identifiable “political positio[n]”. Thus, where alternative overviews of terrorism frequently discuss politics (as manifest, for instance, in the commitments or ambitions of terrorist organisations), the implication here was that such alternatives presumably possess no such commitments of their own.

Related efforts at dissemination were evident, too, in other second wave CTS texts with similarly proselytising energy. Stump and Dixit (2013), for instance, produced a new introduction to research methods in CTS assisting with the practical implementation of this new orientation. Here, chapters on topics such as discourse analysis, ethnography, and social network analysis followed an opening discussion of what they term “The Critical Terrorism Studies Approach” (Stump and Dixit 2013, 1–11). Their subsequent edited volume, Critical Methods in Terrorism Studies (Dixit and Stump 2015) expanded this focus with its collection of contributions from authors working across a wide range of postcolonial, critical realist, feminist, and other backgrounds. Less introductory, but with similarly synthetic ambition, were special issues summarising work in this field, notably: “A Decade on from 11 September 2001: What has Critical Terrorism Studies Learned?” (Blackbourn and Miller 2012), and “Ten Years of Critical Terrorism Studies” (Jackson et al. 2017). Although all of this work – as with more recent examples (Martini and Da Silva 2023a) – sought to push CTS in new directions, a significant emphasis was arguably pedagogical: highlighting the value of this paradigm for the unconvinced or unfamiliar.

Expansion

A second focus of this wave was the gradual expansion of CTS into new empirical and theoretical directions. By mapping the (counter-)terrorism discourse and action of states such as Malaysia (Chan 2018), France (Bogain 2017), Turkey (Baser, Akgönül, and Öztürk 2017), and Pakistan (Feyyaz 2016), such work extended the Anglo-American emphasis of earlier CTS work on constructions of terrorism by political elites in the global North (Jackson 2005; Jarvis 2009b; Winkler 2012). Other literature offered a similarly expansive focus but through a reversing of the analytical gaze to concentrate on the political discourse of terrorist organisations themselves (Al-Dayel and Anfinson 2018; Lorenzo-Dus, Kinzel, and Walker 2018). Such work offered new opportunities for comparative exploration of different actors and their (counter-)terrorism language (Richards 2017). It also provided new insight into established knowledge on (counter-)terrorism such as, for instance, the “religious terrorism” thesis (Macdonald et al. 2018), thus complementing conceptual work in CTS with similar focus (Gunning and Jackson 2011). Work such as this, importantly, developed earlier calls to take CTS insight into geographical areas inadequately studied within terrorism research, such as, perhaps surprisingly, the Middle East region (Dalacoura 2009).

The empirical expansion of CTS’ second wave found complement in efforts to extend the field’s conceptual resources and remit. Thus, important work here brought CTS into closer contact with insight on racialised violences (Groothuis 2020)⁵ and gendered (in)securities, including in relation to elite terrorism discourse (Martini 2018) and everyday experiences (Innes and Steele 2015; Sjoberg and Gentry 2015). Complementary work developed CTS through insight from wider literatures on vernacular global politics (Oyawale 2022), including in relation to social media (Downing, Gerwens, and Dron 2022). Other scholarship still focused on resolving conceptual rather than thematic gaps within CTS, including its perpetuation of a state/non-state dualism inherited from more “traditional” work on terrorism (Tellidis 2011).

Work with more explicitly normative emphasis, meanwhile, set out to buttress this emerging field’s emancipatory ambitions by moving beyond the linguistic emphasis of much early CTS literature (Herring and Stokes 2011). Such efforts linked to increased experimentation with methodological tools previously neglected within the field such as body mapping techniques (Badurdeen, Aroussi, and Jakala 2023). More surprising, given CTS’ association with linguistic approaches (Holland 2016), was a growing engagement with quantitative techniques too (see Kirisci 2020; Powers 2014), one accompanied, perhaps, by a heightened recognition of the power of (counter-)terrorism numbers (Jarvis 2023, 724–727). Although not always explicit, many of these efforts to expand CTS’ conceptual and methodological purview were motivated by a deeper ambition to improve or reinforce critical terrorism studies, an ambition neatly illustrated in the opening sentence of Herring and Stokes’ (2011, 5) piece on historical materialism and CTS:

The central argument of this article is that Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) can be strengthened by scholarship that combines critical realism (CR) as its philosophical and methodological basis and historical materialism (HM) as its substantive theory of world politics.

(emphasis added)

Interdisciplinary learning

A third contribution – already adverted to above – was to make good on the first wave’s call for pluralism and interdisciplinarity in critical terrorism research. In this scholarship, we therefore encounter very explicit attempts at bridge-building between CTS and other critically inclined literatures, including cultural criminology (Hayward 2011), critical algorithm studies (Miller 2019), memory studies (Heath-Kelly 2016), and work on popular culture and world politics (Schmid 2023). Work such as this was important in highlighting synergies between an increasingly consolidated CTS literature, and debates or frameworks from related fields. Such scholarship built, frequently, on a claim to interdisciplinary conceptual adjacency that could facilitate an opening up of CTS research to related conversations – often with lengthier lineage – in a wide range of academic disciplines (see also, Buzan and Hansen 2009, 13–16).

Beyond exploiting conceptual synergies to expand CTS’ grammar and vocabulary, this work was important for improving CTS’ analytical agility – through the introduction of new conceptual tools – and for bolstering its resilience through addressing its omissions or silences. For some, indeed, such efforts would have value beyond the academy, too. An improved engagement with peace and conflict studies, for instance, was seen by Toros and Tellidis (2013) not only to offer a more sophisticated understanding of violence, but also to add new insight on responding to terrorism. In this sense, these interdisciplinary initiatives mobilised a logic of supplementarity in seeking to strengthen or add to CTS, rather than looking to problematise this work and its ambitions. And appeals to interdisciplinary strengthening, of course, represent something of an established tradition within terrorism studies more broadly (see Youngman 2020), despite the long-term co-habiting of political scientists, historians, psychologists, criminologists, and others therein (Gordon 2010).⁶

Summary

It is important to remember that CTS’ second wave was neither homogeneous nor devoid of internal disagreement. One important controversy surrounded the appropriate level of engagement with policymakers for those keen to escape the problem-solving ambitions of more traditional terrorism research (see Fitzgerald, Ali, and Armstrong 2016; McGowan 2016). Toros (2016b), for instance, argued in favour of CTS’ engagement with state actors, not least because such work might force confrontation with non-violent, even emancipatory, alternatives to normal counter-terrorism practices. Jackson (2016c, 120), in contrast, rejected the optimism of earlier CTS calls for practitioner engagement, arguing, retrospectively, that “there was always a potential contradiction, or point of tension, between the contrasting aspirations for policy relevance and access to power, and CTS’s commitment to emancipation and critical distance”.⁷

A second dispute concerned the emphasis on “state terrorism” within CTS research. As noted above, identifying and condemning instances of state terrorism offered, for many, a vital (if contested) opportunity for CTS to differentiate itself from more mainstream forms of terrorism research. As a consequence, this second wave witnessed several sustained efforts to document and unpack campaigns of state terrorism in various contexts (Blakeley 2009, 2018; Jackson 2008). Others, however, questioned the conceptual underpinnings of such work (Jarvis and Lister 2014), and its compatibility with the epistemologically interpretivist and ontologically discursive emphasis of other CTS scholarship (e.g. Jarvis 2009b). Such concerns linked to wider questions around CTS’ meta-theoretical consistencies, including that, “terrorism is treated as a discursive construction and independently existing state of affairs” by its advocates (Stump and Dixit 2012, 211 [emphasis added]; see also, Hülsse and Spencer 2008).

These disagreements speak, I hope, to my employment of the “three waves” metaphor as a heuristic for capturing developments in CTS, with the imprecision that this connotes. I am not, to reiterate, attempting here to posit a definitive “endpoint” to this second wave, not least where so much contemporary CTS work continues the efforts of that explored above. For my purposes, it is important to note that work discussed in this section generated considerable momentum, driving the CTS agenda forward and taking it into new conceptual, empirical, and methodological directions. Whatever one’s take on their virtues, the scope of such efforts is already apparent in the sheer range of scholarly initiatives taking stock of, or marking, this work. By 2016, CTS had its own academic handbook (Jackson 2016b), with a special issue of its core journal the following year confidently marking “10 years of critical studies on terrorism” (Jackson et al. 2017). At the time of writing, the dedicated CTS book series had expanded to some 39 volumes (Routledge, n.d.), with recent years seeing ever further efforts to drive the CTS agenda forward, including new collaborative projects promising “innovative ways of thinking about terrorism and counterterrorism [and] new ways of understanding how it can be studied” (Martini and Da Silva 2023b, 3).

Many of the contributions described above, moreover, also pursue more than one of the ambitions that I argued helped to cohere this second wave. Alone and collectively, this work was important in helping to render CTS a more interesting, and more relevant, academic endeavour, not least by pluralising its activities and introducing fresh perspective – including that acquired from other fields – to the insight and ambitions of first wave work. If marked by emerging debate and contestation, we might characterise this wave’s energy as a fundamentally expansive one that focused on clarifying and, indeed, asserting the importance of critical terrorism research. In this sense, its ambitions moved beyond the ground-clearing efforts of earlier contributions, concentrating instead on rendering CTS a more agile or robust paradigm better equipped to satisfy its own aspirations and respond to its critics. Such a spirit is nicely exemplified in the sub-title of the Hayward (2011) piece on CTS and cultural criminology mentioned above: “Some thoughts on how to ‘toughen up’ the critical studies approach.” It is apparent, too, in Van Milders’ (2020, 220) reflections on causal analysis, which again capture this strengthening ethos:

CTS should reclaim causal analysis as an essential element of its research agenda. This not only facilitates a more robust challenge against Orthodox Terrorism Studies’ conventional understanding of causation but also consolidates CTS’s endeavour of deepening and broadening our understanding that (re)embeds terrorist violence in its historical and social context.

(emphasis added)

Third wave: problematisation

The second wave of CTS, as we have seen, was motivated by an attempt to augment this work’s agility and robustness through taking it into new empirical directions, improving its analytical toolkits, and insulating CTS from potential or actual criticism. In this final section, I turn now to CTS’ most recent wave which has been characterised, I argue, by the emergence of a body of work motivated by a far more profound problematisation of CTS and its underpinning motivations, assumptions, blindspots, and biases. Although often sympathetic to CTS’ broad aspirations, this work appears more sceptical about its achievements than any of the literatures considered thus far. This is a scepticism that generates, in turn, questions about the project’s future directions of travel. Indeed, in more strident contributions to this work, we encounter less a sense of frustration at unfulfilled potential, and more a fear that CTS may even be contributing to the sorts of harm it set out to challenge. In Qureshi’s (2020) “call to the critical terrorism studies” community’, for instance, CTS’ increased appetite for policy engagement considered above risks overlooking, or worse perpetuating, the damage of counterterrorism work, such that “these scholars will in fact end up engaging in cementing systems of violence, or perhaps at best providing a plaster once the harm has been caused” (Qureshi 2020, 486).

The most pronounced concern within CTS’ third wave has been this literature’s perceived inability to engage critically with the politics of race and colonialism (Achieng and Oando 2023; Achieng, Oando, and Jackson 2023; Parashar 2018, 110). Such silences are linked, frequently, to CTS’ historical, geographical, and disciplinary origins. Chukwuma (2022, 400), for instance, points to the spatial and temporal particularities of CTS’ emergence in universities in the global North after 9/11. In so doing, he observes its lack of engagement with (postcolonial) scholarship that might help problematise the extent to which, “continuing discussions and theoretical reflections within CTS have remained insulated within a seemingly Eurocentric and post-9/11 orbit”. Ilyas Mohammed (2022, 420) elaborates here, situating both critical and “orthodox” terrorism research not only within conversations “mainly between terrorism scholars from global north countries based in global north institutions”, but also within “disciplines such as criminology, sociology, international relations, psychology, research methods and religious studies [that] have all been criticised for their coloniality.” Such claims speak to findings from Mohammed’s earlier investigation into authorship across terrorism journals which suggested that 81% of articles were authored by “scholars with Western heritage” (2021, 6), while scholars working in “Western countries” were found to have authored “97% more articles than their counterparts” (Mohammed 2021, 7). In work such as this, we encounter a real concern that the continuities between critical terrorism and more “traditional” terrorism research may be more profound than their differences which had been so important in motivating earlier waves of CTS literature.

Although still emerging, third wave CTS work – which looks set to make a notable impact on the field – is marked by two features distinguishing it from predecessors. First, is a departure from the enthusiastic expansionism that characterised second wave scholarship. The engagement, in this work, with postcolonial and other critical approaches is intended, crucially, to challenge rather than buttress CTS scholarship – to expose its limitations rather than protect these from external critique. In so doing, such scholarship calls for reflexive and meaningful confrontation with CTS’ own shortcomings and prejudices, and the origins thereof, rather than seeking to finesse CTS’ ability to confront the conceptual, methodological, or ethical shortcomings and prejudices of other work such as within “traditional” forms of terrorism research. This involves, although is not limited to, a turning of the critical gaze inwards, and a refusal to overlook CTS’ own complicities in conceptual, epistemological, corporeal, and other violences with their consequences for diverse subjects and referents. A recent piece by Laura Sjoberg (2024), for instance, argues that engaging with the range of violences in which CTS is complicit – while also recognising the impossibility of avoiding violence in our research – might be the pathway to securing CTS’ future relevance. Such claims, of course, form part of a wider critical moment across diverse scholarly fields – most prominently, perhaps, critical security studies (Howell and Richter-Montpetit 2020) – which have begun grappling in earnest with their own – racist, sexist, heteronormative, and other – origins, terminologies, assumptions, and biases.

A second, and related, departure has been a shift in focus from the primarily conceptual and empirical emphasis of second wave literature towards a far more overt concentration on the political questions that sit at the very heart of CTS’ ambitions. CTS’ failure to engage with, say, issues of race and postcolonialism is not simply or even primarily an analytical shortcoming for this work. It is a deeply, urgently, political failure that continues and contributes to the privileging of some violences, case studies, scholars, methods, and so on, while perpetuating the concomitant deprivileging or silencing of other violences, case studies, scholars, methods, and so on. As one exciting recent contribution put it, “[we are advocating] a self-reflective praxis that notes our own replication of exclusionary narratives and further, a praxis that opens itself up to the possibility of new dialogues in the struggle towards social change and revolutionary practice” (Finden and Yebra López 2024, 3). This forceful return to the politics of CTS – internal and external – both encourages and helps us to situate its own acts of inclusion and exclusion in relation to where CTS emerged – universities in the global North; when CTS emerged – the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and ensuing war on terror; and from what CTS emerged – including academic disciplines, epistemologies, and methods with colonial heritage.

To illustrate some of the differences between this emerging wave and its antecedents, it is helpful to compare some of the literatures I have been discussing here with an earlier article on race and racism in critical terrorism studies. Groothuis’ (2020) article, briefly noted above, is premised on a similar starting observation around CTS’ lack of engagement with race. Where Groothuis’ (2020) contribution is more helpfully situated within second wave research than alongside those explored here, however, is in its concern to engage with such questions in order to strengthen CTS rather than problematise it politically. Thus, we have, in Groothuis’ (2020) analysis, a more sympathetic reading of CTS’ omissions that includes the positing of understandable, and perhaps legitimate, reasons for its gaps (Groothuis 2020, 682). We also encounter a more sympathetic reading of CTS’ prior conceptual engagement with (here) race than in more critical third wave work (Groothuis 2020, 684–686). And, in keeping with other second wave scholarship, the earlier piece also contains a far more reconstructive approach to the resolution of CTS’ omissions, seeking to “ameliorate the current conceptual ambiguity in CTS by proposing definitions of race, racialisation, and racism” (Groothuis 2020, 681) that will “be useful for CTS scholars” (Groothuis 2020, 696), and in the process help to sharpen the tools of this “critically important” work (Groothuis 2020, 697). The point, in short, is that the difference between the two waves is more than one of simple empirical focus or analytical preferences. Even where there exists a shared thematic concern, and even where there exists a common diagnosis of CTS’ omissions, the second wave’s expansionist logic differs markedly from the problematising impulse indicative of this third wave’s more deconstructive engagements.

It is important here to highlight the recentness of third wave work within CTS. My concentration on engagements with race and colonialism, moreover, is illustrative of the literature’s focus rather than exhaustive. There is, of course, considerable scope for further future problematisation of CTS’ other omissions, including from queer theoretic and other approaches which are also beginning to shape CTS’ futures (see Njoku 2021; Schotten 2024a). It is noteworthy, however, that work in CTS’ third wave returns us, in a sense, to the profound concern with the politics of critique that sparked this field’s emergence some twenty years ago. And, yet, at the same time, it is striking how opportunities for critique in that earliest literature – the post-9/11 moment, the emergence of a global war on terror, the demonisation of Muslims, and so forth – have begun to be reconceptualised not as opportunities or provocations for critical intervention, but rather as constraints that threaten now to hold back the CTS project. In Rabbea Khan’s (2021) framing, for instance, CTS’ continuing attachment to the 9/11 attacks has only helped singularise that event, trapping “CTS into a self-imposed and limiting discourse that is focused on responding to – i.e. challenging and countering – Neo-Orientalist and Islamophobic discourse”, which has, in turn, “unintentionally reproduced the dominant connection between Islam and terrorism, generated by the dominant scholarship of Terrorism Studies” (Khan 2021, 498). This is why the “modern-colonial, Western inheritance” (Khan 2021, 500) of CTS, and its continued reproduction of this colonial language imply, or perhaps call for, a more radical remedy than the explicitly ameliorative emphasis in, say, Groothuis’ (2020) piece, or related second wave work.

Summary

In positing work such as the above as a third wave of CTS, an inevitable boundary question emerges. Is work explicitly critical of CTS’ emergence, assumptions, and (crucially) politics more adequately located within or outside that field, especially, perhaps, where it calls explicitly for the abolition of CTS itself (see Schotten 2024a)? My incorporation of it within CTS, in this discussion, is predicated on two immediate justifications. First is the issue of audience, with this work either directly and explicitly speaking to, and with, CTS scholar(ship) (see Qureshi 2020), or inferable as intending to do so, for reasons including its publication in CTS’ core journal (Khan 2021) or book series (Finden et al. 2024).

The second, more powerful, justification, is its emphasis on mapping and even facilitating CTS’ futures, even if the call is for something more radically discontinuous than that typical of second wave literature. Noteworthy here, I think, is that CTS’ primary counterpoint in this most recent, most critical, work is no longer “traditional” terrorism studies. In some instances, the latter’s limitations appear simply taken-for-granted and therefore require no further labouring. In others, the very distinction between CTS and “traditional” terrorism research is called into question, given conceptual and material connections between these two “worlds” (Finden and Yebra López 2024, 3). In either case, work in this wave tends to proceed by pointing toward other critical projects and approaches – especially, but not only, postcolonial and decolonial work – and the political potential they contain for critical scholars(hip). This is why the stakes of third-wave work may seem more profound, perhaps even existential, to CTS, not least given the importance of “ground-clearing” work for its earlier incarnations.

The status of work such as this as a third wave of CTS scholarship becomes more interesting, I think, when it explicitly positions itself as continuity or embodiment of CTS’ impulses and impetuses. Khan’s (2024, 3) recent piece, for instance, does this through positing a shared embrace of emancipation across postcolonial, decolonial, and critical terrorism research. Achieng and Oando (2023, 54) make a similar appeal to emancipation in their call for an indigenising of CTS through engagement with globally marginalised voices and epistemologies. Although politically appealing, such calls do risk some of the essentialist temptations of first-wave work discussed above where they allude to, or embrace, a very specific vision of CTS’ essence, identity, purpose or heart that is more static and less plural than that sketched in this article (see also, Finden and Yebra López 2024). The epistemological confidence here connects, perhaps, to the more forceful articulation of explicit normative claims in (some) recent CTS work than found in earlier contributions more obviously rooted in poststructural or constructivist traditions. Such dynamics, as in earlier waves, likely link to external events as much as the fortunes of wider academic frameworks or styles, and it remains to be seen how current violences in Gaza and beyond will shape CTS and other scholarships into the future. They also reflect and raise anew enduring questions that confront all scholarly projects, not least the attractiveness or otherwise of meta-theoretical or normative pluralism.

Conclusion

In this article, I set out to trace the development of CTS research over the twenty years or so since its emergence. My aims in so doing were to historicise CTS, its ambitions, assumptions, and arguments; to chart and take seriously its internal disputes and developments; and to reflect on the stakes of these developments and their importance for CTS’ pasts, presents, and futures. To do this, I proposed periodising CTS research around a (provisional, inevitably imperfect, but I hope illuminating) heuristic of three broadly sequential waves distinguished by their agenda-setting, elaborative, and problematising energies. To bring this discussion to a close, I now briefly reflect on the obvious question: where next? What happens to critical terrorism studies in light of the punctuated evolution charted above, and especially in the light of more strident criticism within its third wave?

This question “where next?” is an empirical one: where will CTS go in its future work? It is also a normative one: where should CTS go? And, in response, two answers immediately present themselves. First, perhaps CTS has now been so undermined by internal contestation and the exposure of its own foundations that it has lost, or will soon lose, the momentum generated in its earlier incarnations. As a result, it is possible that we will witness CTS’ diminishment, even closure, in the evolution of terrorism research, at which point retrospective work evaluating its accomplishments might begin in earnest. We might add here that the rising prominence of other frameworks with better established toolkits for, or legacies of, engaging with the issues now confronting critical terrorism research may render CTS, at least as historically envisaged, no longer necessary. The increased prominence of postcolonial and decolonial work in terrorism studies, and its own long history of engaging with race, for instance, might render those traditions, rather than CTS, a more satisfactory “home” for pursuing some of the questions being raised in its third wave.

Contrastingly, we might conceptualise CTS’ past, as I have attempted to do here, as one that has always been characterised by pluralism, discontinuity, and internal dispute. In this sense, perhaps CTS will continue to evolve in relation and response to the challenges of its critics: friendly and otherwise. Given the emphasis on reflexivity within critical terrorism scholarship, we might feel optimistic about its advocates’ willingness and ability to turn their critical gaze “inwards” and engage with the limitations – the violences – of CTS’ gendered, racialised, heteronormative premises. And perhaps this, in turn, will generate greater openness within CTS’ external gaze, facilitating the prospect of new conceptual, methodological, and empirical foci that are difficult to foresee absent the sort of endogenous reckoning sought by its third wave scholars. As the above discussion suggests, my own hope is that this is the future facing CTS. The prospect or reality thereof, however, will be a product of the sort of internal debate, wider contexts, and scholarly efforts considered throughout this article.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2023 annual conference of the Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group of the British International Studies Association, and to the Challenges to Democracy and the Public Sphere research group at Loughborough University. My thanks to attendees at both for their insightful and encouraging feedback. Sincere thanks also to Alexandre Christoyannopoulos for written feedback on an earlier draft, to Tim Legrand and Michael Lister for discussion on ideas contained here, to the two anonymous reviewers and editors of Critical Studies on Terrorism, and to many others within the critical terrorism research community whose work has shaped my own thinking. Any errors remain, of course, my own.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Lee Jarvis

Lee Jarvis is Professor of International Politics at Loughborough University, UK, Adjunct Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and an Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is author or editor of sixteen books and over fifty articles on the politics of security, including Times of Terror: Discourse, Temporality and the War on Terror; Anti-Terrorism, Citizenship and Security (with Michael Lister), and Banning Them, Securing Us? Terrorism, Parliament and the Ritual of Proscription (with Tim Legrand). Lee’s work has been funded by organisations including the ESRC, the AHRC, the Australian Research Council, and NATO.

Notes

1. Helmreich (2017) in a recent piece notes that the metaphor itself is gendered, with the ocean and its waves frequently coded female.

2. There are also, of course, no shortage of more sympathetic efforts to “test” and extend this framework (e.g. Rasler and Thompson 2009; Weinberg and Eubank 2010).

3. Policy relevance, as we shall see, becomes increasingly contested in CTS’ second wave.

4. For Jackson, first order critique works within the contexts of a target discourse, while second order critique proceeds from an external standpoint.

5. I return to CTS’ relationship with race in my discussion of its third wave below.

6. They build too on wider assumptions around interdisciplinarity’s value for the scientific enterprise (Jacobs and Frickel 2009, 48).

7. Such debates, once more, echo earlier (and ongoing) disagreement within critical security studies (e.g Bilgin 2001).