Michael Stohl (editor) - Constructions of Terrorism: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Research and Policy

Scott Englund, Michael Stohl, and Richard Burchill

Constructions of terrorism emanate from a wide range of sources. Governments and international organizations create criminal laws and administrative lists defining who is a terrorist or what acts constitute terrorism. In society, discussions among its members and the press play a major role in how the words terrorism and extremism are used and applied, which in turn influences public understanding and government policy. Terrorist groups themselves contribute to these constructions through the rationales and justifications they use for their actions. Today we are seeing the continual reference to terrorism in everyday language, government policy, news reporting, and international diplomacy and from various groups and uprisings.

With the term being used to describe a wide range of violence, it is difficult to formulate effective government responses aimed at prevention and eradication. It further makes things difficult in societal settings for creating conducive environments for reconciliation. This volume seeks to establish appropriate research frameworks for understanding how we construct understanding(s) of terrorism. From the perspective of countering terrorism and extremism, if there is not a well-developed understanding of the object of these frameworks, they will not be effective.

Assessments of the literature of terrorism have revealed consistent and troubling shortcomings. Lum, Kennedy, and Sherley and Andrew Silke carefully examined studies of terrorism published over the previous decades and the great explosion of terrorism research after 9/11. The most germane findings about terrorism and counterterrorism research in their two studies help frame the contributions that have been reviewed here.

The first finding is that most of the publications on terrorism have been contributions by scholars who were relatively new to the subject. These scholars discovered terrorism as a problem, usually after a particularly These scholars had not invested the time to discover what research had already been doneeither by scholars engaged in the study or by previous groups of terrorists or policy makers responding to terrorism.

The second key finding is that most of the scholarly work on terrorism, reflecting the prevalent, one-off approach, has not been interested in the hard work of theory building. The vast majority of the scholars who have investigated terrorism have not approached their research with the purpose of developing theoretically grounded studies, and consequently they have not applied positivist research methods to its study. This has been a consistent finding of reviews of the state of the art for the past three decades. As Schmid and Jongman argued: Perhaps as much as eighty percent of the literature is not research-based in any rigorous sense.