An Introduction to Critical Terrorism Studies

E-International Relations  |  Lee Jarvis, Alice Martini

Critical terrorism studies (CTS) emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century as an academic framework challenging the United States-led "war on terror" and its associated military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. This scholarly movement sought to expose human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay and the systemic racial profiling of Muslim communities worldwide.

To address these underlying issues, researchers integrated diverse methodologies from anthropology, sociology, and gender studies to construct a cohesive, collective research community. This collaborative approach aims to dismantle orthodox terrorism research by interrogating state-sponsored violence, the selective application of the 'terrorist' label, and the problematic assumptions of radicalisation theory. As contemporary threats evolve to include far-right extremism, artificial intelligence, and the Hamas-Israel conflict, CTS provides policymakers and academics with accessible analytical tools to deconstruct threat inflation and biased counter-extremism models, thereby offering a more comprehensive understanding of global political violence.

Comment

The institutionalisation of the UK's Prevent Strategy demonstrates how modern state security doctrines have shifted from reactive threat mitigation to pre-emptive societal surveillance. This doctrinal evolution relies on contested behavioural indicators that conflate ideological dissent with operational radicalisation. Consequently, the reliance on these subjective metrics risks alienating British Muslim communities, ultimately degrading the local human intelligence networks essential for identifying actual tactical plots.

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