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Critical Studies on Terrorism
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subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rter20
Terrorism: a critical introduction, by
Richard Jackson, Lee Jarvis, Jeroen
Gunning and Marie Breen Smyth
Laura Sjoberg
a
a
University of Florida , Gainesville, FL, USA
Published online: 16 Dec 2011.
To cite this article: Laura Sjoberg (2011) Terrorism: a critical introduction, by Richard Jackson, Lee
Jarvis, Jeroen Gunning and Marie Breen Smyth, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 4:3, 476-478, DOI:
10.1080/17539153.2011.634709
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2011.634709
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476 Book Reviews
threatened by calls to violence. This result conrms earlier research ndings about media
as signicant inuence on news consumers fears of further terrorist attacks. While this
chapter is entitled Audience uncertainties, the results of the interviews seem to reveal
quite sophisticated participants who were capable of independent thought and judgement.
Thus, interviewees had a good understanding of what radicalisation means, and of those
who were said to know a radicalised person, 40% described a Muslim or Muslims. In
view of these and other results, one wonders whether the rather small pool of participants
comes close to a representative sample for what the authors were after, namely, to nd
out how ordinary citizens understand radicalisation (p. 104). While some demographic
information is provided in the appendix, there is none on the educational and professional
background of participants. The authors write that participants initially recruited were part
of the social networks of our team of ethnographic researchers, with further participants
recruited through snowballing (p. 17). This seems questionable for assembling a cross
section of regular citizens.
Altogether, though, this is a rst-rate book that furthers in signicant ways our
understanding of the interconnectivity between old-timers and newcomers in the new
media/communication ecology and howthese linkages inuence the information that inu-
ences how citizens think about radicalisation and the threat of terrorist violence. While
recommended for those involved in the study of terrorism, counterterrorism, media and
communication, the volume is equally informative for those working in the media and
public ofcials who deal with the causes and consequences of radicalisation.
Terrorism: a critical introduction, by Richard Jackson, Lee Jarvis, Jeroen Gunning and
Marie Breen Smyth, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 332 pp., 23.99 (paperback),
ISBN 978-0-23-0221178
Reviewed by Laura Sjoberg, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA.
Email: sjoberg@u.edu. 2011, Laura Sjoberg
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2011.634709
The very same day that I received Terrorism: A Critical Introduction in the mail to review,
I was walking across the University of Floridas campus to my car to go home, and I saw a
student in a T-shirt (courtesy of Dove World Outreach, of Quran-burning fame) that said
Islam is the Devil on the front and Stop the Devils Terrorism on the back. Of course,
there is no objectively digestible information or rational analysis in that students shirt, but
its very existence demonstrates the realness of terrorism as a social construction. How we
think about terrorism matters, especially, though not only, on university campuses.
As the authors of this book let readers know, in the twenty-rst century, terrorism, it
seems, is everywhere (p. 1), yet, even more than the scholarship that engages it, textbooks
which teach students about terrorism adhere to a certain theoretical and epistemological
orthodoxy blind not only to many of the complexities of acts of terrorism, but also to
the work that the concept itself does in shaping the political arena it is so often used to
describe. This book is a part of the Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) project, which seeks
to denaturalise the idea of terrorism and analyse it as a social construction, placing primary
importance not on the terrorist as subject, but on how we think about it as scholars, as
citizens and (most importantly for these purposes) as students. That in itself makes this
book an important contribution it seeks to make critical approaches to studying terrorism
accessible to students and largely succeeds in doing so.
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Critical Studies on Terrorism 477
The book, after a short introduction, is divided into two parts four chapters on the
study of terrorism and seven chapters addressing key issues in terrorism studies. In Part I
(The Study of Terrorism), Chapter 1 introduces the orthodox study of terrorism, with
justication for that label as well as a comprehensive yet readable introduction to the eld.
The second chapter then distinguishes CTS from the orthodoxy, particularly insomuch as
CTS does not simply assume that terrorism exists independently of the way we seek to
study and understand it (p. 2), a realisation that brings with it epistemological, ontolog-
ical and methodological commitments to reexivity, perspectival knowledge, praxis and
emancipation (see pp. 3840). The third chapter then explains the ways in which media
and nationalist accounts of terrorism culturally construct it, such that we come to draw
upon and reproduce a shared social discourse about terrorism as an ever-present existen-
tial threat to Western societies, an image that would be impossible to imagine without
those accounts (pp. 5152). The nal chapter in Part I, Bringing gender into the study
of terrorism, contends, with Caron Gentry and I, that any approach to studying terrorism
must take account of gender, of gendered stories, and of the interaction between actual and
sensationalist stories of gender to create dominant narratives (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007,
pp. 93, 205). It looks at gender-based violence, queer theory and feminist theory to argue
that it is important to address the issue of gender in a eld that has traditionally been rather
gender-blind (p. 93).
Part II moves from analysing terrorism studies to analysing terrorism per se. This
part impressively combines a high level of technical detail that would make it an elite
company even among traditional texts on terrorism and a vigilance about critical analysis
that makes it an excellent foil for those mainstream books that might otherwise be used in
terrorism studies courses. Chapters 5 (Conceptualizing terrorism) and 6 (Reconsidering
the terrorism threat) are devoted to combining rigorous presentations of orthodox (state
and scholarly) understandings of what terrorism is and how it threatens people with crit-
ical approaches that reassess both terrorisms conceptual boundaries and its degree of
threat to people (individually or collectively). Chapter 7, then, discusses different types
of terrorism, with particular attention to helping students understand that terrorism can be
committed as easily by a state as by non-state actors, as easily by us as by them and
as easily by those people we see as the good guys as by those people we see as the
bad guys. This analysis is reected in the impressively robust Chapters 8 (Understanding
state terrorism), 9 (The Causes of non-state terrorism) and 10 (Responding to non-state
terrorism). The book concludes with a chapter assessing the performance, meaning and
results of the war on terrorism of the early twenty-rst century.
This textbook provides a veritable wealth of information, and it manages to do so in a
form that is both relatively short and relatively easy to read. Its direct text is supplemented
by a number of inserted boxes which explain key terms and point out key arguments, as
well as by informative boxes of empirical examples, important scholarly points and the
like. Each chapter ends with a useful set of discussion questions, a manageable list of
recommended readings and suggested web resources for students. In addition to these
enhancements, the book contains a comprehensive glossary of terms and abbreviations
and an extensive reference list for students interested in engaging CTS (or terrorism stud-
ies more generally) in more depth. These study aids, which sometimes seem to dominate
the text, are on balance useful for unpacking complicated concepts for student use.
Largely, Terrorism: A Critical Introduction accomplishes its goals of bringing CTS to
a textbook and provides an excellent resource for teachers like myself who are tired of
assigning difcult-to-read articles to prove to students that there really are other perspec-
tives on terrorism out there, and it really is possible to think about terrorism critically.
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478 Book Reviews
I learned from reading this book, and I know that my students would too both empirically
and theoretically. While I have not taught with the book yet, I intend to do so despite
it being relatively pricey among terrorism studies textbooks. It is written at a level such
that I will likely use it in both upper-level undergraduate courses (as a key text) and early
graduate courses (as supplemental to articles in the eld).
Perhaps one of the ways that I would supplement this text in the classroom is with an
article that directly engages the way that contemporary media constructions of terrorism
(see Chapter 3) and justications for state counterterrorism (see Chapters 10 and 11) are
bound up with a particularly insidious reading of Islam in the West. While I understand
the authors desire (which I share) to make students aware that Islamist terrorism consti-
tutes a minority of terrorism, which has a long and storied history before the twenty-rst
century, I think it is important to acknowledge that how we think about terrorism (p. 3)
is currently intimately related to how we think about Islam. While the authors make ref-
erence to Islamophobia (p. 80) and orientalist discourses about terrorism (pp. 5859), the
issue receives relatively little attention given its inuence in culturally constructing terror-
ism (Chapter 3) as well as in shaping narratives of, and policy responses to, (perceived)
terrorism and terrorists. After all, the University of Florida student whose T-shirt thinks
about terrorism does so in a way that makes it essential to think about presentations of
religion generally and Islam specically.
That said, I think it would be difcult if not impossible to come up with a better com-
bination of learning tools and accessible writing critically engaging terrorism for students.
It challenges universal denitions and inherited knowledge when thinking not only about
what terrorism is, but about how to see it, act towards it, understand it and feel about it.
Rather than engage in claims to objectivity which ignore the subjective baggage which
shapes our understanding; over-generalizations which ignore historical and geographical
specicity; actor-specic denitions; and failing to separate the description and condem-
nation of terrorism (p. 112), this book recognises that not only terrorism but our readings
of it are inherently political and comes to evaluate the politics of it on a number of levels
including but not limited to on campuses and in classrooms. It shows politics to students,
all the while providing them with the facts that they expect when enrolling in a course on
terrorism specically or security more broadly. For those reasons, I think it is an excellent
book and a sorely needed addition to available classroom resources to teach terrorism.
Reference
Sjoberg, L. and Gentry, C., 2007. Mothers, monsters, whores: womens violence in global politics.
London: Zed Books.
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