ABSTRACT
Talking to terrorists remains a taboo. The demonization and consequential isolation of the terrorist actor led Schmid and Jongman to conclude that much of terrorism research is no more than “counterinsurgency masquerading as political science.”1 Certainly, knowledge and power are interlinked, as “knowledge is always for someone and for some purpose.”2 Proponents of a critical turn in terrorism studies advocate the deconstruction of for whom and for which purpose knowledge that may be hegemonic is produced. Alexander George names scholars who participate in the remaking of the discipline of “terrorlogy,” mentioning academics such as Paul Wilkinson and others joining “in this enterprise.”3 Richard Jackson pinpoints the connection between terrorism scholars and state sources of power, highlighting the embedded nature of many “experts,”4 the RAND Corporation being one of the hatcheries of the current and future generations of such embedded experts.5 This “terrorism industry” led Edward Herman and Gerry O’Sullivan to depict the West’s labeling of terrorists as reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984. Tellingly, scholars such as Noam Chomsky find their place on the list of excluded terrorism experts in the appendix of Herman’s and O’Sullivan’s book.6 The criticism eventually verges on conspiracy theory notions, when the same two argue in “ ‘Terrorism’ as Ideology and Cultural Industry” that
it is the West and Western interests that have pushed “terrorism” to the forefront, not the terrorists. They have done this because they wanted to use terrorism as an ideological instrument of propaganda and control. This mission of “terrorism” has been accomplished with outstanding success.7
