Citation

Jackson R. Behav. Sci. Terrorism Polit. Aggres. 2013; 5(3): 225-228.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/19434472.2011.629581

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

I am grateful to Jacob Sump for his thoughtful engagement with my article, and to the editors of BS TPA for allowing me the opportunity to reply to some of the concerns and issues raised in Stumps comments. The publication of these kinds of intellectual exchanges is important for the continued development of the wider field of terrorism studies, not least because the nature and definition of the fumes central concept remains highly contested, and how we conceive of terrorism as an object of research will have a real and lasting impact on how we study, speak about and respond to it. In this case, it is also an important means of bringing together different sides of the field and allowing new kinds of questions and issues to be raised in a public scholarly forum. In this brief reply, I will direct my comments mainly to a few clarifications about the aims and purposes of the original article as a way of addressing some of the criticisms raised by stone. I would leave the more complex and broader ontological and epistemological issues to be debated by others for qualified. My purpose in writing the article and publishing it in this journal (rather than in Critical Studies on Terrorism, for example) was, to use Stumps terms, to try and find a middle way between duelist and monist approaches to the study of terrorism. That is, I tried to tentatively suggest a set of definitional anchorages and provide a definition which charts of course between the extremes of ontological essentialism and radical contingency. To my view, dualists take an ontologically essential view of what terrorism is, while monists are radically contingent in treating terrorism as a metaphor or social construction. In other words, my purpose was actually to try to open up and widen the field by, first, encouraging those terrorism scholars who adapt to a dualist ontology to be more reflexive in their use of categories and to a college historical and cultural contingency and therefore limitations of the term, and second, encouraging those critical scholars who adopt a monist position like stump himself, to refrain from throwing the baby out with the bathwater and retreating into a form of terrorism studies that restricts itself to the study of the discourses, metaphors, and representational practices of terrorism.... In addition, my intention in the article was to try and contribute some thoughts to a very specific but important problem within the wider terrorism studies view, That is the definitional problem, While at the same time, responding to critics of critical terrorism studies CTS who the wisdom and utility of retaining the term"terrorism" at all within our critical project. The article was certainly not intended to "clarify and advance CTS" as a whole or contribute to...