Description
Recent high-profile attacks have drawn public attention to the rise of ‘far-right’ terrorism. This has led to an increased scholarly and policy attentiveness to the dangers posed by this form of political violence. Yet, as this article argues, it is not possible for the discipline of terrorism studies to merely integrate the far-right as another case study. Indeed, the challenge for the discipline is that the current moment reveals an uncomfortable and troubling silence concerning the importance of far-right, pro-state terror, and its absence from the histories we tell of contemporary terrorism. A survey of terrorism studies scholarship reveals that many of the core analytical frameworks mobilised by the discipline, and taught to students in specialist modules, have little to say about this form of violence. Developing a number of under-utilised empirical cases of far-right, pro-state terror, this article argues there is a pressing need to reconceptualise the histories we tell regarding the evolution and conceptualisations of contemporary terrorism. Attentiveness to the role that far-right, pro-state terrorism has played throughout modernity enables the article to challenge some of the assumptions contained within these pervasive frameworks, problematizing disciplinary binaries between non-state and state-terrorism, and historicisations of ‘old’ and ‘new’ terrorism.
