Description
This article builds on a 2021 special issue of Critical Studies on Terrorism: in which I argued that critical terrorism studies had paid insufficient attention to the discursive histories of ‘terrorism’, and in which I advanced 1970s Northern Ireland as an important context for understanding the ‘genealogy’ of contemporary security practice (Livesey 2021). Content analysis of the Hansard archive of parliamentary debates suggests that the term ‘terrorism’ first entered British political discourse in the mid-1970s, in the context of anxious deliberations about the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’. Specifically, around the year 1974: a year which featured 20 times more mentions of ‘terror*’ per million words of parliamentary debate than the seventy-year average, 1900-1970. In this article, I mix quantitative corpus linguistics and qualitative discourse analysis to explore this mid-1970s explosion of concern about ‘terrorism’. I suggest the concept, which emerged as a way of disciplining non-state violence, gained traction precisely because it spoke through an established vocabulary of concepts relating to Northern Ireland. Namely, concepts which frame Northern Irish politics as ‘deviant’ or ‘abnormal’: synchronising productively with foundational perspectives on terrorism, as an equally exceptional or abnormal form of violence. The article contributes to the fields of critical security studies and critical discourse studies. Firstly, by addressing shortcomings in attention to historical cases in critical analyses of security discourses/practices. Secondly, by revealing the importance of continuity in the evolution of such discourses: which don’t merely emerge overnight, but which tend to succeed when they speak through a language of familiar concepts.
