Description
Keywords: terrorism, Palestine, ethnography, critical IR, narrative
Despite the widespread securitization of ‘terrorism’ and its subsequent prominence within the ‘global War on Terror’, little attention has so far been paid to whether this term is equally salient globally. Put differently: is terrorism always a meaningful concept?
An important priority of ‘critical’ approaches to terrorism has been acknowledging and creating space(s) for discourses on terrorism from ever wider-ranging contexts, challenging the core assumptions of traditional terrorism studies. Such approaches centre difference in what terrorism means, often paying close attention to how such differences are constructed. Exploring terrorism’s many meanings often assumes that terrorism – however understood – will necessarily be meaningful – this paper aims to trouble this assumption.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine, conducted between 2012-2017, in this paper I explore a set of experiences and testimonies in which respondents challenged the very concept of ‘terrorism’. Specifically, I seek to highlight the silences, contestations, discomforts, and outright rejections of the term ‘terrorism’ and to situate such rejections within wider patterns of resistance, which position the ability to (successfully) deploy the term ‘terrorism’ as a mode of colonial control. Such multivalent rejections of terrorism are significant both for how they challenge a fundamental assumption within Terrorism Studies, and for what they tell us about the deployment of the term ‘terrorism’ as an act of politics or – in a colonial context – domination.
Via exploration of this data, I aim to do two things in this paper: firstly, to consider how refusing to engage with the term ‘terrorism’ denaturalises the concept’s salience and how silencing the term can constitute resistance in certain contexts. Secondly, to reflect on the methodological challenges associated with research on terrorism in contexts where its salience might not actually exist (or might exist differently). By examining the gulf between the ethnographic data generated at interview and the various observations outside of this context, I emphasis both the value and limitations of ‘ethnographic’ approaches to terrorism studies.
