Description
Contemporary reckoning with the catastrophic outcomes of the post-9/11 era opens important questions for the future of counterterrorism policy. It also, we argue, raises significant issues for thinking through the future, priorities and purposes of terrorism and security scholarship. The article begins with two observations. First, recent years have seen considerable mainstreaming of ostensibly critical ideas on (counter)terrorism within political debate, media commentary, and – crucially – policy developments. Second, such ideas – including around the futility of 'war' on terror; the ineffectiveness of torture; the unstable framing of threats such as radicalisation; and the inefficiency of excessive counterterrorism expenditure – were widely dismissed as lacking in policy-relevance, even utopian, when articulated by critically-oriented scholars. This paradox, we argue, engenders three crucial questions: (i) How do we account for the movement of critical ideas into the mainstream?; (ii) What becomes of overtly critical scholarship when its ideas and recommendations achieve wider currency?; and, (iii) What does this mean for broader relationships between security research and policy?
