Description
This roundtable brings together the co-editors and contributors of a forthcoming Special Issue in Critical Studies on Terrorism entitled Abolition, Decoloniality, and Criticality: Can Critical Terrorism Studies remain “critical”?. This special issue interrogates what it means to be ‘critical’ when we study ‘terrorism’ in the modern-colonial world. Amidst a current decolonial turn, interrogating how we study ‘terrorism’, a concept deeply embedded and entrenched in racial, gendered, and colonial structures, becomes all the more important and urgent. Whilst the field of Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) has spearheaded the critical study of terrorism, recent scholarship in both ‘critical’ as well as more orthodox approaches to ‘Terrorism Studies’ continues to perpetuate some of the same harmful biases and tropes that CTS originally sought to challenge and do away with. Discussing the challenges and possibilities of abolitionist, decolonial, and postcolonial approaches, as well as the overarching question of ‘criticality’ in CTS, the question of ‘where does CTS go next?’ is central to this project. This roundtable would bring together some of the contributors to the Special Issue who lead a major intervention in response to this central question, and to the values and priorities we believe should be at the heart of a truly ‘critical’ study of terrorism that contests global sites of power and knowledge production.
