Description
The dramatic emergence of the Islamic State group (IS) in 2014 disrupted and revitalised the landscape of Western knowledge production on ‘terrorism’, ‘jihadism’ and ‘radicalisation’. A gold rush to construct ‘expertise’ on the group emerged across academia, think tanks, the media, and further afield. This paper uses Bourdieusian-inspired tools to reveal a deep contestation over who was (and crucially, was not) an ‘ISIS expert’, and as to what exactly constitutes epistemic authority on the group. It proceeds to examine the struggles for expert recognition amongst IS knowledge producers and consumers, including contested sources of legitimisation, diverging strategies aspiring experts undertake, and the impact of the spaces where these struggles occur. Finally, it places these findings on the state of IS expertise within the context of existing accounts of terrorism expertise, largely situated post-9/11, but before the rise of IS, in a different political, media and technological context of knowledge production and circulation. In doing this, it unpacks what the IS-era tells us about the continuity and change in the processes of constructing expertise and the attempts to ‘discipline terror’ (Stampnitzky, 2013).
