Description
Recent high-profile attacks have drawn public attention to the threat of right-wing terrorism. This has led to an increased scholarly and policy attentiveness to the dangers posed by this form of political violence. Within the discipline of terrorism studies, right-wing terror is being discussed as a potential ‘5th wave’, following Rapoport’s analysis of the ‘4 waves’ of modern terrorism.
Yet, as this article argues, it is not possible for terrorism studies to merely integrate the far-right, or what I frame as ‘terror for the state’, as another case study. Indeed, the challenge for the discipline is that the current moment reveals an uncomfortable and troubling silence concerning the historical importance of terrorism for the state, and its absence from the historiographies of contemporary terrorism.
Developing under-utilised empirical cases, this article argues that first, there is a pressing need to reconceptualise the histories we tell of contemporary terrorism, beyond a focus only on stories of clandestine, ‘rebel’ organisations. And second, that attentiveness to terrorism for the state throughout modernity challenges the conceptual boundaries of the discipline itself, drawing attention to significant differences between disciplinary accounts of terrorism and that often found with right-wing terror, notably concerning their relationship to both state and society.