Description
This paper is about making sense, or rather making nonsense, of the messy process of becoming the ‘deradical’. It is about emotions, embodiment, and deradicalisation. Above all, this paper ‘messes’ with the ordering ambitions in the production of knowledge within the (critical) study of terrorism and counterterrorism. Existing ways of knowing try to control (and solve) terrorism and its countermeasures by forming them into neat units of analysis. Emotion, affect and sensation have come to play a vital role in this quest and desire to ‘make sense’, not least in the conception and enactment of deradicalisation. While, at the same time, these phenomena eschew this kind of stability. By continuing to assume ‘making sense’, instead of ‘making nonsense’, as something desirable, the messiness (the multiplicious, ambiguous, ambivalent, relational, etcetera) of these phenomena is lost or displaced into ‘otherness’. This paper attempts to disrupt and reshape the ordering ambitions in the (critical) study of terrorism and counterterrorism. It does this by engaging with the deradicalisation phenomenon through embodied-reflexive ethnographic fieldwork of lived experiences among deradicalisation practitioners and (former) radicals and the poststructuralist, posthumanist, and queer onto-epistemologies of Karen Barad and Gilles Deleuze. In contrast to previous work, this paper does not aim to resolve the messiness, including the ambiguous, ambivalent, and multiplicious, but tries to make these other(ed) realities visible.
Keywords: Deradicalisation, emotions, critical terrorism studies, poststructuralism, posthumanism, onto-epistemology, embodied-reflexive ethnography.
