The Marginalisation of Critical Terrorism Studies
Olawale Ayansola
The discomfort became noticeable in my first quantitative methods seminar. The readings that week were regression tables and research designs, and how a good research question was measured by whether it could be operationalised, tested, and falsified with data. I found myself asking, quietly then insistently: what happened to the questions not measurable this way, about who names violence and what it means? I was not told such questions were wrong, only that they belonged elsewhere, to another discipline, another tradition. It was in that seminar room that I first understood Critical Terrorism Studies not as an abstract debate about epistemology, but as a lived experience of what a discipline chooses to hear, make visible and what it chooses not to.
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This personal observation points to a broader and consequential puzzle in scholarly inquiry about terrorism. Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) – a body of scholarship that questions the assumptions, politics, and power relations embedded in mainstream terrorism research – has grown significantly since the early 2000s. It has produced rigorous, theoretically sophisticated work that challenges how states define terrorism, who gets labelled a terrorist, and whose violence is considered legitimate. Yet CTS remains largely invisible in the leading journals of U.S. International Relations and Political Science. It is not cited in the American Political Science Review (APSR). It does not appear in International Security or Perspectives on Politics. Its foundational texts circulate almost exclusively within a small network of critical and European-oriented journals. The question this article addresses is simple: why? I argue that CTS’s marginalisation is not primarily a product of intellectual inadequacy. Rather, it results from a self-reinforcing system of disciplinary gatekeeping, epistemological hierarchy, funding structures shaped by proximity to state power, and a political climate that has, since 9/11, made critical inquiry into terrorism professionally risky. The article draws on evidence from journal citation patterns, doctoral training research in the U.S., funding structures, and the sociology of the terrorism studies epistemic community itself.
What Is Critical Terrorism Studies, and Why Does It Matter?
To understand why CTS is marginalised, it is important first to understand what it is and what it claims. CTS emerged in the early 2000s as a reaction to what its proponents saw as the fundamental limitations of orthodox terrorism studies (OTS). The mainstream approach, dominant especially in the United States, tends to treat terrorism as an objective, measurable phenomenon. It accepts state definitions of who counts as a terrorist, focuses primarily on non-state political violence, and orients itself toward practical policy recommendations for governments. It is, in the expressive content of IR theory, a ‘problem-solving’ tradition as it takes the existing political order and tries to make it work better (Cox, 1981).
CTS, by contrast, asks different types of questions. It asks who decides what terrorism is, and why some forms of violence, including state violence, are excluded from the definition. It examines how the language of terrorism has been used historically to delegitimise political opponents and justify repressive policies. It draws on critical theory, post-structuralism, constructivism, feminism, and postcolonial thought to argue that knowledge about terrorism is never neutral; it is always produced within specific political and institutional contexts that shape what can be said and what remains unsayable (Jackson, 2007; Breen-Smyth, 2007; Jackson, Smyth, and Gunning, 2009).
The foundational texts of CTS, Jackson’s (2005) Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counterterrorism, the launch of the journal Critical Studies on Terrorism in 2008, and key methodological contributions from scholars like Jarvis (2009) and Gunning (2007), established the field as a coherent and growing research programme. CTS does not claim that terrorism does not exist or that political violence is not serious. It claims that how we study it, and whose interests that study serves, are questions the mainstream tradition has consistently refused to ask. That refusal, CTS scholars argue, is itself a “political act.”
The Epistemological Divide: Two Disciplines Talking Past Each Other
One of the most important reasons CTS remains marginal in the U.S. academy is that it speaks a different intellectual language from the dominant tradition in American Political Science, and that language is not considered equally valid. American IR and Political Science have been historically shaped by positivist and behaviouralist assumptions: the belief that social and political phenomena can be studied with methods borrowed from the natural sciences, that rigorous knowledge requires measurement and quantification, and that the goal of research is to produce generalisable, predictive theories (Hoffmann, 1977; Lapid, 1989). These assumptions were not inevitable. They reflected specific historical choices made by American social scientists during the Cold War, when the discipline became closely aligned with national security institutions and the intellectual prestige of the natural sciences (Oren, 2003).
The consequences for the method have been dramatic. Bennett, Barth, and Rutherford (2003) found that between 1965 and 1975, the proportion of articles in the APSR using statistical methods rose from 40% to over 70%, while formal modelling increased from zero to 40%. Qualitative and interpretive work was progressively pushed to the margins of the discipline’s most prestigious venues. Schwartz-Shea’s (2003) findings on doctoral training reinforce this pattern: almost every Political Science PhD programme in the United States requires statistics, while very few offer, and even fewer require, courses in qualitative or interpretive methods. Graduate students are being trained for a version of Political Science that does not reflect the full range of serious scholarship that exists in the field.
CTS falls on the wrong side of this divide. Its primary methods, such as discourse analysis, genealogy, ethnography, and narrative analysis, are precisely those that have been systematically devalued within American Political Science. When CTS manuscripts reach the desks of reviewers at leading U.S. journals, they are often evaluated by scholars trained entirely within a positivist tradition who may find these methods insufficiently rigorous. The burden of proof falls disproportionately on CTS scholars, who must justify their epistemological premises before they can even make their substantive argument. Orthodox terrorism scholars bear no equivalent burden, because their assumptions are treated as the invisible baseline of the discipline.
Journal Gatekeeping and the Silence of Citation
Perhaps the most concrete evidence of CTS’s marginalisation is what can be found, and what cannot be found, in the citation patterns of leading U.S. journals. A review of the APSR, Perspectives on Politics, and International Security between 2008 and 2025 finds no evidence of serious engagement with work published in Critical Studies on Terrorism, the field’s dedicated journal, founded by Jackson and other prominent critical theorists in 2008. None of these leading outlets has comprehensively engaged with CTS critiques of orthodox terrorism studies. CTS foundational works circulate almost entirely within their own network, such as Critical Studies on Terrorism, Security Dialogue, European Journal of International Relations, and Millennium. This is not merely a matter of relevance or quality; it reflects a well-documented pattern in the discipline. Bennett et al. (2003) found that the APSR mostly cites work from journals sharing its methodological orientation, and that International Security and Journal of Conflict Resolution, both mainstream journals, rarely cited each other even though they share positivist and rationalist assumptions. The citation wall between CTS and mainstream security journals is, if anything, even more impermeable, because it is reinforced not only by methodological difference but by deeper epistemological incompatibility.
What makes this particularly significant is that even criticism of CTS takes place within CTS’s own journal. Horgan and Boyle’s (2008) well-known critique that CTS was built on superficial readings and misinterpretation of the orthodox literature, A Case Against Critical Terrorism Studies, was also published in Critical Studies on Terrorism rather than in the APSR or International Security. The mainstream did not even engage to rebut CTS; the critical conversation simply does not cross the boundary. As a result, CTS is effectively invisible to the graduate students, hiring committees, and funding bodies that shape the reproduction of the discipline in U.S. political science and international relations. This reflects how prestige and gatekeeping work together in academic disciplines. The journals that carry the most professional weight, such as the APSR, International Security, and International Organisation, set the standard for what counts as valid scholarship. Their editorial boards and reviewer pools are drawn overwhelmingly from scholars embedded in the positivist tradition. Work that does not fit this mould is less likely to be accepted, less likely to be cited, and therefore less likely to contribute to the professional trajectories that matter in U.S. Political Science, such as tenure decisions, grant applications, and departmental prestige rankings.
Funding, Policy Proximity, and Incentives Design
Beyond journal gatekeeping, the funding environment that shapes terrorism research in the United States has powerfully reinforced CTS’s marginalisation. After 9/11, federal investment in terrorism research expanded dramatically, channelled through the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the RAND Corporation, and programmes like the Minerva Research Initiative, which explicitly links social science funding to national security priorities.
These funding structures create powerful incentives to pursue research that is legible to state agencies: research that accepts government definitions of terrorism, focuses on operationalizable policy recommendations, and does not challenge the legitimacy of counter-terrorism practices. CTS, built on the opposite premise, that state definitions of terrorism are politically constructed and that counter-terrorism policies deserve critical scrutiny, is structurally unsuited to this funding environment. It is not simply that CTS scholars fail to win these grants; the nature of CTS research makes it inappropriate to even apply for them.
This creates what Jackson (2007) and Gunning (2007) identify as a perverse dynamic: OTS’s proximity to state power is treated as evidence of real-world relevance and practical impact, while CTS’s critical distance from state power is treated as evidence of irrelevance or political bias. The discipline’s standard of ‘policy relevance’ functions as an ideological filter that appears neutral but systematically excludes paradigms that question the state’s framing of political problems. The close relationship between terrorism scholarship and national security institutions, which Oren (2003) traces back to the Cold War origins of American Political Science more broadly, ensures that this filter operates with particular force in the post-9/11 environment.
The Political Climate and the Cost of Critique
The funding environment does not operate in isolation. It is embedded in a broader political climate that, since 9/11, has made critical inquiry into terrorism professionally and socially costly in the United States in ways that have no real equivalent in the British or European academic contexts where CTS has flourished. The post-9/11 period produced intense social pressure toward intellectual conformity around the ‘war on terror’ narrative. Academics who questioned that narrative, or who sought to understand the political conditions that produced terrorism without endorsing it, found themselves accused of sympathising with violence or undermining national security. The Ward Churchill controversy in 2005, in which a University of Colorado professor faced calls for dismissal over his political writings on 9/11, served as a cautionary tale for the discipline. Self-censorship among U.S.-based scholars became, in effect, a rational professional strategy (Stampnitzky, 2013). This political climate maps onto a deeper structural feature of U.S. security studies: the dominance of perspectives broadly compatible with liberal internationalist or neoconservative security frameworks, and the corresponding marginalisation of more radical critiques. CTS scholars, whose work challenges not just individual policies but the entire epistemological and ethical framework through which terrorism is studied, face even greater exposure.
The contrast with European academia is instructive. In the UK, Scandinavia, and Australia, there has been considerably more institutional space for critical security studies, post-structuralist approaches to IR, and direct engagement with the politics of counterterrorism. It is not coincidental, therefore, that the institutional homes of CTS, such as Cardiff, St Andrews, Manchester, and Aberystwyth, are almost exclusively British, or that the founding scholars of the field are overwhelmingly UK-based or European-based. In the United States, there is no equivalent institutional home for CTS at any major IR department. Even Mearsheimer and Waltz (2013, 3-5) argue that American international relations has become too focused on hypothesis testing and statistical methods, without strong theoretical foundations, describing this as a ‘road to ruin.’ Similarly, Sylvester (2013) argues that the IR discipline is capable of genuine renewal when it opens itself to non-mainstream scholarship, such as feminist IR, that takes concrete human experience seriously as a source of theoretical insight. This pattern helps explain why critical approaches like CTS continue to be ignored by the mainstream.
Diversity at the Edge, Uniformity at the Centre
Phillips (2025) offers a useful lens for understanding this pattern in his examination of the sociology of the terrorism studies epistemic community. His findings show that while the field as a whole has become more diverse in terms of the scholars who publish within it, the small group of the most productive and most-cited researchers remains concentrated in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel, and is still predominantly male, with men making up approximately 82% of this core group. This is a revealing pattern: a field can appear more diverse at its periphery while its most influential voices remain remarkably homogeneous at its centre.
Stump and Dixit (2013) make a related argument in advocating for alternative methods in terrorism research, such as discourse analysis, ethnography, critical theory, and social network analysis, precisely because these approaches treat terrorism not as a fixed, objective phenomenon to be measured, but as something continuously shaped by politics, language, and social context. Their intervention reflects a recognition that methodological uniformity at the centre of the field is not simply an aesthetic preference; it is a mechanism that determines whose questions get asked and whose frameworks get validated.
The 2025 opening remarks of Patrick Thaddeus Jackson at the Interpretive Methodology Workshop in Rhode Island are illustrative here. Jackson noted that the workshop had been consistently marginalised within the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, denied a space and sidelined from the main programme, even as regional bodies like the ISA North-East have been more welcoming to critical and interpretive scholars. The geographic and institutional concentration of influence within the discipline does not merely reflect existing hierarchies; it actively reproduces them.
Is the Marginalisation of CTS Deserved?
It would be intellectually hypocritical not to acknowledge that CTS has real weaknesses alongside its genuine strengths. Horgan and Boyle’s (2008) critique that CTS is better at deconstruction than construction, more skilled at critiquing orthodox terrorism studies than building its own rigorous research programme, contains a legitimate point. Stump (2016) has similarly acknowledged, from within the CTS tradition, that the field has been comparatively underdeveloped on questions of research design and method, having focused predominantly on epistemological critique. Some CTS studies are written in dense theoretical language that limits their reach beyond a small community of specialists, undermining the very goal of making terrorism research more publicly accountable.
These are genuine challenges, but they do not justify systematic exclusion from the mainstream of the discipline. Weaknesses in a research programme are grounds for dialogue and refinement, not for the kind of categorical silence that the citation evidence reveals. The APSR’s failure to comprehensively engage with any CTS argument between 2008 and 2025 cannot be explained by the quality of CTS scholarship alone; it reflects institutional and epistemological gatekeeping that operates independently of scholarly merit. As Stump (2016) suggests, CTS needs a more explicit and developed methodological foundation, and that development is more likely to happen through engagement with the broader discipline than through continued mutual isolation.
The broader lesson connects to Jackson’s (2016) argument that IR as a discipline should not be anchored to a single scientific method. Drawing on a Weberian framework, he identifies four distinct research philosophies: neo-positivism, critical realism, analyticism, and reflexivity, each with its own legitimate strengths and appropriate domains of application. The problem is not that U.S. Political Science has chosen to emphasise certain methods; the problem is that it has done so while pretending that this choice is neutral and universal, rather than acknowledging it as one legitimate path among several.
Conclusion: Who Gets to Decide What Counts as Knowledge?
CTS remains marginalised not because it lacks intellectual substance, but because the systems that determine what counts as legitimate scholarship, journal hierarchies, citation networks, funding structures, doctoral training, and the political climate systematically disadvantage interpretive, post-positivist, and critically oriented research. Each of these mechanisms reinforces the others, creating a feedback loop in which marginalisation produces further marginalisation: fewer CTS scholars placed in elite U.S. departments means fewer CTS voices on editorial boards and hiring committees, which means continued exclusion from leading journals, and continued invisibility to students and funders.
The implications extend beyond CTS itself. A discipline that cannot interrogate its own assumptions about terrorism, state violence, and political legitimacy is poorly equipped to understand the phenomena it claims to study. When the standard of ‘policy relevance’ is effectively defined by proximity to state power –as Oren (2003) suggests has long been the case in American Political Science – the result is knowledge that confirms rather than challenges the frameworks that produce policy failures in the first place.
The path forward requires deliberate structural change: greater methodological pluralism in journal editorial standards, inclusion of CTS texts in standard terrorism studies curricula, funding bodies operating independently of security establishment priorities, and sustained transatlantic intellectual exchange between U.S. and European IR epistemic communities. As Chukwuma (2022) notes, the challenge is compounded by the fact that even within CTS, the Global South, which bears the heaviest burden of terrorism and counterterrorism, remains dramatically underrepresented; of 54 articles examined in Critical Studies on Terrorism, only four engaged substantively with postcolonial perspectives. Martha Finnemore’s (1998) observation about states is very instructive in this regard: before states can determine what they want, they have to understand who they are. The same is true of academic disciplines. Before U.S. IR and Political Science can decide what kind of knowledge they want to produce about terrorism, they need to reckon honestly with who they are, which interests they serve, which voices they amplify, and which ones they silence. Gatekeeping, isolation, and hierarchy are not neutral academic processes. They are political acts with intellectual consequences, and until they are recognised as such, CTS will remain at the margins, not because it has nothing to offer, but because the mainstream has not yet chosen to listen.
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Olawale Ayansola is a doctoral researcher in Political Science at the University of Alabama. His research focuses on counterterrorism policy and practice in the developing world, alliance politics, political violence, and critical studies on security/terrorism. He holds a Master of Science in International Conflict and Cooperation from the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom and a Bachelor of Science degree in Political Science from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. You can find him on LinkedIn here.