Abstract This paper explores how inquiries and internal reviews into terrorist attacks make them “domestic,” by discursively separating political violence from its international, political, and historical context. By undertaking fact-finding work, inquiries apply a technocratic, micro-level focus to the days, hours, minutes, and seconds before an atrocity—jettisoning the international and historical factors, which may otherwise have appeared relevant. The violence is produced as an “event,” discrete in its nature, and disconnected from international politics, foreign policy, and international history. Inquiries and internal reviews tend to create knowledge, instead, around “missed opportunities” for security professionals to have intervened in the short-term or missed chances for information sharing between frontline agencies and counter-terrorism officers. They then draw a linear connection to the technocratic solutions, which would close off the potential for a repeat occurrence, recommending adjustments to communications technologies used by the emergency services, training for event staff, or additional reporting requirements for stockists of chemicals or vehicles that have been used in recent attacks. The paper explores inquiries and reviews into the 2017 terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom.
Charlotte Heath-Kelly (Wed,) studied this question.