We're All Terrorists Now: Critical—or Hypocritical—Studies “on” Terrorism?

This article reviews the new journal Critical Studies on Terrorism. The fashionable approach that this journal adopts towards the contemporary phenomenon of terrorism maintains that a “critical” and “self-reflexive” approach to the study of terrorism reveals a variety of shortcomings in the discipline. These range from a distorting over-identification with the Western democratic state perspective on terrorism to a failure to empathize with the misunderstood, non-Western, “other.” This review examines whether the claims of the critical approach adds anything, other than pedantry and obscurity, to our understanding of the phenomenon. It concludes that it does not.