Abstract
Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism” is an outstanding empirical analysis of the creation of terrorism discourse and terrorism expertise. The study is theoretically set in the sociology of culture that excels at linking the conditions of cultural production with the form and content of cultural products. It reveals also how the concept of terrorism has been developed and utilised over recent years. Specifically, Lisa Stampnitzky investigates the transformation of the idea of political violence into the concept of terrorism, and details the creation of expert knowledge, science, public comprehension, and policy in the United States. Despite the minor drawbacks to the theoretical and methodological approach, the book is highly recommendable because of its pioneering approach to the theme of terrorism as an object of knowledge.
The work starts with an introduction, where the author repeatedly states that she does not aspire to determine the one true meaning of either terrorism or terrorism expertise. However, Stampnitzky concentrates on discussing how the concept of terrorism is used empirically in the world; thereby, she shows how the notion is socially constructed and disseminated as defined by Pierre Bourdieu (p. 5).
Stampnitzky convincingly establishes the moment of transition from political violence to a new and distinct sort of problem – terrorism. This transition accompanied alternations, for example, in the idea of expertise and new sorts of experts' appearance. This is depicted not only as the linguistic transformation, but also as the ‘event’ in William Sewell's meaning of the term. The author explains that new networks were conceived by events, actors, relationships, and projects to produce terrorism as an emergent object in the early 1970s. There is also a noticeable attempt to delineate the stages of the development of terrorism expertise. The author clearly discusses a range of sources which were taken into consideration but regrettably does not substantiate why some sources were omitted. Moreover, she does not explain the choice of sources selection criteria.
Following this work Stampnitzky explores the concept of terrorism in the notions of morality, rationality, and politics to determine relations between knowledge and policy. She adopts explanatory, not descriptive goals. Later, she thoroughly examines the techniques of knowledge which were used by experts to make terrorism knowable and governable in the 1970s. In conclusion, the author precisely determines three types of methods of analysis employed to convert terrorism into knowledge projects, namely, to make it rationally understandable: legal rationality/diplomacy, risk management/calculability, and crisis management/routinization. These core modes of rationalization indicate various ways of comprehending terrorism as a difficulty, and they evoke different combinations of handling the problem of terror. Beyond this work, the types mentioned are characterised by placing them into existing structures of coping with this social problems. Nevertheless, the author does not substantiate why she divided the history of terrorism discourse into decades.
The following chapters dissect subsequent stages in the understanding of terrorism by experts and policymakers. Stampnitzky explains that in the 1980s terrorism was comprehended as an assault on civilization, which had to be restrained by way of war because of three episodes: the 1979 Jerusalem conference on international terrorism, the controversy surrounding the publication of Claire Sterling's 1981 work The Terror Network, and the 1981–1986 Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism congressional hearings (p. 111). As she explains, terrorism became a part of the Cold War and thereby the politicization of knowledge came after. This shift in thinking led to a reorientation in the governance of terror from international law and crisis management to outright use of military forces. However, the argument for this approach is not followed by a discussion of counterarguments. Admittedly the author outlines the main variants of the experts' ways of thinking about terrorism which are behavioural ideal types in Max Weber meaning; however, she passes over their antinomies.
The author explains that the new face of terrorism, namely, the ‘new terrorism’ as a fathomless, irrationality in both aims and actions appeared in the 1990s. She concentrates on explaining how new experts produced this new discourse. Following this, Stampnitzky determines contemporary conditions of terrorism governance to highlight distinctive features of the war of terror that emerged in response to 9/11. As well as the matching logic of pre-emption, she suggests that the war on terror was constructed on a pre-existing base of terrorism as a problem – a discourse which had been developed in previous decades (p. 185). She aptly concludes that expert and popular discourse on terrorism after 9/11 is distinguished by the active rejection of elucidation itself, suggesting that it has become a politics of ‘anti-knowledge’.
A significant contribution of the book consists in its outline of terrorism as an object of discourse. Although, Stampnitzky has written a thought-provoking work that is intelligent and inspiring, it has to be read critically. The drawbacks mentioned issue intellectual challenges to researchers interested in discourses of terror. In sum, this work is strongly recommended for those who study sociology, political sciences, and international studies because it opens up important avenues for future research in the study of terror and its construction in discourse.