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Critical security research and the war on terror: from the margins to the mainstream?

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journal contribution
posted on 2025-05-08, 10:11 authored by Lee JarvisLee Jarvis, Michael Lister

Contemporary reckoning with the catastrophic outcomes of the post-9/11 era opens important questions for the future of counterterrorism policy. It also raises significant issues for thinking through the future priorities and purposes of security scholarship. In this article we make two core claims. First, recent years have seen considerable mainstreaming of ostensibly critical ideas on (counter)terrorism within political debate, media commentary, and – crucially – security policy. Second, such ideas – including around the futility of 'war' on terror; the ineffectiveness of torture; the unstable framing of threats such as radicalisation; and the inefficiency of excessive counterterrorism expenditure – were widely dismissed as lacking in policy-relevance, even utopian, when articulated by critically-oriented scholars. This development, we argue, raises important ontological questions around the ending of security paradigms such as the war on terror. It also prompts vital political, epistemological, and normative questions around the status of overtly critical scholarship when its ideas and recommendations achieve wider currency.

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • International Relations, Politics and History

Published in

European Journal of International Security

Volume

10

Issue

Special issue 1

Pages

150 -169

Publisher

Cambridge University Press on behalf of The British International Studies Association

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Author(s)

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.

Acceptance date

2024-09-26

Publication date

2024-11-27

Copyright date

2024

ISSN

2057-5637

eISSN

2057-5645

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Lee Jarvis. Deposit date: 30 September 2024

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