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........

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