| This dissertation is a sociological analysis of the production of terrorism expertise, from its origins in the early 1970s through the attacks of September 11, 2001. My findings are based upon multiple types and sources of data, including an original database of sponsors, participants, and themes at terrorism conferences; archival and published textual sources; and interviews with current and former researchers in the field. Using these sources, I trace the processes through which a field of terrorism expertise emerged and the nature of "terrorism" as a problem was negotiated.;The history of terrorism expertise allows us to analyze how objects of knowledge and claims to expertise are constituted at the boundary---itself increasingly contested--- between academic or scientific expertise and the domain of the state. I argue that "terrorism" has been constituted as meaningful through an ongoing conflict over expertise. Through conflicts over who gets to say what terrorism is, and is not, and why, would-be experts and their interlocutors constitute terrorism as a real, if unstable and ambiguously defined, object of analysis and investigation. Rather than a purely political or a purely analytical concept, expert discourse on "terrorism" must be understood as existing in an interstitial space between the realms of politics and science. This has had significant consequences for the sorts of expert discourses that tend to be produced and disseminated. Those who would address terrorism as a rational object, subject to scientific analysis and manipulation, produce a discourse which they are unable to control, as attempts at scientific discourse are continually hybridized by the moral discourse of the public sphere, in which terrorism is conceived as a problem of evil and pathology. |
