Critical terrorism studies and numbers: engagements, openings, and future research

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a growing multi-disciplinary engagement with the importance of quantification across social, political, and economic life. In this article, I seek to build on this work by offering the first sustained exposition of the significance of numbers for critical scholarship on (counter-)terrorism. Three arguments are made. First, there is evidence of greater appetite for engaging with numbers in critical terrorism studies scholarship than might be intuited, given this work’s widespread association with linguistic and discursive approaches. Second, notwithstanding the above, existing scholarship in this area tends to be limited, fragmentary, and characterised by illustrative or exemplary engagement. And third, there is significant opportunity to move towards a more substantive critical engagement with (counter-)terrorism numbers through inspiration from cognate debates within sociology, rhetorical studies, and critical security studies. To address this, the article therefore provides a new research agenda for critical terrorism studies scholarship and quantification, organised around five themes: (i) the production of (counter-)terrorism numbers; (ii) the form taken by (counter-)terrorism numbers; (iii) the mobility of numbers across sites of (counter-)terrorism knowledge; (iv) the political and other functions of (counter-)terrorism numbers; and (v) the reception of (counter-)terrorism numbers by relevant audiences.