Decolonising Global North terrorism studies in Southeast Asian Muslim-majority countries

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the call to decolonise academia has garnered significant momentum in some Global North and Global South countries and settler states. This shift reflects a growing recognition among scholars that academia perpetuates various forms of coloniality. However, terrorism studies scholars, particularly those in Global South countries, have largely refrained from addressing the need to decolonise the discipline and the broader terrorism industry. This situation is troubling given the role that ‘Global North terrorism studies'–and, by extension, the terrorism industry–plays in supplying Northern-centric intellectual frameworks that work to ‘civilise’ the ‘other,’ support settler colonial projects, and suppress Indigenous and alternative perspectives. This article draws theoretical and methodological insights from the Latin American School of Decoloniality and the Southeast Asian School of Autonomous Knowledge. It seeks to start a conversation among terrorism studies scholars in Southeast Asian Muslim-majority countries on the need to develop an ‘independent and alternative’ terrorism studies discipline based on epistemologies and methodologies from their region to what I call Global North terrorism studies.