Introduction : 10 years of critical studies on terrorism

When the editors of Critical Studies on Terrorism wrote their introduction to the inaugural issue in April 2008, they noted that “terrorism” was a “growth industry” which generated a huge amount of social and political activity, and affected an extensive list of areas of social and cultural life (Breen Smyth et al, 2008: 1). They also noted that there was a yawning gap between the actual material threat posed by terrorists, and the level of investment and activity devoted to responding to it. They suggested that a central analytical task facing critical scholars of terrorism was therefore to explain “how such a small set of behaviours by such small numbers of individuals generates such a pervasive, intrusive and complex series of effects across the world” (Ibid). Lastly, they noted that the political, legal, cultural and academic context in which the journal was being launched was characterised by a very violent global war on terror, frequent moral panics and the political manipulation of terrorism fears, increasingly draconian anti-terrorism legislation, and the mass proliferation of academic and cultural terrorism-related texts