A critical study of space in the geopolitics of terrorism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article theorises epistemologies of ‘space’ in critical studies on terrorism, expanding the research agenda beyond the straitjacket of historicism and discourse-centrism. It traces two theoretical approaches: 1) rescaling terrorism as mundane, situated and private, and 2) treating the ‘space’ of terrorism as a liminal zone between potentiality and anticipatory space-making. This critical spatial lens offers new insights to CTS. In terms of securitisation, this perspective is attentive to the ‘space of securitisation’, the dynamics of space, or space as a discursive process and a subject constitutive of securitisation. In the study of radicalisation, it can help us understand how space and the psychological interpretation of material conditions are co-constituted to shape the process of radicalisation. Finally, it also creates new possibilities for CTS practitioners to employ the embodied, embodying and sensory dimensions of violence, involving not only visual and material dimensions but also sound and hearing, to form an individualised form of resistance against state terrorism. This article attempts to systematically map the permutations of new theoretical and conceptual developments in the critical studies on the spatiality of terrorism.