By drawing on existing work within critical terrorism studies (CTS) and critical security studies (CSS), I argue that these alternatives offer important benefits while staying closer to the spirit of prior critical scholarship. And, second, it involves declining to emphasise the scale of this problem, even for strategic normative or political purposes. Such an approach, I argue, involves, first, resisting the temptation to describe right-wing individuals, groups or events as “extremist” or “terrorist”. In this article, I therefore set out an alternative to these research tendencies, calling for the problematisation and desecuritisation of far-right terrorism, extremism and their (many) equivalents and adjacents.
This, I will argue, has its own antecedent within critical literature on state terrorism. Thus, while policy-relevant and critical contributions share an emphasis on the far-right as a significant threat, the latter go further and see it also as a solution to longstanding academic and political inconsistencies. They are also, significantly, evident in critical contributions approaching the threat of far-right terrorism as an important data-point from which to highlight, and perhaps correct, biases and exclusions within terrorism studies more broadly, not least given the field’s longstanding emphasis on religious (and typically Islamist) terrorisms (Gunning and Jackson 2011 Meier This issue). These tendencies, I argue, appear in problem-solving research explicitly motivated by an attempt to assist policymakers in countering the threat of far-right individuals, organisations and ideologies. The second limitation is a tendency to emphasise, and perhaps accentuate, the threat posed by these entities. The first is a tendency to essentialise far right-violences and groups as if their existence were extra-discursive and amenable to objective identification, explanation, and measurement. Notwithstanding these contributions, my argument here is that this research remains characterised by two limitations evident within, and inherited from, the wider field of terrorism studies. Although other types of terrorism continue to generate greater attention (Schuurman 2019, 470), the far-right is now very far from being a marginal or peripheral concern in this field. It is methodologically plural and thematically diverse, housing vibrant critical interventions drawing on postcolonial and feminist traditions, as well as more obviously policy-relevant analyses rooted within positivist traditions. This scholarship, I argue below, is important, dynamic and heterogeneous. The prominence of far-right terrorism and extremism has grown considerably within terrorism studies in recent years as evidenced by special issues (such as this!) (also Ravndal and Bjørgo 2018) published bibliographies (Axelsen 2018 Tinnes 2020) research networks, centres and projects and even university degrees (Schooling 2021).
This, I suggest, facilitates important new reflection on the far-right’s production within and beyond terrorism research, as well as on the purposes and politics of critique therein. In response, I argue for an approach rooted in the problematisation and desecuritisation of the far-right threat. They are evident too, though, within critical interventions in which a focus on far-right terrorism is seen as an important corrective to established biases and blind spots within (counter-)terrorism research and practice. These limitations are evident, I argue, within scholarship motivated by a problem-solving aspiration for policy relevance. Second, is a temptation to emphasise, even accentuate, the scale of this threat. First, is an essentialist approach to this phenomenon as an extra-discursive object of knowledge to be defined, explained, catalogued, risk assessed, and (ultimately) resolved. In this article, I argue that scholarship on this threat has suffered from two limitations, each with antecedents in terrorism research more broadly. Recent years have witnessed increasing academic, media, and political attention to the threat of far-right terrorism.
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