Knowing Suicide Terrorism?

This article introduces a critical view on a contested field of expertise: terrorism research and its knowledge about suicide terrorism, which has turned into anobject of knowledge in its own right during the last decade. The analysis combines a feminist-postcolonial perspective with a sociology of knowledge approach, including discourse and dispositive analysis. It draws attention to the limitations of hegemonic knowledge production and to its constitutive by-product, an Occidentalist self-ascertainment that is supported by much ofthe research on political violence. What we know about suicide terrorism and how we generate this knowledge, I argue by presenting a comprehensive study of analyses of scholarly publications on suicide bombing from the 1990s to 2006, is embedded in globally asymmetric power arrangements. Academic expertise acrossthe field of International Relations, including the booming sub-discipline of Terrorism Studies, is a vital part of these arrangements.

I establish a link between the various forms of political violence that are present in scholarly expertise on suicide terrorism and the epistemic violence that is inherent in this field of knowledge production. By introducing epistemicviolence as an innovative concept for the investigation of questions around peace, conflict and (non-)violence, this text contributes to a more complex understanding of our fields of research, its objects of analysis, and the subtle entanglements between these two dimensions, of which we are inevitably complicitous as scholars.