Everyday Violence, Gender, and Terrorism

Much of the discussion of terrorism, either in the mainstream context of state/Œterrorist¹ relations or in critical understandings of the politics of the production of the terrorist subject, characterizes terrorism as embedded in a milieu of violence committed for the purpose of inspiring obedience by fear. Whether mainstream or critical, however, much of the research on Œterrorism¹, terrorist subjects, and the objects of terrorism limit the substance of the discussion to particular actors securitized in global politics as inspiring that fear in political collectivities assumed to be unitary. This work accounts for the terrorism in/of the public sphere, but reifies a dichotomy between the public and the private where terrorism is constituted as that which takes place in the public sphere, and that which takes place in the private sphere is constituted as not-terrorism and not-terrorist. It is this not-terrorism that we are interested in reframing in our special issue on 'Intimate Terrorism' ­ suggesting that the terrorism of the private sphere, the terrorism of the everyday, and the terrorism of the feminine is a key part of understanding the content of, and critiquing the concept of, terrorism. This parallels moves in security studies (e.g., Hudson et al¹s Sex and World Peace; Pinker¹s Better Angels of Our Nature), political economy (e.g., Peterson¹s Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy), and foreign aid (e.g., Kristof and Wudunn¹s Half the Sky), but advances those moves by taking from the best work in Critical Terrorism Studies to account for dynamics of gender, race, (post-)coloniality, class, discursive signification, and vulnerability. The ³Intimate Terrorism² special issue combines articles from political science, geography, and queer theorizing to bring an understanding of terrorism in the private sphere to Critical Studies on Terrorism ­ one conscious of power, race, securitization, and signification politics.