-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Michael Levi, Susanne Karstedt, Vincenzo Ruggiero, Introduction to the BJC Special Issue on Terrorism, The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 50, Issue 4, July 2010, Pages 617–621, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azq024
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Criminology—especially empirical and experimental criminology—has often been accused by its critics of focusing primarily on the quantitatively measurable aspects of crime and crime control and of avoiding critiques of business and state power. In the last decade, this sort of criticism has been far more readily applied to the culturally dominant international model—American criminology—than to work published in Australian, British or Continental European criminology journals. Whether as a result of low demand for or low-quality supply of articles, the British Journal of Criminology published only a couple of articles on terrorism or terrorism-related issues prior to ‘9/11’, while its American prestige equivalent, Criminology, published one before ‘9/11’ plus, 2004–10 (allowing for time lags of writing and publication), two articles containing ‘terrorism’ as a keyword, one of which was on Northern Ireland. The neglect of terrorism—a ‘signal crime’ par excellence—within ‘mainstream criminology’ is nevertheless intriguing. The long-running paramilitary and military action in Northern Ireland almost entirely bypassed the world of UK and international ‘official criminology’, finding its way instead into the ‘critical criminology’ and ‘law and society’ journals. More recently, much has been written about the War on Terror in UK and international law journals and the human rights literature, and we decided that a different set of articles, using more quantitative and interview data, was needed to supplement the more explicitly ideological critiques in the BJC Special Issue 49(5) of 2009. The fact that scholarly work which systematically examines the activities of terrorists and terrorist organizations was and still is rare and that case study and other empirical analyses are lacking among an abundance of more narrative, theoretical or prescriptive work (see Kennedy and Lum 2003) convinced the editors that we should focus on the former rather than the latter type of work. We excluded state-sponsored terrorism from our special issue, considering that it had been dealt with adequately previously.
