This chapter digs deeper into one of the key contentions within Terrorism Studies: how to define terrorism. There are multiple stakeholders in this debate: scholars, who wish to study terrorism via various disciplinary approaches (Jackson et al. 2009; Herman and O’Sullivan 1989); governments, who need to show that they are combating terrorism effectively (Wight 2015: 7; Stampnitzky 2013; Lum et al. 2006); and media sources, who, depending upon their ideological leanings, present terrorism in ways that sell (Nacos 2000; Wilkinson 1997). Quite often these stakeholders cannot agree on a definition. Therefore, articles or books like this one often dedicate precious word limits to a discussion of the definition debate. What is it about the lack of agreement on the terrorism definition that is so troubling to particular scholars and practitioners? To answer this question, it is first important to explore what the tensions are in the ‘definition’ debate before looking at it as a contested concept that structures social relations.

There are multiple fissures that perpetuate the debate. First, it is often noted that terrorism is a pejorative, discrediting label (Hoffman 2006: 21–3; Jenkins 1980: 10). An additional concern stems from the idea that a lack of a concrete definition results in less than social scientific objectivity (Richards 2015: 8). While many academics have settled on basing the definition as a form or method of political violence, what exactly this method is or does is not always clear (see for instance Jongman’s [2017] discussion of this: 7, 13–25). Furthermore, negative connotations remain, primarily because the label of terrorism is not uniformly applied to all actors who use this method. As such, the chapter begins to also establish how terrorism is constructed as ‘disordered’ – outside of the hegemonic order of Westphalia and Western dominance, but also as violence belonging to an Other who is also a threat to the hegemonic order. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is not to fulfil the quest for the Golden Fleece and provide a definition, but instead to establish that a definition cannot be agreed upon because the definition quest actually, intentionally or otherwise, represents gender, racial and imperial, and heteronormative aphasias, or preferably, ‘calculated forgetting[s]’ (Thompson 2014: 45).