Harmonie Toros

• Professor (Associate) at University of Kent

This article serves as the introduction to a Special Issue of the European Journal of International Security titled ‘What the War on Terror Leaves Behind’. In it, we seek to contextualise and summarise the diverse contributions of this collection, which is animated by four overarching questions: (i) More than 20 years after the attacks of 11 Octobe...

This chapter examines the potential for talks with Al-Shabaab, identifies potential facilitators and spoilers, and highlights lessons to be learned from past dialogues with Al-Shabaab. Three main conclusions are reached. First, many Somali and international parties agree that there exists some degree of common ground between the Federal Government...

How do we teach and learn the human experience of war? How far removed is this experience from a classroom? This article uses these questions as the starting point for an investigation into the presence/absence of war experience, the effects of narratives distancing war, and the consequences of challenging these narratives. It draws on the experien...

This article argues that despite engaging in a powerful critique of the construction of the attacks of 11 September 2001 (or “9/11”) as temporal break, critical terrorism scholars have sustained and reproduced this same construction of “9/11”. Through a systematic analysis of the research articles published in Critical Studies on Terrorism, this ar...

This book examines potential synergies between the fields of Terrorism Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies. The volume presents theoretically- and empirically-informed contributions, which shed light on whether the two fields can inform each other on issues of mutual interest and importance. The book examines key themes including the conceptuali...

This article explores how the violence against Afghan civilians carried out by the Taliban and US ‘rogue’ soldiers has been accounted for as the product of, respectively, collective evil and individual pathology. These two seemingly contending explanations, it is argued, are part of the same strategy of depoliticization, which aims to provide suppo...

Reprint of special issue of Critical Studies on Terrorism vol.6, no.1 (2013)

The articles in this special issue are drawn from papers presented at a conference titled Terrorism and Peace and Conflict Studies: Investigating the Crossroad. The conference was organised by the Conflict Analysis Research Centre at the University of Kent and the Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group of the British International Studies Asso...

Despite the lack of consensus on a broadly accepted definition of terrorism, a vast majority of scholars agree that terrorist violence is intrinsically political in contrast to organised crime, which is viewed as mainly profit-driven. This article critically examines this widely accepted distinction and contends that it rests on a narrow definition...

This thesis investigates whether talking can contribute to the transformation of conflicts characterized by terrorist violence. It begins by questioning the understanding of terrorism put forward by traditional terrorism scholarship and its contention that talking in contexts of terrorism is useless and/or counterproductive. Drawing on Frankfurt Sc...

Fieldwork in the study of terrorism remains the exception, allowing for scores of publications to be produced each year with little or no contact with the perpetrators of terrorist violence and scarce direct observation of the social realities in which it occurs. While examining some of the serious drawbacks and pitfalls such research can entail, t...

A key objection raised by terrorism scholars and policymakers against engaging in negotiations with terrorists is that it legitimizes terrorist groups, their goals and their means. Talking to them would serve only to incite more violence and weaken the fabric of democratic states, they argue. With the emergence of Al-Qaeda and its complex transnati...