Book Review

Lisa Stampnitzky has produced the first book length treatment of the phenomenon of ‘terror expertise’ since Ed Herman and Gerry O’Sullivan’s The ‘Terrorism’ Industry, published in 1989. Like that book, it focuses on the processes that lead certain persons to be designated as ‘terrorism experts’. Stampnitzky’s book, though, is no reprise of that earlier offering. Whilst agreeing that the rise in ‘terrorism expertise’ cannot be attributed to a concurrent rise in political violence, Stampnitzky rejects Herman and O’Sullivan’s contention that (in her summation) ‘terrorism experts constitute an “industry,” funded and organized by the state and other elite interests’ (p. 10). Disciplining Terror argues that terrorism was socially constructed as a problem in the 1970s and that experts henceforth attempted to build up a body of knowledge about the problem; attempting to ‘discipline’ the concept of terrorism and ‘enrol’ it into their ‘knowledge project’. Central to this project was the formation of a dispersed community of experts (the ‘terrorism mafia’ as they reportedly call themselves) who convened conferences, wrote academic papers and sought to rationalize ‘terrorism’, notably through the development of several databases. Stampnitzky suggests that ‘terrorism studies’, like other burgeoning disciplines, should subsequently have crystallized into a well-defined and demarcated field of expertise. But this did not occur. An agreed definition of terrorism remained elusive, the concept became (or remained) hopelessly politicized and terrorism expertise remained unregulated, leaving the field open to charlatans and chancers. This apparent failure is central to Stampnitzky’s account. The book achieves some notable successes. It is well written, historically informed and the author generally avoids functionalism/reductionism through her attention to experts’ agency. It draws on a range of new data including 32 interviews with prominent experts, hitherto unutilized archives and a new dataset of speakers at conferences. The latter contains biographical data on over 2,000 individuals who participated in 150 conferences between 1972 and 2001 and marks a new departure for work in this area. Stampnitzky makes good use of the data in social network analysis early on in the book and, overall, the empirical material is the book’s greatest strength. 566844 SOC0010.1177/0038038514566844SociologyBook Review book-review2014