In Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism” Lisa Stampnitzky chronicles how terrorism experts and the field of studies on the subject helped to produce new definitions around terrorism, aiding in sustaining the War on Terror. She describes how political violence was once described as insurgency but later came to be defined as terrorism through the development of terrorism experts and terrorism studies. The U.S. government had a role in the creation of this field through federal funding and federal agency conferences on terror and terrorism. Early terrorism experts identified the Soviet Union as the main supporter of terrorists due to the Cold War and simmering tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. At that time, terrorism was characterized as having a political motive or a clearly defined agenda. But in the 1980s, the Islamic world replaced the Soviet Union as the next major threat to the West. Influenced by the clash of the civilizations theses by scholars like Lewis and Huntington, this “new terrorism” was characterized as irrational and without political motives (Stampnitzky 2013).

XREF: Connects to how expert communities and federal funding shape public policy categories, similar to Edward Said's Orientalism critiques of how Western scholarship frames the East.

Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, loc. 32