Filmic representations of radicalization and terrorism: The silver screen as a catalyst for social science

Abstract

Recent years have seen increased attention to depictions of terrorism in film and, as a consequence, scholars have learned a great deal about why and how such films are made. Too often, however, work in this area has been confined to examination of the film(s) in question, where links between what appears on the silver screen and lived experience are implied but not fully explored. Grounded in the rapidly-growing literature on pop culture and world politics, this article seeks to bridge that gap by showing that comparative film analysis can serve as a catalyst for social scientific inquiry into terrorism. By exploring how Third Cinema films communicate motivations for and doubts about the use of violence, it generates questions for social scientific inquiry that might otherwise go unasked.

Keywords

Introduction

Although the relationship between cinema and terrorism has historically been underappreciated,¹ recent years have seen increased scholarly attention to why, how and the frequency with which terrorism has appeared in film.² Literature in this area reflects growing interest in the relationships between popular culture and world politics (PCWP) generally, where constructivists and post-structuralists have traditionally led the way. More recently, scholars who take other approaches, who represent a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, and who were once sceptical of popular culture’s influence on politics, and vice-versa, have made increasing contributions (Nexon and Neumann, 2006: 17).

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the accumulating body of research on terrorism in film is the relative absence of explicit argumentation about film’s utility for understanding terrorism in the real world. Unlike much of the PCWP literature, analysis of terrorism in film is too often confined to the examination of film itself, where links between what appears on the silver screen and lived experience are implied but not fully explored. This gap represents a missed opportunity. Filmic depictions of terrorism and the processes of radicalization that lead to it, particularly in Third Cinema, often draw on and provide insight into real-life instances of these phenomena.

This article builds on existing scholarship, especially at the intersection of popular culture and world politics, to show that comparative film analysis can benefit social scientific inquiry into terrorism. By exploring depictions of two aspects of radicalization – motivations for violence and doubts about the use of violence – I show that film can be consciously used to generate research questions that might otherwise go unasked. It can also be used to suggest tentative answers to these questions, which can be tested through a variety of means. In this sense, the article serves both as a proof of concept and a blueprint for how film can catalyse thinking and inquiry.

In the pages that follow, I first frame the argument by reviewing the relevant PCWP literature and by providing background on the genesis and characteristics of Third Cinema. In doing so, I show that some of the most important insights of PCWP literature apply as forcefully to Third Cinema films about terrorism as they do to more widely-consumed media. Next, I examine depictions of radicalization in four films: Paradise Now (Abu-Assad, 2005), The Oath (Poitras, 2011), The War Within (Castelo, 2005) and The Terrorist (Sivan, 1999).³ Rather than review the films in question, this section identifies select depictions of radicalization that will inform subsequent discussion. The article then draws on insights that derive from these depictions to generate questions for future research. It concludes with a brief summary of the findings.

Popular culture, world politics and terrorism in film

Popular culture and world politics

Scholars have long understood the relevance of popular culture to world politics but, until recently, evidence of this understanding has mostly been confined to the classroom. Professors employ films like Doctor Strangelove (1964) and The Battle of Algiers (1966) to illustrate concepts like deterrence and terrorism, respectively. Undergraduate courses on ‘Politics and Film’ and ‘Politics and Literature’ have become common (Nexon and Neumann, 2006: 9). Some have gone so far as to systematize the study of politics through film in the classroom. For example, Cynthia Weber’s multi-edition textbook, International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction (2014), dedicates nine chapters to exploring what she terms the ‘myths’ within International Relations theory.

Attention to the roles of popular culture in world politics is newer in academic publishing. Traditionally, theorists have shied away from second-order representations of social and political life (i.e. narratives that re-present aspects of politics through a layer of fiction) in favour of the ‘real’ stuff of politics (e.g. elite statements, debates, etc., but that which, in any case, is ‘fiction-free’) (Nexon and Neumann, 2006: 7). When Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) observed that most of what we ‘know’ about the world comes not through direct experience, but rather through the experiences of others (i.e. through second-order representations), this distinction began to fall apart. Michael Shapiro (1988: 7) has since authored one of the most famous statements on the subject:

Part of what must be rejected is that aspect of the terrain predicated on a radical distinction between what is thought of as fictional and scientific genres of writing. In the history of thought the distinction has been supported by the notion that the fictional text, e.g., the story, play, or novel, manufactures its own objects and events in acts of imagination, while the epistemologically respectable genres, such as the scientific text, have ‘real’ objects and events, which provide a warrant for the knowledge-value of those of the text’s statements purporting to be about the objects and events.

Other scholars have offered (often-compatible) alternatives to collapsing the distinction between popular culture and world politics. Kyle Grayson, Matt Davies, and Simon Philpott (2009: 158), for example, argue that the complexity at play ‘makes a strong case for viewing popular culture and world politics as a continuum. Each is implicated in the practices and understandings of the other’, and thus ‘popular culture cannot be divorced from world politics nor world politics from popular culture.’ Jutta Weldes and Christina Rowley (2015: 12) observe that, ‘Empirically, the objects and practices to which the terms [popular culture and world politics] refer, and the “relations” between and among them, are varied, complex and dynamic.’ Therefore, ‘there can be no single understanding of either.’⁴

Terrorism in Third Cinema film

The discussion thus far has focused on the benefits – indeed, the necessity – of incorporating popular culture into scholarship about world politics. How such incorporation takes place is also vitally important. Though popular culture can tell us much about the political world, the relevance of specific artefacts to different research questions will vary. For example, the 1994 film True Lies, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, may tell us something about popular conceptions of terrorism in a certain place, at a certain time, among a certain people, but it does little to shed light on processes of radicalization or other aspects of terrorism in the real world. For this reason, the discussion here is built around filmic depictions of terrorism in Third Cinema, a category of popular culture that tends to mimic social and political life more reliably than mainstream films.⁵

‘Third Cinema’ finds its roots in a 1969 interview with members of Cine Liberación, an Argentine film group that argued:

There is a growing need for a ‘Third Cinema,’ one that would not fall into the trap of trying to engage in a dialogue with those who have no interest in doing so. It would be a cinema of aggression, a cinema that would put an end to the irrationality that has come before it; an agit cinema. This does not mean that filmmakers should take on exclusively political or revolutionary themes, but that their films would thoroughly explore all aspects of life in Latin America today … This cinema, revolutionary in both its formulation and its consciousness, would invent a new cinematographic language, in order to create a new consciousness and a new social reality.⁶

A series of publications and conferences across Latin America built on this statement,⁷ laying the foundation for a brand of cinema that would spread worldwide.⁸ Over time, more specific attributes of Third Cinema have come into focus, several of which merit brief discussion.

First, cinematographically, Third Cinema is characterized by (at least some) of the following: low budgets, rapid filming, filming on location, non-professional actors, genre hybridity, use of subtitles and a basis in historical events (Martin, 2011: 218). Second, and especially important for our purposes here, it ‘has sought to foster the participation of the people who constitute the subject matter of the films’ (Wayne, 2001: 3). Though all films draw on the lived experiences of those who make them, relatively few working in mainstream cinematography create films about the quotidian struggles and contexts in which they live. Third, it is a form of socio-politico-cultural critique, one that intends to animate and encourage thinking. ‘Thinking’, in this context,

… is not a matter of systematically achieving representations or experience by using reliable (that is, repeatable) techniques of observation. Rather, thinking involves resistance to the dominant modes of representing the world, whether those representational practices function as mere unreflective habit or as intentionally organized, systematic observation. (Shapiro, 2009: 5)

Given these characteristics, it is not surprising that Third Cinema about terrorism tends to humanize terrorists, especially through depictions of logical paths to violence. In this respect, Third Cinema can be contrasted with more typically mainstream films. As Thomas Riegler (2010: 44) notes:

In Hollywood movies terrorism is essentialized, that is, often presented as de-politicized and merely pathological or criminal. Its cinematic representation generates a high degree of assurance in the effectiveness of simple, quick solutions to highly complex problems … it tends to reduce reality’s complexity to a simple dichotomy of good and evil.

In sum, Third Cinema is rooted in the social and political world in a way that mainstream cinema is not. It draws more directly on the lived experiences of filmmakers – producers, directors, actors, and others – to produce understandings and interpretations of phenomena from what is, ironically, an untraditional angle. Third Cinema does more to step inside the minds of those who would use violence than mainstream cinematography and, in doing so, more fully conveys the complexities of terrorism.

Selecting and encountering films

Given the rapid proliferation of films about terrorism in recent years, there is no consensus on the best method to select films for this kind of research. The present work follows criteria set out by Martin (2012: 140) and Weber (2014: 9, 271–272). Martin argues that film selection should ‘suggest the breadth of the genre as well as the depth of particular films’. Paraphrasing, Weber argues that films should be selected on the basis of their ability to effectively illustrate the phenomenon in question. Though no film, or small selection of films, can address the range of motivations that may lead individuals to radicalization, the films analysed here – Paradise Now, The Oath, The War Within, and the Terrorist – meet both aforementioned criteria.⁹

As for encountering the selected films, I chose to focus primarily on narrative elements of the plot that conveyed processes of radicalization and doubts about the use of violence. This approach privileged dialogue and internal monologue among the protagonists, what Shapiro (2009) refers to as the psychological subject, over other important cinematographic elements. Lighting, sound, mis en scène, etc. – Shapiro’s ‘aesthetic subject’ – often hold tremendous value in Third Cinema, including in the films examined here.¹⁰ That said, my aim was to keep the focus narrow. As outlined above, this work is largely a proof of concept: a demonstration that exploration of Third Cinema can generate new thinking about terrorism. There are many potential benefits to looking beyond the articulated motivations of characters and future research would do well to take that tack. The present work, however, is satisfied with meeting this limited objective.

Communicating motivation and doubt

Among the most common elements of Third Cinema depictions of radicalization is the explicit articulation of the logic behind the violence. Scenes that outline this process are often among the most potent, conveying a sense of normality among would-be terrorists.¹¹ They paint pictures of men and women driven by reason as much as emotion, with questions about the utility of violence ever present. At the same time, these films tend to present the viewer with alternative views of whether violence is appropriate or effective. Scenes that convey doubt in the minds of protagonists, or those around them, effectively serve as ‘counterweight’ scenes to those that articulate motivations for violence. They convey the complexities of the situations in which protagonists and their real-life analogues find themselves.

Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (2005) is among the most critically acclaimed Third Cinema films about terrorism. It follows the stories of Saïd and Khaled, Palestinian men selected by a militant organization to carry out suicide bombings in Israel. The bulk of the film centres on what are to be the final 24 hours of the young men’s lives, but formative experiences that have the effect of motivating violence come through clearly in the dialogue.

In a powerful scene where he explains his desire to attack Israel, for example, Saïd speaks of the indignity that the occupation has caused his family. He explains how it has affected his life, and how it has turned families against each other. Through direct and indirect references, the viewer understands that Saïd’s father ‘collaborated’ (i.e. worked as a spy) with Israel before being executed by Palestinians for that reason. Saïd holds Israel responsible for his father’s defection, for his death and for the shame brought on his family. In another scene that covers similar ground, Khaled answers a question posed by his handler about why his father walks with a limp. He explains that Israeli soldiers once gave him the option of which leg to keep, before breaking the other. ‘If it were me’, Khaled says, ‘I would have let them break both of my legs rather than suffer that humiliation.’

In a combative debate with Suha, a Palestinian woman recently returned from living in France, Khaled gives voice to communal frustration over Israeli oppression: ‘In life there are no = there are only equals in death! … If we had an air force, we wouldn’t need martyrs …’ This reference echoes a famous line from Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), where a captured terrorist answers a reporter’s question about whether it is cowardly to use women’s baskets to carry bombs. ‘Isn’t it more cowardly to attack defenceless villages with napalm bombs that kill many thousands of times more? Obviously planes would make things easier for us. Give us your bombers, sir, and you can have our baskets.’

The debate between Suha and Khaled communicates not just motivation for violence but also doubt about its use. Khaled explains his reasons for violence, but Suha offers a strong voice in opposition. ‘If you kill there’s no difference between the victims and the oppressors’, she explains. ‘You give Israel the perfect excuse for continuing.’ This conversation affects Khaled, who over the course of the film transitions from someone who embraces the idea of martyrdom to someone who ultimately abandons his operation. Saïd undergoes the opposite transition, from evincing ambivalence to eventually shedding any trace of that. These transitions demonstrate that doubt can grow in the most committed individuals, and that it can subside in the most reflective.

Laura Poitras initially intended The Oath (2010) to be a documentary about the return of Salim Ahmed Hamdan – a former driver for Usama bin Laden – to Yemen after nearly six years of detention at Guantanamo Bay. Instead, the film is primarily a series of interviews with Hamdan’s brother-in-law, Abu Jandal, a former bodyguard to bin Laden. Though Abu Jandal mostly articulates communal, rather than individual, justifications for violence, the film does convey the importance of first-hand experience. Abu Jandal discusses his sense of responsibility for his brother-in-law’s incarceration, as it was he who recruited Hamdan to travel to Afghanistan for work.

The film devotes several scenes to gatherings between Abu Jandal and a small group of Yemeni youth interested in learning about jihad. Answering a question about whether it was just to kill innocents on September 11, 2001, Abu Jandal asks, ‘Why not? What’s the difference between them and the people in Palestine or Iraq? Or is it wrong when it concerns them and right when it concerns someone else?’ Asked in another scene whether the next generation of al Qaeda could assimilate into legal politics, he explains, ‘The political game now is rooted in Western and democratic values … If al Qaeda or any Islamist organisation gets involved in politics, then it is lost. If it stays on the battlefield, then a soldier can kill a king.’

These comments suggest that Abu Jandal is encouraging youth to take up arms, but viewed in context his objective is less clear. He goes on to ask the youth what he has taught them over three years of their meetings with him:

Did I ever tell you to bomb anything? I am against loading buses with people and shipping them for jihad. Totally against it … I don’t urge anyone to go for jihad. I got out of prison pledging not to encourage anyone to go for jihad.¹²

These scenes force the viewer to consider Abu Jandal’s comments justifying the killings of innocents on 9/11 alongside those where he rejects violence. This juxtaposition is not necessarily a contradiction: understanding, explaining and even justifying terrorism is different from calling for violence. The comments demand awareness, however, that not advocating violence reflects a kind of neutrality. Abu Jandal is not advocating for non-violence.

Joseph Castelo’s The War Within (2005), like Paradise Now, was among the first of several post-9/11 films to explore suicide bombing. Castelo and co-writer Ayad Akhtar initially approached Hollywood’s Miramax, LLC and Fine Line Features about production, but those studios explained that the film ‘would never get made in America’ (Smith, 2005). It was eventually picked up by HDNET Films, a more independently-minded production company launched in 2003.

The film tells the story of Hassan, a Pakistani engineer abducted in Paris by American intelligence officials and renditioned to Pakistan for interrogation. An early scene illustrates that Hassan is not initially an extremist: when an inmate assures him that there is a community of (Muslim) brothers in the prison, he responds, ‘I don’t want anything from your brotherhood.’ Later, recovering from torture, a Qur’an is placed in Hassan’s hands through iron bars. Three years pass before we see him again, by which time he plans to attack Grand Central Station in New York. Flashbacks to torture, which the viewer infers catalysed Hassan’s radicalization, are common throughout the film.

The War Within differs from Paradise Now and The Oath in how its protagonist articulates rationalization for the use of violence. Rather than explain his thinking face-to-face, Hassan writes a letter to a childhood friend:

The life you live is born from the blood of our brothers and sisters throughout the world. Your government takes action of which its people are unaware. But ignorance is not innocence. In the Qur’an it is written: “Prescribed for you is fighting, though it be hateful to you. Yet it may happen that you will hate a thing which is better for you, and it will happen that you will love a thing which is worse for you. Allah knows and you know not.”¹³

That Hassan shies away from explicitly articulating personal experience as a justification for violence is not surprising because he forcefully connects his political grievance to religion in a way that seeks to reinforce the ostensibly altruistic nature of his objective. This has the effect of mitigating doubt about the use of violence. ‘Now this moment has arrived’, he explains in his letter. ‘I am not scared; I am relieved. Something has become very clear. What I am doing, I am doing for Allah.’ In this sense, The War Within is ironically titled: its main character evinces relatively little doubt about the use of violence.¹⁴ Indeed, the choice to communicate through a letter signals intent to provide an explanation for violence only after its commission. Because Hassan intends to carry out a suicide bombing, no-one who reads his letter will be able to respond to its author. The viewer wonders if this approach to justifying violence suggests a harder radicalization, a stronger commitment than the kind that would leave a person open to discussion about his or her motivation(s).

Finally, Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist (1999)¹⁵ follows Malli, an adolescent guerrilla fighter based in an unidentified jungle, on a suicide bombing mission. The militant group and the target of its attack are never identified in the film, but an informed viewer might deduce that the group is the Tamil Tigers, the target an official from the Sri Lankan or Indian governments.¹⁶

Unlike the other films considered here, religion is absent in The Terrorist.¹⁷ The protagonist’s motivation, and that of the group she represents, is secular and nationalist. Malli explains her reasons for wanting to be a suicide bomber: ‘If our blood mixes with the soil today, the country will be ours tomorrow … My mission is for the future of our people.’ Statements of this kind take place throughout the film, from a scene where young girls audition for a suicide mission to Malli’s conversations with Lotus, an ill-fated boy who guides her out of the jungle en route to her target.

The line between communal and personal motivation in The Terrorist is unclear because Malli’s devotion to her cause is more transparent than the reasons for that devotion. Given her youth and the presence of children living with the militant group in the jungle, the viewer assumes that Malli may have been born into her cause. The viewer further deduces that the death of Malli’s brother, at the hands of government soldiers, is not unconnected to the fervency of her cause. We see flashbacks throughout the film to his funeral pyre and the esteem in which he is held by the organization’s leaders and those who know of his martyrdom. While all of the films considered here communicate personal motivations and broader ones, for Malli these are intimately connected. Her brother’s death seems to have reinforced the importance of a cause she may never have questioned.

Film as a catalyst for social science research

Having outlined aspects of Third Cinema depictions of radicalization in film, I now draw on the discussion to argue that comparative film analysis can usefully generate questions for social scientific research. In this section, I outline four kinds of questions that derive from the observations above. These deal with experiences that contribute to radicalization, how context can shape reaction to film, the extent to which Third Cinema may influence mainstream film productions, and how exposure to film can directly affect political views. They represent just a few of many kinds of questions that comparative film analysis can prompt.¹⁸

First, though the stereotype of an irrational fanatic bent on destruction is absent in the films considered here (and in Third Cinema generally), the levels of doubt that protagonists exhibit within the films vary within and across productions. The most extreme of the protagonists is Hassan from The War Within, who after being radicalized shows little doubt about the righteousness of his intended action – the suicide bombing of Grand Central Station. Unlike characters in other films, the first step on Hassan’s path to radicalization was extraordinary rendition and torture. Even Saïd and Khaled from Paradise Now, both motivated to violence by personal experience, struggled with their intended course of action. The Oath’s Abu Jandal, too, has personal reasons for justifying violence. None of his comments suggest a degree of militancy on a par with Hassan’s.

One research question that could derive from these comparative observations is about whether a radicalized individual’s level of doubt about perpetrating violence tends to be inversely correlated with the severity of the experience that contributed to radicalization. Do more personal and/or more severe catalysts of radicalization (e.g. torture or prolonged detention without charge or trial) produce more enduring, harder commitments to violence than communal catalysts (e.g. knowledge of the plight of others in one’s own community, nearby or farther afield)? One might also ask the related question of whether witnessing another person suffer humiliation, as in the case of Khaled witnessing soldiers break his father’s leg, is as likely to contribute to the radicalization of the witness as it is to the person who directly suffered the humiliation.

A second question is comparative in a broader sense, one that examines reactions to films across contexts based on the content the films. Paraphrasing Linda Williams (1998: 393), Bennett (2008: 116) observes, ‘The specific cultural context in which films are viewed will necessarily frame their meaning and so the truths represented or embodied by a particular film are inevitably relative and partial, though not necessarily insignificant or ineffective.’ Indeed, scholars have seen enough evidence for this phenomenon that they have given it a name: the ‘Rashomon effect’. Named for the 1950 Akira Kurosawa film, the term refers to situations in which people see exactly the same event (or in this case, film) entirely differently (Nexon and Neumann, 2006: 12). Weldes and Rowley (2015: 20) illustrate this possibility with reference to the film Rambo: First Blood Part II, noting that:

One viewer … may revel in the combat scenes and find support for their brand of US national patriotism and valorisation of the veteran; another may find the racial and gender dynamics of the film highly problematic and read into the film a critique of US popular culture and/or US foreign policy.

With these insights in mind, what kinds of differences might emerge in reactions to Paradise Now among different populations in the Holy Land? One might assume (correctly or incorrectly) that Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza would be more sympathetic to Saïd’s and/or Khaled’s decisions than Jewish Israelis, but would the views of West Bank or Gazan Palestinians differ significantly from those of Arab Israelis? Do differences emerge within these groups but across generational lines? What are the implications if they do? Furthermore, what of state reactions? Are there films that Israel has banned, or that Israel would ban, just as France initially banned screening of The Battle of Algiers? Might the Palestinian Authority react in this way to other films? Or might these states surprise us by promoting what may intuitively seem controversial in pursuit of dialogue across peoples?

Another question about reactions to film relates to the passage of time. Writing about depictions of terrorism in the United States, Riegler (2010: 41) observes, ‘the differing depiction of terrorism indicates shifts in the public’s understanding – in line with the specific political and social “Zeitgeist” of the decade, or in reference to hegemonic ideas about the interpretation of terrorism in the public discourse.’ This prompts a question about how outside populations (i.e. third parties to conflict) react to films about enduring conflicts over time. How might perceptions of the kinds of violence treated in Paradise Now, for example, differ between American and European audiences? If such differences were found to be significant, we might also look for corollary policy differences, especially in democracies.

Similar questions could be asked of Tamil and Hindu populations in Sri Lanka and India about Malli’s depiction in The Terrorist. A notable difference between these contexts, of course, is that in contrast to the situation in Israel–Palestine, the conflict between the Tamil Tigers and Sri Lanka (backed by India) ended with the group’s defeat in 2009. This raises another question: would reactions to the film in Sri Lanka or India differ in a post-conflict environment? More generally, how far removed must audiences be from the violence in question, in time and space, to have substantially different reactions to these kinds of films?

A third question – rooted in the contention that assumptions in social science should be periodically revisited – relates to how mainstream and Third Cinema have treated depictions of terrorism over time. Have depictions of radicalization and terrorism in Third Cinema influenced mainstream productions that treat similar material? If so, how? Though outlining a methodology for approaching this question might be difficult, one could imagine ways (script comparisons; interviews with writers, producers, directors; polling about what viewing audiences look for in film; etc.). One might start by asking whether mainstream films that exhibit characteristics of Third Cinema are becoming increasingly common,¹⁹ or whether they remain exceptions to the rule.

Finally, building on Shapiro’s aforementioned observation that film has the capacity to ‘animate and encourage thinking’, as well as Berger and Luckmann’s observation that most of what we ‘know’ about the world comes from second-order representations, one might ask whether and how exposure to films such as those analysed here can affect viewers’ political preferences. In a sense, this question builds on the one above about reaction to film, but it is comparative in a different way. It asks not whether my reaction to film will be different from another person’s, but rather whether my previously held beliefs can or will change in response to film. This might be particularly interesting to explore among American citizens, who tend to be less accustomed to Third Cinema than some other populations.

Conclusion

Research about depictions of terrorism in film has been on the rise in recent years and such work has benefited scholars’ understandings of why and how such films are made. The number of films in this area now represents a wealth of material for academics to explore and analyse. Despite increasingly realistic depictions of radicalization and terrorism, however, comparative film analysis has so far been underutilized as a tool to promote social scientific inquiry.

By exploring motivation and doubt in four films, this article has sought to demonstrate the utility of comparative film analysis for this end. It has shown that Third Cinema film, in particular, opens a window into real-life phenomena, eschewing simplistic characterizations of real or would-be terrorists in favour of more complex characterizations of actors motivated by a range of reasons and emotions that may lead to violence. Apart from highlighting questions identified in these kinds of films – about the utility, appropriateness and effectiveness of terrorism – it has shown that questions can be generated from these kinds of films, in this case about experiences that can contribute to radicalization, how context can shape viewers’ reactions to film, the extent to which Third Cinema may influence mainstream film production and how exposure to film can affect political views.

In short, the analysis above demonstrates that film can serve as a launch pad for future research. Anthropologists, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists and others may be spurred to different kinds of questions, all of them valid, which may be explored through a range of methodologies. This should be encouraged, as it can only contribute to more holistic, interdisciplinary understandings of the phenomena in question.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Seth Cantey is an assistant professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University, where he teaches a range of courses related to global politics. His research centers on political violence, especially at the sub-state level. Recent publications include articles in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and Parameters, as well as a chapter in an edited volume for IOS Press, a scientific publishing house headquartered in Amsterdam.

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