On Friday, December 17, Professor Naveed S. Sheikh, lecturer at the department of International Relations at Keele University (UK) and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Politics, Religion and Ideology, held a presentation on the topic of “The Essence of Terror: Contending Explanations for Terrorism across the Social Sciences”.
The etiology, or causation, of terrorism is greatly contested between rival paradigms of analysis. Professor Sheikh briefly discussed different theories on terrorism studies such as: structural, cultural, perceptual, psychological and socio-biological theories. In addition, Prof. Sheikh provided cartography of terrorism studies, covering micro-, meso-, and macro-level approaches to the phenomenon of terrorism. He outlined how they differ not only on the essence of terrorism but the consequences this ontological-cum-epistemological divide has for their ideas of efficacious counter-terrorism strategies.
Prof. Sheikh pointed out that terrorism is a multi-layered, multi-levelled phenomenon, and suffers from compounded complexity and that responses to terrorism are, at best, guestimated and they link directly to our nations above the etiology of the phenomenon.