Bringing the State Back into Terrorism Studies

Orthodox terrorism studies tend to focus on the activities of illiberal nonstate actors against the liberal democratic states in the North. It thus excludes state terrorism, which is one of a number of repressive tools that great powers from the North have used extensively in the global South in

the service of foreign policy objectives. I establish the reasons for the absence of state terrorism from orthodox accounts of terrorism and argue that critical–normative approaches could help to overcome this major weakness.