Reflections on Remembering: 9/11 Twenty Years On

As critical terrorism scholars and editors of this journal, we approached the 20th anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attacks with considerable ambivalence. Conscious that many journals in our field would mark the two decades since those dramatic events, we debated what adopting a “critical approach” demanded of us. As a journal, and specifically as editors of this special issue, we had at least two – potentially conflicting – aspirations for this moment. First, to take the opportunity to (once again) recognise and reflect on the duration, consequences, and costs of 9/11’s aftermath; an aftermath characterised by a war on terror that has stretched not only across continents and policy domains, but across decades too now. And, second, explicitly to call into question the widespread framing of those attacks as a powerful temporal marker complicit not only in contemporary responses to political resistance and violence, but also in the understanding, research and teaching of the politics of counter-terrorism (Jarvis 2009; Holland and Jarvis 2014; Toros 2017). Such aspirations compel critical engagement with technologies of “commemoration” and “remembrance”, including through ceremonies, monuments, and practices (Jarvis 2010; Heath-Kelly 2016, 2018). They compel engagement too, though, with decisions, demands and structures of forgetting, with many critically-inclined scholars sympathetic to Zehfuss’s (2003) urging that we might “forget September 11”.