Since its emergence in the 1970s and its revival in the post-9/11 era, the field of Terrorism Studies has been dominated overwhelmingly by social scientists. A noteworthy handful of historians contributed to the field in its formative periods, yet like their colleagues in other disciplines, these scholars tended to share core presuppositions with members of Western intelligence, police, and military agencies who sought to suppress political violence carried out by non-state actors. Historians of terrorism embraced contemporary state definitions of the concept and applied it to various examples from the past. Their work produced valuable insights on how states responded to violent challengers; they also attracted understandable charges of presentism.

In recent years, a new generation of historians has expanded upon this work with more distance from the traumatic events of 9/11 and the U.S. Global War on Terrorism. Benefiting from social science scholarship in the subfield of Critical Terrorism Studies (which formed in the United Kingdom in 2011), historians have produced an emerging historiography of counterterrorism. Historians have carefully analyzed, for example, how state and non-state political violence influenced one another; how the term “terrorism” itself has a history connected to violent conflicts and political power; how technological innovations—from dynamite and automobiles to commercial jets and satellite television—created new possibilities for violent political messaging; how contemporary counterterrorism developed from violent Cold War era conflicts over imperialism, racism, and capitalism; how state leaders like those in the administrations of U.S. presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush politicized terrorist attacks to advance militaristic foreign policy agendas; and how international antiterrorist diplomacy and militarism helped facilitate the rise of neoliberalism and a postcolonial world order benefiting states of the Global North at the expense of the Global South.

The field of terrorism history looks different, however, when viewed from the Global South. Few historians of Asia, Africa, or Latin America have prioritized engagement with Terrorism Studies literature. Indeed, the histories of antiterrorism in these regions are intertwined with some of the same forces of colonialism and Global North power that have shaped prerogatives of Terrorism Studies research. The question of what terrorism history means in the Global South will therefore be a core area of inquiry for this roundtable. Commentary will specifically draw from research on Iran and Islamic resistance movements in Lebanon and Palestine, and on the women of El Salvador’s popular armed revolutionary movement of the 1970s and 80s and their connections to other socialist movements and regimes.