A Critical Approach to Terrorism phenomenon: Traditional and CriticalTheories

As with any academic field, terrorism studies is in large part constituted by an identifiable and fairly consistent set of sharedassumptions, narratives and labels about its primary subject as well as an accepted body of knowledge-generating practices.These narratives, assumptions and knowledge-generating practices function to define the field’s ontological, epistemological,methodological and ethical-normative approaches which can be found in much of the field’s primary output, particularly byits leading scholars. Since, nowadays there is a great knowledge about different dimensions of terrorism that should bestudied in term of interdisciplinary and analytical matters. In this regard, we can address about formation of critical terrorismwhich attempts to explain terrorism phenomenon. So, the main question of this paper is that if critical approach couldestablish a comprehensive frame for studying terrorism as it did in other fields. For this aim, by applying critical approach toterrorism in two steps, including; deepening and broadening terrorism research shows that such critical view not only revealshortage of dominant traditional paradigm such as, lack of self- reflexivity, lack of contextualization, ahistoricity, statistbias, media censoring, dearth of fieldwork and so on, but also provides more comprehensive framework for terrorismstudies.