From ISIS to (US) Insurrection: Exploring the Sociology of Knowledge on Extremism and Political Violence through Struggles for Expert Authority

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As major recent events, from Brexit to COVID-19 have revealed, the social and political construction of 'experts' and their 'expert knowledge' is pivotal in shaping outcomes and ways of understanding global challenges. However, the centrality of the contested nature of expertise that these events brought to the fore have also been playing out in the study of 'terrorism'. The Islamic State group's (IS) declaration of a 'caliphate' in 2014 led to a gold rush to provide expertise on the group. It attracted a plethora of different fields, institutions, and individuals producing knowledge and claiming authority on IS (academia, policy institutions, private sector analysts, among many others). However, unlike many spaces of specialised knowledge (e.g., medicine), which have highly regulated fields to demarcate who the 'experts' are (and crucially, are not), the study of 'terrorism', 'radicalisation' and 'counterterrorism' does not maintain such institutionalised regulation. My research has revealed that there is no consistency amongst IS knowledge producers and elite consumers (e.g., government, media) as to who is an 'expert' and what attributes constitute expert authority. This subsequent competition for recognition as an 'expert' and its 'winners' in-turn shapes dominant knowledge on how the group is understood and should be responded to.Consequently, my research sociologically analyses this period and the conditions of terrorism expertise after 2014. This began with mapping the landscape of IS experts, proceeding to trace how deep historical debates over knowledge on Islam, the Middle East and political violence have shaped contemporary dynamics amongst expertise and their state, media, and wider consumers. This uncovered a broad spectrum of heavily disputed sources of authority that aspiring experts draw upon. Breaking new ground in the study of terrorism, it showed how this 'marketplace of expertise' produces diverse strategies pursued by experts to produce or maintain their authority, impacting whose expertise is utilised by practitioners, policy makers and the media. This research also explored how both physical and virtual spaces (such as conferences and Twitter) also shape the production and circulation of knowledge on IS, the membership of the expert community, and their relations amongst each other and with consumers.This fellowship's further research aims to extend this analysis of the terrorism 'expert marketplace' from the IS-era to account for the transition towards new terrorism threats in the Anglo-American context (far right). I will explore the processes by which another wave of aspiring experts emerged fulfil a demand to understand the far right, and how established expertise have responded to a changing landscape of consumer demands amid shifting political conditions shaping the framing of this threat. By introducing new findings into my existing analysis and preparing multiple publications based on this collective research, this fellowship will develop and communicate new insights into how the West understands contemporary political violence. As an analysis of expertise within a major, contentious global challenge, it further contributes towards understanding ongoing change in the function and politics of expertise at-large.