HRinI is delighted to welcome this contribution to today’s discussion on education by Dr. Rod Thornton of the University of Nottingham. Rod is a specialist in terrorism and counter-insurgency and a lecturer at the School of Politics and International Relations, UoN. He is also an occasional lecturer at the NATO Defence College in Rome; has provided expert evidence to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, and has been contracted to produce work for the Ministry of Defence and the US Department of Defense.

When it comes to the teaching and study of terrorism at universities there appears to be a rather disturbing shift in attitude. In the days of the ‘old’ terrorists – IRA, Bader-Meinhoff and the like – there existed the general principle that those in the academic world – lecturers, researchers and students – who were looking at such groups were doing so ‘harmlessly’. They were neutral observers. There was an accepted distance between the subject being studied and those doing the studying. It was all done to gain a greater understanding of terrorism, terrorists and their particular causes. And it was through such understanding that effective solutions, however understood, could be found to the scourge of terrorism.

But nowadays it is different. We seem to be in an era where those studying the current wave of Islamist terrorism are not viewed in the same way. The idea of study as a means of creating a measure of understanding appears to have gone by the wayside. Those engaged in the study of Islamist terrorism must, the prevailing sentiment runs, be sympathetic in some way. Efforts to understand motivations become perceived as efforts to excuse those motivations. The old idea of merely wanting to understanding terrorism in terms of an academic subject is seen to be too much of a fence-sitting exercise. However much George Bush’s phraseology is derided, the zeitgeist now is one where Manichaean dichotomies do exist where one you ARE ‘either with us or against us’. There can be no more neutral observers where the study of terrorism is concerned.

This sentiment appears to be especially true when it comes to Muslim students studying any form of Islamist extremism. Where they are concerned, Pavlov comes to the fore: establishment antennae begin to twitch uncontrollably. A white student researching for a politics essay on the BNP is not automatically seen as sympathetic to that organisation’s cause, but when it comes, however, to a Muslim student writing an essay on Al Mujharoun or its ilk – can the same still be said?

And what sources will soon be closed off? The British police are talking of ensuring that all students studying terrorism courses at universities can only carry out research via computers within their individual universities. While this will aid the ‘monitoring’ process it hardly seems workable. And which students of which faith will be ‘monitored’ more than others? Fear will enter the system. In 2008, a student at Nottingham University studying Al Qaeda in Iraq for his MA dissertation downloaded an Al Qaeda document from a U.S. government website. He could, indeed, have got exactly the same document from his own university library. But he was arrested, held for six days under counter-terrorism laws and was subsequently listed as a participant in a ‘major Islamist plot’ in an American publication held by the U.K. Home Office. His life is now scarred. Why would anyone want to study Islamism at a university? Why would anyone try to understand?