This symposium emerged as a response to three recent developments in the field of terrorism studies. The first development has been the tremendous growth in terrorismrelated research and teaching activities since the attacks of 11 September 2001. Since then, terrorism studies has been transformed from a minor subfield of security studies to a large stand-alone field with its own dedicated journals, research centres, leading scholars and experts, research funding opportunities, conferences and university study programmes. As a consequence, it is now one of the fastest expanding areas of research in the Western academic world, with literally thousands of new books and articles published over the past few years, significant investment in terrorism-related research projects and increasing numbers of postgraduate dissertations and undergraduate students.

Orthodox terrorism studies tend to focus on the activities of illiberal non-state actors against the liberal democratic states in the North. It thus excludes state terrorism, which is one of a number of repressive tools that great powers from the North have used extensively in the global South in the service of foreign policy objectives. I establish the reasons for the absence of state terrorism from orthodox accounts of terrorism and argue that critical–normative approaches could help to overcome this major weakness.

This paper examines some of the key challenges critical terrorism studies will have to face. Starting from the premise that a critical turn must both challenge traditional approaches to ‘terrorism’ and provide an umbrella under which traditional and critical perspectives from ‘terrorism studies’ and cognate fields can converge, the article reflects on the tensions this will introduce, ranging from how to define the boundaries of a critical field and whether to adopt the term ‘terrorism’ as a field delineator, to the need for policy-relevance and the tensions this introduces between striving to influence policy and avoiding co-optation. The paper ends with a reflection on the challenge of being sensitive to cultural and contextual differences while remaining true to one's emancipatory agenda.

Critical terrorism studies (CTS) is founded firstly on a series of powerful critiques of the current state of orthodox terrorism studies, including: its poor methods and theories, its state centricity, its problem-solving orientation and its institutional and intellectual links to state security projects. Defined broadly by a sceptical attitude towards accepted terrorism ‘knowledge’, CTS is also characterised by a set of core epistemological, ontological and ethical commitments, including: an appreciation of the politically constructed nature of terrorism knowledge; an awareness of the inherent ontological instability of the ‘terrorism’ category; a commitment to critical reflexivity regarding the uses to which research findings are put; a set of well-defined research ethics and a normative commitment to an emancipatory political praxis.

Drawing on the insights of critical security studies, this article argues that an understanding of emancipation as a process of freeing up space for dialogue and deliberation enables a focus on crucial questions, experiences and practices neglected in most orthodox accounts of security and terrorism. In particular, emancipation has the potential to serve as a philosophical anchorage for a nascent critical terrorism studies research agenda. The paper goes on to outline what a critical terrorism studies informed by a concern with emancipation might look like, focusing on a series of key questions that such an approach might encourage in the context of the post-2001 ‘war on terror’.

This article examines the ethical and methodological challenges for the critical investigation of ‘terrorism’ and political violence. Who is such research ‘for’? How might critical research avoid replicating hegemonic accounts while still engaging with dominant discourses? The pressure to find answers to the real (and imagined) threats of ‘terrorist’ violence and the challenges of establishing a critical perspective while including an emancipatory dimension are addressed, and a suggested code of practice and research agenda for critical studies on terrorism is provided.

This article examines the current state of political science in Sweden, by looking at the contents of recent years' doctoral dissertations. To what extent do young Swedish political scientists seek to make their research available to an international audience? The findings indicate that Swedish political scientists are becoming increasingly more oriented towards the international research community. The use of the English language in doctoral dissertations has increased. Also, Swedish political scientists have taken increasingly more interest in international affairs, instead of writing exclusively about Swedish politics.

A comparative survey of the main journal of the Political Studies Association (Political Studies) and of its French counterpart, the journal of the Association Française de Science Politique (Revue Française de Science Politique), between 1951 and 2002, reveals that the two political science communities have not followed the same road to institutionalisation. Three types of differences are analysed: the struggle of the discipline for legitimacy, and its evolution to differentiation and internationalisation.

This article deals with the main obstacles in the way of conducting field research in Eastern Europe. Focusing on Ukraine, the article confronts a number of research design rules with the post-Soviet reality. Taking into consideration cultural and political factors, the article seeks to highlight the challenges that await researchers. Thanks to personal experience acquired in Ukraine, the author points to some of the potential difficulties, as well as opportunities awaiting political scientists conducting research in the region.

This article raises important questions about the standing of citation indices as true reflections of the flow of influence in political science. Are citations being used strategically to enlarge personal standing in the profession? A recent experience suggests that sanctions against unacknowledged appropriation of others' research may be decreasingly severe or non-existent. This has serious implications for collective research and the ‘free marketplace of ideas’ within the discipline.

Bibliometric measures, as provided by the Social Science Citation Index of the Institute for Scientific Information, certainly represent a useful tool for librarians and researchers. However, although librarian scientists have shown that the use of journal impact factors to evaluate the performance of academics is misleading, some authors continue to promote bibliometric metrics to assess the productivity of academic departments and even the entire European academic community. Taking an ambitious ‘global ranking of political science departments’ as a reference, this article questions both the reliability and desirability of bibliometric performance indicators. The article concludes that the development of a panopticon-like audit culture in universities will not enhance their quality, but rather undermine the classical idea and purpose of the university.

This commentary is in response to the European Union's (EU's) 7th framework programme (FP7). It sets out the major elements of FP7 and discusses the pros and cons of the EU's activity in the field of research funding. The main argument is that the EU's activities have grown in size. They can and should no longer be ignored by political scientists when looking for research money. The commentary enumerates some arguments regarding why the EU programmes may be better, or may become better in the future, than the usually critical accounts of the EU research system suggest.

Comparing educational experience, culture and academic practice within Europe can often be an interesting and rewarding exercise. The observations in this article are based on the author's experience of six and half years' teaching at two universities in Bavaria, the completion of a doctorate at the Free University Berlin, two degrees at the University of Edinburgh (one in history, the other in social sciences), and, most recently, two years' teaching in the Politics and Contemporary History Subject Group at the University of Salford in the United Kingdom. The aim is to reflect on the experience of teaching in two different European academic systems, with a view to making some comparisons as well as observations on the changes which have taken place in the UK higher education system over the last two decades.