Within discourse analysis it is known that discursive labels are used to fix something, to uphold a dominant way of being. Yet, these discursive labels are also never as stable as the one speaking or labelling would like them to be; they shift and move as culture, time and history unfold (see Hansen 2013: 98, 128; Milliken 1999: 230). All academic work is part of a discursive process – it joins with other discourse production, creating ‘grids of intelligibility’ (Milliken 1999: 230). Terrorism Studies has created its own grids of intelligibility, yet all grids are ‘unstable grids, requiring work to “articulate” and “rearticulate” their knowledges and identities (to fix the “regime of truth”)’ (Milliken 1999: 230). This chapter looks at how discursive narratives within (or that inform) Terrorism Studies travel beyond the academy, situating terrorist actors in particular lights that produce the subject in particular way, reproducing grids of intelligibility that shift to home in on different actors in different ways.

It is my contention that the discursive hierarchy of terrorism is not simply dependent upon the state and its agents. Instead, the discourse is enabled by fears, prejudices and biases that exist on a personal level. As pointed out in Chapter 2, the Westphalian myth is not just about Western pre-eminence; it is also masculinist and white. Therefore, harm does not just remain between states or non-state actors – protection/harm impacts individuals as well. In order to get below the abstractions that occur when IR and Terrorism Studies becomes hyper-focused on state-level activities, feminism urges us to look at the complexity of individuals (Sylvester 2013 and 2010; Tickner 1992).

Therefore, how do the racialised, gendered, heteronormative biases embedded in the Westphalian/imperialism narrative bleed downwards? How do they impact not only our understanding of the violence and of the organisations labelled as terrorist, but our thinking on those individuals that are labelled as terrorists? An intersectional analysis helps to bring these to the forefront, forcing us to recognise that there has always been a power-over between the researcher and her subject that have tended to follow race, class, gender and religious lines. By looking at how these biases have been levelled at different actors from different locales, groups and ideologies, we can see how the easy marks of routinely held identity prejudices provide a ‘narrative fidelity’ for the disorder, irrationality and immorality of terrorist violence.