Dr Lisa Stampnitzky

My research analyzes how understandings of state and non-state violence are politically, socially, and historically constructed.

My first book*, Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism” (Cambridge University Press, 2013), addresses the question of how the contemporary concept of "terrorism" took shape. Through a multi-method study, drawing on historical research, network analysis, and interviews with experts in the field, I establish how both "terrorism" and terrorism expertise were socially and historically constructed. I argue that acts that we now call terrorism, such as hijackings and assassinations, were previously understood through a completely different framework: that of insurgency committed by rational strategic actors.

However, as I show, over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, understandings of political violence was overtaken by a new discourse of "terrorism." I find that this transformation was effected through the emergence of a new arena of expertise spanning universities, think tanks, and state agencies. Although popular commentators in the wake of 9/11 often declared that the war on terror represented a sharp break with prior American foreign policy, my book shows that the war on terror built on a set of cultural frameworks about the problem of terrorism that had taken shape since the 1970s.

My current book project, How Torture Became Speakable, aims to explain the puzzle of why the post-9/11 war on terror has been characterized by the open justification of practices that violate human rights norms, such as torture and assassination. While the literature on human rights predicts that states will sometimes fail to abide by the norms they rhetorically affirm, it is expected that this will manifest as hypocrisy, rather than open defiance of such norms. The puzzle, then, is why the US has chosen to openly justify the practices of "harsh interrogation" and "targeted killing," rather than rely on a strategy of denial.

Drawing on published memoirs and declassified documents recounting debates on torture and assassination in the Bush and Obama administrations, this project aims to understand the shifting construction of the boundary between the speakable and the unspeakable in moral and political discourse. I argue that this brazenness is best understood as a strategic response to a context in which secrecy and denial have become less practicable than in the past, and, paradoxically, that this shift is due in large part to the rise of the very norms and institutions of human rights themselves.

*Disciplining Terror has been awarded the 2015 Francesco Guicciardini Prize for Best Book in Historical International Relations from the International Studies Association; the 2015 International Political Sociology Book Award from the International Studies Association; and the 2012 President's Book Award from the Social Science History Association.