Speaker: Rabea Khan
Date: Tuesday 4 February 2025
Time: 17:00 to 18:30
Address: School III, St Salvator’s Quad
In this talk, Rabea Khan discusses the dominant narrative that has produced the so-called Religious Terrorism Thesis, i.e. the popular assumption that terrorism at its worst and most dominant form is always religious. Rabea shows how this dominant narrative about ‘religious terrorism’s’ uniquely dangerous character builds on colonial knowledge and assumptions about ‘religion’ in the first place. As she further shows, religion is also written into the category ‘terrorism’ and enables its negative discursive power and the colonial imagination of ‘terrorism’ as racialised and a system-threat to (Western) modernity. This has implications for the use of the category ‘terrorism’ more generally. The Religious Terrorism Thesis, then, is a crucial element of coloniality today which justifies many controversial and contemporary counterterrorism practices.
Dr Rabea Khan is a lecturer in International Relations at Liverpool John Moores University. As a St Andrews alumni she holds both an M.Litt. degree in International Security as well as a PhD in IR from the University of St Andrews. Her primary research interests lie in the critical study of terrorism, religion, and counter-terrorism. She approaches the ‘critical’ study of these concepts and ideas through post- and decolonial as well as abolitionist approaches. Rabea is the current co-convenor of the BISA Critical Terrorism Studies working group and the co-editor of the special issue on ‘Abolition, Decoloniality and Criticality’ which seeks to radically re-think the project of Critical Terrorism Studies. Rabea’s most recent work has been published in Review of International Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Critical Research on Religion, Critical Studies on Terrorism and, Method and Theory of Religion. She is currently working on her first monograph entitled the ‘The colonial Myth of Religious Terrorism’.