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TERRORISM, RISK COMMUNICATION, AND PLURALISTIC INQUIRY
Kevin J. Macy-Ayotte
Risk communication can be defined as the exchange of information among interested parties about the nature, magnitude, significance, or control of a risk.
(Covello, 1992, p. 359)
Communication about the causes, consequences, and control of danger has long been part of human society. Although the stakeholders Covello (1992) enumerated, i.e. “government agencies, corporations or industry groups, unions, the communications media, scientists, professional organizations, public interest groups, communities, and individual citizens” (p. 359), have a decidedly modern character, Palenchar (2009) noted that speculation about the probability of dangerous events can be traced back to the time of the Babylonians. The more formal emergence of risk communication as a distinct, if not fully coherent, area of scientific and academic inquiry can be traced to the mid-20th century concern with industrial hazards and the then-novel dangers of nuclear technology. To some extent, from that early interest through today, the analysis of risk has always been multidisciplinary in the sense that different fields (chemistry, engineering, meteorology, medicine, etc.) each dealt with potentially hazardous phenomena, and various academic disciplines (psychology, public health, communication, and more) have contributed research offering insights on ways to disseminate information about risks to various stakeholders. There is ample evidence of the opportunity for such disciplinary pluralism—scholars from psychology, public health, communication studies, international relations, and many other disciplines all publish research relevant to the study of risk communication, but the potential contributions of all are rarely considered in any particular article.
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Communicating the Risk of Terrorism
Although of some limited interest during the final two decades of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, communication about terrorism threats did not receive much focused attention from risk communication scholars until the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Following shortly after, the dissemination of anthrax spores in US mail in October and November 2001 further demonstrated the importance of communicating effectively with the public about the risks associated with bioterrorism. In particular, the difficulties—and in some cases failures—of communication by the Centers for Disease Control and other government agencies about risk to the public and appropriate protective measures have been well documented (Becker, 2005; Vanderford, 2003). Recognizing the potential benefit of applying expertise in communication processes to the increasing range of terrorist threats, Sparks, Kreps, Botan, and Rowan (2005) argued that “communication scholars need to become involved in providing research-based expertise both theoretically and methodologically for constructing, tailoring, and evaluating messages in terrorism contexts” (p. 1). Nearly a decade later, however, Ruggiero and Vos (2013) observed that “relatively little attention has been paid to the topic [of terrorism risk communication] in communication journals” (p. 163).
Ruggiero and Vos’ (2013) worry about the dearth of communication research on terrorism risks serves as a useful starting point for reflection upon both the continuing need for such research and the danger of theoretical and methodological narrowness, sometimes outright parochialism, in existing research on terrorism risk communication. To begin with, Ruggiero and Vos note that the majority of articles in their survey relied upon empirical methodologies, itself documentation of the preference for, or at least primary visibility of, quantitative research over humanistic (e.g., rhetorical and critical) methods of inquiry.
However, Ruggiero and Vos’ own methodology is illustrative of potentially problematic assumptions about what counts as legitimate terrorism risk communication research. Their review of scholarship on terrorism and communication found 435 articles altogether that the literature review authors then culled to 193 by sorting for “scientific articles” as well as other criteria (p. 154). Although the authors specify their exclusion of opinion pieces and commentary, the criteria for an article to qualify as “scientific” were not explicitly articulated. European scholars sometimes label research as “scientific” in fields such as philosophy that would likely be described as “humanistic” in the United States. While the European descriptor of “scientific” connotes systematic analysis, in the US it is generally reserved for quantitative (and less commonly, qualitative) empirical research. But a careful examination of the exemplars mentioned by Ruggiero and Vos suggests they employed criteria that filtered out certain theoretical and methodological approaches as unscientific. The categories identified by the authors for their summary literature review include the role of cultural knowledge and popular culture in influencing perceptions of terrorism risk (p. 158), as well as a category for “leadership communication and rhetoric” (p. 159) containing research on President George W. Bush’s “public communication and crisis rhetoric” regarding the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. However, the examples cited do not include any of the widely recognized scholars (e.g., Dana Cloud, Jeremy Engels, Stephen Hartnett, Robert Ivie, Roger Stahl, and Carol Winkler) who regularly publish in communication journals on the topic of terrorism. It is possible that critical and rhetorical scholarship on communication about terrorism was not actively excluded but simply missed in the initial survey, but this too would demonstrate a methodological assumption substantially limiting what counts as risk communication research.
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The absence of rhetorical approaches to the study of risk communication in general is not new, whether because few scholars employed rhetorical methods or because editors and reviewers have found such work less worthy of publication (Grabill & Simmons, 1998). In the case of terrorism preparedness exercises, federal government planning similarly tends to presume the empirical quantifiability of risk. For example, Danisch (2011) described the Department of Homeland Security’s “primary method of risk management” where “event trees and decision analysis are added to ‘multi-attribute analysis’” (p. 242) in the study of bioterrorism risks in general. He documented this particularly with the 2005 TOPOFF 3 simulation response exercise involving a multi-city terrorist dispersal of plague bacteria, chemical gas, and conventional explosive devices. Planning for the 2003 TOPOFF 2 exercise, involving a radiological terrorist event, included elements intended to highlight affective and sometimes intangible influences on hypothetical victim and public behaviors, but Becker (2005) noted that TOPOFF 2 “did not undertake a systematic effort to capture relevant information and insights” (p. 525) on the handling of psychosocial aspects of bioterror threat perceptions and accompanying public behaviors that were actually built into the scenario at the two hospital sites.
Even some of the existing calls for reflection on risk communication research about terrorism, while acknowledging the uncertainty and limitations of conclusions reached by currently predominant empirical research, further entrench a narrow awareness of potentially valuable theories and methods. For instance, after documenting the inadequacy of attempts to precisely quantify terrorism risks (given the constantly changing variables surrounding any given threat), Haimes (2011) emphasizes the need for “a continuous quantification of the dynamically evolving risk function” regarding terrorism (p. 1184). In other cases, even calls for methodological pluralism are subsequently co-opted by preferences for empirical research. For example, Lee, Lemyre, and Krewski (2010) state that “it is increasingly recognized that these more qualitative, dreaded, and unknown facets of risk have real consequences on individuals’ feelings and behaviors that must be accounted for in risk-management frameworks” (p. 242), but the authors proceed to study those qualitative perceptions of terrorism risks quantitatively with Likert-type surveys.
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Sparks et al. (2005) list several areas of communication studies that they argue should be brought to bear on the study of terrorism risk communication, ending with the inclusive final phrase “among other relevant research areas” (p. 3), but notably absent from the list are rhetorical and critical/cultural studies. Given that these areas represent two of the largest divisions of communication inquiry catalogued by the National Communication Association, and a significant amount of research on terrorism has been published by communication scholars using these approaches, their absence from what has been understood to count as risk communication research is troubling. Equally significant is the problematic manner in which some risk communication scholarship treats concepts like rhetoric in ways that would be unrecognizable to the vast majority of rhetoricians today. For example, Fischoff (2011) attempts to acknowledge the significance of rhetoric by announcing that risk “communications must adopt a rhetorical stance that is either persuasive, trying to induce some behavior (e.g., stock up, take shelter), or nonpersuasive, trying to facilitate informed decision-making (e.g., about how best to use the time until fallout arrives)” (p. 526). However, the notion that information can somehow be segregated from its potentially persuasive implications, as if the content and manner of information dissemination has no effect on its persuasive force, would find little purchase with any contemporary rhetorical theorist.
To be clear, the fact that researchers prefer particular theoretical frameworks, even to the point of privileging some in describing their discipline, is neither a novel observation nor unusual. Merton (1996) observed two decades ago that the “very difference of perspective” in theoretical frameworks “typically leads them to focus on different rather than the same problems” (p. 36). Unfortunately, the tendency of the preference for particular theories to result in the artificial competition, or overt exclusion, of differing theories is also not exactly a new phenomenon. As Merton noted, although “theories are often complementary or unconnected rather than contradictory,” the inability or refusal to acknowledge that fact “often results in the mock controversies that recurrently pepper the history of the sciences” (p. 36). Such controversies about theory and method can be found in virtually all academic disciplines, and across them as well; the “science wars” that emerged in debates about the application of humanistic inquiry to natural sciences during the 1990s are especially illustrative (see Slack & Semati, 1997; Sokal, 1996). These intellectual divisions are thus clearly not unique to the study of risk communication. Moreover, the fact that risk is implicated in so many different facets of human life, and that so many different academic fields are impacted by the study and practice of risk communication, itself generates some of this theoretical partisanship.
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As Althaus (2005) has noted, “Each discipline applies a particular form of knowledge to uncertainty so as to order its randomness and convert it into a risk proposition” (p. 569). Expanding upon Althaus’ claim, Palenchar and Heath (2007) conclude that “each discipline is an epistemological system that focuses on risk matters with a unique set of bifocals and varying interpretive screens” (p. 122). The fact of these different lenses for inquiry in diverse academic disciplines is not itself a point for judgment or blame; as scholars in different fields, even when we study the same phenomenon, we examine it with different interests, from differing angles, and with different assumptions. Medical doctors may be especially interested in the accurate diagnosis of the pathogen deployed in a suspected biological attack, public health officials may be focused on the status of the disease as communicable or not, and health communication experts planning messages about the suspected attack might focus on whether public audiences understand the difference between infectious and communicable disease in order to determine the language used in press releases. Too often, however, the understandable differences in disciplinary focus become not merely different lenses but limits to what researchers consider as relevant or legitimate expertise. One illustration that may be especially striking for communication scholars is Fischoff’s (2011) relegation of “communication specialists” to the role of creating “channels for staying in touch” (p. 529) with the public, while it is “psychologists who can study their audience’s needs, design potentially effective communications, and evaluate their usefulness” (p. 528). Fischoff’s privileging of psychology might merely be a nod to the article’s publication venue, American Psychologist, yet that would still demonstrate the entrenched fragmentation of diverse disciplines that all have a part to play in risk communication.
The gulf between disciplines is, as noted above, often replicated within academic fields. Sometimes those differences are the result of the necessary specialization that comes with developing expertise on a given subject and attendant inexperience with alternative theories or methods. Other times, the privileging of one theoretical framework has as much to do with implicit attributions of professional status as it does with the explanatory potential of a given theory. As Robert Hariman (1986) observed three decades ago, “theoretical discourse is political discourse—that is, it inevitably establishes relations of dominance and subordination” (p. 45).
The politics of theory manifest in myriad ways. Most people have probably experienced a colleague denigrating theoretical frameworks to which said colleague doesn’t subscribe, and not in all cases because of documented inaccurate conclusions or lack of intellectual rigor. The motives are many: the competitive socialization of graduate school, intradepartmental politics, adaptation to a particular journal, and sometimes simply intellectual parochialism. This disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological fragmentation may not be uncommon, but it is singularly unhelpful for advancing the prospects of risk communication, particularly about terrorism.
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Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Methodological Pluralism
Consistent with the tendency toward empiricism in terrorism risk communication research described in the previous section, much of the risk and crisis communication literature frames its goal as helping the public understand what experts believe to be the objective truth of a particular danger. Risk communication research has long lamented the disconnect between public attitudes or behaviors and what hazard experts and risk communication scholars see as the “facts” of a given threat. Current risk communication theory is mostly positivist—i.e., focused only on providing objectively provable information to the publics—which is why there is a great deal of emphasis placed on transparency and clarity in such communications. These empirical approaches to the study of risk communication are necessary, but not sufficient to fully analyze risk communication about terrorism (Ayotte, Bernard, & O’Hair, 2009). Groves and Newman’s (1990) observation about the need for pluralistic inquiry in criminology offers a useful analogy: “Positivism works well in establishing co-variations between defined variables. But it does not address, nor does it try to address, the ‘meaning’ crime has for individuals or for society generally” (p. 106). The “meaning” of terrorism risks, and recalling the range of elements Covello (1992) included—“nature, magnitude, significance, or control of a risk” (p. 359)—is helpful here, but will not adequately be assessed exclusively by any one theory or method.
A far more promising approach to studying terrorism risk communication would be one that seeks out and values interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological pluralism. Such an approach emerges logically from the fundamentally uncertain nature of risk. As Beck (2002) postulates, risk as a concept “presumes decision-making” and requires efforts at “calculating the incalculable” (p. 40) that will always fall short of certainty. Similarly, Palenchar and Heath (2007) observe, citing Aristotle’s notion that humans think precisely because of the impossibility of certainty in human affairs, that “[t]he very nature of risk prohibits absolute definitions and knowledge” (p. 125). The humility that should follow from the inability to know with objective certainty, from the inevitable incompleteness of human knowledge, can also serve as the impetus for pluralistic research.
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First, terrorism risk communication research must demand interdisciplinary perspectives. At the most basic level, research from different fields must be recognized as potentially valuable to understanding the multiple facets of terrorism threats. The nature of a hypothetical bioterrorist threat encompasses the biology of a weaponized pathogen, the physics of the agent’s dispersal, and an adversary’s motivation to attack. The probability of the risk depends upon a host of factors, all of which might be evaluated by several academic disciplines. Magnitude not only depends upon the pathogen and dispersal but also variables of epidemiology and the success of response efforts. The response implicates the accuracy and feasibility of public health messages, the public’s ability to interpret messages given existing cultural discourses about terrorism, the news media’s ability and interest in transmitting information without editorializing, and material resources and distribution plans. Thus, rather than assuming that one discipline’s approach is superior, Althaus (2005) recommends that we bring to bear on risk communication what we all know differently. Disciplinary pluralism in risk communication research will not be helpful, however, if such perspectives remain fragmented. As Groves and Newman (1990) state, “A truly interdisciplinary approach integrates material from various disciplines into a single image. It is not merely additive” (p. 106). Practitioners of many disciplines must talk to each other with the goal of understanding how distinct or even seemingly divergent perspectives contribute to a more robust understanding of a given risk.
Second, taking seriously the uncertain nature of risk requires acknowledging the necessarily limited nature of a given theory or method for studying it; theoretical pluralism is not just a good idea but a necessary compensation for the limits of any given perspective. As an alternative to the hope for unattainable certainty in risk communication, Palenchar and Heath (2007) acknowledge the insights of narrative theory, which posits that people interpret the world and live their lives not as rationally calculating machines but as participants in a story whose events, characters, and plot are arguments rather than objective facts. Such a view necessarily recognizes the value of rhetorical theories and methods, among many other frameworks, and not only those focused on narratives. The uncertainty on which risk is based leads Danisch (2011) to conclude that “[t]he very concept of risk serves as a well of probable knowledge from which many different kinds of arguments can be drawn” (p. 238). Sellnow, Littlefield, Vidoloff, and Webb (2009) turned to argumentation theory in a study of risk communication about terrorist hoaxes because of the nature of such hoaxes as false claims in need of refutation, but we should not restrict ourselves to looking at the words of terrorists as arguments. All risk communication could be tested as argumentation for a particular understanding of the threat, as well as recommended preparedness measures, policy responses, and crisis behavior, all of which rely upon “practical reasoning based on the values and norms to which a group or society is already committed” (Sellnow et al., 2009, p. 138).
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The terrorist threat assessments by government agencies and other analysts, upon which all subsequent risk communication is based, depend upon an analysis of both an enemy’s capabilities and the vulnerabilities of the potential target, the latter of which are often “matters of heated domestic controversy” (Freedman, 2005, p. 384) regarding individual and collective beliefs about various political, social, economic, and philosophical values and institutions. Claims about the nature of enemy capabilities and intentions are also the result of analytic calculations, which are inevitably shaped by ideology, worldview, emotion, and a host of symbolic connections that shape perceptions of the significance and relevance of data. We cannot assume the objective character of any threat or intelligence estimate, since preferences for various policies and hoped-for outcomes can shape analysis at all levels: “advocates of particular strategic choices develop theories of vulnerability to rationalize their preferences and then seek intelligence estimates which add weight to their theories” (Freedman, 2005, p. 384). The cherry-picking of intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein’s WMD capability prior to the 2003 Iraq War offers an especially stark example of the consequences for later risk communication about WMD and terrorist threats. We would be better served by taking to heart Burke’s (1969) admonition that descriptions of reality are always “selections of reality,” and therefore necessarily a “deflection of reality” (p. 59) as well. If our goal as risk communication researchers is better public understanding of risk and the attendant behaviors for minimizing it, we must actively encourage accounting for many different “selections of reality.”
Terrorism, Risk, and the Limits of Parochial Inquiry
This section offers two extended examples of the need for, and value of, interdisciplinary scholarship on terrorism risk communication that is theoretically and methodologically pluralistic. That is, scholarship that takes seriously the contributions of differing disciplines and that both draws from, and is open to, an array of differing theories and approaches to inquiry. The first example considers the role of the media as the primary conduit for risk communication about terrorism, and the second example examines several articles in a special issue of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence attacking critical terrorism scholars for allegedly legitimizing terrorism. The goal in each example is not to present an exhaustive case study but rather to demonstrate concretely the consequences of disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological parochialism in specific instances of research on terrorism risk communication.
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Mediated Risk
It is a basic fact of terrorism risk communication that “[m]ost Americans must rely exclusively on the media for terrorism-related information” (Nellis & Savage, 2012, p. 751; see also Dobkin, 1992). Luckily, most Americans have no direct experience with terrorism as victims or spectators, much less as participants. Nearly all of our spectatorship, as well as official risk communication about terrorism, is experienced through our television screens and other news media. Although the role of the media in disseminating information about terrorism is generally well recognized, Heilbrun, Wolbransky, Shah, and Kelly (2010) interestingly separate the news media from the government as risk information sources, writing that “[w]hile the media play an important role in providing information . . . , individuals are also likely to depend upon the federal government for ongoing information regarding personal and collective risks of terrorism” (p. 721), as if information from the federal government is not almost always disseminated via the news media. Even when the news media transmit unedited announcements from government sources, those official messages are almost certainly book-ended by interpretive commentary that audiences may not disaggregate when processing the nature of a threat. The point here is not the significance of a single study that fails to understand the ubiquity of media as the fundamental channel through which risk communication flows, but instead the value of fully integrating media theory (which does fully understand the ubiquity of media framing) with this research.
A different problem results from the failure to account adequately for the various ways in which the structural constraints of the news industry, audience reception, and the intertextuality of media messages inevitably shape the meanings of terrorism that are ultimately available to public audiences. The media are often blamed for failures of risk communication (e.g., Murray, Schwartz, & Lichter, 2001; Willis & Okunade, 1997). Heilbrun et al. (2010) note that in addition to “media influences,” “irrational fears” and “trouble understanding probabilities . . . may lead people to overestimate and underestimate the seriousness of risk and inappropriately respond to such risks” (p. 719). Although they’re a step toward acknowledging the range of variables (not all of them quantifiable) affecting public interpretation of risk communication, the solutions proffered by scholars from outside the field of media studies, or without attention to the insights especially of critical media theory, often simply replicate a positivist hope for the realization of an ideal transmission model of communication. Lowrey et al. (2007), for example, acknowledge that “[n]ews reports of terrorism and natural disasters . . . sometimes have been faulted for inaccurate, incomplete, and sensational coverage that may contribute to public misunderstanding of risks,” but emphasize that “[r]esearch suggests journalists are unprepared to cover terrorism and many types of natural disasters, in part because journalists lack sufficient expertise in science and medicine” (p. 2). This leads Lowrey et al. (2007) to call on risk communicators to “[t]ranslate and disseminate the work of experts in health and risk communication” (p. 7) for use by journalists and public information officers. Although that may be part of the solution, whether through training scientists to communicate with lay audiences or training journalists in basic science and research methods, there is also a need for interdisciplinary approaches to the study of risk communication that account for the inherent complexities of mediated communication in the first place, not merely the “translation” of positivist empirical research, as if the mediated channel itself does not shape the message that ultimately reaches public audiences. Even if those deficiencies of science communication were remedied, for instance, it would be inadeqaute to deal with what Mueller (2005) has described as the news media’s “congenital incapacity for dealing with issues of risk and comparative probabilities” (p. 226). At least three distinct challenges complicating the media’s capacity to serve as the transparent conduit of accurate information about terrorism risks become apparent only when reading across disciplines and with a sincere willingness to consider seriously theoretical and methodological frameworks that may be unfamiliar and perhaps already prejudged with skepticism.
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First, a variety of structural factors simultaneously incentivize media exaggeration of risks and disincentivize calmer, more nuanced coverage. In Mueller’s (2005) words, “Reporters and politicians mostly find extreme and alarmist possibilities so much more appealing than discussions of broader context, much less of statistical reality” (p. 226), and the reasons are myriad. Experts who may have a financial stake in industry or grant funding tied to terrorism preparedness have an incentive to exaggerate threats, politicians and analysts likely face greater reputational risks for being wrong about a terrorist event than a non-event, and consumers of media and political discourse drive the demand for drama in public culture (see also Dobkin, 1992; Lowrey et al., 2007). Many media scholars have documented the ways in which finite limits on journalists’ financial resources and time, against the pressure to meet submission deadlines, lead to the over-reliance on government and other elite sources of information (e.g., Ericson, Baranek, & Chan, 1987; Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts, 1978; Herman & Chomsky, 2002; Singer & Endreny, 1993; Vincent, 1992). Some of these official sources may have a direct financial incentive to choose alarmism over accuracy, as “[t]here is no surer way for the national labs or the intelligence agencies to receive more money from the Treasury than by hyping the terrorist threat, particularly if the word ‘nuclear’ can be attached to it” (Weiss, 2015, p. 84). The same was true of federal funding for biodefense research after 2001, and a robust analysis of mediated risk communication about bioterrorism would have to account for incentives at all levels that potentially shape the subjective interpretation of threat information.
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Second, the many reasons public audiences have difficulty interpreting probabilities according to the mathematical standards of risk researchers has also been well documented (e.g., Slovic, 1987). One difficulty is that, as Sunstein (2003) explains,
in the face of ignorance, people assess probabilities through the use of various heuristics, most notably the availability heuristic, in accordance with which probability is measured by asking whether a readily available example comes to mind. . . . In the aftermath of a terrorist act, and for a period thereafter, that act is likely to be both available and salient, and thus to make people think that another act is likely.
(p. 121)
Sunstein’s reminder of the need to account for the impact of proximal terrorist events upon interpretations of the probability of future terrorist attacks is important, but greater theoretical scope might help researchers to recognize that a broad range of elements could serve as “available and salient” examples used by audiences to interpret risk scenarios. Hall et al. (1978) describe the news media’s reliance upon “cultural ‘maps’” through which they “‘make sense’ for their audiences of the unusual, unexpected and unpredicted events which form the basic content of what is ‘newsworthy’” (p. 54; see also Altheide, 2007). Ayotte (2011) documents the news media’s inordinate reliance on cultural maps embedded in US popular culture, not just the CDC or the federal government, to explain the 2001 anthrax attacks, which led CNN to turn to novelist Richard Preston as a “bioterrorism expert” (Ayotte, 2011, p. 8). Preston’s alleged expertise had already been established by the bestselling status of his novel The Cobra Event (1997) and his nonfiction book The Hot Zone (1994), such that he had been invited to testify before the Senate in 1998 about the former Soviet Union’s bioweapons program—testimony in which he misreported the historical transmission rate of anthrax by a factor of 10 (Ayotte, 2011, p. 11). Thus, the semiotic proximity of popular culture may in some cases be as significant as recent material events in providing available information for public audiences. The key lesson for risk communication researchers is that in the 2001 anthrax attacks and the later SARS outbreak, national news media in some cases turned as often to popular writers as to CDC experts for public information about disease risks, and so our modes of inquiry must draw from a range of theories and disciplines adequate to the complexity of that phenomenon.
Third, Sunstein (2003) also notes that people are likely to engage in “probability neglect” (p. 122), wherein they fail to account for the (un)likelihood of harm for a given risk because of their focus on the horror of the negative impact. Sunstein cites one small study where the vividness of the description of cancer death (as illustrative of the emotional aspect of impact magnitude) seemed to be responsible for substantial effects on participant responses (pp. 124–126). In the context of research in communication studies (Ayotte, 2011; Keränen, 2008) and public policy (Stern, 1999) confirming that visceral revulsion of harms associated with WMD may result in disproportionate feelings of dread and horror, Sunstein’s (2003) analysis helps to explain why the news media’s tendency to the dramatic may carry very real consequences for the public’s interpretation of mediated risk communication.
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The various critical media theories drawn upon above—propaganda studies, Marxist political economy, post-structuralist semiotics, and several approaches to cultural studies—demonstrate on-point utility for identifying the gaps in some existing critiques of the media in risk communication research. The conclusions above are reinforced by rhetorical scholarship, as “what is taken to be knowledge of terrorism risks is constructed in significant part by the rhetoric through which those risks are described” (Ayotte et al., 2009, p. 608). Whether the rhetorical characteristics of risk communication emerge in the message development process, the media’s dissemination of risk messages, or the audience’s interpretation of risk discourse, diverse approaches to risk communication enhance the quality of the overall conclusion. The point is not to disparage empirical research that has not integrated media and rhetorical theory, but rather to emphasize the need to supplement it with awareness of structural, linguistic, and ideological limitations to the transparency, accuracy, and clarity with which the news media will ever be able to communicate information about terrorism risks.
(Un)critical Terrorism Studies
Seeking in part to broaden the theoretical horizons of risk communication scholars to include nuanced questions about the social construction of threats, Palenchar and Heath (2007) argue that “[r]isk communication becomes a tool for communicating values and identities as much as being about the awareness, attitudes and behaviors related to the risk itself” (p. 127). The nature of risk as a potential hazard to something valued necessarily begs the question of how that value came to be established and whose interests are served or threatened by that hazard. Those values and identities, of audiences and risk communicators themselves, are not previously established but rather constituted and reinforced through the discourse in which risks are described and responses prescribed. Questions like this underlie, for instance, Beck’s (2002) concern about the phenomenon of “methodological nationalism,” which “equates societies with nation-state societies, and sees states and their governments as the cornerstones of a social science analysis. . . . These premises also structure empirical research, as in, for example, the choice of statistical indicators, which are almost always exclusively national” (p. 51). Notable for the current discussion of interdisciplinary, pluralistic inquiry is that critical media and cultural studies scholar Noam Chomsky (1989; see also Herman & Chomsky, 2002) leveled much the same criticism against official US government discourse about terrorism and its omission of violence perpetrated by the United States and ally states.
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In the late 1990s, some critical theorists working primarily in departments of international relations and geography began drawing upon a broad array of philosophical, linguistic, and social theories to challenge what they saw as the narrowly positivistic approaches then dominating the discipline of international relations; work in this area came to be referred to under the rubric of Critical Security Studies (see, for example, Campbell, 1998; Krause & Williams, 1997; Shapiro, 1997). A contemporary extension of this critical inquiry regarding the study and representation of international security threats focused specifically on terrorism has emerged under the label of Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) (e.g., Dixit & Stump, 2016; Jackson, 2007; Jackson, Smyth, & Gunning, 2009; Jarvis, 2009). It is against the backdrop of CTS research, and the sometimes surprisingly visceral and unscholarly reaction to it by other terrorism researchers, that we find another useful example of the opportunity for, and resistance to, theoretical pluralism in risk communication about terrorism.
In 2013, the journal Terrorism and Political Violence published a special issue entitled “The Intellectuals and Terror: A Fatal Attraction.” Although not exclusively focused on terrorism risk communication, this journal is among the most prominent publishing academic work on the threat of terrorism. If we are to take seriously Covello’s (1992) definition of risk communication as including information about the nature of a risk, then the research published in this journal falls squarely under the purview of terrorism risk communication. Recalling Palenchar and Heath’s (2007) previously cited observation that risk communication is as much “a tool for communicating values and identities” as it is for describing “the awareness, attitudes and behaviors related to the risk itself,” interrogation of the sort of values and identities propounded by this issue of Terrorism and Political Violence represents an invaluable exercise in the exploration of theoretical pluralism.
Ranging beyond scholarship specifically associated with the label of CTS, several of the articles in this special issue nonetheless engage lines of argument commonly found in CTS research. Claiming that “[i]ntellectuals have even provided the perpetrators of violence with a legitimacy of sorts at different junctures” (Rimon & Schleifer, 2013, p. 511), the editors provide a platform from which several authors attempt to discredit critical scholarship that asks exactly the sort of questions about the discursive and methodological construction of values and identities in risk communication research called for by Palenchar and Heath (2007) and Beck (2002). The special issue further exemplifies the resistance to theoretical pluralism that is the focus of this chapter. As Hopkins (2014) noted, the special issue of Terrorism and Policitcal Violence is “published within a context whereby the editors, the authors and the references they use all have a singular ideological view of terrorism, and where certain assumptions on power and legitimacy are unquestioned” (p. 301). The articles by Landes (2013), Hollander (2013), and Geifman (2013) illustrate the implications of the theoretical parochialism displayed in this journal’s special issue.
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To begin with, consider this passage from Landes’ (2013) article, which establishes the tone of his argument:
Nothing is more useful to Jihadi ambitions . . . than non-Muslim intellectuals who insist that Islam is a religion of peace; that it is perfectly consonant with democracy; that the terrorists represent a tiny, marginal deviation from true Islam. . . . Historically, no more inane claim can be put forth than that a belligerent (if not the most belligerent) creed . . . could be called “a religion of peace.”
(p. 622)
The first thing to note is that Landes does not offer a single piece of evidence to support his claim, not even an asserted contrast to the similarly well-documented bloody history of the Crusades. Landes’ (and apparently the editors’) assumption of the self-evident truth of such a strident and negative generalization about an entire religion should give any serious researcher pause. By contrast, scholars from various disciplines have disproven the validity, and documented the harms, of the homogenization and vilification of Islam (Ayotte & Husain, 2005; Said, 1994; Said, 1997).
Landes (2013) additionally asserts that postmodern and post-colonial theory are responsible for legitimizing terrorism: “The ‘Other’ in post-colonial discourse inspired by Levinasian-Derridean post-modernism has come to occupy such a central position that some thinkers actually argue the epistemological priority of the ethnic or national ‘Other’” (p. 626). Again, Landes cites no examples, footnoting only his own blog post as evidence, a post whose only mentions of Jacques Derrida consist of secondary references to two conference papers about the late French philosopher. Other scholars have found it similarly acceptable to dismiss the relevance of Derrida’s work to the project of Critical Terrorism Studies without bothering to cite a single word of the philosopher’s work (e.g., Jones & Smith, 2009). The uncritical caricature of postmodern theory, and particularly of Derrida, reflects a surprisingly widespread comfort with dismissing divergent theoretical frameworks with little expectation of intellectual engagement, which carried over even into the public obituaries (some eulogistic and others bizarrely gleeful) following Derrida’s death (Tumolo, Biedendorf, & Ayotte, 2014).
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Two other authors in the special issue offer broad indictments of any scholarship that identifies Palestinian suicide bombings and other terrorist violence as a response to Israeli or US foreign policies. Hollander (2013) labels virtually all such critical analyses “rationalizations” (p. 528) of terrorism by “left-of-center” “Western academic intellectuals, especially in the humanities and social sciences” (p. 519). Geifman (2013) goes even further in the special issue, asserting that terrorism scholars who criticize Israeli counter-terrorism policies may be suffering from Stockholm syndrome. She implies that such critical perspectives amount to “redirecting liability from the architects of brutality to its victims,” allegedly “[a] common symptom of the Stockholm syndrome” (p. 557). The lengthy history of people, from doctors to demagogues, who have relied upon intimations of insanity to disparage or marginalize those with divergent views has been well-documented (van Voren, 2009). Suffice it to say that Geifman’s pseudo-psychiatry should be a less-than-compelling reason to dismiss an entire category of terrorism scholarship that happens to differ from hers.
More importantly, if, as Heath and Waymer (2014) recommend, risk communication researchers and policy makers must ask “what message, value position, identity, or interest are some terrorists attempting to communicate” (p. 242), then contra Hollander (2013) and Geifman (2013), we must include in our analyses the self-described motives of terrorists like Osama bin Laden (2001), who himself identified the alleged violence of Israel and Western powers as the impetus for Al Qaeda’s terrorism. To simply describe bin Laden’s own rationalizations is not to legitimize them, any more than a prosecutor is rationalizing the motive of a murderer when attempting to win a conviction at trial. The hijackers of TWA flight 847 claimed their motive to be partly retaliation for a CIA-involved car bombing in Beirut targeting Sheik Fadlallah, which failed to get Fadlallah but killed dozens and wounded many more (Dobkin, 1992). Far from the Leftist propaganda imagined by Hollander and Geifman, it was the CIA that coined the term “blowback” to label exactly this phenomenon (Johnson, 2000, p. 8). Military scholars have thusly for decades described terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and guerilla tactics as “asymmetric” responses to the conventional military superiority of the United States and other countries (e.g., Burrows & Windrem, 1994; Cottam, 1988; Klare, 1995; Sloan, 1998).
Because of the nature of journal special issues, the aforementioned articles by Landes (2013), Hollander (2013), and Geifman (2013) may not have gone through the normal anonymous peer-review process designed to ensure rigor and objectivity of research. But the publication of articles that skimp on even basic expectations of evidentiary documentation, analytical reasoning, and openness to intellectual disagreement does not satisfy our need for robust research that helps us understand the nature of terrorism risks. We cannot rely on ad hominem arguments or facile reasoning to discount perspectives that differ from ours, and we should object to scholarship that does so when we encounter it.
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Conclusion
As documented by Merton (1996), the call for theoretical pluralism is decades old, spanning the natural and social sciences as well as humanistic disciplines. It is a worthy, if unfinished, project because robust research demands an accumulated diversity of inquiry. The stakes involved in the success or failure of risk communication, particularly that about terrorism, make this an important area for pluralistic research. The inevitably incomplete perspective of any one approach to the study of terrorism risks makes such pluralism necessary, since understanding the “contextual complexity” of terrorism risk communication “requires a multi-dimensional approach that combines different disciplines, methodologies, theories and levels of analysis” (Crelinsten, 2002, p. 110). This chapter has sought, through a review of literature on terrorism risk communication and analysis of extended examples of mediated risk communication and the controversy about Critical Terrorism Studies, to demonstrate the need for, and value of, interdisciplinary theoretically and methodologically pluralistic inquiry. Through the sources cited and the integration of complementary and diverse scholarship on terrorism, this chapter has also attempted to put into practice this call for pluralistic research on terrorism risk communication.
The success of efforts to improve the effectiveness of messages about terrorism risks will depend on researchers’ ability to account for the myriad influences on risk interpretations by both the media and public audiences. Although not independently a sufficient approach to terrorism risk communication research, Critical Terrorism Studies, and even the theoretical poverty on display in Terrorism and Political Violence’s special issue, may offer new perspectives on terrorism threats of significant value to risk communication scholars. This is not to say that each of us must personally utilize theoretical frameworks or methodological tools with which we are unfamiliar or disagree. Nor should we hesitate to criticize research that we believe lacks theoretical coherence or methodological rigor. But we must cultivate theoretical perspectives that differ from our own, with the expectation that they demonstrate their usefulness to the endeavor of better risk communication, in order to develop the most thorough understanding and response to risk that we are able.
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