This semester I am teaching a course on Terrorism at Hunter College. It’s about as close to an ideal course topic as I can get (given that The Coffee and Doughnuts of New York City isn’t a widely recognised political science topic), and it made for an interesting end to the summer, as I put together a syllabus.

When I was first assigned the course, it was called ‘Terrorism and National Conflict’ – an old course listing, that I could dust off and revise. I was told that I needed to make sure the course didn’t overlap too much with other courses, including an International Relations course on Terrorism that the department offers. I took this as a chance to put together a course that was less focused on a terrorism/counter-terrorism, here-is-a-problem-how-do-we-solve-it perspective, and more focused on questioning some of the assumptions about how we define and categorise terrorism. A comparative, constructivist kind of approach to teaching terrorism.

Designing a course around a concept that you’re simultaneously trying to deconstruct has its challenges. The first couple of classes of the course will focus on picking apart our assumptions about who and what terrorism is, but most of the course is going to be dedicated to trying to reconstruct some semblance of scholarly knowledge. If we should be suspicious of the way that some people and groups are labelled as terrorist, then upon what can we ground the study of terrorism?

A partial answer might come by giving attention to those directly involved in terror and violence. Towards this end, I have dedicated one class to looking at justifications for violence, and a few classes to looking at why individuals participate in violence. Perhaps more importantly, I have included some first-person narratives from those most closely connected to violence, such as Che Guevara’s reflections of the inauspicious beginning of the Cuban Revolution, and Rigoberta Menchú’s account of state terror in Guatemala.

I finished up the syllabus for this course at about the same time as the protests in Charlottesville, during which a member of a white supremacist group ran down protestors, killing one and injuring more. After the attack, a huge amount of debate focused on whether the act would or should be called terrorism. Here was the kind of contention over interpretation and naming, that I was trying to examine in this course, but here also was a further challenge: having focused on the idea of deconstructing terrorism as a stable category, I now faced a situation in which I felt the use of the label was warranted. Was I still prepared to stand by the syllabus, and my whole approach to the topic of terrorism? I’m going to try, but I am also going to bring my uncertainty about this to the class discussions. If anything, I think this uncertainty means that we have a topic to which it is worth dedicating a semester.