To be called a terrorist by one group is to be signaled as a kind of ultimate Other, a dark and essentially unknowable force that can only be crushed into oblivion. Deployments of the term has justified extralegal killings, torture, collective punishment, besiegements, and decimation of entire populations around the world while curtailing civil liberties of domestic populations at home.

But there’s a quiet force animating discussions on who is and is not a terrorist, which indirectly inform how it is used and popularly understood. Some entities appear simply immune to the term: there is no mainstream chorus of terrorism analysts genuinely insisting that the CIA is a terrorist organization even if its actions neatly fit within the same definition terrorist analysts rely on to label nascent jihadi organizations terrorists. Who is immune to the Terrorist label and its implications is thus just as important as who is subject to it.

To get a better understanding of the politics behind terrorism discourse, I’ll be speaking with Alexander Thurston, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati, where he focuses on the study of Islam and Northwest Africa. Thurston is the author of the 2018 book, Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement and has written about the prevalence of experts who always seem to pop up whenever a new terror threat is identified. He calls these people 'terrorologists.’