Images of Terror: what we can and can't know about terrorism.

• Author: McCarthy, Daniel
• Position: Brief Article - Book Review

Images of Terror: What We Can and Can't Know about Terrorism

By Philip Jenkins New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. x, 227. $24.95 paperback.

Philip Jenkins, the Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, is perhaps best known for his recent books The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) and The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), each of which presents, in terms accessible to the layman, scholarly arguments about the changing social status of Christianity. The former book highlights the emergence of developing countries, particularly in Africa, as the future demographic and cultural center of global Christianity. The latter work examines the propensity of media outlets, otherwise careful to offend no minority, to cast the Catholic Church and its teachings in the worst terms possible.

Jenkins brings to Images of Terror the same talent for rendering academic material comprehensible to the popular reader that made his better-known books so appealing, although this monograph is intended for a somewhat narrower audience. Jenkins also brings to this work more familiarity with terrorism as a field of study than might be expected; indeed, he has been writing about the topic since at least 1986. Moreover, Images of Terror is not simply about terrorism itself, but rather about the social construction of terrorism as a concept and problem. Jenkins has considerable experience with the "social constructivist" approach: Images of terrorism is the third book he has written for Aldine de Gruyter's "Social Problems and Social Issues" series.

As the author is careful to explain, social constructivism does not deny the hard reality of specific acts of violence--of suicide bombings, hijackings, and assassinations. But what makes a particular incident an example of terrorism, rather than a conventional crime? It might be possible in the abstract to formulate a definition of terrorism with which most reasonable people would agree, and Jenkins cites just such a definition from the U.S. State Department. In practice, however, as Jenkins argues, the understanding of the problem that prevails at any given moment has been shaped by the news media, interest groups, government agencies--often different agencies with competing agendas--and by a variety of other forces.

Significantly, as a new understanding...