Lisa Stampnitzky, Ph.D.
l.stampnitzky@sheffield.ac.uk
Assistant Professor
The University of Sheffield
Year of PhD: 2008
Phone: +44 114 222 1701
City: Sheffield, England
Country: United Kingdom
About Me:
Lisa Stampnitzky is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sheffield, and earned her PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her award-winning book, Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented Terrorism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), analyses the construction of the meanings of "terrorism" and terrorism expertise in the United States. Her current research focuses on the new "speakability" of torture in the post 9/11 war on terror.
Research Interests
Terrorism
Human Rights
Political Violence
War On Terror
Human Rights
Torture
EXPERTISE
POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE
Countries of Interest
United States
My Research:
My research focuses upon the contentious processes through which shared meanings of the world-- particularly in relation to the "War on Terror"-- are produced. My first book analyzed the emergence and development of a "field of expertise" around the problem of terrorism, and the simultaneous development of a new discourse through which political violence was understood. My current book project analyzes the debates over the use of torture in the post 9/11 War on Terror, asking specifically how the previously unthinkable-- that the U.S. should openly engage in torture-- became speakable.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Secrecy, especially state secrecy, has taken on increasing interest for scholars of international relations and security studies. However, even with interest in secrecy on the rise, there has been little explicit attention paid to exposure. The breaking of secrecy has generally been relegated to the role of a mere ‘switch’, whose internal workings and variations are of little consequence. This article argues that exposure is a significant process in its own right, and introduces a new conceptualization of exposure as a socially and politically constructed process, one that must be ‘thickly described’ if we are to understand how it occurs and has effects. I differentiate the process of exposure into two distinct aspects, reserving the concept of exposure to refer to releases of information, while introducing the concept of revelation to refer to a collective recognition that something has been exposed. The first part of the article explores existing understandings of secrecy and exposure to demonstrate why a new framework is needed, while the second part applies this framework to a case study of the exposure of the use of torture in the post-9/11 US ‘war on terror’.
While torture and assassination have not infrequently been used by states,the post 9/11 ‘war on terror’ waged by the US has been distinguished by the openacknowledgement of, and political and legal justifications put forward in support of,these practices. This is surprising insofar as the primary theories that have been mo-bilized by sociologists and political scientists to understand the relation between thespread of human rights norms and state action presume that states will increasinglyadhere to such norms in their rhetoric, if not always in practice. Thus, while it is notinconceivable that the US would engage in torture and assassination, we would ex-pect these acts would be conducted under a cloak of deniability. Yet rather than purehypocrisy, the US war on terror has been characterized by the development of a legalinfrastructure to support the use of ‘forbidden’ practices such as torture and assassina-tion, along with varying degrees of open defence of such tactics. Drawing on first-orderaccounts presented in published memoirs, this paper argues that the Bush administra-tion developed such openness as a purposeful strategy, in response to the rise of a legal,technological, and institutional transnational human rights infrastructure which hadturned deniability into a less sustainable option. It concludes by suggesting that a morerobust theory of state action, drawing on sociological field theory, can help better ex-plain the ways that transnational norms and institutions affect states
Books Written:
Since 9/11 we have been told that terrorists are pathological evildoers, beyond our comprehension. Before the 1970s, however, hijackings, assassinations, and other acts we now call 'terrorism' were considered the work of rational strategic actors. Disciplining Terror examines how political violence became 'terrorism', and how this transformation ultimately led to the current 'war on terror'. Drawing upon archival research and interviews with terrorism experts, Lisa Stampnitzky traces the political and academic struggles through which experts made terrorism, and terrorism made experts. She argues that the expert discourse on terrorism operates at the boundary - itself increasingly contested - between science and politics, and between academic expertise and the state. Despite terrorism now being central to contemporary political discourse, there have been few empirical studies of terrorism experts. This book investigates how the concept of terrorism has been developed and used over recent decades.h