A Tale of Terror: Autoethnography and the Study of Terrorism

Although terrorism is the only form of violence named after an emotion, terror, there appears to be negligible attention paid to comprehending and analysing this core emotion. Due in large part to the unique subjective factors of terror, there is immense difficulty in quantifying the emotion. Similarly, attempts to qualify emotions using qualitative methodologies are underexplored. This paper presents autoethnography as a legitimate, viable, and ethical research method for the study of terror in terrorism. The author advances a first person account of the experience of terror from a recognised terrorist attack in Istanbul in 2016. The intention is to provide a starting point for understanding the emotional complexities of terror, its unique qualities, and the inherent problems of researching and analysing such an emotion. The paper argues for the need to understand the emotion of terror, the unique characteristics that make the study difficult, how autoethnography can overcome such obstacles, and illustrates the point with a detailed accounting of personal experience of a terrorist attack.