Kitts/Violence, Conspiracies 2. Researching Religious Terrorism

This chapter explores a common problem of those who research the topic of religion-related terrorism: how to enter into the mindset of religious activists, especially those committed to violent interactions. This is the challenge for anyone trying to make sense of people and groups that are different than themselves, a problem for textual and historical scholars as well as those applying contemporary social and anthropological approaches. This chapter advocates a form of epistemic worldview analysis that adopts an approach involving informative conversations. These emphasize relational knowledge—attempts to engage with a subject either directly or through textual analysis that brackets the investigator’s assumptions and allows the subject to frame the information from his or her own worldview.