Abstract :This article introduces a critical view on terrorism research and its knowledge about
suicide terrorism. The analysis combines a feminist-postcolonial perspective with a
sociology of knowledge approach, including discourse and dispositive analysis. It
draws attention to the limitations of hegemonic knowledge production and to an Occi-
dentalist self-assertion as its by-product. What we know about suicide terrorism and
how we generate this knowledge, I argue by presenting a comprehensive study of
analyses of scholarly publications on suicide bombing from the 1990s to 2006, is embedded
in globally asymmetric power arrangements. I establish a link between the
various forms of political violence that are present in scholarly expertise on suicide
terrorism and the epistemic violence that is inherent in this field of knowledge production.
By introducing the concept of epistemic violence, this text contributes to a more
complex understanding of our fields of research, their objects of analysis, and the
entanglements between these two dimensions, of which we are inevitably complic-
itous as scholars. First, the transdisciplinary research perspective is introduced in
order to move away the focus from political violence (suicide bombing) and turn it on
epistemic violence (knowledge production about it). Second, I present the results of the
research project that this article summarizes.