This symposium emerged as a response to three recent developments in the field of terrorism studies. The first development has been the tremendous growth in terrorismrelated research and teaching activities since the attacks of 11 September 2001. Since then, terrorism studies has been transformed from a minor subfield of security studies to a large stand-alone field with its own dedicated journals, research centres, leading scholars and experts, research funding opportunities, conferences and university study programmes. As a consequence, it is now one of the fastest expanding areas of research in the Western academic world, with literally thousands of new books and articles published over the past few years, significant investment in terrorism-related research projects and increasing numbers of postgraduate dissertations and undergraduate students.

The article describes the history and the process of editing the Czech Journal of Political Science. First, it puts the journal into the general context of the development of Czech political science. The journal is now one of three well-established political science journals in the Czech Republic, and invites contributions in all subfields of the discipline. The article discusses the limitations of a social scientific journal published predominantly in a small-nation language. Second, it focuses on the particular steps of the editing process. It primarily describes the peer review process.

Quantitatively predictive model building has proven itself in physics and could enrich political science, which is presently addicted to postdictive approaches. As a specific example, I address the dependence of electoral volatility on the number of parties in both ways: testing falsifiable predictive models based on logical considerations, and theory-free postdictive regression. The pressure to apply regression to any and all problems harms political science by omitting one-half of the scientific method. Most numbers published in political science are dead on arrival: once printed, they are never used for anything. We can do better than that. It is not a matter of starting from scratch but widening the tool kit so as to bring to completion research that presently all too often stops just short of the pay-off stage.

Orthodox terrorism studies tend to focus on the activities of illiberal non-state actors against the liberal democratic states in the North. It thus excludes state terrorism, which is one of a number of repressive tools that great powers from the North have used extensively in the global South in the service of foreign policy objectives. I establish the reasons for the absence of state terrorism from orthodox accounts of terrorism and argue that critical–normative approaches could help to overcome this major weakness.

Editing a journal like the European Journal of Political Research means in the first place the organisation of a constant reviewing process. Finding referees and making sure that they provide useful reports is needed for making wise decisions. Double-blind refereeing is indeed the generally accepted procedure for selecting publishable articles. This blind refereeing process is also believed to be the best way to select high-quality manuscripts. It is a sacred ritual. Yet the real life of refereeing can sometimes be quite messy and is not at all free from biases. It tends to be a fairly conservative selection process.

This paper examines some of the key challenges critical terrorism studies will have to face. Starting from the premise that a critical turn must both challenge traditional approaches to ‘terrorism’ and provide an umbrella under which traditional and critical perspectives from ‘terrorism studies’ and cognate fields can converge, the article reflects on the tensions this will introduce, ranging from how to define the boundaries of a critical field and whether to adopt the term ‘terrorism’ as a field delineator, to the need for policy-relevance and the tensions this introduces between striving to influence policy and avoiding co-optation. The paper ends with a reflection on the challenge of being sensitive to cultural and contextual differences while remaining true to one's emancipatory agenda.

Unlike theories in physics, social theories are usually tested by applying statistical hypothesis testing to observational data. This approach has more problems than commonly realised owing to false positives and model uncertainty, and it inhibits the development of social science. A better method to test a theory is by making definitive predictions that, if proved, strongly support the theory against alternative explanations.

The Journal of European Public Policy was launched to fill a perceived intellectual gap in the market for European public policy research. It appears to have been a success but some luck was needed, good academic contacts, and a publisher willing to take a risk by committing quite large sums of money up front. Referees are hugely important for the success of a journal but this does not mean that editors should not occasionally exercise their own judgement. Evaluation and ranking of journals is a complex and unreliable process. Thus, the market is probably the best judge. If a journal sells well and subscriptions are rising it is probably ok! Submission fees seem a bad idea as authors already work for no pay. Payment for referees might work but is it really necessary? Finally, let us have more journals and more competition for our work.

Critical terrorism studies (CTS) is founded firstly on a series of powerful critiques of the current state of orthodox terrorism studies, including: its poor methods and theories, its state centricity, its problem-solving orientation and its institutional and intellectual links to state security projects. Defined broadly by a sceptical attitude towards accepted terrorism ‘knowledge’, CTS is also characterised by a set of core epistemological, ontological and ethical commitments, including: an appreciation of the politically constructed nature of terrorism knowledge; an awareness of the inherent ontological instability of the ‘terrorism’ category; a commitment to critical reflexivity regarding the uses to which research findings are put; a set of well-defined research ethics and a normative commitment to an emancipatory political praxis.

In order to have references for discussing mathematical menus in political science, I review the most common types of mathematical formulae used in physics and chemistry, as well as some mathematical advances in economics. Several issues appear relevant: variables should be well defined and measurable; the relationships between variables may be non-linear; the direction of causality should be clearly identified and not assumed on a priori grounds. On these bases, theoretically driven equations on political matters can be validated by empirical tests and can predict observable phenomena.