According to historian Geoffrey Cubbit [‘Conspiracy Myths and Conspiracy Theories’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 1989, 20(1): 12-26], conspiracy theories are a way of making sense of current events and the grand sweep of history that is characterised by intentionalism, dualism and occultism. They assume that everything has been planned and nothing happens by coincidence; they divide the world strictly into the evil conspirators and the innocent victims of their plot; and they claim that the conspiracy works in secret and does not reveal itself even after it has reached its goals. Political scientist Michael Barkun [A culture of conspiracy: apocalyptic visions in contemporary America, 2013, 2nd ed., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Comparative Studies in Religion and Society 15] highlights similar characteristics in his influential definition of conspiracy theories: nothing happens by accident; nothing is as it seems; and everything is connected.
– ‘General introduction’, in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (2020), p. 1
Other cultural studies scholars focus less on the meaning and function of particular conspiracy theories, than on the conditions of knowledge that create and sustain conspiracy theory as a distinct category. Bratich [Bratich, J.Z. (2008) Conspiracy panics: political rationality and popular culture, Albany: State University of New York Press], for example, argues that the very term ‘conspiracy theory’ is not neutral : It is often pejorative, used by elites to mark out particular beliefs as beyond the pale of rational political discourse. This means that certain ‘extreme’ (in the sense of non-mainstream) forms of political dissent can be delegitimised through what seems like an objective psychological diagnosis. Instead of explaining why ordinary people believe in conspiracy theories, Bratich insists that we need to consider why the spectre of popular conspiracism occasions panic among the elite, and how conspiracy theorists increasingly and self-consciously resist the stigmatisation of their worldview [Harambam, J. and Aupers, S. (2015) ‘Contesting epistemic authority: conspiracy theories on the boundary of science’, Public Understanding of Science, 24(4): 466-80]. Birchall [Birchall, C. (2006) Knowledge goes pop: from conspiracy theory to gossip, New York: Berg] likewise explores how conspiracy theories can call into question the very boundary between the reasonable and the irrational, the official and the subjugated, given that any attempt to demarcate certain kinds of knowledge as legitimate is only ever a fiction. This is because there is no ultimate ground of justification that sets aside one way of knowing the world as intrinsically legitimate or true.
– ‘Conspiracy theory in historical, cultural and literary studies’, in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (2020), p. 33