Terrorism

Defining Terrorism

The term terrorism refers to the creation of a psychological condition of extreme fear in a population by the unpredictable use of violence to achieve political or political-theological ends. It is usually, but by no means always, the provenance of non-state actors. In the course of the Cold War, Western governments revived the term to denote an illegitimate use of violence by substate groups increasingly with transnational connections. Observing this development in the 1980s, George Shultz, Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, considered terrorism as “the matrix” of different kinds of challenges varying in scope and scale: “If they have a single feature in common it is their ambiguity—they can throw us off balance” (quoted in Hitchens, 1986, p. 66).

The modern political character of terrorism and its proponents or “terrorists” dates from the French Revolution and the revolutionary imposition of a régime de la terreur between March 1793 and July 1794 aimed at purging the new order of its anachronistic feudal and monarchical remnant. In other words, the term's political usage coincides with the emergence of modern revolutionary or ideological politics that justifies violence in order to emancipate a putatively oppressed people. As Louis Saint Just, the radical Jacobin leader, observed at the height of the French Terror, “Nothing resembles virtue like a great crime.” However, whereas the classically educated Jacobins considered terrorism essentially purgative, their conservative opponents, like the Irish Whig Edmund Burke, denounced the new revolutionary style. The soubriquet “terrorist” subsequently acquired a pejorative connotation. Nonetheless, following Saint Just, it is possible to distinguish between criminal and political terror and between terrorist acts politically driven by state or non-state actors and more commonplace acts of violence.

For Paul Wilkinson, terror represents a kind of tyranny in which the potential victims are unable to do anything to avoid their destruction because terrorism functions according to its own idiosyncratic code. Both state and non-state actors can conduct themselves in this arbitrary manner. Indeed, the 19th- and 20th-century record demonstrates that the terror of the state often historically precedes the revolutionary terror of substate actors. State terror occurs when those state actors who have acquired a preponderant use of force violate the norms of existing law with impunity.

Somewhat differently, strategic theorists maintain that terrorism does not exist as an independent phenomenon. It is, after all, an abstract noun. Terrorism is, from this perspective, a method or tactic employed by any social actor, state or non-state, that uses fear to achieve an end. Any moral judgment applied to the act is entirely separate. Therefore, to combine the two, as some commentators do, is to commit a category mistake. From a strategic perspective, moreover, all violence is instrumental and any strategic actor may practice forms of warfare. Strategic theory thus recognizes that actions on the part of state or non-state actors that create a condition of fear (such as the allied aerial bombing of Germany in World War II or the nuclear deterrent posture of mutually assured destruction [MAD] during the Cold War) is terrorist in nature. That is why theorists routinely referred to the concept of MAD during the Cold War as the balance of terror.

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