Terrorism

A Contested Concept

Terrorism is a highly contested concept and no agreement can be found for its definition; in both scholarly literature and official policy documents there exist hundreds of competing definitions and approaches. It is a highly pejorative term that no person or group voluntarily adopts, and with its culturally shaped connotations of savagery, criminality, and illegitimacy, the act of labeling particular instances of violence as terrorism is almost always a political judgment rather than an analytical or definitional exercise. The popular adage, “one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter” expresses this reality. Arguably, the central problem in defining terrorism revolves around the legitimacy of violence. Although states take the view that violence by any actor other than appointed authorities is both illegitimate and illegal, there is a political tradition that maintains that violent resistance to brutal and unjust state repression is legitimate, even if it is strictly illegal. For example, the resistance to Nazi rule during World War II, anticolonial struggles in Africa and Asia, and the anti-Apartheid campaign in South Africa were all perceived as legitimate forms of nonstate violence against a recognized state. Similarly, the violent resistance by the Palestinians to what is perceived by them to be an illegal and unjust military occupation by Israel is to many observers a legitimate form of struggle.

Despite these controversies, it is possible to identify some key characteristics of terrorist violence that distinguish it from other forms of violent action. First, terrorism is a form of politically motivated violence. This characteristic distinguishes it from criminal violence, although there are intense definitional contests over what constitutes a political motive. There can be many political motivations for employing terrorist violence: publicizing a cause or grievance, intimidating a population to enforce compliance, forcing a change in government policy, instigating popular revolution or social disorder, providing an additional strategy to revolutionary or guerrilla struggle, eliminating rivals or opponents, or illustrating the weakness of the state as a keeper of law and order—among many others.

A second feature of terrorist violence is that it is a form of political communication—what the early anarchists called, “propaganda of the deed.” It is an act of exemplary violence designed to send messages [Page 961]to a range of audiences: the wider society, the authorities, external observers, potential and actual supporters, and members of the terrorist group. For this reason, the vast majority of terrorist attacks are directed at symbolic targets that serve to amplify the various messages. Thus, it is misleading to describe terrorism as random and aimed at mass casualties. Some scholars have suggested that terrorists want a lot of people watching, rather than a lot of people dead. Terrorist violence is also instrumental; it is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Unlike military violence, terrorists do not aim to capture strategic territory, degrade the enemy's capabilities, or physically dominate their opponent. Whether the victims of terrorist violence are chosen deliberately or incidentally, they are treated as means to objectives other than murder or destruction. These features highlight the important role of the media in the calculations of terrorist violence; in one sense, media exposure functions as the amplifier of terrorist violence.

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