Terrorism

What Motivations Exist for Terrorism?

The modern global community has passed through four significant eras of terrorist activity. The anarchist period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries sought to overturn the international order. Post-World War II to the mid-1960s saw the liberationist and nationalist motivation for terrorism as many societies strove for political mastery of their destinies. Ideological motivations for terrorist activity, especially of the leftist sort, characterized the 1960s through the late 1980s. The latest division has been the religious period, which describes many groups since the late 1980s. In addition, motivations for terrorist activity can range from outrage over social and economic conditions for the attackers to inhuman policy decision making on the part of the terror masters who carry out their attacks.

Martha Crenshaw has surveyed terrorist motivations and mapped its motivation this way: terrorism has a certain logic. It can be both effective and satisfying to the terror perpetrators. Robert Pape, studying the worrying trend toward suicide bombers as the weapon of choice in modern terror, describes this as a strategic logic. Although an immediate, existential defeat of its target opponent may not be possible, the terrorist movement is resilient and attractive because at a certain level it is successful, especially against a superior enemy military force. Terrorism is attractive because it works in the right circumstances where other methods have not worked. The apparently unstoppable Oslo Peace Process between Israel and the Palestinians was stalled—perhaps stopped—by a cascading barrage of suicide bomber attacks from several organizations which claimed thousands of Israeli lives. Attacks against Madrid commuter trains in 2004 seemed to convince Spain to withdraw its troops from Iraq. Moreover, such attacks—and suicide bomber attacks are just the most dramatic—are both economic and effective. Relatively small investments in time and personnel net huge media attention, demoralizing civilian casualties in the target population, and can be countered only with great difficulty. The security measures necessary to arrest terror attacks can become so autarkic that the terrorist group wins a strategic victory merely by destroying the opponent's public square and denying its people a normal life. The open society that is always on guard against a terror attack does not long last as an open society.

...