International Relations and Terrorism

The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, represented the most significant single act of international antistate terrorism in history, with roughly 3,000 people killed and damage estimates as high as $1 trillion. Until the September 11 attacks, it was generally state governments that had committed the most significant actions in terms of death and destruction, either in the repression of various partisan groups within state territory (often repressing groups that were believed to have obtained external financing or support) or in the form of state-supported terrorism against other states or against movements outside the state's borders.

Terrorism as part of a systematic and international effort to undermine, assassinate, or overthrow the leadership of both major and minor powers began to manifest itself in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the rise of anarchist, ethno-nationalist, religious, and other left- or right-wing ideological movements. But state leaderships were generally unable to effectively coordinate action against the violent actions of such movements, either before World War I or before World War II. On the eve of World War II, the League of Nations did address the question of antistate terrorism in 1937, in the aftermath of the assassinations of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and the French foreign minister, Louis Barthou, in 1934, but the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism never entered into force.

Although there was greater interstate political, military, and security coordination against terrorism during the Cold War and in its aftermath than before World War II, most efforts were piecemeal responses to individual acts of terrorism. No truly coordinated multilateral or international strategy emerged, largely because the world was divided into capitalist and communist blocs. Even after the end of the Cold War, it was not until the 9/11 attacks that states and international organizations began to more systematically address the question of terrorism.

After the September 11 attacks, the United States opted to engage in a “global war on terror,” militarily intervening in Afghanistan in October 2001 [Page 281]and in Iraq in March 2003, while concurrently seeking international and multilateral supports from the United Nations and NATO, among other international organizations and states, in addition to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), in an effort to deal with the questions of state-supported and antistate terrorism in all its geopolitical, socioeconomic, and ideological-cultural aspects.