Terrorism

• 1. Introduction

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  Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims. In 2006, one estimate counted over 109 different definitions of the word. A Harvard law professor named Richard Baxter, an expert on the law of war, was blunt about the problem. He wrote that there was cause to regret a legal concept of terrorism was ever inflicted on us, calling the term imprecise, ambiguous, and of no operative legal purpose. How does a single word resist definition for so long? Who decides when violence becomes terrorism, and when it becomes something governments would rather call by another name? This script follows the term from a revolutionary courtroom to a global database of more than 61,000 incidents, and asks why one person's terrorist remains another person's freedom fighter.

• 2. A Word Born In Revolution

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  Maximilien Robespierre, leader of the Jacobin Club, declared that terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible. The word terrorism itself first described the actions of his club during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. In 1795, Edmund Burke denounced the Jacobins for letting thousands of those hell-hounds called Terrorists loose on the people of France. The label was an accusation from the start. John Calvin's rule over Geneva in the 16th century has also been described as a reign of terror, stretching the idea backward. The terms regained currency in the 1970s, attached to groups including the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Irish Republican Army, the Basque separatist group ETA, and the Red Army Faction. Leila Khaled was described as a terrorist in a 1970 issue of Life magazine, and a number of books on the subject appeared that decade. The topic came further forward after the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings, then again after the 2001 September 11 attacks and the 2002 Bali bombings.

• 3. The Definition Problem

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  Title 18 of the United States Code, section 2331, defines terrorism as acts intended to intimidate or coerce civilians, to influence government policy by coercion, or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. Yet no definition has gained universal agreement. The trouble runs deeper than wording. Counterterrorism analyst Bruce Hoffman observed that it is not only agencies within the same government that cannot agree on one definition; long-established scholars are equally incapable of reaching consensus. In 1992, terrorism studies scholar Alex P. Schmid proposed a simple formulation to a United Nations commission, calling such acts peacetime equivalents of war crimes, but it was not accepted. The international community has been slow to formulate a universally agreed, legally binding definition. It could not conclude a Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism. Instead it adopted a series of sectoral conventions that criminalize specific activities, such as homicide, rather than terrorism as a single cohesive offense. The Chairman of the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee later noted that of twelve international conventions on the subject, none referred to state terrorism, which he said was not an international legal concept.

• 4. Older Than Modern Politics

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  David C. Rapoport published his article Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions in 1984, and the field shifted beneath it. Before that, early studies like Paul Wilkinson's treated terrorism as a product of 19th-century revolutionary politics, made possible by the pistol and dynamite. Rapoport proposed three case studies to argue for an ancient lineage of what he called sacred terror: the Thugs, the Order of Assassins, and the Jewish Sicarii Zealots. He was the first to propose that religious doctrines mattered more than political rationales for some groups. His work became the basis of a model called New Terrorism, developed by Bruce Hoffman. Hoffman argued that religious terrorists carry out indiscriminate violence as a divine duty, with no consideration for political efficacy, their aim transcendental. Critics have called the model politically charged and over-simplified. The Oxford Handbook on the History of Terrorism noted that authors tend to crudely paraphrase Rapoport, taking the relevance of Thuggee to modern terrorism for granted in lieu of empirical research.

• 5. The First Modern Campaigns

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  The Irish Republican Brotherhood, founded in 1858 as a revolutionary Irish nationalist group, has been called the first organization to use modern terrorist techniques. It carried out attacks in England. In 1881 it began the Fenian dynamite campaign, using timed explosives to sow fear in the heart of metropolitan Britain rather than relying on political assassination. In Russia, Narodnaya Volya was founded in 1878, a revolutionary anarchist group inspired by Sergei Nechayev and the propaganda-by-the-deed theorist Carlo Pisacane. They were the first anarchist group to make widespread use of dynamite, convinced the new technology let them strike directly and with discrimination. In France, state repression of anarchists led to the Ere des attentats from 1892 to 1894. Following Ravachol's bombings, terrorism shifted from being person-based to location-based, beginning with the Saint-Germain bombing. Three incidents months apart laid the foundation for mass terrorism: the Liceu bombing, the stabbing of the 13th of November 1893, and the Cafe Terminus attack. Emile Henry, responsible for the Cafe Terminus bombing, claimed the birth of this new form, saying he wanted to strike at random.

• 6. Faith As The New Engine

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  In 1980, by Bruce Hoffman's count, 2 out of 64 terrorist groups were categorized as religiously motivated. By 1995, almost half, 26 out of 56, were, the majority guided by Islam. The Global Terrorism Index, from the University of Maryland, College Park, reports that religious extremism has overtaken national separatism as the main driver of attacks worldwide. Before 2000, nationalist separatist organizations such as the IRA and Chechen rebels were behind the most attacks. Their numbers stayed relatively stable while religious extremism grew, driven by Islamist groups in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Syria. Hamas, the main Islamist movement in the Palestinian territories, was formed by Palestinian Imam Ahmed Yassin in 1987. In the periods of 1994 to 1996 and 2001 to 2007, it carried out suicide bombings that killed over 1,000 Israeli civilians. In 2013, eighty percent of all deaths from terrorism occurred in five countries. Yet the danger is not only Islamist. A 2015 report titled The Age of the Wolf analysed 62 incidents and found that between 2009 and 2015, more people were killed in America by non-Islamic domestic terrorists than by jihadists.

• 7. Who And Why

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  Ariel Merari, a psychologist who has studied suicide terrorists since 1983, concluded they were unlikely to be psychologically abnormal. The careful planning seen in many attacks is not a trait of mentally unstable people. A 2007 study by economist Alan B. Krueger found terrorists less likely to come from impoverished backgrounds, 28 percent versus 33 percent, and more likely to have at least a high-school education. Scott Atran found that suicide terrorists show none of the socially dysfunctional traits one might expect; they do not act out of hopelessness. Researchers Paul Gill, John Horgan, and Paige Deckert profiled lone wolf attackers and found 43 percent motivated by religious beliefs, 32 percent with pre-existing mental health disorders, and 40 percent unemployed at the time of arrest or event. Abrahm suggests groups do not select terrorism for its political effectiveness, and that individuals are motivated more by social solidarity with fellow members than by murky strategic objectives. The majority of attacks are carried out by military-age men, aged 16 to 40, who look and behave normally until executing the mission.

• 8. The Argument Over The Name

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  Vera Zasulich attacked a Russian official known for abusing prisoners, then told the court, I am not a criminal, I am a terrorist. The stunned court acquitted her, realizing she was trying to become a martyr, and she was carried out on the shoulders of the crowd. Margaret Thatcher called publicity the oxygen of terrorism, and the word itself has become a weapon. Bruce Hoffman, in Inside Terrorism, noted that everyone agrees on one point: terrorism is a pejorative term applied to one's enemies. The aphorism runs that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Professor Martin Rudner called that grossly misleading, arguing it judges the cause when terrorism is an act; one can have a beautiful cause and still commit terrorism. Nobel Peace Prize laureates Menachem Begin and Nelson Mandela were once called terrorists, then statesmen. The Zionist group Lohamei Herut Yisrael admitted using terrorist tactics while calling itself Freedom Fighters for Israel. Audrey Kurth Cronin, in How Terrorism Ends, listed six ways groups finish, among them decapitation, negotiation, success, and repression. Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev initiated a Code of Conduct, adopted by the United Nations in 2018 and signed by more than 70 countries, aiming for a world free of terrorism by 2045.