What is terrorism? Few words have so insidiously worked
their way into our everyday vocabulary. Like “Internet”—
another grossly overused term that has similarly become an indispensable part
of the argot of the early twenty-first century—most people have a vague idea
or impression of what terrorism is but lack a more precise, concrete, and truly
explanatory definition of the word. This imprecision has been abetted partly by
the modern media, whose efforts to communicate an often complex and convoluted
message in the briefest amount of airtime or print space possible have
led to the promiscuous labeling of a range of violent acts as “terrorism.” Pick
up a newspaper or turn on the television and—even within the same broadcast
or on the same page—one can find such disparate acts as the bombing of
a building, the assassination of a head of state, the massacre of civilians by a
military unit, the poisoning of produce on supermarket shelves, or the deliberate
contamination of over-the-counter medication in a drugstore, all described
as incidents of terrorism. Indeed, virtually any especially abhorrent act of violence
perceived as directed against society—whether it involves the activities of
antigovernment dissidents or governments themselves, organized-crime syndicates,
common criminals, rioting mobs, people engaged in militant protest,
individual psychotics, or lone extortionists—is often labeled “terrorism.”
Chapter 
Defining Terrorism
Dictionary definitions are of little help. The preeminent authority on the
English language, the much-venerated Oxford English Dictionary, is disappointingly
unobliging when it comes to providing edification on this subject,
its interpretation at once too literal and too historical to be of much
contemporary use:
Terrorism: A system of terror. . Government by intimidation as directed
and carried out by the party in power in France during the revolution of
789–94; the system of “Terror.” 2. gen. A policy intended to strike with
terror those against whom it is adopted; the employment of methods of
intimidation; the fact of terrorizing or condition of being terrorized.1
These definitions are wholly unsatisfying. Rather than learning what terrorism
is, one instead finds, in the first instance, a somewhat pedestrian
historical—and, in respect of the modern accepted usage of the term, a
uselessly anachronistic—description. The second definition offered is only
slightly more helpful. While accurately communicating the fear-inducing
quality of terrorism, the definition is still so broad as to apply to almost any
action that scares (“terrorizes”) us. Though an integral part of “terrorism,”
this definition is still insufficient for the purpose of accurately defining the
phenomenon that is today called “terrorism.”
A slightly more satisfying elucidation may be found in the OED’s definition
of the perpetrator of the act than in its efforts to come to grips with the
act itself. In this respect, a “terrorist” is defined thus:
. As a political term: a. Applied to the Jacobins and their agents and partisans
in the French Revolution, esp. to those connected with the Revolutionary
tribunals during the “Reign of Terror,” b. Any one who attempts
to further his views by a system of coercive intimidation; spec, applied to
members of one of the extreme revolutionary societies in Russia.2
This is appreciably more helpful. First, it immediately introduces the reader
to the notion of terrorism as a political concept. As will be seen, this key
characteristic of terrorism is absolutely paramount to understanding its
aims, motivations, and purposes and is critical in distinguishing it from
other types of violence.
Terrorism, in the most widely accepted contemporary usage of the term,
is fundamentally and inherently political. It is also ineluctably about power:
the pursuit of power, the acquisition of power, and the use of power to
achieve political change. Terrorism is thus violence—or, equally important,
2 Defining Terrorism
the threat of violence—used and directed in pursuit of, or in service of, a
political aim. With this vital point clearly illuminated, one can appreciate
the significance of the additional definition of “terrorist” provided by the
OED: “Any one who attempts to further his views by a system of coercive
intimidation.” This definition underscores clearly the other fundamental
characteristic of terrorism: that it is a planned, calculated, and indeed systematic
act.
Given this relatively straightforward elucidation, why, then, is terrorism so
difficult to define? The most compelling reason perhaps is because the meaning
of the term has changed so frequently over the past two hundred years.3
The Changing Meaning of Terrorism
The word “terrorism” was first popularized during the French Revolution.
In contrast to its contemporary usage, at that time terrorism had a decidedly
positive connotation. The system or régime de la terreur of 793–94—
from which the English word came—was adopted as a means to establish
order during the transient anarchical period of turmoil and upheaval that
followed the uprisings of 789, and indeed many other revolutions. Hence,
unlike terrorism as it is commonly understood today, to mean a revolutionary
or antigovernment activity undertaken by nonstate or subnational
entities, the régime de la terreur was an instrument of governance wielded
by the recently established revolutionary state. It was designed to consolidate
the new government’s power by intimidating counterrevolutionaries,
subversives, and all other dissidents whom the new regime regarded as
“enemies of the people.” The Committee of General Security and the Revolutionary
Tribunal (“People’s Court” in the modern vernacular) were thus
accorded wide powers of arrest and judgment, publicly putting to death by
guillotine those convicted of treasonous (i.e., reactionary) crimes. In this
manner, a powerful lesson was conveyed to any and all who might oppose
the revolution or grow nostalgic for the ancien régime.
Ironically, perhaps, terrorism in its original context was also closely associated
with the ideals of virtue and democracy. The revolutionary leader
Maximilien Robespierre firmly believed that virtue was the mainspring of a
popular government at peace, but that during the time of revolution virtue
must be allied with terror in order for democracy to triumph. He appealed
famously to “virtue, without which terror is evil; terror, without which
virtue is helpless” and proclaimed: “Terror is nothing but justice, prompt,
severe and inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.”4
Defining Terrorism 3
Despite this divergence from its subsequent meaning, the French Revolution’s
“terrorism” still shared at least two key characteristics with its
modern-day variant. First, the régime de la terreur was neither random nor
indiscriminate, as terrorism is often portrayed today, but was organized,
deliberate, and systematic. Second, its goal and its very justification—like
that of contemporary terrorism—was the creation of a “new and better society”
in place of a fundamentally corrupt and undemocratic political system.
Indeed, Robespierre’s vague and Utopian exegeses of the revolution’s central
goals are remarkably similar in tone and content to the equally turgid, millenarian
manifestos issued by many contemporary revolutionary—primarily
left-wing, Marxist-oriented—terrorist organizations. For example, in 794
Robespierre declared, in language eerily presaging the communiqués issued
by groups such as Germany’s Red Army Faction and Italy’s Red Brigades
nearly two centuries later:
We want an order of things . . . in which the arts are an adornment to
the liberty that ennobles them, and commerce the source of wealth for
the public and not of monstrous opulence for a few families. . . . In our
country we desire morality instead of selfishness, honesty and not mere
“honor,” principle and not mere custom, duty and not mere propriety, the
sway of reason rather than the tyranny of fashion, a scorn for vice and
not a contempt for the unfortunate.5
Like many other revolutions, the French Revolution eventually began to
consume itself. On 8 Thermidor, year two of the new calendar adopted by the
revolutionaries (July 26, 794), Robespierre announced to the National Convention
that he had in his possession a new list of traitors. Fearing that their
own names might be on that list, extremists joined forces with moderates
to repudiate both Robespierre and his régime de la terreur. Robespierre and
his closest followers themselves met the same fate that had befallen some
forty thousand others: execution by guillotine. The Terror was at an end;
thereafter “terrorism” became a term associated with the abuse of office and
power—with overt “criminal” implications.6 Within a year of Robespierre’s
demise, the word had been popularized in English by Edmund Burke, who,
in his famous polemic against the French Revolution, described the “Thousands
of those Hell hounds called Terrorists . . . let loose on the people.”7
One of the French Revolution’s more enduring repercussions was the
impetus it gave to antimonarchical sentiment elsewhere in Europe. Popular
subservience to rulers who derived their authority from God through
“divine right of rule,” rather than from their subjects, was increasingly
4 Defining Terrorism
questioned by a politically awakened Continent. The advent of nationalism,
and with it notions of statehood and citizenship based on the common
identity of a people rather than the lineage of a royal family, were resulting
in the unification and creation of new nation-states such as Germany and
Italy. Meanwhile, the massive socioeconomic changes engendered by the
Industrial Revolution were creating new “universalist” ideologies (such as
communism/Marxism), born of the alienation and exploitative conditions
of nineteenth-century capitalism. From this milieu a new era of terrorism
emerged, in which the concept had gained many of the familiar revolutionary,
antistate connotations of today. Its chief progenitor was arguably the
Italian republican extremist Carlo Pisacane, who had forsaken his birthright
as duke of San Giovanni only to perish in 857 during an ill-fated revolt
against Bourbon rule. A passionate advocate of federalism and mutualism,
Pisacane is remembered less on this account than for the theory of “propaganda
by deed,”8 which he is credited with defining—an idea that has
exerted a compelling influence on rebels and terrorists alike ever since. “The
propaganda of the idea is a chimera,” Pisacane wrote. “Ideas result from
deeds, not the latter from the former, and the people will not be free when
they are educated, but educated when they are free.”9 Violence, he argued,
was necessary not only to draw attention to, or generate publicity for, a
cause, but also to inform, educate, and ultimately rally the masses behind
the revolution. The didactic purpose of violence, Pisacane argued, could
never be effectively replaced by pamphlets, wall posters, or assemblies.
Perhaps the first organization to put into practice Pisacane’s dictum
was the Narodnaya Volya, or People’s Will (sometimes translated as “People’s
Freedom”), a small group of Russian constitutionalists that had been
founded in 878 to challenge czarist rule. For the Narodnaya Volya, the apathy
and alienation of the Russian masses afforded few alternatives besides
resorting to daring and dramatic acts of violence designed to attract attention
to the group and its cause. However, unlike the many late-twentiethcentury
terrorist organizations that have cited the principle of “propaganda
by deed” to justify the wanton targeting of civilians in order to assure them
publicity through the shock and horror produced by wholesale bloodshed,
the Narodnaya Volya displayed an almost quixotic attitude toward the violence
it wrought. To this group, “propaganda by deed” meant the selective
targeting of specific individuals whom the group considered the embodiment
of the autocratic, oppressive state.10 Hence the victims—the czar,
leading members of the royal family, senior government officials—were
deliberately chosen for their “symbolic” value as the dynastic heads and
subservient agents of a corrupt and tyrannical regime. An intrinsic element
Defining Terrorism 5
in the group’s collective beliefs was that “not one drop of superfluous blood”
should be shed in pursuit of aims, however noble or utilitarian they might
be.11 Even having selected their targets with great care and the utmost deliberation,
group members still harbored profound regrets about taking the
life of a fellow human being. Their unswerving adherence to this principle is
perhaps best illustrated by the failed attempt on the life of Grand Duke Serge
Alexandrovich made by a successor organization to the Narodnaya Volya in
905. As the royal carriage came into view, the terrorist tasked with the assassination
saw that the duke was unexpectedly accompanied by his children
and therefore aborted his mission rather than risk harming the intended
victim’s family (the duke was killed in a subsequent attack). By comparison,
the midair explosion caused by a terrorist bomb on Pan Am Flight 03 over
Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 988 indiscriminately claimed the lives of
all 259 people on board—innocent men, women, and children alike—plus
eleven inhabitants of the village where the plane crashed.
Ironically, the Narodnaya Volya’s most dramatic accomplishment also
led directly to its demise. On March , 88, the group assassinated Czar
Alexander II.12 The failure of eight previous plots had led the conspirators
to take extraordinary measures to ensure the success of this attempt. Four
volunteers were given four bombs each and deployed along the alternative
routes followed by the czar’s cortege. As two of the bomber-assassins stood
in wait on the same street, the sleighs carrying the czar and his Cossack
escort approached the first terrorist, who hurled his bomb at the passing
sleigh, missing it by inches. The whole entourage came to a halt as soldiers
seized the hapless culprit and the czar descended from his sleigh to
check on a bystander wounded by the explosion. “Thank God, I am safe,”
the czar reportedly declared—just as the second bomber emerged from the
crowd and detonated his weapon, killing both himself and his target. The
full weight of the czarist state now fell on the heads of the Narodnaya Volya.
Acting on information provided by the arrested member, the secret police
swept down on the group’s safe houses and hideouts, rounding up most of
the plotters, who were quickly tried, convicted, and hanged. Further information
from this group led to subsequent arrests, so that within a year of
the assassination only one member of the original executive committee was
still at large. She too was finally apprehended in 883, at which point the first
generation of Narodnaya Volya terrorists ceased to exist, although various
successor organizations subsequently emerged to carry on the struggle.13
At the time, the repercussions of the czar’s assassination could not have
been known or appreciated by either the condemned or their comrades languishing
in prison or exiled to Siberia. But in addition to precipitating the
6 Defining Terrorism
beginning of the end of czarist rule, the group also deeply influenced individual
revolutionaries and subversive organizations elsewhere. To the nascent
anarchist movement, the “propaganda by deed” strategy championed by the
Narodnaya Volya provided a model to be emulated.14 Within four months of
the czar’s murder, a group of radicals in London convened an “anarchist conference,”
which publicly applauded the assassination and extolled tyrannicide
as a means to achieve revolutionary change. In hopes of encouraging and
coordinating worldwide anarchist activities, the conferees decided to establish
the “Anarchist International” (or “Black International”). Although this
idea, like most of their ambitious plans, came to naught, the publicity generated
by even a putative “Anarchist International” was sufficient to create
a myth of global revolutionary pretensions and thereby stimulate fears and
suspicions disproportionate to its actual impact or political achievements.
Disparate and uncoordinated though the anarchists’ violence was, the movement’s
emphasis on individual action or operations carried out by small cells
of like-minded radicals made detection and prevention by the police particularly
difficult, thus further heightening public fears. For example, following
the assassination of U.S. president William McKinley in 90 (by a young
Hungarian refugee, Leon Czolgosz, who, while not a regular member of any
anarchist organization, was nonetheless influenced by the philosophy), Congress
swiftly enacted legislation barring known anarchists or anyone “who
disbelieves in or is opposed to all organized government” from entering the
United States. However, while anarchists were responsible for an impressive
string of assassinations of heads of state and a number of particularly notorious
bombings from about 878 until the second decade of the twentieth century,15
in the final analysis, other than stimulating often exaggerated fears,
anarchism made little tangible impact on either the domestic or the international
politics of the countries affected. It does, however, offer an interesting
historical footnote: much as the “information revolution” of the late-twentieth
and early-twenty-first centuries is alleged to have made the means and
methods of bomb-making and other types of terrorist activity more readily
available via the Internet, on CD-ROM, and through ordinary libraries and
bookstores, one of anarchism’s flourishing “cottage industries” more than a
century earlier was the widespread distribution of similar “how-to”- or “doit-yourself”-type
manuals and publications of violence and mayhem.16
Meanwhile, another series of developments was unfolding on the other
side of Europe that would exert a similarly profound influence on future terrorist
strategy and tactics. In this instance, the motivation was neither antimonarchical
nor anarchist, but nationalist and separatist. Although Britain’s
rule of Ireland already had a centuries-long history of restiveness and rebelDefining
Terrorism 7
lion, in the mid-nineteenth century the locus of revolutionary activities had
expanded from Ireland to include the United States as well. Among the mass
of Irish emigrants who had fled the failure of successive potato crops and
the resultant famine was a group of radical nationalists who in 858 founded
a secret society called the Fenian Brotherhood. The Fenians—and their Ireland-based
offshoot, the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood (IRB)—were at
once as daring and determined as they were impatient and incompetent.
Their motto of “revolution sooner or never”17 accurately describes a string
of half-baked plots that purported to kidnap the Prince of Wales,18 invade
Canada, and orchestrate a popular uprising in Ireland. So successful were
British efforts to penetrate the organization, and so abject were the Fenians’
failed grand schemes, that the movement fell into desuetude within a decade
of its founding.19 But the Fenians’ unswerving commitment to both Irish
republicanism and the use of violence to attain it20 created a legacy that subsequently
inspired a new generation of U.S.-based Irish revolutionaries.
Thus by 873 a new organization, calling itself the Clan na Gael (United
Irishmen), had taken up the Fenians’ mantle. Its driving force was a firebrand
named Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. Sentenced to life imprisonment
for sedition in 865, O’Donovan Rossa was released only six years later
after a commission of inquiry substantiated his claims of mistreatment. The
abuse inflicted on imprisoned terrorists like O’Donovan Rossa in the nineteenth
century actually bears a disquieting resemblance to the treatment
reportedly meted out to some detainees in the war on terrorism today.21
Not only was O’Donovan Rossa held for more than a month with his hands
handcuffed behind his back, but he was also “kept naked day and night” in
a darkened cell and fed a meager ration of bread and water.22 Exiled to the
United States, O’Donovan Rossa quickly resumed his subversive activities.
He was assisted in these endeavors by Patrick Ford, the editor of the Irish
World, a newspaper that became the main platform for Clan na Gael propaganda
and incitement. Together, they developed a new strategy for the
republican movement. “We are not now advising a general insurrection,”
Ford explained in a December 4, 875, column.
On the contrary, we should oppose a general insurrection in Ireland as
untimely and ill advised. But we believe in action nonetheless. The Irish
cause requires Skirmishers. It requires a little band of heroes who will
initiate and keep up without intermission a guerrilla warfare.
In words that accurately presaged the advent of a form of transnational terrorism
that has become a permanent fixture of our time, Ford also described
8 Defining Terrorism
how these “Skirmishers” would “fly over land and sea like invisible beings—
now striking the enemy in Ireland, now in India, now in England itself as
occasion may present.”23
O’Donovan Rossa and Ford displayed an uncommon understanding of
the terrorist dynamic that went beyond even this early recognition of the
media’s power to communicate and amplify a violent message. Remarkably,
both men grasped that just as money lubricates commerce, a solid financial
base is required to sustain an effective terrorism campaign. It was thus
not long before advertisements began to appear in the Irish World soliciting
contributions on behalf of a “skirmisher fund.”24 By March 877 $23,350
had been collected—a sum equivalent to nearly half a million dollars in
2005.25 O’Donovan Rossa appears to have also fully appreciated terrorism’s
asymmetric virtues with regard to the disproportionate economic losses
and damage that could be inflicted on the enemy state and the flood of
contributions that a series of successful attacks might engender. “England,”
he explained in the Irish World, “will not know how or where she is to be
struck. A successful strike that will do her half a million dollars’ worth of
damage will bring us enough funds to carry on the work.”26
Four years later, the Skirmishers commenced operations. On January
4, 88, they bombed the Salford Infantry Barracks in Manchester. Their
choice of target reflected yet another now-familiar pattern of contemporary
terrorism: attacks on buildings or other inanimate objects designed
to commemorate, and thereby draw attention to, some event of historic
significance to the perpetrators. In this instance, the Salford Barracks was
where three Fenians—the so-called Manchester Martyrs—had been hanged
in 867. Up until this point, the Irish terrorists seem to have differed only
slightly from their Russian counterparts. Both attacked targets symbolizing
their enemy (inanimate objects in the case of the Skirmishers and representatives
of the czar by the Narodnaya Volya). Both also believed fervently in
terrorism’s didactic potential—whether directed toward the landless Irish
or the Russian peasant.27 But two years later, the Irish campaign diverged
significantly from the highly discriminate terrorism practiced by the Narodnaya
Volya to something both more sinister and consequential. The principal
weapons in the Russians’ campaign, as we have seen, were the handgun
and the nineteenth-century equivalent of the hand grenade; employed
in acts of individual assassination deliberately calculated to avoid death or
injury to all but their intended target. By comparison, the Skirmishers had
already spilled innocent blood: a seven-year-old boy had been killed and
three other people injured in the Salford Barracks blast.28 Still more innocent
blood, however, was soon to be shed.
Defining Terrorism 9
In 883 the Clan na Gael and a rebranded IRB, now known as the Irish
Republican Brotherhood, formed a tactical alliance and together embarked
on a bombing campaign directed against the London Underground and
mainline railway stations in both the United Kingdom’s capital and other
cities.29 Although the bombers’ intention was not to wantonly or deliberately
kill or harm innocent persons, but instead to throttle Britain’s economy
and dramatically call attention to themselves and their cause,30 their choice
of both weapon (homemade bombs consisting of gunpowder detonated by
primitive time-delay fuses) and target (locations in congested urban areas
and public transportation) ensured that the effects of their operations
could be neither constrained nor controlled. And, while it is true that these
bombings claimed the lives of fewer than a dozen passersby or rail passengers,
given that some of the explosive devices contained more than twenty
pounds of commercial dynamite, this was more likely the result of luck and
happenstance than any effort on the part of the bombers to limit by timing
or placement the effect of their attacks.31
The “dynamite campaign,” as this spasm of Victorian-era urban terrorism
came to be known, lasted until 887.32 It spread beyond London to Liverpool
and Glasgow before collapsing under the weight of intensified police
surveillance, heightened border and port control, the effective use of informants,
and unprecedented national and even international cooperation and
liaison among hitherto entirely parochial law enforcement agencies. Indeed,
the advances in police investigative, intelligence, and preemptive operations
necessitated by the bombings led that same year to the formal establishment
of Scotland Yard’s famed Special Branch—the first such police unit
dedicated specifically to political crime and counterterrorism.33 More significant
for our purposes, however, is the impact that nineteenth-century
Irish political violence had on terrorism’s evolution and development. In
retrospect, we can see that it was at this time that patterns and modi operandi
first appeared that would become standard terrorist operating procedures
decades later. The Irish groups, for example, were among the first to
recognize the importance of establishing a foreign base beyond the reach
of their enemy in order to better sustain and promote a protracted terrorist
campaign. They were also ahead of their time in understanding the value
of such a sanctuary not only for planning and logistical purposes but also
for the effective dissemination of propaganda and the critical solicitation
of operational funds. Their use of time-delayed explosive devices so that
the perpetrator could easily effect escape, and thereby ensure the terrorist
campaign’s sustainment, was another important innovation that became a
standard feature of twentieth-century terrorism. Finally, terrorist targeting
0 Defining Terrorism
of mass transport—and especially subway systems—along with an almost
callous, if not even casual, disregard of innocent life have now become
commonplace. The July 2005 suicide attacks on London’s transit system,
which killed 52 people and wounded 700 others, and the ten near-simultaneous
bombings of commuter trains arriving at Madrid’s Atocha rail station
in March 2004, which killed 9 people and wounded hundreds more,
are especially apposite, and tragic, examples. “At the grand strategic level,”
Lindsay Clutterbuck cogently notes, the Clan na Gael and IRB’s
ideas enabled terrorism to move away from being a phenomenon consisting
of a single event, or at best a loosely connected series of events,
and to evolve into sustained campaigns underpinned by their own well
developed sense of timing and tempo. There was a quantum leap beyond
the limited aim of assassinating an individual to achieve their objectives
and into operational scenarios where terrorism could persist for years
and encompass the deaths of thousands of people.34
On the eve of the First World War, terrorism still retained its revolutionary
connotations. By this time, growing unrest and irredentist ferment had
already welled up within the decaying Ottoman and Hapsburg empires. In
the 880s and 890s, for example, militant Armenian nationalist movements
in eastern Turkey pursued a terrorist strategy against continued Ottoman
rule of a kind that would later be adopted by most of the post–Second
World War ethno-nationalist/separatist movements. The Armenians’ objective
was simultaneously to strike a blow against the despotic “alien” regime
through repeated attacks on its colonial administration and security forces,
in order to rally indigenous support, and to attract international attention,
sympathy, and support.35 Around the same time, the Inner Macedonian
Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) was active in the region overlapping
present-day Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia.36 Although the Macedonians did
not go on to suffer the catastrophic fate that befell the Armenians during
the First World War (when an estimated one million people perished in
what is considered to be the first officially implemented genocide of the
twentieth century),37 IMRO never came close to achieving its aim of an
independent Macedonia and thereafter degenerated into a mostly criminal
organization of hired thugs and political assassins.
The events immediately preceding the First World War in Bosnia are of
course more familiar because of their subsequent cataclysmic impact on
world affairs. There, similar groups of disaffected nationalists—Bosnian
Serb intellectuals, university students, and even schoolchildren, collectively
Defining Terrorism 
known as Mlada Bosna, or Young Bosnians—arose against continued Hapsburg
suzerainty. While it is perhaps easy to dismiss the movement, as some
historians have, as comprising “frustrated, poor, dreary and maladjusted”38
adolescents—much as many contemporary observers similarly denigrate
modern-day terrorists as mindless, obsessive, and maladjusted—it was a
member of Young Bosnia, Gavrilo Princip, who is widely credited with having
set in motion the chain of events that began on June 28, 94, when
he assassinated the Hapsburg archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, and
culminated in the First World War. Whatever its superficially juvenile characteristics,
the group was nonetheless passionately dedicated to the attainment
of a federal South Slav political entity—uniting Slovenes, Croats, and
Serbs—and resolutely committed to assassination as the vehicle with which
to achieve that aim. In this respect, the Young Bosnians perhaps had more
in common with the radical republicanism of Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the
most ardent exponents of Italian unification in the nineteenth century, than
with groups such as the Narodnaya Volya—despite a shared conviction in
the efficacy of tyrannicide. An even more significant difference, however,
was the degree of involvement in, and external support provided to, Young
Bosnian activities by various shadowy Serbian nationalist groups. Principal
among these was the pan-Serbian secret society, the Narodna Obrana (the
People’s Defense, or National Defense).
The Narodna Obrana had been established in 908, originally to promote
Serbian cultural and national activities. It subsequently assumed a
more subversive orientation as the movement became increasingly involved
with anti-Austrian activities—including terrorism—mostly in neighboring
Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although the Narodna Obrana’s exclusionist panSerbian
aims clashed with the Young Bosnians’ less parochial South Slav
ideals, its leadership was quite happy to manipulate and exploit the Bosnians’
emotive nationalism and youthful zeal for its own purposes. To this
end, the Narodna Obrana actively recruited, trained, and armed young Bosnians
and Herzegovinians from movements, such as the Young Bosnians,
who were then deployed in various seditious activities against the Hapsburgs.
As early as four years before the archduke’s assassination, a Herzegovinian
youth, trained by a Serbian army officer with close ties to the
Narodna Obrana, had attempted to kill the governor of Bosnia. But while
the Narodna Obrana included among its members senior Serbian government
officials, it was not an explicitly government-controlled or directly
state-supported entity. Whatever hazy government links it maintained were
further and deliberately obscured when a radical faction left the Narodna
Obrana in 9 and established the Ujedinjenje ili Smrt (the Union of Death,
2 Defining Terrorism
or Death or Unification)—more popularly known as the Crna Ruka, the
Black Hand. This more militant and appreciably more clandestine splinter
group has been described by one historian as combining
the more unattractive features of the anarchist cells of earlier years—
which had been responsible for quite a number of assassinations in
Europe and whose methods had a good deal of influence via the writings
of Russian anarchists upon Serbian youth—and of the [American]
Ku Klux Klan. There were gory rituals and oaths of loyalty, there were
murders of backsliding members, there was identification of members
by number, there were distributions of guns and bombs. And there was
a steady traffic between Bosnia and Serbia.39
This group, which continued to maintain close links with its parent body,
was largely composed of Serbian military officers. It was led by Lieutenant
Colonel Dragutin Dmitrievich (known by his pseudonym, Apis), himself
the chief of the Intelligence Department of the Serbian general staff. With
this key additional advantage of direct access to military armaments, intelligence,
and training facilities, the Black Hand effectively took charge of all
Serb-backed clandestine operations in Bosnia.40
Although there were obviously close links between the Serbian military,
the Black Hand, and the Young Bosnians, it would be a mistake to regard
the relationship as one of direct control, much less outright manipulation.
Clearly, the Serbian government was well aware of the Black Hand’s objectives
and the violent means the group employed in pursuit of them; indeed,
the Serbian crown prince Alexander was one of the group’s benefactors. But
this does not mean that the Serbian government was necessarily as committed
to war with Austria as the Black Hand’s leaders were, or that it was prepared
to countenance the group’s more extreme plans for fomenting crossborder,
anti-Hapsburg terrorism. There is some evidence to suggest that the
Black Hand may have been trying to force Austria’s hand against Serbia and
thereby plunge both countries into war by actively abetting the Young Bosnians’
plot to assassinate the archduke. Indeed, according to one revisionist
account of the events leading up to the murder,41 even though the pistol
used by Princip had been supplied by the Black Hand from a Serbian military
armory in Kragujevac, and even though Princip had been trained by
the Black Hand in Serbia before being smuggled back across the border for
the assassination, at the eleventh hour Dmitrievich had apparently bowed
to intense government pressure and tried to stop the assassination. According
to this version, Princip and his fellow conspirators would hear nothing of
Defining Terrorism 3
it and stubbornly went ahead with their plans. Contrary to popular assumption,
therefore, the archduke’s assassination may not have been specifically
ordered or even directly sanctioned by the Serbian government.42 However,
the obscure links between high government officials and their senior
military commanders and ostensibly independent, transnational terrorist
movements, and the tangled web of intrigue, plots, clandestine arms provision
and training, intelligence agents, and cross-border sanctuary that these
relationships inevitably involved provide a pertinent historical parallel to
the contemporary phenomenon known as “state-sponsored” terrorism (that
is, the active and often clandestine support, encouragement, and assistance
provided by a foreign government to a terrorist group).
By the 930s, the meaning of “terrorism” had changed again. It was now
used less to refer to revolutionary movements and violence directed against
governments and their leaders and more to describe the practices of mass
repression employed by totalitarian states and their dictatorial leaders against
their own citizens. Thus the term regained its former connotations of abuse
of power by government, and it was applied specifically to the authoritarian
regimes that had come to power in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Stalinist
Russia. In Germany and Italy, respectively, the accession to office of Hitler
and Mussolini had depended in large measure on the “street”—the mobilization
and deployment of gangs of brown- or black-shirted thugs to harass
and intimidate political opponents and root out other scapegoats for public
vilification and further victimization. “Terror? Never,” Mussolini insisted,
demurely dismissing such intimidation as “simply . . . social hygiene, taking
those individuals out of circulation like a doctor would take out a bacillus.”43
The most sinister dimension of this form of “terror” was that it became an
intrinsic component of Fascist and Nazi governance, executed at the behest of,
and in complete subservience to, the ruling political party of the land—which
had arrogated to itself complete, total control of the country and its people.
A system of government-sanctioned fear and coercion was thus created
whereby political brawls, street fights, and widespread persecution of Jews,
communists, and other declared “enemies of the state” became the means
through which complete and submissive compliance was ensured. The totality
of party control over, and perversion of, government was perhaps most
clearly evinced by a speech given by Hermann Göring, the newly appointed
Prussian minister of the interior, in 933. “Fellow Germans,” he declared,
my measures will not be crippled by any judicial thinking. My measures
will not be crippled by any bureaucracy. Here I don’t have to worry about
Justice; my mission is only to destroy and exterminate, nothing more. This
4 Defining Terrorism
struggle will be a struggle against chaos, and such a struggle I shall not
conduct with the power of the police. A bourgeois State might have done
that. Certainly, I shall use the power of the State and the police to the
utmost, my dear Communists, so don’t draw any false conclusions; but
the struggle to the death, in which my fist will grasp your necks, I shall
lead with those there—the Brown Shirts.44
The “Great Terror” that Stalin was shortly to unleash in Russia both
resembled and differed from that of the Nazis. On the one hand, drawing
inspiration from Hitler’s ruthless elimination of his own political opponents,
the Russian dictator similarly transformed the political party he led into a
servile instrument responsive directly to his personal will, and the state’s
police and security apparatus into slavish organs of coercion, enforcement,
and repression. But conditions in the Soviet Union of the 930s bore little
resemblance to the turbulent political, social, and economic upheaval
afflicting Germany and Italy during that decade and the previous one. On
the other hand, therefore, unlike either the Nazis or the Fascists, who had
emerged from the political free-for-alls in their own countries to seize
power and then had to struggle to consolidate their rule and retain their
unchallenged authority, the Russian Communist Party had by the mid-930s
been firmly entrenched in power for more than a decade. Stalin’s purges,
in contrast to those of the French Revolution, and even to Russia’s own
recent experience, were not “launched in time of crisis, or revolution and
war . . . [but] in the coldest of cold blood, when Russia had at last reached a
comparatively calm and even moderately prosperous condition.”45 Thus the
political purges ordered by Stalin became, in the words of one of his biographers,
a “conspiracy to seize total power by terrorist action,”46 resulting in
the death, exile, imprisonment, or forcible impressment of millions.
Certainly, similar forms of state-imposed or state-directed violence
and terror against a government’s own citizens continue today. The use
of so-called death squads (often off-duty or plainclothes security or police
officers) in conjunction with blatant intimidation of political opponents,
human rights and aid workers, student groups, labor organizers, journalists,
and others has been a prominent feature of the right-wing military dictatorships
that took power in Argentina, Chile, and Greece during the 970s
and even of elected governments in El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia,
and Peru during the upheavals that afflicted those countries, particularly
in the 980s. But these state-sanctioned or explicitly ordered acts of internal
political violence directed mostly against domestic populations—that
is, rule by violence and intimidation by those already in power against their
Defining Terrorism 5
own citizenry—are generally termed “terror” in order to distinguish that
phenomenon from “terrorism,” which is understood to be violence committed
by nonstate entities.
Following the Second World War, in another swing of the pendulum of
meaning, “terrorism” regained the revolutionary connotations with which it
is most commonly associated today. At that time the term was used primarily
in reference to the violent revolts then being prosecuted by the various
indigenous nationalist/anticolonialist groups that emerged in Asia, Africa,
and the Middle East during the late 940s and 950s to oppose continued
European rule. Countries as diverse as Israel, Kenya, Cyprus, and Algeria,
for example, owe their independence at least in part to nationalist political
movements that employed terrorism against colonial powers. It was also
during this period that the “politically correct” appellation of “freedom fighters”
came into fashion as a result of the political legitimacy that the international
community (whose sympathy and support were actively courted
by many of these movements) accorded to struggles for national liberation
and self-determination. Sympathy and support for the rebels extended to
segments of the colonial state’s own population as well, creating a need for
less judgmental and more politically neutral language than “terrorist” and
“terrorism” to describe these revolutionaries and the violence they committed
in what were considered justified “wars of liberation.”47 Many newly
independent Third World countries and communist-bloc states in particular
also adopted this vernacular, arguing that anyone or any movement that
fought against “colonial” oppression and/or Western domination should
not be described as “terrorists” but were properly deemed to be “freedom
fighters.” This position was perhaps most famously explained by Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman Yasir Arafat, when he addressed
the United Nations General Assembly in November 974. “The difference
between the revolutionary and the terrorist,” Arafat stated, “lies in the reason
for which each fights. For whoever stands by a just cause and fights for
the freedom and liberation of his land from the invaders, the settlers and
the colonialists, cannot possibly be called terrorist.”48
During the late 960s and 970s, terrorism continued to be viewed within
a revolutionary context. However, this usage now expanded to include
nationalist and ethnic separatist groups outside a colonial or neocolonial
framework as well as radical, entirely ideologically motivated organizations.
Disenfranchised or exiled nationalist minorities—such as the PLO, the Quebecois
separatist group FLQ (Front de Liberation du Quebec), the Basque
ETA (Euskadita Askatasuna, or Freedom for the Basque Homeland), and
even a hitherto unknown South Moluccan irredentist group seeking inde6
Defining Terrorism
pendence from Indonesia—adopted terrorism as a means to draw attention
to themselves and their respective causes, in many instances with the
specific aim, like their anticolonial predecessors, of attracting international
sympathy and support. Around the same time, various left-wing political
extremists—drawn mostly from the radical student organizations and Marxist/Leninist/Maoist
movements in Western Europe, Latin America, and the
United States—began to form terrorist groups opposing American intervention
in Vietnam and what they claimed were the irredeemable social and
economic inequities of the modern capitalist liberal-democratic state.
Although the revolutionary cum ethno-nationalist/separatist and ideological
exemplars continue to shape our most basic understanding of the
term, it was not long before “terrorism” was being used to denote broader,
less distinct phenomena. In the early 980s, for example, terrorism came to
be regarded as a calculated means to destabilize the West as part of a vast
global conspiracy. Books like The Terror Network by Claire Sterling propagated
the notion to a receptive American presidential administration and
similarly susceptible governments elsewhere that the seemingly isolated terrorist
incidents perpetrated by disparate groups scattered across the globe
were in fact linked elements of a massive clandestine plot, orchestrated by
the Kremlin and implemented by its Warsaw Pact client states, to destroy
the Free World.49 By the middle of the decade, however, a series of suicide
bombings directed mostly against American diplomatic and military targets
in the Middle East was focusing attention on the rising threat of statesponsored
terrorism. Consequently, this phenomenon—whereby various
renegade foreign governments such as the regimes in Iran, Iraq, Libya, and
Syria became actively involved in sponsoring or commissioning terrorist
acts—replaced communist conspiracy theories as the main context within
which terrorism was viewed. Terrorism thus became associated with a type
of covert or surrogate warfare whereby weaker states could confront larger,
more powerful rivals without the risk of retribution.50
In the early 990s the meaning and usage of the term “terrorism” were
further blurred by the emergence of two new buzzwords: “narco-terrorism”
and the so-called gray area phenomenon.51 The former term revived
the Moscow-orchestrated terrorism conspiracy theories of previous years
while introducing the critical new dimension of narcotics trafficking. Thus
“narco-terrorism” was defined by one of the concept’s foremost propagators
as the “use of drug trafficking to advance the objectives of certain governments
and terrorist organizations”—identified as the “Marxist-Leninist
regimes” of the Soviet Union, Cuba, Bulgaria, and Nicaragua, among others.52
The emphasis on “narco-terrorism” as the latest manifestation of the
Defining Terrorism 7
communist plot to undermine Western society,53 however, had the unfortunate
effect of diverting official attention away from a bona fide emerging
trend. To a greater extent than ever in the past, entirely criminal (that is,
violent, economically motivated) organizations were now forging strategic
alliances with terrorist and guerrilla organizations or were themselves
employing violence for specifically political ends. The growing power of the
Colombian cocaine cartels, their close ties with left-wing terrorist groups
in Colombia and Peru, and their repeated attempts to subvert Colombia’s
electoral process and undermine successive governments constitute perhaps
the best-known example of this continuing trend.54
Those who drew attention to this “gray area phenomenon” were concerned
less with grand conspiracies than with highlighting the increasingly
fluid and variable nature of subnational conflict in the post–cold war era.
Accordingly, in the 990s “terrorism” began to be subsumed by some analysts
within the “gray area phenomenon.” Thus the latter term came to be
used to denote “threats to the stability of nation states by non-state actors
and non-governmental processes and organizations”;55 to describe violence
affecting “immense regions or urban areas where control has shifted from
legitimate governments to new half-political, half-criminal powers”;56 or
simply to group together in one category the range of conflicts across the
world that no longer conformed to traditionally accepted notions of war as
fighting between the armed forces of two or more established states, but
instead involved irregular forces as one or more of the combatants.57 Terrorism
had shifted its meaning again from an individual phenomenon of
subnational violence to one of several elements, or part of a wider pattern,
of nonstate conflict.
The terrorist attacks on September , 200, inevitably, redefined “terrorism”
yet again. On that day, nineteen terrorists belonging to a group calling
itself al Qaeda (or al-Qa’ida) hijacked four passenger aircraft soon after they
took off from airports in Boston, Newark, New Jersey, and Washington,
D.C. Two of the planes were then deliberately flown into the twin towers
of New York City’s World Trade Center. Both structures collapsed shortly
afterward. A third aircraft similarly smashed into the Pentagon, where the
U.S. Department of Defense is located, severely damaging the southwest
portion of that building. Meanwhile, passengers on board the fourth aircraft
learned of the other attacks and struggled to subdue the hijackers. In the
ensuing melee, the plane spun out of control and crashed into a field in rural
Pennsylvania. A total of nearly three thousand people were killed in the
attacks.58 To put that death toll in perspective, in the entirety of the twentieth
century no more than fourteen terrorist incidents had killed more than
8 Defining Terrorism
one hundred people.59 And until 9/ no terrorist operation had ever killed
more than five hundred people.60 Among the dead were citizens of some
eighty different countries,61 although the largest number of fatalities by far
were U.S. citizens. Indeed, more than twice as many Americans perished on
9/ than had been killed by terrorists since 96862—the year acknowledged
as marking the advent of modern, international terrorism.
So massive and consequential a terrorist onslaught required nothing
less than an equally comprehensive and far-reaching response. “This is a
new kind of evil . . . [and we] will rid the world of the evildoers,” President
George W. Bush promised just days later. “Our nation was horrified,” he
continued, “but it’s not going to be terrorized.”63 Yet when the president
addressed a special joint session of the U.S. Congress on September 20,
200, he repeatedly invoked the word “terror”—that is, the “state of being
terrified or greatly frightened,” according to the OED’s definition64—rather
than the specifically political phenomenon “terrorism.” “Our war on terror,”
the president famously declared, “begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end
there.”65 The consequences of his semantic choice, whether deliberate or
not, nonetheless proved as portentous as they were significant: heralding
a virtually open-ended struggle against anyone and anything that arguably
scared or threatened Americans. The range of potential adversaries thus
expanded beyond Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda’s leader, and his minions, who,
the president explained, “hate us . . . [and] our freedoms,”66 now to include
“rogue” states arrayed in an “axis of evil” (e.g., Iraq, Iran, and North Korea)67
and especially heinous Middle East dictators thought to possess weapons
of mass destruction (WMD). As Professor Sir Michael Howard, the world’s
leading authority on strategy and military history, later reflected,
President Bush’s declaration of a “war on terror” was generally seen
abroad as a rhetorical device to alert the American people to the dangers
facing them, rather than as a statement to be taken seriously or literally
in terms of international law. But further statements and actions by the
Bush Administration have made it clear that the President’s words were
intended to be taken literally.68
The implications of this policy were clearly demonstrated by the relationship
that the president and his advisers believed existed between al
Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Although White House suspicions that Iraq
was somehow behind 9/ never completely faded,69 they were eventually
eclipsed by growing concerns about terrorists acquiring WMD from Iraqi
stockpiles.70 Indeed, it was precisely this fear that President Bush cited to
Defining Terrorism 9
justify the March 2003 invasion. The Bush administration’s conflation of
terrorism and WMD was specifically cited by Richard Dearlove, then head
of MI-6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, in his report to Prime Minister
Tony Blair of high-level U.S.-U.K. consultations held in Washington, D.C.,
seven months before the invasion. “Military action was now seen as inevitable,”
notes of Dearlove’s meeting with the prime minister stated. “Bush
wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction
of terrorism and WMD.”71 The chain of events that began on 9/
and the declaration of a “war on terror” that thereafter set America on the
path to war with Iraq thus prompted Michael Howard again to note how it
was evidently “not enough” for Americans
to be at war with an abstract entity described by their president as “Terror.”
They need a specific adversary who embodies the spirit of evil against
whom national sentiment can be mobilised, as it was mobilised against
Hitler in 94. Osama bin Laden proved too evasive and evanescent a figure
to provide the necessary catharsis, but prominent among the usual
suspects was Saddam Hussein. There was little evidence to link him with
this particular crime, but he was a bad guy, with whom many members of
the Bush administration had unfinished business. . . . He was, in short, the
most powerful and dangerous figure among the declared enemies of the
US, which in itself gave them the right indeed the duty—to destroy him.72
The “war on terror” thus became, in President Bush’s infelicitous choice
of words, as much a “crusade”73 against evil as it was an unwavering reaction
to the multiplicity of new security threats confronting the nation—and
therefore accounts for the way terrorism was redefined in the early twentyfirst
century, according to Stanford University linguist Geoffrey Nunberg,
in order to “encompass both the dark forces that threaten ‘civilization’ and
the fears they arouse.”74
Why Is Terrorism So Difficult to Define?
Not surprisingly, as the meaning and usage of the word have changed over
time to accommodate the political vernacular and discourse of each successive
era, terrorism has proved increasingly elusive in the face of attempts to
construct one consistent definition. At one time, the terrorists themselves
were far more cooperative in this endeavor than they are today. The early
practitioners didn’t mince their words or hide behind the semantic camou-
20 Defining Terrorism
flage of more anodyne labels such as “freedom fighter” or “urban guerrilla.”
The nineteenth-century anarchists, for example, unabashedly proclaimed
themselves to be terrorists and frankly proclaimed their tactics to be terrorism.75
The members of Narodnaya Volya similarly displayed no qualms
in using these same words to describe themselves and their deeds.76 Such
frankness did not last, however. Although the Jewish terrorist group of the
940s known as Lehi (the Hebrew acronym for Lohamei Herut Yisrael, the
Freedom Fighters for Israel), but more popularly called the Stern Gang after
its founder and first leader, Abraham Stern, would admit to its effective use of
terrorist tactics, its members never considered themselves to be terrorists.77
It is significant, however, that even Lehi, while it may have been far more
candid than its latter-day counterparts, chose as the name of the organization
not Terrorist Fighters for Israel but the far less pejorative Freedom Fighters
for Israel. Similarly, although more than twenty years later the Brazilian revolutionary
Carlos Marighela displayed little compunction about openly advocating
the use of “terrorist” tactics,78 he still insisted on depicting himself and
his disciples as “urban guerrillas” rather than “urban terrorists.” Indeed, it is
clear from Marighela’s writings that he was well aware of the word’s undesirable
connotations and strove to displace them with positive resonances. “The
words ‘aggressor’ and ‘terrorist,’” Marighela wrote in his famous Handbook
of Urban Guerrilla War (also known as the “Mini-Manual”), “no longer mean
what they did. Instead of arousing fear or censure, they are a call to action. To
be called an aggressor or a terrorist in Brazil is now an honour to any citizen,
for it means that he is fighting, with a gun in his hand, against the monstrosity
of the present dictatorship and the suffering it causes.”79
This trend toward ever more convoluted semantic obfuscations to sidestep
terrorism’s pejorative overtones has, if anything, become more entrenched in
recent decades. Terrorist organizations almost without exception now regularly
select names for themselves that consciously eschew the word “terrorism”
in any of its forms. Instead these groups actively seek to evoke images of
• freedom and liberation (e.g., the National Liberation Front, the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Freedom for the Basque
Homeland);
• armies or other military organizational structures (e.g., the National
Military Organization, the Popular Liberation Army, the Fifth Battalion
of the Liberation Army);
• actual self-defense movements (e.g., the Afrikaner Resistance Movement,
the Shankhill Defence Association, the Organization for the
Defence of the Free People, the Jewish Defense Organization);
Defining Terrorism 2
• righteous vengeance (the Organization for the Oppressed on Earth,
the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide, the Palestinian
Revenge Organization)
—or else deliberately choose names that are decidedly neutral and therefore
bereft of all but the most innocuous suggestions or associations (e.g.,
the Shining Path, Front Line, al-Dawa (the Call), Alfaro Lives—Damn It!,
Kach (Thus), al-Gamat al-Islamiya (the Islamic Organization), the Lantaro
Youth Movement, and especially al Qaeda (the Arabic word for the “base of
operation”80 or “foundation”—meaning the base or foundation from which
worldwide Islamic revolution can be waged—or, as other translations have
it, the “precept” or “method”).81
What all these examples suggest is that terrorists clearly do not see or
regard themselves as others do. “Above all I am a family man,” the archterrorist
Carlos, the Jackal, described himself to a French newspaper following
his capture in 994.82 Similarly, when the infamous KSM—Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/ attacks whom bin Laden called simply
“al Mukhtar” (Arabic for “the brain”)—was apprehended in March 2003,
a photograph of him with his arms around his two young sons was found
next to the bed in which he had been sleeping.83 Cast perpetually on the
defensive and forced to take up arms to protect themselves and their real or
imagined constituents only, terrorists perceive themselves as reluctant warriors,
driven by desperation—and lacking any viable alternative—to violence
against a repressive state, a predatory rival ethnic or nationalist group, or an
unresponsive international order. This perceived characteristic of self-denial
also distinguishes the terrorist from other types of political extremists as well
as from people similarly involved in illegal, violent avocations. A communist
or a revolutionary, for example, would likely readily accept and admit that
he is in fact a communist or a revolutionary. Indeed, many would doubtless
take particular pride in claiming either of those appellations for themselves.
Similarly, even a person engaged in illegal, wholly disreputable, or entirely
selfish violent activities, such as robbing banks or carrying out contract killings,
would probably admit to being a bank robber or a murderer for hire.
The terrorist, by contrast, will never acknowledge that he is a terrorist and
moreover will go to great lengths to evade and obscure any such inference
or connection. Terry Anderson, the American journalist who was held hostage
for almost seven years by the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah,
relates a telling conversation he had with one of his guards. The guard had
objected to a newspaper article that referred to Hezbollah as terrorists. “We
are not terrorists,” he indignantly stated, “we are fighters.” Anderson replied,
22 Defining Terrorism
“Hajj, you are a terrorist, look it up in the dictionary. You are a terrorist, you
may not like the word and if you do not like the word, do not do it.”84 The terrorist
will always argue that it is society or the government or the socioeconomic
“system” and its laws that are the real “terrorists,” and moreover that
if it were not for this oppression, he would not have felt the need to defend
either himself or the population he claims to represent.85 Another revealing
example of this process of obfuscation-projection may be found in the book
Invisible Armies, written by Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual
leader of the Lebanese terrorist group responsible for Anderson’s kidnapping.
“We don’t see ourselves as terrorists,” Fadlallah explains, “because
we don’t believe in terrorism. We don’t see resisting the occupier as a terrorist
action. We see ourselves as mujihadeen [holy warriors] who fight a Holy
War for the people.”86 Indeed, Hezbollah’s efforts to distance itself entirely
from any terrorist associations and appellations have only intensified in the
years since it first entered mainstream Lebanese politics.87 Perhaps because
it now has thirteen elected members of the Lebanese Parliament, Hezbollah
spokespersons persistently argue that it is a bona fide political party, cum
“resistance movement.”88
On one point, at least, everyone agrees: “Terrorism” is a pejorative
term.89 It is a word with intrinsically negative connotations that is generally
applied to one’s enemies and opponents, or to those with whom one
disagrees and would otherwise prefer to ignore. “What is called terrorism,”
Brian Jenkins has written, “thus seems to depend on one’s point of view. Use
of the term implies a moral judgement; and if one party can successfully
attach the label terrorist to its opponent, then it has indirectly persuaded
others to adopt its moral viewpoint.”90 Hence the decision to call someone
or label some organization “terrorist” becomes almost unavoidably subjective,
depending largely on whether one sympathizes with or opposes the
person/group/cause concerned. If one identifies with the victim of the violence,
for example, then the act is terrorism. If, however, one identifies with
the perpetrator, the violent act is regarded in a more sympathetic, if not
positive (or, at the worst, ambivalent) light, and it is not terrorism.
The implications of this associational logic were perhaps most clearly
demonstrated in the exchanges between Western and non-Western member
states of the United Nations following the 972 Munich Olympics massacre,
in which eleven Israeli athletes were killed. The debate began with
the proposal by the UN secretary general, Kurt Waldheim, that the UN
should not remain a “mute spectator” to the acts of terrorist violence then
occurring throughout the world but should take practical steps that might
prevent further bloodshed.91 While a majority of the UN member states
Defining Terrorism 23
supported the secretary general, a disputatious minority—including many
Arab states and various African and Asian countries—derailed the discussion,
arguing (much as Arafat would do two years later in his own address
to the General Assembly) that “people who struggle to liberate themselves
from foreign oppression and exploitation have the right to use all methods
at their disposal, including force.”92
The Third World delegates justified their position with two arguments.
First, they claimed that all bona fide liberation movements are invariably
decried as “terrorists” by the regimes against which their struggles for freedom
are directed. The Nazis, for example, labeled as terrorists the resistance
groups opposing Germany’s occupation of their lands, Moulaye el-Hassen,
the Mauritanian ambassador, pointed out, just as “all liberation movements
are described as terrorists by those who have reduced them to slavery.”
Therefore, by condemning “terrorism” the UN was endorsing the power of
the strong over the weak and of the established entity over its nonestablished
challenger—in effect, acting as the defender of the status quo. According to
Chen Chu, the deputy representative of the People’s Republic of China, the
UN thus was proposing to deprive “oppressed nations and peoples” of the
only effective weapon they had with which to oppose “imperialism, colonialism,
neo-colonialism, racism and Israeli Zionism.”93 Second, the Third
World delegates argued forcefully that it is not the violence itself that is
germane but its “underlying causes”—that is, the “misery, frustration, grievance
and despair”—that produce the violent acts.94 As the Mauritanian representative
again explained, the term “terrorist” could “hardly be held to
apply to persons who were denied the most elementary human rights, dignity,
freedom and independence, and whose countries objected to foreign
occupation.”95 When the issue was again raised the following year, Syria
objected on the grounds that “the international community is under legal
and moral obligation to promote the struggle for liberation and to resist any
attempt to depict this struggle as synonymous with terrorism and illegitimate
violence.”96 The resultant definitional paralysis subsequently throttled
UN efforts to make any substantive progress on international cooperation
against terrorism beyond very specific agreements on individual aspects of
the problem (concerning, for example, diplomats and civil aviation).
The opposite approach, in which identification with the victim determines
the classification of a violent act as terrorism, is evident in the conclusions
of a parliamentary working group of NATO (an organization comprising
long-established, status quo Western states). The final report of the
989 North Atlantic Assembly’s Subcommittee on Terrorism states: “Murder,
kidnapping, arson and other felonious acts constitute criminal behav-
24 Defining Terrorism
ior, but many non-Western nations have proved reluctant to condemn as
terrorist acts what they consider to be struggles of national liberation.”97
In this reasoning, the defining characteristic of terrorism is the act of violence
itself, not the motivations or justification for or reasons behind it.
After decades of debate and resistance, the UN itself finally embraced this
rationale by adopting the International Convention for the Suppression of
Terrorist Bombings. The convention outlawed the unlawful delivery, placement,
discharge, or detonation of an
explosive or other lethal device in, into or against a place of public use, a
State or government facility, a public transportation system or an infrastructure
facility with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury;
or with the intent to cause extensive destruction of such a place, facility
or system, where such destruction results in or is likely to result in major
economic loss.98
It came into force just four months before the 9/ attacks.99
Indeed, this approach has long been espoused by analysts such as Jenkins
who argue that terrorism should be defined “by the nature of the act, not by
the identity of the perpetrators or the nature of their cause.”100 But this is not
an entirely satisfactory solution either, since it fails to differentiate clearly
between violence perpetrated by states and by nonstate entities, such as terrorists.
Accordingly, it plays into the hands of terrorists and their apologists
who would argue that there is no difference between the “low-tech” terrorist
pipe bomb placed in the rubbish bin at a crowded market that wantonly and
indiscriminately kills or maims everyone within a radius measured in tens
of feet and the “high-tech” precision-guided ordnance dropped by air force
fighter-bombers from a height of twenty thousand feet or more that achieves
the same wanton and indiscriminate effects on the crowded marketplace far
below. This rationale thus equates the random violence inflicted on enemy
population centers by military forces—such as the Luftwaffe’s raids on Warsaw
and Coventry, the Allied firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo, and the
atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
during the Second World War, and indeed the countervalue strategy of the
postwar superpowers’ strategic nuclear policy, which deliberately targeted
the enemy’s civilian population—with the violence committed by substate
entities labeled “terrorists,” since both involve the infliction of death and
injury on noncombatants.101 Indeed, this was precisely the point made during
the above-mentioned UN debates following the 972 Munich Olympics
massacre by the Cuban representative, who argued that “the methods of
Defining Terrorism 25
combat used by national liberation movements could not be declared illegal
while the policy of terrorism unleashed against certain peoples [by the
armed forces of established states] was declared legitimate.”102
It is a familiar argument. Terrorists, as we have seen, deliberately cloak
themselves in the terminology of military jargon. They consciously portray
themselves as bona fide (freedom) fighters, if not soldiers, who—though
they wear no identifying uniform or insignia—are entitled to treatment as
prisoners of war (POWs) if captured and therefore should not be prosecuted
as common criminals in ordinary courts of law. Terrorists further argue
that, because of their numerical inferiority, far more limited firepower, and
paucity of resources compared with an established nation-state’s massive
defense and national security apparatus, they have no choice but to operate
clandestinely, emerging from the shadows to carry out dramatic (in other
words, bloody and destructive) acts of hit-and-run violence in order to
attract attention to, and ensure publicity for, themselves and their cause.
The bomb in the rubbish bin, in their view, is merely a circumstantially
imposed “poor man’s air force”:103 the only means with which the terrorist
can challenge—and get the attention of—the more powerful state. “How
else can we bring pressure to bear on the world?” one of Arafat’s political
aides once inquired. “The deaths are regrettable, but they are a fact of war
in which innocents have become involved. They are no more innocent than
the Palestinian women and children killed by the Israelis and we are ready
to carry the war all over the world.”104
But rationalizations such as these ignore the fact that, even while national
armed forces have been responsible for far more death and destruction than
terrorists might ever aspire to bring about, there nonetheless is a fundamental
qualitative difference between the two types of violence. Even in
war there are rules and accepted norms of behavior that prohibit the use of
certain types of weapons (for example, hollow-point or “dum-dum” bullets,
CS “tear” gas, chemical and biological warfare agents) and proscribe various
tactics and outlaw attacks on specific categories of targets. Accordingly,
in theory, if not always in practice, the rules of war—as observed from the
early seventeenth century when they were first proposed by the Dutch jurist
Hugo Grotius and subsequently codified in the famous Geneva and Hague
Conventions on Warfare of the 860s, 899, 907, and 949—not only grant
civilian noncombatants immunity from attack but also
• prohibit taking civilians as hostages;
• impose regulations governing the treatment of captured or surrendered
soldiers (POWs);
26 Defining Terrorism
• outlaw reprisals against either civilians or POWs;
• recognize neutral territory and the rights of citizens of neutral
states; and
• uphold the inviolability of diplomats and other accredited representa-
tives.
Even the most cursory review of terrorist tactics and targets over the past
quarter century reveals that terrorists have violated all these rules. They not
infrequently have
• taken civilians as hostages, and in some instances then brutally executed
them (e.g., the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro and the
German industrialist Hans Martin Schleyer, who, respectively, were
taken captive and later murdered by the Red Brigades and the Red
Army Faction in the 970s and, more recently, Daniel Pearl, a Wall
Street Journal reporter, and Nicholas Berg, an American businessmen,
who were kidnapped by radical Islamic terrorists in Pakistan
and Iraq, respectively, and grotesquely beheaded);
• similarly abused and murdered kidnapped military officers—even
when they were serving on UN-sponsored peacekeeping or truce
supervisory missions (e.g., the American Marine Lieutenant Colonel
William Higgins, the commander of a UN truce-monitoring detachment,
who was abducted by Lebanese Shi’a terrorists in 989 and subsequently
hanged);
• undertaken reprisals against wholly innocent civilians, often in countries
far removed from the terrorists’ ostensible “theater of operation,”
thus disdaining any concept of neutral states or the rights of citizens of
neutral countries (e.g., the brutal 986 machine-gun and hand-grenade
attack on Turkish Jewish worshipers at an Istanbul synagogue carried
out by the Palestinian Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) in retaliation for
a recent Israeli raid on a guerrilla base in southern Lebanon); and
• repeatedly attacked embassies and other diplomatic installations (e.g.,
the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in
998 and in Beirut and Kuwait City in 983 and 984, and the mass
hostage-taking at the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima, Peru,
in 996–97), as well as deliberately targeting diplomats and other
accredited representatives (e.g., the British ambassador to Uruguay,
Sir Geoffrey Jackson, who was kidnapped by leftist terrorists in that
country in 97, and the fifty-two American diplomats taken hostage
at the Tehran legation in 979).
Defining Terrorism 27
Admittedly, the armed forces of established states have also been guilty
of violating some of the same rules of war. However, when these transgressions
do occur—when civilians are deliberately and wantonly attacked in war
or taken hostage and killed by military forces—the term “war crime” is used
to describe such acts and, as imperfect and flawed as both international and
national judicial remedies may be, steps nonetheless are often taken to hold
the perpetrators accountable for the crimes. By comparison, one of the fundamental
raisons d’être of international terrorism is a refusal to be bound
by such rules of warfare and codes of conduct. International terrorism disdains
any concept of delimited areas of combat or demarcated battlefields,
much less respect for neutral territory. Accordingly, terrorists have repeatedly
taken their often parochial struggles to other, sometimes geographically
distant, third-party countries and there deliberately enmeshed people
completely unconnected with the terrorists’ cause or grievances in violent
incidents designed to generate attention and publicity.
The reporting of terrorism by the news media, which have been drawn
into the semantic debates that divided the UN in the 970s and continue
to influence all discourse on terrorism, has further contributed to the
obfuscation of the terrorist/“freedom fighter” debate, enshrining imprecision
and implication as the lingua franca of political violence in the name
of objectivity and neutrality. In striving to avoid appearing either partisan
or judgmental, the American media, for example, resorted to describing
terrorists—often in the same report—as variously “guerrillas,” “gunmen,”
“raiders,” “commandos,” and even “soldiers.” A random sample of American
newspaper reports of Palestinian terrorist activities between June and
December 973, found in the terrorism archives and database maintained
by the RAND Corporation,105 provides striking illustrations of this practice.
Out of eight headlines of articles reporting the same incident, six used the
word “guerrillas” and only two used “terrorists” to describe the perpetrators.
An interesting pattern was also observed: those accounts that immediately
followed a particularly horrific or tragic incident—that is, involving
the death and injury of innocent people (in this instance, a 973 attack on a
Pan Am airliner at the Rome airport, in which thirty-two passengers were
killed)—tended to describe the perpetrators as “terrorists” and their act as
“terrorism” (albeit in the headline in one case only, before reverting to the
more neutral terminology of “commando,” “militants,” and “guerrilla attack”
in the text) more frequently than did reports of less serious or nonlethal
incidents.106 One New York Times editorial, however, was far less restrained
than the stories describing the actual incident, describing it as “bloody” and
“mindless” and using the words “terrorists” and “terrorism” interchangeably
28 Defining Terrorism
with “guerrillas” and “extremists.”107 Only six months previously, however,
the same newspaper had run a story about another terrorist attack that
completely eschewed the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist,” preferring “guerrillas”
and “resistance” (as in “resistance movement”) instead.108 The Christian
Science Monitor’s reports of the Rome Pan Am attack similarly avoided
“terrorist” and “terrorism” in favor of “guerrillas” and “extremists”;109 an
Associated Press story in the next day’s Los Angeles Times also stuck with
“guerrillas,”110 while the two Washington Post articles on the same incident
opted for the terms “commandos” and “guerrillas.”111
This slavish devotion to terminological neutrality, which David Rapoport
first observed nearly thirty years ago,112 is still in evidence today. A telling
illustration of the semantics of terrorism reportage can be found in some
of the press coverage of the terrorist violence that afflicted Algeria during
the 990s and claimed the lives of an estimated hundred thousand people.
An article appearing in the International Herald Tribune (a Paris-based
newspaper then published in conjunction with the New York Times and the
Washington Post) reported a 997 incident in Algeria in which thirty people
had been killed by perpetrators who were variously described as “terrorists”
in the article’s headline, less judgmentally as “extremists” in the lead
paragraph, and as the still more ambiguous “Islamic fundamentalists” in the
article’s third paragraph.113 In a country where terrorist-inflicted bloodshed
was endemic, one might think that the distinctions between “terrorists,”
mere “extremists,” and ordinary “fundamentalists” would be clearer. Equally
interesting was the article that appeared on the opposite side of the same
page of the newspaper that described the “decades of sporadic guerrilla [my
emphasis] warfare by the IRA” in Northern Ireland.114 Yet sixty years ago
this newspaper apparently had fewer qualms about using the word “terrorists”
to describe the two young Jewish men in pre-independence Israel who,
while awaiting execution after having been convicted of attacking British
military targets, committed suicide.115 Other press accounts of the same
period in The Times of London and the Palestine Post similarly had no difficulties,
for example, in describing the 946 bombing by Jewish terrorists
of the British military headquarters and government secretariat located in
Jerusalem’s King David Hotel as a “terrorist” act perpetrated by “terrorists.”116
And, in perhaps the most specific application of the term, the communist
terrorists against whom the British fought in Malaya throughout the
late 940s and 950s were routinely referred to as “CTs”—for “Communist
terrorists.” As Rapoport warned in the 970s, “In attempting to correct the
abuse of language for political purposes, our journalists may succeed in
making language altogether worthless.”117
Defining Terrorism 29
More recently, the coverage given by the Washington Post and the New
York Times to the barricade-and-hostage situation that unfolded at a Beslan,
North Ossetia, school in early September 2004 underscored these continuing
semantic ambiguities. Even in the post-9/ era, few terrorist attacks
have evoked quite the horror and revulsion that the fifty-two-hour ordeal
and its deliberate targeting of children produced. According to official Russian
figures, at least 33 hostages—including more than 72 children—were
killed, although many believe the actual numbers to be much higher. Yet the
perpetrators, an indisputably cruel and ruthless group of Chechen terrorists,
were repeatedly described in far more neutral and anodyne terms by both of
America’s national newspapers of record. The Washington Post’s initial report
of the seizure and its account of the rescue operations, for example, did not
use the words “terrorism” and “terrorists” at all, except in the context of
direct quotations or statements made by an aide to Russian president Vladimir
Putin, various other Russian official spokespersons, or President Bush
himself. Instead, a variety of other adjectives were employed in the two articles
sampled, including “guerrillas” (seventeen references), “hostage takers”
(eleven), “rebels” (six), “fighters” (three), and “separatists” (two).118 The New
York Times’s reporting and rhetorical choices were little different. Admittedly,
its first article detailing the incident used the word “terrorist” twice, in
both instances independently of quotes or statements made by Russian officials.
But more inoffensive terms such as “guerrillas” (seventeen references),
“fighters” (nine), “insurgents” (six), “rebels” (six), and “hostage takers” (two)
predominated in both this story and the report of the siege’s grisly denouement.119
The word “terrorist” again appeared twice in the second piece, but
only when quoting Russian president Vladimir Putin and his spokesman.120
Indeed, the “unrelenting use of such euphemistic language” in the Washington
Post’s reporting of the Beslan incident prompted one reader to ask in a
letter to the editor, “Why can’t your editors just identify these people for what
they are . . . terrorists?”121 The New York Times’s first public editor, Daniel
Okrent, devoted a column to the subject after readers similarly complained
about the paper’s reluctance to use the words “terrorist,” “terrorism,” and “terror.”
His explanation was that the Times in fact has no policy governing the
use of such words—except to eschew them as much possible.122
The cumulative effect of this proclivity toward equivocation is that today
there is no one widely accepted or agreed-upon definition for terrorism.
Different departments or agencies of even the same government will themselves
often have very different definitions for it. The U.S. State Department,
for example, uses the definition of terrorism contained in Title 22 of
the United States Code, Section 2656f(d):
30 Defining Terrorism
premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant
targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually
intended to influence an audience.
In an accompanying footnote is the explanation that:
For purposes of this definition, the term “noncombatant” is interpreted
to include, in addition to civilians, military personnel who at the time
of the incident are unarmed and/or not on duty. . . . We also consider as
acts of terrorism attacks on military installations or on armed military
personnel when a state of military hostilities does not exist at the site,
such as bombings against US bases in Europe, the Philippines, or else-
where.123
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines terrorism as
the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to
intimidate or coerce a Government, the civilian population, or any segment
thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives,124
while the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) states that terrorism is
any activity that involves an act that:
is dangerous to human life or potentially destructive of critical infrastructure
or key resources; and . . . must also appear to be intended
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the
policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the
conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnap-
ping.125
And the U.S. Department of Defense defines it as
the calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence
to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or
societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or
ideological objectives.126
Not surprisingly, each of the above definitions reflects the priorities
and particular interests of the specific agency involved. The State
Department’s emphasis is on the premeditated and planned or calculated
Defining Terrorism 3
nature of terrorism in contrast to more spontaneous acts of political violence.
Its definition is also the only one of the four to emphasize both the
ineluctably political nature of terrorism and the perpetrators’ fundamental
“subnational” characteristic. The State Department’s approach is also
noteworthy in that it expands the definition of a terrorist act beyond the
usual, exclusive focus on civilians to include “noncombatant targets.” This
broad category encompasses not only assassinations of military attachés
and military forces deployed on peacekeeping missions, but also attacks
on cafes, discotheques, and other facilities frequented by off-duty service
personnel, as well as on military installations and armed personnel—provided
that a “state of military hostilities does not exist at the site.” Under
this rubric, incidents such as the 983 suicide truck bombing of the U.S.
Marine barracks at Beirut International Airport; the similar attack thirteen
years later against a U.S. Air Force housing complex in Khobar, Saudi
Arabia; and the October 2000 seaborne suicide assault on a U.S. Navy
destroyer, the USS Cole while it was at anchor in Aden, Yemen, are defined
as terrorist acts.127 The State Department definition is deficient, however,
in failing to consider the psychological dimension of terrorism. Terrorism
is as much about the threat of violence as the violent act itself and,
accordingly, is deliberately conceived to have far-reaching psychological
repercussions beyond the actual target of the act among a wider, watching,
“target” audience. “Terrorism,” as Jenkins succinctly observed two
decades ago, “is theatre.”128
Given the FBI’s mission of investigating and solving crimes—both political
(e.g., terrorism) and other—it is not surprising that its definition focuses
on different elements. Unlike the State Department’s, this definition does
address the psychological dimensions of the terrorist act described above,
laying stress on terrorism’s intimidatory and coercive aspects. The FBI definition
also identifies a much broader category of terrorist targets than only
“noncombatants,” specifying not only governments and their citizens but
also inanimate objects, such as private and public property. Accordingly,
politically motivated acts of vandalism and sabotage are included, such as
attacks on:
• abortion clinics by militant opponents of legalized abortion in the
United States;
• retail businesses and stores by anti-globalists and/or anarchists;
• medical research facilities by groups opposing experimentation on
animals, such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF); and
32 Defining Terrorism
• ski resorts, condominium vacation developments, commercial logging
operations, or automobile dealerships by radical environmentalists
associated with the Earth Liberation Front (ELF).129
Although the FBI definition recognizes social alongside political objectives
as fundamental terrorist aims, it offers no clear elucidation of the differences
between them to explain this distinction. The Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) definition clearly reflects its mission: concentrating on
attacks to critical infrastructure and key national resources that could have
grave societal consequences. In this respect, the DHS cites specifically in
its definition the threat of “mass destruction,” the better to differentiate and
distinguish its responsibilities from those of other agencies.
The Department of Defense definition of terrorism is arguably the most
complete of the four. It highlights the terrorist threat as much as the actual
act of violence and focuses on terrorism’s targeting of whole societies as
well as governments. Curiously, unlike the State Department definition, it
does not include the deliberate targeting of individuals for assassination and
makes no attempt to distinguish between attacks on combatant and noncombatant
military personnel. The Defense Department definition, significantly,
also cites the religious and ideological aims of terrorism alongside
its fundamental political objectives—but omits the social dimension found
in the FBI’s definition.
It is not only individual agencies within the same governmental apparatus
that cannot agree on a single definition of terrorism. Experts and other
long-established scholars in the field are equally incapable of reaching a
consensus. In the first edition of his magisterial survey, Political Terrorism:
A Research Guide,130 Alex Schmid devoted more than a hundred pages
to examining more than a hundred different definitions of terrorism in an
effort to discover a broadly acceptable, reasonably comprehensive explication
of the word. Four years and a second edition later, Schmid was no
closer to the goal of his quest, conceding in the first sentence of the revised
volume that the “search for an adequate definition is still on.”131 Walter
Laqueur despaired of defining terrorism in both editions of his monumental
work on the subject, maintaining that it is neither possible to do so nor
worthwhile to make the attempt.132 “Ten years of debates on typologies and
definitions,” he responded to a survey on definitions conducted by Schmid,
“have not enhanced our knowledge of the subject to a significant degree.”133
Laqueur’s contention is supported by the twenty-two different word categories
occurring in the 09 different definitions that Schmid identified in
Defining Terrorism 33
his survey (see table ). At the end of this exhaustive exercise, Schmid asks
“whether the above list contains all the elements necessary for a good definition.
The answer,” he suggests, “is probably ‘no.’”134
If it is impossible to define terrorism, as Laqueur argues, and fruitless
to attempt to cobble together a truly comprehensive definition, as Schmid
admits, are we to conclude that terrorism is impervious to precise, much
less accurate definition? Not entirely. If we cannot define terrorism, then we
can at least usefully distinguish it from other types of violence and identify
the characteristics that make terrorism the distinct phenomenon of political
violence that it is.
TABLE 1 Frequencies of definitional elements in 09 definitions of “terrorism”
Element Frequency (%)
 Violence, force 83.5
2 Political 65
3 Fear, terror emphasized 5
4 Threat 47
5 (Psychological) effects and (anticipated) reactions 4.5
6 Victim-target differentiation 37.5
7 Purposive, planned, systematic, organized action 32
8 Method of combat, strategy, tactic 30.5
9 Extranormality, in breach of accepted rules,
without humanitarian constraints 30
0 Coercion, extortion, induction of compliance 28
 Publicity aspect 2.5
2 Arbitrariness; impersonal, random character; indiscrimination 2
3 Civilians, noncombatants, neutrals, outsiders as victims 7.5
4 Intimidation 7
5 Innocence of victims emphasized 5.5
6 Group, movement, organization as perpetrator 4
7 Symbolic aspect, demonstration to others 3.5
8 Incalculability, unpredictability, unexpectedness
of occurrence of violence 9
9 Clandestine, covert nature 9
20 Repetitiveness; serial or campaign character of violence 7
2 Criminal 6
22 Demands made on third parties 4
Source: Alex P. Schmid, Albert J. Jongman, et al., Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors,
Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories, and Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction
Books, 988), pp. 5–6.
34 Defining Terrorism
Distinctions as a Path to Definition
Guerrilla warfare and insurgency are good places to start. Terrorism is
often confused or equated with, or treated as synonymous with, guerrilla
warfare and insurgency. This is not entirely surprising, since guerrillas and
insurgents often employ the same tactics (assassination, kidnapping, hitand-run
attack, bombings of public gathering places, hostage-taking, etc.)
for the same purposes (to intimidate or coerce, thereby affecting behavior
through the arousal of fear) as terrorists. In addition, terrorists as well as
guerrillas and insurgents wear neither uniform nor identifying insignia and
thus are often indistinguishable from noncombatants. However, despite
the inclination to lump terrorists, guerrillas, and insurgents into the same
catchall category of “irregulars,” there are nonetheless fundamental differences
among the three. “Guerrilla,” for example, in its most widely accepted
usage, is taken to refer to a numerically larger group of armed individuals,135
who operate as a military unit, attack enemy military forces, and seize and
hold territory (even if only ephemerally during daylight hours), while also
exercising some form of sovereignty or control over a defined geographical
area and its population. “Insurgents” share these same characteristics;
however, their strategy and operations transcend hit-and-run attacks to
embrace what in the past has variously been called “revolutionary guerrilla
warfare,”136 “modern revolutionary warfare,” or “people’s war”137 but
is today commonly termed “insurgency.” Thus, in addition to the irregular
military tactics that characterize guerrilla operations, insurgencies typically
involve coordinated informational (e.g., propaganda) and psychological
warfare efforts designed to mobilize popular support in a struggle against
an established national government, imperialist power, or foreign occupying
force.138 Terrorists, however, do not function in the open as armed units,
generally do not attempt to seize or hold territory, deliberately avoid engaging
enemy military forces in combat, are constrained both numerically and
logistically from undertaking concerted mass political mobilization efforts,
and exercise no direct control or governance over a populace at either the
local or the national level.139
It should be emphasized that none of these are pure categories and
considerable overlap exists. Established terrorist groups like Hezbollah,
FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), and the LTTE (Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers), for example, are also often
described as guerrilla movements because of their size, tactics, and control
over territory and populace. Indeed, nearly a third of the thirty-seven
Defining Terrorism 35
groups on the U.S. State Department’s “Designated Foreign Terrorist
Organizations” list could just as easily be categorized as guerrillas.140 The
ongoing insurgency in Iraq has further contributed to this semantic confusion.
The 2003 edition of the State Department’s Global Patterns of Terrorism
specifically cited the challenge of making meaningful distinctions
between these categories, lamenting how the “line between insurgency and
terrorism has become increasingly blurred as attacks on civilian targets
have become more common.”141 Generally, the State Department considers
attacks against U.S. and coalition military forces as insurgent operations
and incidents such as the August 2003 suicide vehicle-borne bombings of
the UN headquarters in Baghdad and the Jordanian embassy in that city,
the assassinations of Japanese diplomats, and kidnapping and murder of
aid workers and civilian contractors as terrorist attacks.142 The definitional
rule of thumb therefore is that secular Ba’athist Party loyalists and other
former regime elements who stage guerrilla-like hit-and-run assaults or
carry out attacks using roadside IEDs (improvised explosive devices) are
deemed “insurgents,” while foreign jihadists and domestic Islamic extremists
who belong to groups like al Qaeda in Mesopotamia,143 led by Abu
Musab Zarqawi, and who are responsible for most of the suicide attacks
and the videotaped beheading of hostages, are labeled terrorists.
It is also useful to distinguish terrorists from ordinary criminals. Like
terrorists, criminals use violence as a means to attain a specific end. However,
while the violent act itself may be similar—kidnapping, shooting, and
arson, for example—the purpose or motivation clearly is different. Whether
the criminal employs violence as a means to obtain money, to acquire material
goods, or to kill or injure a specific victim for pay, he is acting primarily
for selfish, personal motivations (usually material gain). Moreover, unlike
terrorism, the ordinary criminal’s violent act is not designed or intended
to have consequences or create psychological repercussions beyond the act
itself. The criminal may of course use some short-term act of violence to
“terrorize” his victim, such as waving a gun in the face of a bank clerk during
a robbery in order to ensure the clerk’s expeditious compliance. In these
instances, however, the bank robber is conveying no “message” (political or
otherwise) through his act of violence beyond facilitating the rapid handing
over of his “loot.” The criminal’s act therefore is not meant to have any effect
reaching beyond either the incident itself or the immediate victim. Further,
the violence is neither conceived nor intended to convey any message to
anyone other than the bank clerk himself, whose rapid cooperation is the
robber’s only objective. Perhaps most fundamentally, the criminal is not
concerned with influencing or affecting public opinion; he simply wants to
36 Defining Terrorism
abscond with his money or accomplish his mercenary task in the quickest
and easiest way possible so that he may reap his reward and enjoy the fruits
of his labors. By contrast, the fundamental aim of the terrorist’s violence is
ultimately to change “the system”—about which the ordinary criminal, of
course, couldn’t care less.144
The terrorist is also very different from the lunatic assassin, who may use
identical tactics (e.g., shooting, bombing) and perhaps even seeks the same
objective (e.g., the death of a political figure). However, while the tactics
and targets of terrorists and lone assassins are often identical, their purpose
is different. Whereas the terrorist’s goal is again ineluctably political (to
change or fundamentally alter a political system through his violent act), the
lunatic assassin’s goal is more often intrinsically idiosyncratic, completely
egocentric and deeply personal. John Hinckley, who tried to kill President
Reagan in 98 to impress the actress Jodie Foster, is a case in point. He
acted not from political motivation or ideological conviction but to fulfill
some profound personal quest (killing the president to impress his screen
idol). Such entirely apolitical motivations can in no way be compared to
the rationalizations used by the Narodnaya Volya to justify its campaign of
tyrannicide against the czar and his minions, nor even to the Irish Republican
Army’s efforts to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher or
her successor, John Major, in hopes of dramatically changing British policy
toward Northern Ireland. Further, just as one person cannot credibly claim
to be a political party, so a lone individual cannot be considered to constitute
a terrorist group. In this respect, even though Sirhan Sirhan’s assassination
of presidential candidate and U.S. senator Robert Kennedy in 968
had a political motive (to protest against U.S. support for Israel), it is debatable
whether the murder should be defined as a terrorist act since Sirhan
belonged to no organized political group and there is no evidence that he
was directly influenced or inspired by an identifiable political or terrorist
movement. Rather, Sirhan acted entirely on his own, out of deep personal
frustration and a profound animus.145
Finally, the point should be emphasized that, unlike the ordinary criminal
or the lunatic assassin, the terrorist is not pursuing purely egocentric goals;
he is not driven by the wish to line his own pocket or satisfy some personal
need or grievance. The terrorist is fundamentally an altruist: he believes that
he is serving a “good” cause designed to achieve a greater good for a wider
constituency—whether real or imagined—that the terrorist and his organization
purport to represent. The criminal, by comparison, serves no cause at all,
just his own personal aggrandizement and material satiation. Indeed, a “terrorist
without a cause (at least in his own mind),” Konrad Kellen has argued,
Defining Terrorism 37
“is not a terrorist.”146 Yet the possession or identification of a cause is not a
sufficient criterion for labeling someone a terrorist. In this key respect, the
difference between terrorists and political extremists is clear. Many people,
of course, harbor all sorts of radical and extreme beliefs and opinions, and
many of them belong to radical or even illegal or proscribed political organizations.
However, if they do not use violence in the pursuit of their beliefs,
they cannot be considered terrorists. The terrorist is fundamentally a violent
intellectual, prepared to use and, indeed, committed to using force in
the attainment of his goals.
In the past, terrorism was arguably easier to define than it is today. To
qualify as terrorism, violence had to be perpetrated by an individual acting
at the behest of or on the behalf of some existent organizational entity
or movement with at least some conspiratorial structure and identifiable
chain of command. This criterion, however, is no longer sufficient. In recent
years, a variety of terrorist movements have increasingly adopted a strategy
of “leaderless networks” in order to thwart law enforcement and intelligence
agency efforts to penetrate them.147 Craig Rosebraugh, the publicist
for a radical environmentalist group calling itself the Earth Liberation Front
(ELF), described the movement in a 200 interview as a deliberately conceived
“series of cells across the country with no chain of command and no
membership roll . . . only a shared philosophy.” It is designed this way, he
continued, so that “there’s no central leadership where [the authorities] can
go and knock off the top guy and [the movement then] will be defunct.”148
Indeed, an ELF recruitment video narrated by Rosebraugh advises “individuals
interested in becoming active in the Earth Liberation Front to . . .
form your own close-knit autonomous cells made of trustworthy and sincere
people. Remember, the ELF and each cell within it are anonymous not
only to one another but to the general public.”149 As a senior FBI official
conceded, the ELF is “not a group you can put your fingers on” and thus is
extremely difficult to infiltrate.150
This type of networked adversary is a new and different breed of terrorist
entity to which traditional organizational constructs and definitions do not
neatly apply. It is populated by individuals who are ideologically motivated,
inspired, and animated by a movement or a leader, but who neither formally
belong to a specific, identifiable terrorist group nor directly follow orders
issued by its leadership and are therefore outside any established chain of
command. It is a structure and approach that al Qaeda has also sought to
implement. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy and al Qaeda’s chief
theoretician, extolled this strategy in his seminal clarion call to jihad (Arabic
for “striving,” but also “holy war”), Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner:
38 Defining Terrorism
Meditations on the Jihadist Movement. The chapter titled “Small Groups
Could Frighten the Americans” explains:
Tracking down Americans and the Jews is not impossible. Killing them
with a single bullet, a stab, or a device made up of a popular mix of
explosives or hitting them with an iron rod is not impossible. Burning
down their property with Molotov cocktails is not difficult. With the
available means, small groups could prove to be a frightening horror for
the Americans and the Jews.151
Whether termed “leaderless resistance,” “phantom cell networks,” “autonomous
leadership units,”152 “autonomous cells,” a “network of networks,”153 or
“lone wolves,” this new conflict paradigm conforms to what John Arquilla
and David Ronfeldt call “netwar”:
an emerging mode of conflict (and crime) at societal levels, short of traditional
military warfare, in which the protagonists use network forms of
organization and related doctrines, strategies, and technologies attuned
to the information age. These protagonists are likely to consist of dispersed
organizations, small groups, and individuals who communicate,
coordinate, and conduct their campaigns in an internetted manner, often
without precise central command.154
Unlike the hierarchical, pyramidal structure that typified terrorist groups
of the past, this new type of organization is looser, flatter, more linear.
Although there is a leadership of sorts, its role may be more titular than
actual, with less a direct command and control relationship than a mostly
inspirational and motivational one. “The organizational structure,” Arquilla
and Ronfeldt explain,
is quite flat. There is no single central leader or commander; the network
as a whole (but not necessarily each node) has little to no hierarchy.
There may be multiple leaders. Decisionmaking and operations
are decentralized and depend on consultative consensus-building that
allows for local initiative and autonomy. The design is both acephalous
(headless) and polycephalous (Hydra-headed)—it has not precise heart
or head, although not all nodes may be “created equal.”155
As part of this “leaderless” strategy, autonomous local terrorist cells plan and
execute attacks independently of one another or of any central command
Defining Terrorism 39
authority, but through their individual terrorist efforts seek the eventual
attainment of a terrorist organization or movement’s wider goals. Although
these ad hoc terrorist cells and lone individuals may be less sophisticated
and therefore less capable than their more professional, trained counterparts
who are members of actual established terrorist groups, these “amateur”
terrorists can be just as bloody-minded. A recent FBI strategic planning
document, for instance, describes lone wolves as the “most significant
domestic terrorism threat” that the United States faces. “They typically draw
ideological inspiration from formal terrorist organizations,” the 2004–09
plan states, “but operate on the fringes of those movements. Despite their
ad hoc nature and generally limited resources, they can mount high-profile,
extremely destructive attacks, and their operational planning is often difficult
to detect.”156
Conclusion
By distinguishing terrorists from other types of criminals and irregular
fighters and terrorism from other forms of crime and irregular warfare, we
come to appreciate that terrorism is
• ineluctably political in aims and motives;
• violent—or, equally important, threatens violence;
• designed to have far-reaching psychological repercussions beyond the
immediate victim or target;
• conducted either by an organization with an identifiable chain of
command or conspiratorial cell structure (whose members wear no
uniform or identifying insignia) or by individuals or a small collection
of individuals directly influenced, motivated, or inspired by the ideological
aims or example of some existent terrorist movement and/or
its leaders; and
• perpetrated by a subnational group or nonstate entity.
We may therefore now attempt to define terrorism as the deliberate creation
and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence
in the pursuit of political change. All terrorist acts involve violence or the
threat of violence. Terrorism is specifically designed to have far-reaching
psychological effects beyond the immediate victim(s) or object of the terrorist
attack. It is meant to instill fear within, and thereby intimidate, a
wider “target audience” that might include a rival ethnic or religious group,
40 Defining Terrorism
an entire country, a national government or political party, or public opinion
in general. Terrorism is designed to create power where there is none
or to consolidate power where there is very little. Through the publicity
generated by their violence, terrorists seek to obtain the leverage, influence,
and power they otherwise lack to effect political change on either a local or
an international scale.
Defining Terrorism 4