Who claims terrorism constitutes the illegitimate use of force to achieve a political objective by targeting innocent people?

Abstract

Terrorism is a concept that dates from the French Revolution. Terrorism is defined as a destructive method of political action which uses violence to cause fear for political ends. While some political goals may be achieved only through the use of terrorism, terrorists often kill or injure noncombatants or the innocent in order to maximize terror and to seek widespread publicity for their actions. Contemporary terrorism is often conceived in terms of war. While terrorism may be perpetrated by individuals against a state, states can enact policies of terrorism against their own citizens or subjects of another nation or country.

2.3 The Effects of Terrorism

Does terrorism succeed? It attracts the attention of the news media and the public, and the issue ranks high on the agendas of many governments and international organizations. However, does recognition of the threat or even of the grievances behind terrorism produce favorable political outcomes? Despite widespread publicity, the political effectiveness of terrorism is generally short-term and limited in scope. Terrorism may intimidate jurors or dissuade tourists, but it cannot compel popular majorities to give in to minority demands. Both the Irish Republican Army and the PLO eventually renounced terrorism. Terrorism polarizes opinion by mobilizing support and hardening opposition. In this way, it can inflame existing conflicts and disrupt peace processes, but it rarely changes fundamental attitudes.

What and Who of Terror, Terrorist, and Terrorism

Terrorism does not have a universally accepted definition. The term entered the Western popular and scholarly lexicon with reference to the excesses of the Jacobin regime in the aftermath of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th Century—though some have used the term to refer to secret societies of assassins in 1st-Century Palestine and 11th-Century Persia. In fact, through most of the early 19th Century, the term was mostly used with reference to state violence. In mainland Europe and Russia in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the terms terror and terrorism were mostly applied to substate left-wing anarchist and revolutionary movements. The concept had a brief realignment with the state during the Fascist/Nazi era in Germany and Italy, but it reverted back to being understood as a substate phenomenon during the second half of the 20th Century.

Despite concern on part of many for lack of an acceptable definition of terrorism, geographers have not been very attentive to the definitional issues surrounding terrorism. This is partial because they have tended to approach it as a discourse rather than an absolute conceptual category to be defined and, second, because of their concern with a critical engagement with the dominant understanding of the concept and its implications. Nevertheless, a geographical engagement with the question of terrorism will inevitably be from a spatial lens, and a geographical definition of terrorism therefore defines it in spatial terms, as follows:

Terrorism is an act of violence, different from other acts of violence, for example, genocide, war, war crimes, political assassinations, and so on in that it is (1) a spectacle directed toward a wider audience than the immediate victims, (2) directed toward place destruction, and/or (3) place alienation (Daanish Mustafa).

Even though many types of violence may also have a spectacular aspect to them, the difference between violence and terrorist violence is twofold. First, in say an assassination, the prime motivation is to kill the target, with accompanying possible publicity as a secondary objective. The person in an assassination is killed not because of the message it sends but because of the attributes of the person and what they were doing or had done. Besides assassinations, attempted or actual, already have clear definitions in settled law, as murder, hence, there is no functional need to conflate them with terrorism. Targeted killings similarly are a tautology. It is another way of referring to a clear category in settled law—murder. Second, the definition links terrorism to place annihilation or alienation. Without the latter, it is argued that the act will not qualify as terrorism. Besides, there is no hierarchy implied in the label terrorism. Genocide or war crimes or other acts of violence are at times just as morally reprehensible as terrorism, if not more.

The definition stresses the theatrical aspects of terrorist violence and goes on to draw attention to the spatial focus of the perpetrators of terrorism, both state and nonstate. The definitional exercise on terrorism is concerned with delimiting the scope of terrorism, that is, all violence is not terrorism, and the need to distinguish it from other types of violence, for example, genocide, assassinations, war crimes, and so on for which there are established legal definitions. In talking about place destruction and place alienation, the above definition draws upon earlier work by geographers who draw attention to the traumatic psychological impact of destruction of places from violent military raids, aerial bombing, and environmental extremes on war and disaster victims. This attention to the spatiality of the terrorism phenomenon has been a prominent theme in the geographical literature on terrorism.

Many of the more influential definitions of terrorism, such as the one by the US State Department stress that terrorism is politically motivated violence committed by nonstate actors. The nation-state, one of the most violent institutions in human history by that definition, cannot commit terrorism. Many human geographers referring to more stark examples of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union, and even less egregious ones like that of the Turkish state argue that states are, in fact, some of the most frequent and destructive perpetrators of terrorism. The emphasis on the spatiality of violence in the geographical definition leaves the ground open for states’ to be also potential perpetrators of violence. The geographical definition emphasizes the actual attributes of the violent act to recognize terror and terrorism, instead of who the perpetrator is. The implications are profoundly political in the sense of providing avenues for accountability for terroristic violence by both state and nonstate actors.

Introduction

Terrorism is an intentional form of violence that involves targeted attacks which are designed to intentionally scare, intimidate, to ‘terrorize’ for a political purpose. Attacks are usually directed at immediate targets such as people, events, or institutions and a wider audience whom protagonists aim to intimidate, shock or threaten. By so doing, terror groups intend to arouse support for their political discourse while undermining rival, usually dominant, ideologies as part of an overarching strategy to win concessions or defeat the declared enemy. These forms of political violence can be relatively inexpensive and undertaken by small numbers of activists. Hence acts of terrorism are considered to be a form of asymmetrical warfare, committed by marginalized groups who often resort to such tactics because they lack more conventional political resources and avenues for engagement. However, this opinion overlooks the strategic, clandestine use of violence by national governments or their complicit supporters. Such government actions are usually classified under the reactive heading of ‘counterterrorism.’

Since September 2001, perceptions of terrorism have been dominated by impressions of contemporary ‘Islamic’ groups. Yet terrorism is a well established strategy that has been implemented by groups across the ideological spectrum and historical periods.

Group Behavior

Another productive approach describes terrorism as rational strategy decided by a group [37]. This approach is rather close to the political one because it requires collective decision making in the utilization of terrorist tactics to reach group goals. Group behavior is wider than the political approach because it can include, for example, criminal acts of international terrorism, in which the goals will not be political. Very often the definitions of terrorism mention only “groups” or clandestine agents as an active core of this type of activity. But in this case we’re excluding state-sponsored international terrorism.

In order to understand international terrorism, one must always assess what exactly constitutes terrorism and the definition in use. International terrorism or terrorism has to be analyzed as an instrument, not a concept.

History, Concept, and Problem of Definition

Terrorism has an ancient lineage. It appears sometimes in primitive societies and has a significant history in various religious traditions. But the concept of terrorism, as distinguished from the phenomenon, is a recent development, produced by the secular French Revolution. The term originated in 1795, meaning “government by intimidation” or “a (government) policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted.” “Terrorists” carried out those policies.

The architects of the French Reign of Terror believed that they possessed a new purpose and method; when Robespierre proclaimed, “either virtue or the terror,” he meant that terror was the only form of force that could produce democratic dispositions. The “Revolutionary Tribunal” (“People's Court”) practices best exemplified the new purpose and method. Ordinary courts assessed a defendant's behavior, but the People's Court treated those with “impure” hearts. Motive, not behavior (Carter, 1989) and Billington was its chief concern, and the ordinary rules of evidence were scrapped as impediments to accomplishing the new task. Conventional notions of guilt or innocence thus became irrelevant. The issue for the Revolutionary Tribunals was not justice, but how to manipulate a prisoner's fate so that it would be a didactic lesson, that is, the identification of appropriate and inappropriate civic dispositions for a democratic ethos (Billington, 1980).

A century later, Narodnaya Volya (“The People's Will,” 1879) emerged, the first rebel movement to characterize itself as terrorist; its successors haunted Russia for nearly four decades. The Russians sought popular rule, understood terrorism as a temporary necessity to “raise the consciousness of the masses,” and chose victims for “symbolic” reasons or for political effects. The immediate political objectives were not achieved, but they generated a “culture of terror” for successors to inherit and improve.

Russian writers like Nechaev, Bakunin, Morozov, Stepniak, and Kropotkin addressed the despair of revolutionaries who believed spontaneous mass uprisings had become impossible and the public perceived revolutionaries as “idle word spillers.” A new way of acting was needed to bring recognized but latent diffused social tensions to the surface and then direct them toward their proper objects.

The doctrine was developed partly from studying the Tsars' Balkan intrigues. The Tsars organized assassinations of Turkish officials knowing that the Turks would then massacre Christian subjects, who in turn would revolt, provoking critical international responses. Publicity and provocation were the objective of Tsarist Balkan atrocities, and the lesson was absorbed by Russian revolutionary terrorists and became a defining feature of modern rebel terrorism ever since.

Revolutionary atrocities or “propaganda of the deed” would transform society by publicizing a cause and provoking the opposition to violate its own norms in efforts to root the terrorists out, responses invariably creating serious international concern. Beyond their several political purposes, atrocities had “therapeutic” value, promoting self-confidence among revolutionaries freeing their souls from the paralyzing weight of moral conventions. Successful terrorism entailed learning both how to kill and how to die, a death best culminated in a public trial where, in circumstances maximizing publicity and empathy, one simultaneously accepted responsibility and indicted the regime. “The terrorist is noble, terrible, irresistibly fascinating (uniting) the two sublimities of human grandeur, the martyr and the hero” (Stepniak, 1883).

The Russians had so many successors in other countries that most people associated terrorist activity exclusively with rebel activity. In the 1930s after the rise of the totalitarian state in Germany and the Soviet Union, state terrorism eclipsed the rebel form briefly, but, since the 1960s, rebel terror has preoccupied the public again.

Initially, there was no confusion about the term because rebel terrorists described themselves as terrorists. But over time the word suggested so many abusive connotations and created enormous political liabilities that terrorists stopped calling themselves terrorists. Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun in the struggle for Israel's independence emphasizing their purpose, described Irgun members as “freedom fighters” and the British “suppressors” as terrorists (Begin, 1977). Afterward, rebels characterized all opposing governments in the same way; governments returned the compliment and described all violent rebels as terrorists.

Historical events compounded uncertainties associated with the term. Over time some terrorists changed themselves and the differences often became so dramatic that one could hardly remember earlier characterizations. When Britain recognized the Irish Free State (1922), Michael Collins became the first terrorist to be acknowledged as the political leader of a legitimate government. After World War II similar, though not identical, developments occurred when Kenya, Algeria, and others achieved independence.

By 1996 four persons once known as terrorists received Nobel Peace Prizes. Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat shared one (1978) for leading Israel and Egypt to a peace treaty. Nelson Mandela (1994) was indispensable in leading South Africa to reconciliation. Yasser Arafat (1996) was still in charge of an active terrorist organization, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), when he signed the Oslo Peace Accords (1993). In these instances, the individuals were involved in a peace-making process. But occasionally terrorist reputations were transformed without a change in behavior. A most striking historical instance was the status of those at Masada. Jewish rabbis for nearly two millennia rejected them as unsavory criminals, but modern secular Israelis hail them as heroes, and Masada became an important site for military ceremonies.

Initially, only the idea of a perfect society could be powerful enough to justify “extra normal violence,” that is, attacks on the unarmed or innocent. Today, many different groups use terror. Their only common feature is a strong feeling that some injustice requires attention. Even groups organized around a “single issue,” such as abortion, environmentalism, animal rights, and exclusion of immigrants, have used terror (Jongman and Schmid, 2005). In the 1980s Action Directe, a left-wing French group, moved from issue to issue vainly seeking one to give them a popular constituency.

Schmid and Jongman (2005) discovered more than 100 definitions, and Laqueur “solved” the problem by refusing to provide one! But the issue can be solved. Most serious observers today agree that terrorism is violence aiming to achieve a public end, but beyond that a major difference still remains. Some emphasize that terrorism is distinguishable from other forms of violence, while others minimize that distinction. For those who emphasize differences, Walter's (1972) study of Zulu government terrorism provides the most useful and influential account, describing terrorism as extra-normal violence that goes beyond the rules (informal and formal) governing coercion, a violence which ignores conventional distinctions between guilt and innocence and/or between combatants and noncombatants. The “target” is not the individuals directly assaulted, but the public as a whole. Many scholars, for example, Thornton, Rapoport, Crenshaw, and Schmid, indorse this view. The definition reflects conceptions the original modern terrorists accepted, provides a good way to link rebel and state terror, and allows one to anticipate direction, that is, the pronounced tendencies of terrorist campaigns to escalate atrocities and provoke greater counter atrocities.

A less satisfactory view makes terrorism synonymous with all forms of illegal rebel violence, a view often incorporated by state definitions, for instance, in United Kingdom (1974) and West Germany (1985). To use the term consistently and retrospectively, soldiers like George Washington and Robert E. Lee would become terrorists, indistinguishable from their contemporaries who really were terrorists, such as the Sons of Liberty and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) (Rapoport, 2008). This definition also obscures a crucial often-forgotten political fact, namely that the public does distinguish the different means rebels use. A classic instance was the British decision to execute leaders of the Easter Rising (1916), men who were not terrorists, fought in uniform, and attacked soldiers only. Those executed became martyrs for a hitherto indifferent public.

Within human geography, terrorism has been researched with an eye toward problem definition, investigating the spatiality of state and nonstate terrorist violence and unpacking the discourses surrounding terror, terrorists, and terrorism. In terms of problem definition, from a geographical perspective, terrorism is an act of violence directed toward place destruction and/or place alienation, and a spectacle directed toward a wider audience than the immediate victims. Processes of globalization, geographies of perceived injustices, and geographical imaginaries of the terrorists influence the spatiality of terrorism. There is indeed evidence for a correspondence between terrorists’ geographical imaginaries and the geographies of injustice and terrorists’ target selection. Geographers have sought to unpack the multiplicity of discourses surrounding terrorism – from critical geopolitics, political ecological, historical, and post-structuralist perspectives. Discourse analyses of terrorism have sought to highlight how demonized others are produced and spaces of terror are conceptualized at the nation-state scale by those in power to justify wars against other states and governments. Attention to the processes producing spaces of justice and injustice, spatial imaginaries, and cultural fundamentalisms may yet be the greatest contribution of human geography to not just counter terrorism but securing a just and peaceful world.

Definition and Overview

We have defined terrorism as “politically motivated violence or the threat of violence, especially against civilians, with the intent to instill fear” (Levy and Sidel, 2007). (Bioterrorism is defined as the use of, or threat to use, biological weapons for this purpose.) Terrorism is intended to have psychological effects that go beyond the immediate victims to intimidate a wider population, such as a rival ethnic or religious group, a national government or political party, or an entire country (Hoffman, 1998). It is often intended to establish power were there is none or to consolidate power where there is little. While many nations, including the United States, differentiate terrorism from war – especially a war formally declared by a nation, we perceive little difference between terrorism and a war directed largely against civilian populations.

The term terrorism is “generally applied to one's enemies and opponents, or to those with whom one disagrees and would otherwise prefer to ignore” (Hoffman, 1998). The use of the term terrorism, therefore, depends on one's point of view. The term terrorism implies a moral judgment; if one group can attach the term to its opponent, then it may have persuaded others to adopt its moral perspective (Jenkins, 1980). In civil wars, revolutions, and other conflicts, those considered terrorists by one side are often considered freedom fighters by the other. In these situations, groups that have been relatively powerless, in contrast to very powerful foes, have often utilized terrorist tactics, believing that these tactics represent their own effective weapon against superior force. An analysis of 109 definitions of the term terrorism revealed that the most frequent definitional elements were the words violence, force, political, and fear (Schmidt et al., 1998). Because of ambiguity in the use of the term, some organizations avoid its use in formal communication.

Terrorism can be construed as encompassing the use by countries of weapons designed to cause casualties among civilian populations. Examples of such terrorism include the bombing of Guernica, Spain, by Nazi forces in 1937 and during World War II, the bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Coventry, and other cities by Germany; the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and other cities by the Allies; the bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities by the United States; and the detonation of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States. There is controversy about whether these ‘acts of war’ should be considered terrorism (Geiger, 1997).

U.S. law defines terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents” (U.S. Code, 22, §2656f(d)). Based on this definition, the National Counterterrorism Center reported that during 2006, 14 352 terrorist attacks occurred worldwide and resulted in 20 573 deaths (13 340 in Iraq), with an additional 36 214 people wounded. Nearly 300 incidents resulted in ten or more deaths, 90% of which were in the Near East and South Asia. Armed attacks and bombings led to 77% of the fatalities during 2006 (National Counterterrorism Center, 2006).

The bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, and U.S. military and diplomatic facilities abroad in the late 1990s awakened Americans to the reality of terrorism directed at U.S. targets at home and abroad. Americans' concerns about terrorism on U.S. soil were tragically confirmed by the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, followed soon afterward by letters contaminated with anthrax spores that were mailed to two U.S. senators and several news-media organizations.

In recent decades, terrorist incidents have occurred in many countries worldwide: the killing of nine Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the Olympics in Munich in 1972; the use of explosives on airplanes, such as the bombing of an Air India 747 over the Atlantic in 1985, which killed all 329 people on board; numerous attacks on embassies, with kidnapping and killing of diplomats; and thousands of attacks on civilians in many countries. Among major terrorist attacks since 2002 have been the detonation of bombs on a train in Madrid in 2004, which killed 191 people and injured 1700, and on local public transport in London in 2005, which killed 56 people, including four perpetrators, and injured 700 people; the occupation of a theater in Moscow in 2002 by Chechen guerillas, in which 170 people were killed, including 41 of the guerillas – deaths that were mainly caused by fentanyl and halothane used in gaseous form by the police in a rescue attempt; and the seizure of a public school in Beslan in southern Russia in 2004 by a Chechen group, which led to the death of 332 people, mostly students, teachers, and parents.

Terrorist events have highlighted the important roles of public health professionals and their agencies and organizations in responding to these events and helping prepare for and prevent future terrorist attacks. The involvement in this response, not only of public health professionals but also of others throughout society, has underscored the fact that public health is what we, as a society, do collectively to ensure the conditions in which people can be healthy.

Global Terrorism Index (GTI)

The GTI measures the impact of terrorism in 162 countries. The GTI uses the University of Maryland Global Terrorism Database (GTD) to formulate their index. The data points captured from the GTD to develop the index include the number of terrorist incidents in a given year, the number of fatalities caused by those events, the total number of injuries, and the total property damage. These four points are weighed and a score is assigned to each of the 162 countries. Users can view the index as an interactive map with each country ranked, dating back to 2002. Users can also download the latest Global Terrorism Report and other related infographics under “Reports and Highlights.”

Terrorism Insurance

The Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002 (TRIA) was passed by Congress to calm the insurance industry that faced claims resulting from the 9/11 attacks and concern over subsequent attacks. The act requires insurance companies to provide terrorism coverage to businesses willing to purchase it. Participating insurance companies pay out a claim (a deductible) before TRIA pays for the loss. TRIA losses are capped at $100 billion. The act is viewed as important to the U.S. economy to support recovery in the event of attacks. Congress and the President extended this Act multiple times. At the time of this writing TRIA will expire on December 31, 2014. This latest extension includes coverage for terrorism perpetrated by domestic persons or interests, whereas earlier the Act covered only terrorism perpetrated by foreign persons or interests (Ball, 2008).

The number of businesses purchasing terrorism insurance has increased steadily since 2003. Large organizations with assets in metropolitan areas while doing business globally view terrorism as another catastrophic exposure. These firms seek broad coverage to manage the risk (Tuckey, 2010).