terrorism

/ter"euh riz'euhm/, n.

1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.

2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization.

3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.

[1785-95; TERROR + -ISM]

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Systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective.

It has been used throughout history by political organizations of both the left and the right, by nationalist and ethnic groups, and by revolutionaries. Although usually thought of as a means of destabilizing or overthrowing existing political institutions, terror also has been employed by governments against their own people to suppress dissent; examples include the reigns of certain Roman emperors, the French Revolution (see Reign of Terror), Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union under Stalin, and Argentina during the "dirty war" of the 1970s. Terrorism's impact has been magnified by the deadliness and technological sophistication of modern-day weapons and the capability of the media to disseminate news of such attacks instantaneously throughout the world. The deadliest terrorist attack ever occurred on Sept. 11, 2001 (see September 11 attacks), when members of al-Qaeda terrorist network hijacked four commercial airplanes and crashed two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center complex and one into the Pentagon building near Washington, D.C.; the fourth plane crashed near Pittsburgh, Pa. The crashes resulted in the collapse of much of the World Trade Center complex, the destruction of part of the southwest side of the Pentagon, and the deaths of some 3,000 people.

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Introduction

 the systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective. Terrorism has been practiced by political organizations with both rightist and leftist objectives, by nationalistic and religious groups, by revolutionaries, and even by state institutions such as armies, intelligence services, and police.

Definitions of terrorism

 Definitions of terrorism are usually complex and controversial, and, because of the inherent ferocity and violence of terrorism, the term in its popular usage has developed an intense stigma. It was first coined in the 1790s to refer to the terror used during the French Revolution by the revolutionaries against their opponents. The Jacobin party of Maximilien Robespierre (Robespierre, Maximilien de) carried out a Reign of Terror (Terror, Reign of) involving mass executions by the guillotine. Although terrorism in this usage implies an act of violence by a state against its domestic enemies, since the 20th century the term has been applied most frequently to violence aimed, either directly or indirectly, at governments in an effort to influence policy or topple an existing regime.

      Terrorism is not legally defined in all jurisdictions; the statutes that do exist, however, generally share some common elements. Terrorism involves the use or threat of violence and seeks to create fear, not just within the direct victims but among a wide audience. The degree to which it relies on fear distinguishes terrorism from both conventional and guerrilla warfare. Although conventional military forces invariably engage in psychological warfare against the enemy, their principal means of victory is strength of arms. Similarly, guerrilla forces, which often rely on acts of terror and other forms of propaganda, aim at military victory and occasionally succeed (e.g., the Viet Cong in Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia). Terrorism proper is thus the systematic use of violence to generate fear, and thereby to achieve political goals, when direct military victory is not possible. This has led some social scientists to refer to guerrilla warfare as the “weapon of the weak” and terrorism as the “weapon of the weakest.”

      In order to attract and maintain the publicity necessary to generate widespread fear, terrorists must engage in increasingly dramatic, violent, and high-profile attacks. These have included hijackings (hijacking), hostage takings, kidnappings, car bombings, and, frequently, suicide bombings. Although apparently random, the victims and locations of terrorist attacks often are carefully selected for their shock value. Schools, shopping centres, bus and train stations, and restaurants and nightclubs have been targeted both because they attract large crowds and because they are places with which members of the civilian population are familiar and in which they feel at ease. The goal of terrorism generally is to destroy the public's sense of security in the places most familiar to them. Major targets sometimes also include buildings or other locations that are important economic or political symbols, such as embassies or military installations. The hope of the terrorist is that the sense of terror these acts engender will induce the population to pressure political leaders toward a specific political end.

      Some definitions treat all acts of terrorism, regardless of their political motivations, as simple criminal activity. For example, in the United States the standard definition used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) describes terrorism as “the unlawful use of force and 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.” The element of criminality, however, is problematic, because it does not distinguish among different political and legal systems and thus cannot account for cases in which violent attacks against a government may be legitimate. A frequently mentioned example is the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, which committed violent actions against that country's apartheid government but commanded broad sympathy throughout the world. Another example is the resistance movement against the Nazi occupation of France during World War II.

      Since the 20th century, ideology and political opportunism have led a number of countries to engage in transnational terrorism, often under the guise of supporting movements of national liberation. (Hence, it became a common saying that “One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.”) The distinction between terrorism and other forms of political violence became blurred—particularly as many guerrilla groups often employed terrorist tactics—and issues of jurisdiction and legality were similarly obscured.

      These problems have led some social scientists to adopt a definition of terrorism based not on criminality but on the fact that the victims of terrorist violence are most often innocent civilians. For example, the U.S. government eventually accepted the view that terrorism was premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets. Even this definition is flexible, however, and on occasion it has been expanded to include various other factors, such as that terrorist acts are clandestine or surreptitious, that terrorists choose their victims randomly, and that terrorist acts are intended to create an overwhelming sense of fear.

      In the late 20th century, the term ecoterrorism was used to describe acts of environmental destruction committed in order to further a political goal or as an act of war, such as the burning of Kuwaiti oil wells by the Iraqi army during the Persian Gulf War. The term also was applied to certain environmentally benign though criminal acts, such as the spiking of lumber trees, intended to disrupt or prevent activities allegedly harmful to the environment.

Types of terrorism

      Various attempts have been made to distinguish among types of terrorist activities. It is vital to bear in mind, however, that there are many kinds of terrorist movements, and no single theory can cover them all. Not only are the aims, members, beliefs, and resources of groups engaged in terrorism extremely diverse, but so are the political contexts of their campaigns. One popular typology identifies three broad classes of terrorism: revolutionary, subrevolutionary, and establishment terrorism. Although this typology has been criticized as inexhaustive, it provides a useful framework for understanding and evaluating terrorist activities.

      Revolutionary terrorism is arguably the most common form. Practitioners of this type of terrorism seek the complete abolition of a political system and its replacement with new structures. Modern instances of such activity include campaigns by the Italian Red Brigades, the German Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Gang), the Basque separatist group ETA, and the Peruvian Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), each of which attempted to topple a national regime. Subrevolutionary terrorism is rather less common. It is used not to overthrow an existing regime but to modify the existing sociopolitical structure. Since this modification is often accomplished through the threat of deposing the existing regime, subrevolutionary groups are somewhat more difficult to identify. An example can be seen in the ANC and its campaign to end apartheid in South Africa.

      Establishment terrorism, often called state or state-sponsored terrorism, is employed by governments—or more often by factions within governments—against that government's citizens, against factions within the government, or against foreign governments or groups. This type of terrorism is very common but difficult to identify, mainly because the state's support is always clandestine. The Soviet Union and its allies allegedly engaged in widespread support of international terrorism during the Cold War; in the 1980s the United States supported rebel groups in Africa that allegedly engaged in acts of terrorism, such as the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA); and various Muslim countries (e.g., Iran and Syria) purportedly provided logistical and financial aid to Islamic revolutionary groups engaged in campaigns against Israel, the United States, and some Muslim countries in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

      The military dictatorships in Chile (1973–90) and Argentina (1976–83) committed acts of state terrorism against their own populations. The violent police states of Joseph Stalin (Stalin, Joseph) in the Soviet Union and Ṣaddām Ḥussein in Iraq are examples of countries in which one organ of the government—often either the executive branch or the intelligence establishment—engaged in widespread terror against not only the population but also other organs of the government, including the military.

      The persistent element of all forms of establishment terrorism, unlike that of nonstate terrorism, is that of secrecy. States invariably seek to disavow their active complicity in such acts, both to evade international censure and to avoid political and military retribution by those they target.

History

      Terror has been practiced by state and nonstate actors throughout history and throughout the world. The ancient Greek historian Xenophon (c. 431–c. 350 BC) wrote of the effectiveness of psychological warfare against enemy populations. Roman emperors such as Tiberius (reigned AD 14–37) and Caligula (reigned AD 37–41) used banishment, expropriation of property, and execution as means to discourage opposition to their rule.

      The most commonly cited example of early terror, however, is the activity of the Jewish Zealots (Zealot), often known as the Sicarii (Hebrew: “Daggers”), who engaged in frequent violent attacks on fellow Hebrews suspected of collusion with the Roman authorities. Likewise, the use of terror was openly advocated by Robespierre (Robespierre, Maximilien de) during the French Revolution, and the Spanish Inquisition used arbitrary arrest, torture, and execution to punish what it viewed as religious heresy. After the American Civil War (1861–65), defiant Southerners formed the Ku Klux Klan to intimidate supporters of Reconstruction (1865–77) and the newly freed former slaves. In the latter half of the 19th century, terror was adopted in western Europe, Russia, and the United States by adherents of anarchism, who believed that the best way to effect revolutionary political and social change was to assassinate persons in positions of power. From 1865 to 1905 a number of kings, presidents, prime ministers, and other government officials were killed by anarchists' guns or bombs.

      The 20th century witnessed great changes in the use and practice of terror. It became the hallmark of a number of political movements stretching from the extreme right to the extreme left of the political spectrum. Technological advances, such as automatic weapons and compact, electrically detonated explosives, gave terrorists a new mobility and lethality, and the growth of air travel provided new methods and opportunities. Terrorism was virtually an official policy in totalitarian (totalitarianism) states such as those of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler (Hitler, Adolf) and the Soviet Union under Stalin (Stalin, Joseph). In these states arrest, imprisonment, torture, and execution were carried out without legal guidance or restraints to create a climate of fear and to encourage adherence to the national ideology and the declared economic, social, and political goals of the state.

      Terror has been used by one or both sides in anticolonial conflicts (e.g., Ireland and the United Kingdom, Algeria and France, and Vietnam and France and the United States), in disputes between different national groups over possession of a contested homeland (e.g., Palestinians and Israelis), in conflicts between different religious denominations (e.g., Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland), and in internal conflicts between revolutionary forces and established governments (e.g., in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Peru). In the late 20th and early 21st centuries some of the most extreme and destructive organizations that engaged in terrorism possessed a fundamentalist religious ideology (e.g., Ḥamās and al-Qaeda (Qaeda, al-)). Some groups, including the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers) and Ḥamās, adopted the tactic of suicide bombing, in which the perpetrator would attempt to destroy an important economic, military, political, or symbolic target by detonating a bomb on his person. In the latter half of the 20th century the most prominent groups using terrorist tactics were the Red Army Faction, the Japanese Red Army, the Red Brigades, the Puerto Rican FALN, Fatah and other groups related to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Shining Path, and the Liberation Tigers.

 In the late 20th century the United States suffered several acts of terrorist violence by Puerto Rican nationalists (such as the FALN), antiabortion groups, and foreign-based organizations. The 1990s witnessed some of the deadliest attacks on American soil, including the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing two years later, which killed 168 people. In addition, there were several major terrorist attacks on U.S. government targets overseas, including military bases in Saudi Arabia (1996) and the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (1998). In 2000 an explosion triggered by suicide bombers caused the deaths of 17 sailors aboard a U.S. naval ship, the USS Cole, in the Yemeni port of Aden.

 The deadliest terrorist strikes to date were the September 11 attacks (2001), in which suicide terrorists associated with al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial airplanes, crashing two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center complex in New York City and the third into the Pentagon building near Washington, D.C.; the fourth plane crashed near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The crashes destroyed much of the World Trade Center complex and a large portion of one side of the Pentagon and killed more than 3,000 people.

 Terrorism appears to be an enduring feature of political life. Even prior to the September 11 attacks, there was widespread concern that terrorists might escalate their destructive power to vastly greater proportions by using weapons of mass destruction—including nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons—as was done by the Japanese doomsday cult AUM Shinrikyo, which released nerve gas into a Tokyo subway in 1995. These fears were intensified after September 11, when a number of letters contaminated with anthrax were delivered to political leaders and journalists in the United States, leading to several deaths. U.S. President George W. Bush (Bush, George W.) made a broad war against terrorism the centrepiece of U.S. foreign policy at the beginning of the 21st century.

John Philip Jenkins Ed.

Additional Reading

A collection of critical essays on various international movements and crises is Martha Crenshaw (ed.), Terrorism in Context (1995). A comprehensive survey of patterns of terrorism is Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (1999). Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religion's Violence (2000), studies the relationship between religion and political violence. The relationship between politics and terrorism is explored in Grant Wardlaw, Political Terrorism: Theory, Tactics, and Counter-Measures, 2nd ed., rev. and extended (1989); and Paul Wilkinson, Terrorism and the Liberal State, 2nd ed., rev., extended, and updated (1986). Works examining trends in terrorism in the 1990s include Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (1999); and Richard A. Falkenrath, Robert D. Newman, and Bradley A. Thayer, America's Achilles' Heel: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack (1998).John Philip Jenkins

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