Terrorism is not a new phenomenon, though the understanding and categorization of it is relatively new. ”Terrorism” is a controversial term with multiple definitions. A simple definition is that it is a premeditated threat of violence or an act of violence against an influential individual or a group in order to influence that group to initiate change. The U.S. State Department has defined terrorism as ”premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience ….” (U.S. State Department 2002). The FBI has defined it 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” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, n.d.). The United Nations observed that the organization ”[s]trongly condemns all acts, methods, and practices of terrorism as criminal and unjustifiable, wherever and by whomsoever committed” and ”[r]eiterates that criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons, or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious, or other nature that may be invoked to justify them” (United Nations 1996). The terrorists’ actions are orchestrated to challenge the status quo and to initiate change, and those actions will be underpinned by acts of violence that include bombings, hijackings, and assassination. Such acts are not random, spontaneous, or blind but are deliberately orchestrated for maximum effect (Kingshott 2003).
Historical Review
The origins of the word ”terrorism” can be traced back to the French Revolution (1789-1799), a period in the history of France in which an absolute monarchy was overthrown and the Roman Catholic Church was forced to undergo radical restructuring. This was achieved through the ”Constitution Civile du Clerge” (Civil Constitution of the Clergy, passed July 12, 1790), which subordinated the Roman Catholic Church in France to the French government. The clergy became employees of the state, requiring them to take an oath of loyalty to the nation.
September 1793 through July 1794 marked what was known as the Reign of Terror, a period characterized by brutal repression and violence in the pursuit of political aims. In this short time span a highly centralized political regime, led by Maximilien Francois Marie Isidore de Robespierre, suspended most of the democratic achievements gained by the revolution, and intended to pursue the revolution on social matters. Its stated aim was to destroy internal enemies and conspirators and to oust external enemies from French territory. Robespierre believed that terror was justified in order to root out those opposed to his rule. During the course of the reign, an estimated forty thousand people were executed using the guillotine.
Categorizing Violent Acts as ”Terrorism”
Acts of violence that fit the modern construct parameters of terrorism can be traced back to early recorded history and include, but are not limited to, those committed by individuals or groups of individuals who intimidate others to change their behavior or aspects of their lives. For example, the first century Jewish group the Zealot-Sicarii (66-70 a.d.) was not only concerned with the members of their own religious culture but were also seeking an uprising against the Greek population in Judea and against the Romans who governed both. The revolt led to the destruction of the temple and mass suicide at Masada (Griset and Mahan 2003; Yadin 1997; Rapport 1984).
Other terrorist groups from past ages include the medieval Assassins, a group of fanatical Muslims who terrorized the Middle East in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, seeking political conquest for religious purposes and murdering leaders and others who deviated from the strict Muslim law (Lewis 1987). In India there were the Thuggees, an Indian cult thought responsible for more than a million deaths, which operated from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Their strategy was to kidnap travelers and offer them up as a sacrifice to Kali, a destructive and creative aspect of God as the Divine Mother in Hinduism. The method of killing was strangulation. However, this group seemed more intent on terrorizing their victims than trying to effect some change in society (Griset and Mahan 2003).
The beginnings of modern terrorism may go back to the mid nineteenth century when a German radical, Karl Heinzen, published Der Mord, in which he justified political murder in terms of its positive outcome on history. This work has been referred to as ”the most important ideological statement of early terrorism” (Laqueur 1977, 47). In London, John Most, in the issue of his newspaper Freiheit published on September 13, 1884, advised would-be terrorists that ”no one who considers the deed itself to be right can take offense at the manner in which the funds for it are acquired,” thereby suggesting that criminal acts are allowed if they support and fund the terrorist action (Laqueur 1978, 101). In Italy, the anarchist Carlo Pisacane theorized that terrorism could deliver a message to an audience and draw attention to and support for a cause and is credited with developing the concept of ”propaganda by the deed” (Hoffman 1998, 17).
During the nineteenth century, terrorism underwent a transformation, coming to be associated with nongovernmental groups. One such group—the Russian revolutionaries of ”Narodnaya Volya” (The People’s Will)—was active for a short period (1878-1881); they developed certain ideas and an ideology that were to become the hallmark of subsequent manifestations of terrorism in many countries. They believed in the targeted killing of political figures they identified as ”leaders of oppression.” The group embraced the developing technologies of the age, symbolized by bombs and bullets, which enabled them to strike directly and discriminately against a Tsarist hierarchy that they argued was corrupt. In their fight against the Tsar and the existing political system they propagated what has remained the common terrorist’s belief that violent acts would ignite a revolution or civil war. Their efforts led to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on March 13, 1881, but that event failed to achieve the revolutionary effects they hoped for (Gaucher 1968).
Terrorism continued for many decades to be associated primarily with the assassination of political leaders and heads of state, thereby reinforcing the view that it was primarily a political tool of expediency. Although there were many political assassinations during this period, including that of President William McKinley, assassinated by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in Buffalo, New York, in September 1901, it was the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire by a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb student, Gavril Princip, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, that proved to be the catalyst for World War I. In general terms, historical analysis has identified that the practice of assassination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seldom had the particular effects for which terrorists had hoped.
The onset of the twentieth century saw terrorism appearing in global conflicts localized as revolution, an armed struggle for independence from foreign occupiers with a goal of independent statehood. What was not always understood was the means by which that goal was pursued. The violent struggles over supremacy of ideologies include but are not limited to anarchy, syndicalism, socialism, Marxism, Communism, Fascism, and capitalism.
Terrorism has a political dimension. Most definitions of terrorism identify four primary criteria, which are the objective, the motive, the target, and the legitimacy of the action. One definition may represent a shift from territorial, ideological, religious, or cultural disputes to the acts of violence against the public. Such an interpretation may be challenged as ideological and simplistic, ignoring environment, history, and ethnicity as well as social and economic factors that underpin political evolution in a state. It may be argued that ”terrorism” is simply a demon-izing term for an enemy’s actions, as beneath any current state conflict may be found the same materialistic and ethnocentric reasons on which many past wars were based. The use of the terms ”terrorism,” ”terrorist,” ”guerilla,” and ”freedom fighter” are politically weighted, and their use has a polarizing effect; terrorism sometimes seems to become a moral relativist term for violent actions from the point of view of the victim.
Terrorism’s characteristics and trends are changing (Lesser et al. 2004) and one of the factors associated with that change relates to religious fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism’s violent struggle within the context of terrorism in the late twentieth century identified a grosser fanaticism to achieve the stated objective. The half-century since World War II has seen a change of group structures and the metamorphosis of terrorism (White 2003). The approach went beyond assassination of political leaders and heads of state. There was a global expectation after World War II of self-determination, acceptance of diversity, and religious freedom.
Much of the world had been under colonial masters (Britain, France, and Portugal). In many European colonies, terrorist movements developed, often with two distinct purposes. The first was to put pressure on the colonial powers to hasten their withdrawal. The second was to intimidate the indigenous population into supporting a particular group’s claims to leadership. India’s achievement of independence in 1947 and later that of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) were mainly the result not of terrorism but of the movement of nonviolent civil disobedience led by Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948). Conversely, in Malaya, communist terrorists launched a major campaign in 1948, but they failed due to two factors: British military opposition and a program of political reform leading to independence. Terrorist groups appeared in other colonial conflicts, including those in Palestine, Algeria, Kenya, Burma, and French Indochina.
The collapse of the main European overseas empires in the 1950s and 1960s did not see an end to terrorist activities. In Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America there were killings of politicians, industrialists, and policemen and terrorist actions included assassinations, hostage-takings, hijackings of aircraft, and bombings of buildings. In many actions the targeting of specific individuals was replaced by the targeting of civilians. The causes espoused by terrorists encompassed not just revolutionary socialism and nationalism but also a rise in religious fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism allowed for the perpetrators to ignore the international law and the agreed rules of conflict (Geneva Conventions), justifying their actions as being moral because of the authority of a higher cause. Seeing how terrorism could have such an impact on a variety of issues, some governments became involved in supporting terrorism. This is known as state-sponsored terrorism.
Modern international terrorism as we know it today did not come into prominence until the 1960s. The colonial era had passed, and many postcolonial attempts at state formation had failed. It was the creation of the state of Israel that engendered a series of Marxist and anti-Western transformations and movements throughout Middle Eastern Arab states and the Islamic world. The growth of nationalist and revolutionary movements was not limited to the Middle East. It also included European groups, such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland and Euzkadi Ta Azkatasuna (ETA) in the Basque region of Spain, along with their view that terrorism could be effective in reaching political goals, generating the first phase of modern international terrorism. There was an increased number of urban incidents using the strategies learned from guerrilla conflicts and the writing and ideologies of Carlos Marighella, Franz Fannon, Regis Debray, and Ernesto (Che) Guevara.
In the late 1960s, Palestinian secular movements such as Al Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) began to target civilians outside the immediate arena of conflict. Following Israel’s 1967 defeat of Arab forces, Palestinian leaders realized that the Arab world was unable to militarily confront Israel. At the same time, lessons drawn from revolutionary movements in Latin America, North Africa, and Southeast Asia as well the Jewish struggle against Britain in Palestine prompted the Palestinians to move away from classic guerrilla, typically rural-based, warfare toward urban terrorism. Radical Palestinians took advantage of modern communication, technology, and transportation systems to internationalize their struggle. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), and other terrorist groups used attacks against civilian populations in an attempt to effect change for religious, ideological, or political reasons. The failure of Arab nationalism in the 1967 war resulted in the strengthening of both progressive and extremist Islamic movements.
While secular Palestinians dominated the scene during the 1970s, Islamic movements increasingly came into opposition with secular nationalism. Islamic groups were supported by antinationalist conservative regimes, such as Saudi Arabia, to counter the expansion of nationalist ideology. Although political Islam was considered to be tolerant to progressive change, that change was seen as a threat to conservative Arab regimes. This threat provided the catalyst for the support as Islamic fundamentalist and other extremist groups evolved to combat both nationalist and political Islamist movements.
In Iran the move toward Shia Islam further eroded the power and legitimacy of the United States-backed authoritarian Pahlevi regime, which ended with the Shah being deposed. On February 1, 1979, exiled religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from France to direct a revolution that resulted in a theocratic republic guided by Islamic principles. Iran’s relations with many of its Arab neighbors have become strained due to the aggressive Iranian attempts to spread Islamic revolution throughout the region.
In 1979, there was a turning point in international terrorism, with the Iranian Islamic revolution sparking fears of a wave of revolutionary Shia Islam throughout the Arab world and the West. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent anti-Soviet Mujahedeen War (1979-1989) initiated an expansion of terrorist groups. The end of the war provided a post-jihad cadre of trained militants whose skills would provide a key trend of enlisting mercenaries in contemporary international terrorism and insurgency-related violence. The Islamic mercenaries have supported local insurgencies in North Africa, Kashmir, Chechnya, China, Bosnia, and the Philippines.
State-Sponsored Terrorism
In 1979, the West’s attention was focused on state-sponsored terrorism, and specifically on the Iranian-backed and Syrian-supported Hezbollah terrorist group, who trained secular Shia and Sunni Islamic movement members and who were the pioneers of suicide bombers in the Middle
East. Iraq and Syria were involved in supporting various terrorist groups and state sponsors of terrorism who used various terrorist groups to attack Israel and Western interests in addition to domestic and regional opponents. The American policy of listing state sponsors of terrorism was heavily politicized and, prior to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, did not include several countries, both allies and opponents of U.S foreign policy, that, under U.S. government definitions, were guilty of supporting or using terrorism. However, since the United States declared a ”war on terrorism”—a global effort by governments (primarily the United States and its principal allies) to neutralize international groups and ensure that rogue nations no longer support terrorist activities—the United States has been consistent in naming and condemning such states.
The Globalization of Terror
The disintegration of post-Cold War states and the Cold War legacy provide both the conventional weapons and the technology that have assisted the proliferation of terrorism worldwide. Political instability created by conflict in areas such as the Balkans, Afghanistan, Colombia, and certain African countries and the abuse of human rights provides a fertile environment for terrorist recruitment, while smuggling and drug trafficking routes are often exploited by terrorists to support operations worldwide.
In addition, the trend toward and the rise in religious fundamentalism has identified a grosser fanaticism that is underpinned by the proliferation of suicide bombers as a cost-effective strategy against a stronger enemy. Since 1989, the increasing willingness of religious extremists to strike targets outside immediate country or regional areas underscores the global nature of contemporary terrorism. The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the September 11,2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are representative of this trend.
No fully accepted definition of terrorism has been achieved, regardless of the government agencies or academic disciplines that have examined the phenomenon. It has been observed that ”any explanation that attempts to account for all its many manifestations is bound to be exceedingly vague or altogether wrong” (Laqueur 1977, 133).
