The definitional problems associated with terrorism must first be addressed by looking at the etymology of the terms associated with terrorism—words such as terrorize, terrorist, freedom, guerilla, insurgent, and insurrection—and how often those terms are incorrectly interchanged in the media, causing confusion and misunderstanding. The Oxford English Dictionary (1933) offers the following definitions:
Freedom. Exemption or release from slavery or imprisonment; personal liberty. Exemption from arbitrary, despotic, or autocratic control; civil liberty. Independence: The state of being able to act without hindrance or restraint; liberty of action; the quality of being free from the control of fate or necessity; the power of self-determination attributed to the will.
Guerilla. 1. An irregular war carried on by small bodies of men acting independently. 2. One engaged in such warfare.
Insurgent. Rising in active revolt—One who rises in revolt against constituted authority; a rebel who is not recognized as a belligerent.
Insurrection. The action of rising in arms or open resistance against established authority or government restraint; with plural, an instance of this, an armed rising, a revolt: an incipient or limited rebellion.
Terrorist. 1. As a political term applied to the Jacobins and their agents and partisans in the French Revolution (1790-1795), especially to those connected with the Revolutionary tribunals during the ‘Reign of Terror’. . . . 3. b. Anyone who attempts to further his views by a system of coercive intimidation; specifically applied to members of one of the extreme revolutionary societies in Russia.
Terrorize. To fill or inspire with terror, reduce to a state of terror; especially to coerce or deter by terror.
”Terrorism” has a pejorative connotation, and its meaning changes within social, political, religious, and historical contexts (White 2003, 4). The use of such words will also depend upon an individual’s perception, whether that of victim or perpetrator. The difficulty of defining terrorism has been acknowledged by many (Poland 2005; Crank and Gregor 2005; White 2003; Combs 2003; Hoffman 1998).
A uniform definition of terrorism often will not exist across the various law enforcement agencies of a given country. This is the case in the United States, where a range of definitions is currently applied:
U.S. Department of Defense (2003): ”The calculated use 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.”
Federal Bureau of Investigation (1999): ”[T]he 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.”
U.S. State Department (2003): ”[P] remeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.” This document further states 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.”
These definitions identify three interrelated factors: first, the terrorist’s identity, second, the methods employed, and third, motivation. (Other definitions also include the legitimacy of the action.) It is those factors that influence a workable definition and a construct that differentiates terrorism from everyday criminality.
In the global fight against terrorism there is talk of the ”war” against terrorism. If war is ”the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means” (Von Clausewitz 1989, 605), it may be argued that terrorism is also a continuation of political intercourse where violence is fueled not only by its practitioners’ political motivations but also by ethnicity, cultural diversity, and religious parameters.
”Terrorism, in the most widely accepted contemporary usage of the term, is fundamentally and inherently political” (Hoffman 1998, 14). However, as with many definitional characteristics of terrorism, this view of it as always being political is not universally accepted. Nor is motivation always considered a factor in deciding what is and is not terrorism.
Eqbal Ahmad (2003, 46-53) argued that motivations ”make no difference”; this position was acknowledged by Jessica Stern (1999), who further argued that any definition of terrorism had to be unconstrained by either ”perpetrator or purpose.” This approach does not exclude or limit political goals as a terrorist aim but allows for other motivations, nationalistic, religious, or criminal. Stern identifies that the ”deliberate evocation of dread is what sets terrorism apart from simple murder or assault” (Stern 1999, 11).
Political motivation is often identified as a prerequisite of terrorism, but criminal activity underpins many terrorist organizations. As Paul Pillar (2001, 13-14) states, ”Terrorism is fundamentally different from these other forms of violence, however, in what gives rise to it and in how it must be countered, beyond simple physical security and police techniques. Terrorists’ concerns are macro-concerns about changing a larger order; other violent criminals are focused on the micro-level of pecuniary gain and personal relationships. ‘Political’ in this regard encompasses not just traditional left-right politics but also what are frequently described as religious motivations or social issues.”
While it may be argued that terrorism can be identified as political violence, all political violence cannot be regarded as terrorism. It is argued that war is a form of political violence, but one that is differentiated from terrorist action due to the rules of war contained within the Geneva Conventions (Kingshott 2003). This trend is partly connected to the tendency to label certain acts of political violence as terrorism on the basis of their perpetrators’ identities. The connection between terrorism and political goals is related to the perceived illegitimacy of political violence. A Western-style democracy is considered to provide an alternative to violence as an agent of political change, with the state viewed as sole custodian of the monopoly of legitimate force. In this argument political violence against the state is more apt to be termed ”terrorism” than is political violence on the part of the state.
However, this is not universally accepted to be the case. Totalitarian regimes such as those that once existed in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Stalinist Russia, as well as, more recently, the military dictatorships that previously ruled some South American countries and emerging African nations all used oppressive measures that can be described as state-sponsored terrorism. The literature identifies state sponsors of terrorism to include, but not limited to, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and North Korea.
Hoffman (1998, 25) contends that ”such usages are generally termed ‘terror’ in order to distinguish that phenomenon from ‘terrorism,’ which is understood to be violence committed by non-state entities.” Mark Burgess (2004) argues that ”such a state-centric reading is Western in outlook, and would probably be questioned by those non-state actors who regard themselves as politically disenfranchised.” The term ”terrorism” may bestow illegitimacy on individuals or groups acting for a cause; it can also confer legitimacy on the governments combating it and their methods.
It should be acknowledged that culture, ethnicity, and religious upbringing may engender either sympathy or disapproval for a cause, for a regime, or for counter-terrorism methods and strategies. The individual’s perception can therefore lead to inconsistency in deciding what is and is not terrorism, epitomized in the oft used phrase ”One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” As a consequence of such reasoning, what might be viewed as terrorism by the Western democratic states may be regarded as legitimate protest when it happens in states found in less politically stable regions of the world and that do not embrace the philosophy of a liberal Western democracy.
Hoffman (1998, 42-43) argues that a debatable assertion is that ”to qualify as terrorism, violence must be perpetrated by some organizational entity with at least some conspiratorial structure and identifiable chain of command beyond a single individual acting on his or her own.”
That being so, then arguably an individual, if politically motivated and using the methods of terrorists, should also be called a terrorist. Pillar argues (2001, 43) that unless such an approach is adopted, the politically motivated acts of individuals such as Mir Aimal Kansi (who killed two CIA employees outside the organization’s headquarters in 1993) and Sirhan Sirhan (who assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968) would be classed as criminal rather than terrorist (Hoffman 1998, 42). (The Sirhan case is representative of the difficulty in considering such instances of individuals carrying out such acts as ”lone wolves,” albeit that the actions are underpinned with political motivations.)
The academic consensus definition argued by Schmid (1983, 107-9) states
Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group, or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal, or political reasons, whereby—in contrast to assassination—the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperiled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought.
Another definition from an Islamic perspective is that terrorism ”is an act carried out to achieve an inhuman and corrupt (”mufsid”) objective, and involving threat to security of any kind, and violation of rights acknowledged by religion and mankind” (Taskhiri 1987). Further explanation is given as to what is not considered acts of terrorism and that includes, but is not limited to, the following (Taskhiri 1987):
1. Acts of national resistance exercised against occupying forces, colonizers, and usurpers
2. Resistance of peoples against cliques imposed on them by the force of arms
3. Rejection of dictatorships and other forms of despotism and efforts to undermine their institutions
4. Resistance against racial discrimination and attacks on the latter’s strongholds
5. Retaliation against any aggression if there is no other alternative
Terrorism, from an Islamic perspective, was defined as follows (Taskhiri 1987):
1. Acts of piracy on land, air, and sea
2. All colonialist operations, including wars and military expeditions
3. All dictatorial acts against peoples and all forms of protection of dictatorships, not to mention their imposition on nations
4. All military methods contrary to human practice, such as the use of chemical weapons, the shelling of civilian-populated areas, the blowing up of homes, the displacement of civilians, and so forth
5. All types of pollution of geographical, cultural, and informational environment; indeed, intellectual terrorism may be one of the most dangerous types of terrorism
6. All moves that undermine or adversely affect the condition of international or national economy, adversely affect the condition of the poor and the deprived, deepen up nations with the shackles of socioeconomic gaps, and chain up nations with the shackles of exorbitant debts
7. All conspiratorial acts aimed at crushing the determination of nations for liberation and independence and imposing disgraceful pacts on them
The difficulty of finding a definition that addresses issues of cultural, ethnic, and religious perceptions that is not couched in inflammatory rhetoric is problematic because ”Even if there were an objective, value-free definition of terrorism, covering all its important aspects and features, it would still be rejected by some for ideological reasons . . .” (Laqueur 1987, 149-50).
It would appear that finding a definitive definition for terrorism acceptable to all is impossible due to differing cultures, religions, and global diversity. A definition is only sought for the purposes of international law, so that an individual may be correctly identified and tried for an act that is defined across cultures and criminal justice systems as a terrorist act.
