Following the end of the Cold War, the threat of ‘international terrorism’ was widely seen as the greatest affecting Western society. This sentiment increased following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in September 2001. The USA proclaimed a ‘War on Terrorism’ in response, although this term itself provoked questions—critics asked whether it was desirable or indeed possible to declare war on a concept, particularly one so ill-defined as terrorism.
It is probably impossible to give a general definition of terrorism that would not be too general to be useful. The best that can be said is that terrorism includes any use of violence towards political, moral or religious ends which is not carried out by the official military institutions of a state. Because the concept is, too often, used with an implicitly evaluative undertone, it is, as political theorists say, ‘inherently contestable’. Simply put, one person’s terrorist is another’s ‘freedom fighter’. Merely to say that terrorists use terror as a weapon, which is why it has the evaluative tone, is to say nothing—even orthodox military strategy has relied at times on simply terrifying civilian populations. It is thus better to concentrate on the distinction between actions of an official uniformed military and other actors lacking the international recognition of statehood.
That being said, terrorist operations differ from most orthodox military strategy in two ways. First terrorists do, very frequently, strike at unarmed civilian groups with no direct responsibility for state policy. In part they do this because such civilians are easier targets than those offered by a nation’s military, or its well-guarded political élite. The main reason for such targeting, however, relates to the second difference from military strategy. The actual aim of a terrorist campaign is to influence the civilian population, rather than to damage the military capacity of the enemy. Even when military personnel are attacked, as with the IRA attacks on the British army in Ulster, the aim is still to influence civilian attitudes, not seriously to reduce the strength of the army, which would be well beyond a terrorist group’s capacity. Terrorist activity aims to hurt the general population of the enemy state so much that out of fear, impatience with inconvenience, or unwillingness to take the economic and human consequences of the attacks, they withdraw public support for the government policies objected to by the terrorists. Something like this is true even when dealing with such groups as extreme Islamic fundamentalists whose aim is to drive the USA out of all influence and presence in the Muslim world. Even terrorist leaders like the Saudi Arabian Islamist leader Osama bin Laden, who openly calls for a Jihad against the USA because of a detestation of all of secular Western culture, do not expect actually to kill enough Americans to reduce their potential world power. Rather they hope to make the projection of such power and influence something the American voter will not risk. It must be admitted, however, that analyses like these probably over-rationalize the actual thought processes of terrorists, certainly of the lower ranks, if not of the leadership. Frustration, hatred and despair probably lead to terrorism, from a simple desire for revenge against wrongs, imagined or otherwise.
In practice, terrorists often seem to combine a massively exaggerated estimate of how easy it is to change public support for a government with a very considerable desire to hurt for its own sake. A secondary motivation for terrorism has been said to be that of drawing world attention to the plight and cause of the terrorists’ community; as such it again largely underestimates the reaction of the public when attacked by terrorist campaigns. The problem for terrorism is the same as that faced by orthodox military strategy when it attempts to destroy civilian morale by, for example, mass bombing raids on cities. Most historical evidence suggests that such attacks are counter-productive—populations refuse to be cowed, and actually become more supportive of the governments the terrorists are trying to undermine.
Finally, it must be stressed that terrorism is not a product of late 20th century society. At the very least, organized political groups using terrorists techniques to attack civilian morale, go back to the 19th century, becoming more widespread in the early 20th century. The IRA, for example, ran a bombing campaign in mainland Britain in the 1920s. For that matter, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which triggered the First World War, was only one of a series of terrorist attacks by independence movements in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. What has changed is that the nature of 21st-century society and the easy availability of technological means of killing, has enormously increased the scale at which terrorists can destroy life.
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