Rather than learning what terrorism is, one instead finds, in the first instance, a somewhat potted historical -- and, in respect of the modern accepted usage of the term, a uselessly anachronistic -- description. The second definition offered is only slightly more helpful.
A slightly more satisfying elucidation may be found in the OED 's definition of the perpetrator of the act than in its efforts to come to grips with the act itself. As a political term: Applied to the Jacobins and their agents and partisans in the French Revolution, esp.
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Any one who attempts to further his views by a system of coercive intimidation; spec. This is appreciably more helpful. First, it immediately introduces the reader to the notion of terrorism as a political concept. As will be seen, this key characteristic of terrorism is absolutely paramount to understanding its aims, motivations and purposes and critical in distinguishing it from other types of violence.
Terrorism, in the most widely accepted contemporary usage of the term, is fundamentally and inherently political. It is also ineluctably about power: Terrorism is thus violence -- or, equally important, the threat of violence -- used and directed in pursuit of, or in service of, a political aim. This definition underscores clearly the other fundamental characteristic of terrorism: Given this relatively straightforward elucidation, why, then, is terrorism so difficult to define?
The most compelling reason perhaps is because the meaning of the term has changed so frequently over the past two hundred years. In contrast to its contemporary usage, at that time terrorism had a decidedly positive connotation. The system or regime de la terreur of -- from which the English word came -- was adopted as a means to establish order during the transient anarchical period of turmoil and upheaval that followed the uprisings of , as it has followed in the wake of many other revolutions.
Hence, unlike terrorism as it is commonly understood today, to mean a revolutionary or anti-government activity undertaken by non-state or subnational entities, the regime de la terreur was an instrument of governance wielded by the recently established revolutionary state. In this manner, a powerful lesson was conveyed to any and all who might oppose the revolution or grow nostalgic for the ancien regime. Ironically, perhaps, terrorism in its original context Was also closely associated with the ideals of virtue and democracy.
The revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre firmly believed that virtue was the mainspring of a popular government at peace, but that during the time of revolution must be allied with terror in order for democracy to triumph.
First, the regime de la terreur was neither random nor indiscriminate, as terrorism is often portrayed today, but was organized, deliberate and systematic. Indeed, Robespierre's vague and utopian exegeses of the revolution's central goals are remarkably similar in tone and content to the equally turgid, millenarian manifestos issued by many contemporary revolutionary -- primarily left-wing, Marxist-oriented -- terrorist organizations.
For example, in Robespierre declared, in language eerily presaging the communiques issued by groups such as Germany's Red Army Faction and Italy's Red Brigades nearly two centuries later: We want an order of things Like many other revolutions, the French Revolution eventually began to consume itself. On 8 Thermidor, year two of the new calendar adopted by the revolutionaries 26 July , Robespierre announced to the National Convention that he had in his possession a new list of traitors.
Fearing that their own names might be on that list, extremists joined forces with moderates to repudiate both Robespierre and his regime de la terreur. Robespierre and his closest followers themselves met the same fate that had befallen some 40, others: One of the French Revolution's more enduring repercussions was the impetus it gave to anti-monarchical sentiment elsewhere in Europe.
The advent of nationalism, and with it notions of statehood and citizenship based on the common identity of a people rather than the lineage of a royal family, were resulting in the unification and creation of new nation-states such as Germany and Italy. From this milieu a new era of terrorism emerged, in which the concept had gained many of the familiar revolutionary, anti-state connotations of today.
The didactic purpose of violence, Pisacane argued, could never be effectively replaced by pamphlets, wall posters or assemblies. Perhaps the first organization to put into practice Pisacane's dictum was the Narodnaya Volya, or People's Will sometimes translated as People's Freedom , a small group of Russian constitutionalists that had been founded in to challenge tsarist rule. For the Narodnaya Volya, the apathy and alienation of the Russian masses afforded few alternatives to the resort to daring and dramatic acts of violence designed to attract attention to the group and its cause. Even having selected their targets with great care and the utmost deliberation, group members still harboured profound regrets about taking the life of a fellow human being.
Their unswerving adherence to this principle is perhaps best illustrated by the failed attempt on the life of the Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich made by a successor organization to the Narodnaya Volya in As the royal carriage came into view, the terrorist tasked with the assassination saw that the duke was unexpectedly accompanied by his children and therefore aborted his mission rather than risk harming the intended victim's family the duke was killed in a subsequent attack. By comparison, the mid-air explosion caused by a terrorist bomb on Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December indiscriminately claimed the lives of all persons on board -- innocent men, women and children alike -- plus eleven inhabitants of the village where the plane crashed.
Ironically, the Narodnaya Volya's most dramatic accomplishment also led directly to its demise. The failure of eight previous plots had led the conspirators to take extraordinary measures to ensure the success of this attempt. Four volunteers were given four bombs each and deployed along the alternative routes followed by the tsar's cortege. As two of the bomber-assassins stood in wait on the same street, the sleighs carrying the tsar and his Cossack escort approached the first terrorist, who hurled his bomb at the passing sleigh, missing it by inches.
The whole entourage came to a halt as soldiers seized the hapless culprit and the tsar descended from his sleigh to check on a bystander wounded by the explosion. The full weight of the tsarist state now fell on the heads of the Narodnaya Volya. Acting on information provided by the arrested member, the secret police swept down on the group's safe houses and hide-outs, rounding up most of the plotters, who were quickly tried, convicted and hanged. Further information from this group led to subsequent arrests, so that within a year of the assassination only one member of the original executive committee was still at large.
She too was finally apprehended in , at which point the first generation of Narodnaya Volya terrorists ceased to exist, although various successor organizations subsequently emerged to carry on the struggle. At the time, the repercussions of the tsar's assassination could not have been known or appreciated by either the condemned or their comrades languishing in prison or exiled to Siberia. But in addition to precipitating the beginning of the end of tsarist rule, the group also deeply influenced individual revolutionaries and subversive organizations elsewhere.
Disparate and uncoordinated though the anarchists' violence was, the movement's emphasis on individual action or operations carried out by small cells of like-minded radicals made detection and prevention by the police particularly difficult, thus further heightening public fears. However, while anarchists were responsible for an impressive string of assassinations of heads of state and a number of particularly notorious bombings from about until the second decade of the twentieth century, in the final analysis, other than stimulating often exaggerated fears, anarchism made little tangible impact on either the domestic or the international politics of the countries affected.
It does, however, offer an interesting historical footnote: On the eve of the First World War, terrorism still retained its revolutionary connotations. By this time, growing unrest and irredentist ferment had already welled up within the decaying Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. Although the Macedonians did not go on to suffer the catastrophic fate that befell the Armenians during the First World War when an estimated one million persons perished in what is considered to be the first officially implemented genocide of the twentieth century , IMRO never came close to achieving its aim of an independent Macedonia and thereafter degenerated into a mostly criminal organization of hired thugs and political assassins.
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The events immediately preceding the First World War in Bosnia are of course more familiar because of their subsequent cataclysmic impact on world affairs. There, similar groups of disaffected nationalists -- Bosnian Serb intellectuals, university students and even schoolchildren, collectively known as Mlada Bosna, or Young Bosnians -- arose against continued Habsburg suzerainty. Whatever its superficially juvenile characteristics, the group was nonetheless passionately dedicated to the attainment of a federal South Slav political entity -- uniting Slovenes, Croats and Serbs -- and resolutely committed to assassination as the vehicle with which to achieve that aim.
In this respect, the Young Bosnians perhaps had more in common with the radical republicanism of Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the most ardent exponents of Italian unification in the nineteenth century, than with groups such as the Narodnaya Volya -- despite a shared conviction in the efficacy of tyrannicide. An even more significant difference, however, was the degree of involvement in, and external support provided to, Young Bosnian activities by various shadowy Serbian nationalist groups.
The Narodna Obrana had been established in originally to promote Serb cultural and national activities. It subsequently assumed a more subversive orientation as the movement became increasingly involved with anti-Austrian activities -- including terrorism -- mostly in neighbouring Bosnia and Hercegovina.
Although the Narodna Obrana's exclusionist pan-Serbian aims clashed with the Young Bosnians' less parochial South Slav ideals, its leadership was quite happy to manipulate and exploit the Bosnians' emotive nationalism and youthful zeal for their own purposes. To this end, the Narodna Obrana actively recruited, trained and armed young Bosnians and Hercegovinians from movements such as the Young Bosnians who were then deployed in various seditious activities against the Habsburgs. As early as four years before the archduke's assassination, a Hercegovinian youth, trained by a Serb army officer with close ties to the Narodna Obrana, had attempted to kill the governor of Bosnia.
But, while the Narodna Obrana included among its members senior Serbian government officials, it was not an explicitly government-controlled or directly state-supported entity.
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This more militant and appreciably more clandestine splinter has been described by one historian as combining the more unattractive features of the anarchist cells of earlier years -- which had been responsible for quite a number of assassinations in Europe and whose methods had a good deal of influence via the writings of Russian anarchists upon Serbian youth -- and of the [American] Ku Klux Klan. There were gory rituals and oaths of loyalty, there were murders of backsliding members, there was identification of members by number, there were distributions of guns and bombs.
And there was a steady traffic between Bosnia and Serbia. This group, which continued to maintain close links with its parent body, was largely composed of serving Serbian military officers. It was led by Lieutenant-Colonel Dragutin Dmitrievich known by his pseudonym, Apis , himself the chief of the Intelligence Department of the Serbian general staff.
With this key additional advantage of direct access to military armaments, intelligence and training facilities, the Black Hand effectively took charge of all Serb-backed clandestine operations in Bosnia.
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Although there were obviously close links between the Serbian military, the Black Hand and the Young Bosnians, it would be a mistake to regard the relationship as one of direct control, much less outright manipulation. Clearly, the Serbian government was well aware of the Black Hand's objectives and the violent means the group employed in pursuit of them; indeed, the Serbian Crown Prince Alexander was one of the group's benefactors.
But this does not mean that the Serbian government was necessarily as committed to war with Austria as the Black Hand's leaders were, or that it was prepared to countenance the group's more extreme plans for fomenting cross-border, anti-Habsburg terrorism. There is some evidence to suggest that the Black Hand may have been trying to force Austria's hand against Serbia and thereby plunge both countries into war by actively abetting the Young Bosnians' plot to assassinate the archduke. Indeed, according to one revisionist account of the events leading up to the murder, even though the pistol used by Princip had been supplied by the Black Hand from a Serb military armoury in Kragujevac, and even though Princip had been trained by the Black Hand in Serbia before being smuggled back across the border for the assassination, at the eleventh hour Dmitrievich had apparently bowed to intense government pressure and tried to stop the assassination.
According to this version, Princip and his fellow conspirators would hear nothing of it and stubbornly went ahead with their plans. Contrary to popular assumption, therefore, the archduke's assassination may not have been specifically ordered or even directly sanctioned by the Serbian government. It was now used less to refer to revolutionary movements and violence directed against governments and their leaders, and more to describe the practices of mass repression employed by totalitarian states and their dictatorial leaders against their own citizens.
Thus the term regained its former connotations of abuse of power by governments, and was applied specifically to the authoritarian regimes that had come to power in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. The totality of party control over, and perversion of, government was perhaps most clearly evinced by a speech given by Hermann Goering, the newly appointed Prussian minister of the interior, in My measures will not be crippled by any bureaucracy. Here I don't have to worry about Justice; my mission is only to destroy and exterminate, nothing more.
This struggle will be a struggle against chaos, and such a struggle I shall not conduct with the power of the police. A bourgeois State might have done that. Certainly, I shall use the power of the State and the police to the utmost, my dear Communists, so don't draw any false conclusions; but the struggle to the death, in which my fist will grasp your necks, I shall lead with those there -- the Brown Shirts.
On the one hand, drawing inspiration from Hitler's ruthless elimination of his own political opponents, the Russian dictator similarly transformed the political party he led into a servile instrument responsive directly to his personal will, and the state's police and security apparatus into slavish organs of coercion, enforcement and repression. But conditions in the Soviet Union of the s bore little resemblance to the turbulent political, social and economic upheaval afflicting Germany and Italy during that decade and the previous one.
On the other hand, therefore, unlike either the Nazis or the Fascists, who had emerged from the political free-for-alls in their own countries to seize power and then had to struggle to consolidate their rule and retain their unchallenged authority, the Russian Communist Party had by the mids been firmly entrenched in power for more than a decade. Certainly, similar forms of state-imposed or state-directed violence and terror against a government's own citizens continue today.
Countries as diverse as Israel, Kenya, Cyprus and Algeria, for example, owe their independence at least in part to nationalist political movements that employed terrorism against colonial powers. For whoever stands by a just cause and fights for the freedom and liberation of his land from the invaders, the settlers and the colonialists, cannot possibly be called terrorist However, this usage now expanded to include nationalist and ethnic separatist groups outside a colonial or neo-colonial framework as well as radical, entirely ideologically motivated organizations.
Terrorism and WMDs: Awareness and Response, Second Edition
Disenfranchised or exiled nationalist minorities -- such as the PLO, the Quebecois separatist group FLQ Front de Liberation du Quebec , the Basque ETA Euskadi ta Askatasuna, or Freedom for the Basque Homeland and even a hitherto unknown South Moluccan irredentist group seeking independence from Indonesia -- adopted terrorism as a means to draw attention to themselves and their respective causes, in many instances with the specific aim, like their anti-colonial predecessors, of attracting international sympathy and support.
In the early s, for example, terrorism came to be regarded as a calculated means to destabilize the West as part of a vast global conspiracy.
Books like The Terror Network by Claire Sterling propagated the notion to a receptive American presidential administration and similarly susceptible governments elsewhere that the seemingly isolated terrorist incidents perpetrated by disparate groups scattered across the globe were in fact linked elements of a massive clandestine plot, orchestrated by the Kremlin and implemented by its Warsaw Pact client states, to destroy the Free World.
By the middle of the decade, however, a series of suicide bombings directed mostly against American diplomatic and military targets in the Middle East was focusing attention on the rising threat of state-sponsored terrorism. Consequently, this phenomenon -- whereby various renegade foreign governments such as the regimes in Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria became actively involved in sponsoring or commissioning terrorist acts -- replaced communist conspiracy theories as the main context within which terrorism was viewed.
Terrorism thus became associated with a type of covert or surrogate warfare whereby weaker states could confront larger, more powerful rivals without the risk of retribution. The former term revived the Moscow-orchestrated terrorism conspiracy theories of previous years while introducing the critical new dimension of narcotics trafficking.
To a greater extent than ever in the past, entirely criminal that is, violent, economically motivated organizations were now forging strategic alliances with terrorist and guerrilla organizations or themselves employing violence for specifically political ends. The growing power of the Colombian cocaine cartels, their close ties with left-wing terrorist groups in Colombia and Peru, and their repeated attempts to subvert Colombia's electoral process and undermine successive governments constitute perhaps the best-known example of this continuing trend.
Terrorism had shifted its meaning again from an individual phenomenon of subnational violence to one of several elements, or part of a wider pattern, of non-state conflict. Would you like to change to the United States site? A comprehensive guide to understanding, assessing, and responding to terrorism in this modern age. This book provides readers with a thorough understanding of the types of attacks that may be perpetrated, and how to identify potential targets, conduct a meaningful vulnerability analysis, and apply protective measures to secure personnel and facilities.
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Understanding, Assessing, and Responding to Terrorism, Second Edition is a must-have reference for private and public sector risk managers, safety engineers, security professionals, facility managers, emergency responders, and others charged with protecting facilities and personnel from all types of hazards accidental, intentional, and natural. Request an Evaluation Copy for this title. Bennett holds certifications as an instructor in firefighting, emergency medical, hazardous materials, technical rescue, weapons of mass destruction, and counter-terrorism topics.
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