Terrorism

Terrorism

Introduction

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon were the first in a series of dramatic and destructive terrorist attacks in which Islamist extremists sought to coerce Western and pro-Western governments into changing at least some of their policies. Subsequently, there were major attacks in the United Kingdom, Spain, Algeria, Egypt, and Jordan by Islamist radicals. Thousands of people perished in the September 11 attacks alone, and hundreds died after trains were bombed in London and Madrid.

These attacks made terrorism a front-and-center issue in the United States and Western Europe, but terrorism has been a major concern for many decades in many different parts of the world. Israel, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Japan, for example, have also experienced serious terrorist incidents since the mid-1990s. Indeed, terrorism in various forms has existed for centuries. Perhaps the earliest organized terrorist movement was by the Zealots in the first century. The Zealots used public assassinations as a tactic for frightening Jewish residents into refusing to cooperate with the Roman occupiers of the Holy Lands.

Terrorism was particularly widespread in 19th-century Europe. Anarchist and nationalist groups all resorted to violence against government officials and/or average citizens suspected of collaborating with the authorities. Anarchists sought to topple governments by killing key leaders-hoping that this would usher in an era of self-governance by the people themselves. Nationalists as far apart as Armenia (in the Ottoman Empire), Bosnia (in Austria-Hungary), and Ireland (in the British Empire) used violence against nonmilitary targets, including civilian infrastructure like the London subway, to do what the Zealots had attempted to do centuries earlier: compel an imperial power to withdraw and grant their territories independence.

Research Question

Is terrorism a social movement, with an ideology and purpose or something else?

Defining Terrorism: A Distinct Form of Political Violence?

The term terrorism, like globalism, is difficult to define and has a diversity of meanings among different groups and individuals. As a common cliché says, “One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.” The shifting contexts in which the term is used make it difficult, but not impossible, to study the phenomenon as a distinct form of political violence. For the purposes of empirical analysis, terrorism must be defined explicitly. This chapter offers such a definition, while acknowledging that it may differ from that of other scholars, cultures, governments, media outlets, and perhaps the reader. It is useful to examine first the evolution of the usage of the term throughout history. Although examples of terrorism stretch back several millennia, the word terrorism is relatively new to the world stage.

The Causes of Terrorism

Structural Causes of Terrorism

Rather than focus on the individual psychological calculations of the individual terrorist, some researchers have put forth causal arguments based on the institutional and structural features of a society. One such argument revolves around the supposed connection between poverty and terrorism.

In both the literature and the culture at large, there is an expectation of a causal relationship between poverty and ...