POLITICAL VIOLENCE

Political Violence

Political Violence

Terrorism is basically and fundamentally political in nature. It is also very much about power—that is, pursuing power, acquiring power, and using power to cause political change. Consequently, terrorism is also violence or, just as importantly, the threat of violence used and aimed in the pursuit of or in the service of a political objective.

By the 1930s, terrorism did not mean so much revolutionary movements and violence against governments or empires but rather the politics and practices of mass oppression and repression used by dictatorships and their leaders against their own citizenry. In other words, it meant again, like at the end of the terror regime in France, governmental abuse of power as it was taking place especially in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Stalinist Soviet Union.

Similar forms of state-planned, imposed, or directed violence have taken place and are still occurring in various parts of the world. Violence has been a well-known aspect of right of center military dictatorships in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, especially in Chile, Argentina (Buchanan 1987; Cox 1983), Brazil, Greece, Spain, Portugal, various African countries, the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, and Pakistan. Use of violence and intimidation by government authorities against their own people is generally identified as terror to distinguish such behavior from terrorism or violence that is carried out by nonstate entities (Moxon-Browne 1994).

The meaning of terrorism changed once more after World War II, thereby reclaiming the revolutionary reputation with which it is associated today. In the late 1940s, 1950s, and into the 1960s, terrorism was connected with the uprisings by indigenous populations in various parts of the world—Africa, Asia, the Middle East—to expel European colonial powers from their countries. At times they involved long guerrilla wars or terrorism.

At the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, terrorism was still viewed within a revolutionary framework even though usage of the term was expanded to encompass nationalist and ethnic separatist groups beyond a colonial or neocolonial context as well as radical and ideologically driven organizations. In particular, ethnic minorities seeking independence or autonomy used terrorism not only to inflict casualties and serious damage to the dominant group but also to attract international attention, sympathy, and aid. The late 1960s also saw major student's upheavals in Western Europe and the United States that had in some cases terrorist overtones and rhetoric (Wilkinson 1994).

More recently, the term terrorism has been used to describe broader, less narrow phenomena. In the early 1980s, terrorism was considered a planned and calculated strategy to destabilize the Western world as part of a vast global conspiracy. Claire Sterling (1981) in her book The Terror Network described apparently isolated terrorist events committed by different groups around the globe that were actually connected elements of a secret plan, under the direction of the former USSR and implemented by its Warsaw Pact countries to annihilate the free world. At the time the Cold War atmosphere offered the theory as appealing, particularly to the American and some western European ...