Week 5: Defining 'terrorism'

There's a big problem with the generally-accepted academic definitions of 'terrorism'. There's a consensus right across the literature: terrorism means indiscriminate attacks on civilians and 'symbolic' targets, carried out with the aim of inducing terror and changing political behaviour - by intimidating the general public and/or by influencing the government. Some terrorist groups certainly fit the bill some of the time: Al-Qaida is only the most obvious example.

But there wasn't very much that was 'terrorist' (according to the textbook definition) about the activities of the Red Brigades in Italy or the Provisional IRA in Ireland or the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Generally speaking, "armed struggle" groups don't bomb newspaper offices or murder police officers or assassinate their opponents because they want to terrorise the general public, or even because they want to intimidate journalists and police officers and politicians; they do it because they believe they're fighting a war and those targets represent their enemies.

If the textbook definition of 'terrorism' doesn't describe actual flesh-and-blood terrorists, what does it describe? In political discourse, the word 'terror' goes back to the French Revolution. The first 'Terror' was an eleven-month clampdown on political opponents, involving mass executions of enemies of the regime; between September 1793 and the following July, tens of thousands died on the guillotine. Subsequently the word 'terror' was widely used to describe indiscriminate killing by governments, particularly in the aftermath of an attempted revolution - the Hungarian "White Terror" of 1919-21 is only one example. When the development of military aircraft permitted it, "terror bombing" was carried out in World War II (Dresden, Hamburg), during the Spanish Civil War (Guernica) and in Britain's colonies (Mesopotamia, a.k.a. Iraq). There's no textbook definition for "terror bombing" - or "state terror" - but when you look at the textbook criteria for terrorism (indiscriminate attacks on civilians and 'symbolic' targets, carried out with the aim of inducing terror and changing political behaviour) both Dresden and Guernica seem to fit quite well.

In other words, governments are much more likely to use terror tactics than most people who are called 'terrorists'. State terror is a state crime (in war it's a war crime), and as such it can only happen on the basis of 'organisational deviance' - a phrase which here means 'a government collectively thinking that it's above the law'. Ironically, counter-terrorism - with its associated concepts of 'exceptional situations' and 'emergency measures' - makes a fertile breeding ground for organisational deviance in government.