Terrorism

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TERRORISM

Terrorism is one of today's most contested terms. It is widely used polemically to delegitimate both state-sponsored violence as well as counter-state insurgencies. Although there is as yet no scholarly consensus in defining and theorizing about the subject, there is some agreement that terrorism involves the threat and actual use of violence against civilians to bring about political, social, and economic change. During the late twentieth century, political elites, state intelligence agencies, the establishment media, and an array of experts (qualified and unqualified) began to use the term to describe the militant tactics of various movements and organizations, none more than those connected with Islam. The subject is considerably more complicated, however.

Origins and Meanings of the Term

The origin of the word "terror" in Latin-derived languages is the French terreur, which assumed its modern meaning in the context of the French Revolution. Following the overthrow of the monarchy in 1789, the new government established its laws and its authority through a "reign of terror," which inspired in the population a constant fear of arrest and execution. In this context, terrorisme was understood as fear created by the state, or government rule through the specter of violence. This definition also applies to the totalitarian states of the twentieth century. More contemporarily, however, terrorism has become synonymous with violence perpetrated by non-state actors.

In Arabic, the term irhab is commonly used today as the equivalent for "terrorism," its meanings largely affected by the use of the latter term in Western languages, particularly English and French. Irhab, derived from arhaba ("to frighten," "to strike with fear," or "to terrify"), never appears in the Qur?an, though its imperfect verbal form occurs once. The Qur?an states, "Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to terrify (yurhibuna) thereby the enemies of God, your enemies, and others whom you do not know, but God knows" (8:60). The historical context for this command is that of the early battles of Muhammad and his followers against their Meccan enemies; it has had limited use subsequently in the context of discourses on jihad. Other variations of the same root appearing in the Qur?an refer to humanity's awe of God, particularly as an appellation for Christian monks (ruhban). Since the 1980s, irhab has been widely used in Arabic political rhetoric to condemn Israel's use of military force. Egyptian political elites and government-controlled media usually use the term to describe violence committed by anti-state Islamist groups.

More Recent Usages

After the Second World War, movements countering colonialism and imperialism grew in strength and influence in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In the Middle East (for example, Israel/Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, and Iran), nationalist and Islamic movements engaged in active and, at times, violent opposition to Western powers and the emergent client regimes they supported. Then, as now, the means of resistance differed within and among the many groups at work, regardless of whether or not this resistance was articulated in terms of national struggle and liberation, as with many early resistance movements, or in religious terms through the concept of jihad, a concept that acquired greater salience in the 1970s. At that time, revisionist formulations of classical Islamic jihad doctrine by Islamist ideologues such as Abu l-A?la? al-Maududi (1903–1979) and Sayyid Qutb (1903–1966) were adapted by radical Islamic groups to legitimate the use of violence, first against agents of secular, pro-Western nation-states, and subsequently against civilian populations.

Groups as diverse as the European anarchists, Viet Cong, Irish Republican Army, Nicaraguan Sandinistas, and Nelson Mandela's African National Congress have been branded with the terrorist label. In Middle Eastern contexts, terrorism has been used generically to characterize incidents of violence such as the attacks by Jewish guerillas against the British during the Mandate Period; the 1972 killings of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich at the hands of Palestinian Liberation Organization gunmen; violence committed by agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran at home and abroad since 1979; the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat by the Jihad group in 1981; the 1983 bombing of a United States Marine barracks in Beirut and the kidnappings of westerners in Lebanon; the Islamist insurgency against the Algerian government since the mid-1990s; and attacks against Israeli forces and civilians. While anti-Soviet Muslim combatants in Afghanistan received moral, economic, and military support from the United States from 1979 to 1988 as "freedom fighters" (a loose translation of mujahidin), spin-off organizations such as al-Qa?ida and the Taliban have come to epitomize what many now call terrorism.

In the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the administration of George W. Bush placed the war against terrorism, known officially as Operation Enduring Freedom, at the top of its foreign and domestic political agendas. This new anti-terrorism policy led to large-scale military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as implementation of stringent security measures in the United States, including mass deportations, detentions, and curtailment of the civil rights of immigrants and visitors to the country—especially those coming from the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia and who may be Muslims.

The way in which the international community—including Western and Arab states—interpreted these events has had a profound effect on how terrorism is identified today. The incidents described above reflect many different contexts and many different kinds of violence. What links them analytically is that various actors have described each as terrorist activity. When attempting to identify terrorism, however, the term's broad use offers little guidance in describing or understanding a particular situation.

Defining Terrorism Today

How we define "terrorism" creates the intellectual framework that delimits the explanations available to us in working to understand an event or series of events. Most states, and much of the international community, now define terrorism as the use of force by non-state actors, a definition that focuses analytic attention on the violence of resistance at the expense of attention to violence perpetrated by the state. The analytic and conceptual shift in the meaning of terrorism in the last decades of the twentieth century has had important consequences. Rather than focusing on the causes that lead to violent resistance, discussions of terrorism are often limited to questions about the legitimate use of force to eliminate it.

Brought into greater relief, the modern meaning of terrorism comes out of the use of violence to justify and preserve a regime of law, relations of power, or, more broadly, a way of life. While all states use violence to protect the authority of the law and the state itself, those using violence to resist state authority do so in order to undermine that authority. Both kinds of violence aim at a similar end: creating and maintaining a system that orders the world. In fact, when seen in a broader context, state terror and non-state terror legitimize each other, marginalizing alternatives to that violence.

Defining terrorism in terms of "essential meanings" of Islam—or of any religious tradition—provides little help in understanding how violence functions. Violence is not particular to a specific religion, or to religion in general, or to a particular kind of socio-political organization, though it is indelibly part of both. The term "terrorism" used to describe any and all violent activity unsanctioned by a sovereign state or by international authority is insufficient to arrive at a nuanced understanding of events. As a result, the term "terrorism" should be limited to a heuristic role, and should not be used as an explanatory tool in analyzing specific incidents of violence or patterns of violence.