Book Description

Terrorism is an extremely complex set of phenomena, covering a great diversity of groups with different origins and causes. The statements researchers have identified more than 200 definitions of terrorism but failed to agree on anyone and one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighters have become cliches. However, there is a growing consensus among researchers as well as among governments about the core meaning of the concept of terrorism. Most agree that terrorism is a set of methods or strategies of combat rather than an identifiable ideology or movement, and that terrorism involves premeditated use of violence against (at least primarily) non-combatants in order to achieve a psychological effect of fear on others than the immediate targets. However, beyond this core meaning of terrorism, there is heated disagreement regarding the delimitation of the phenomenon of terrorism, and particularly when it comes down to which specific groups or violent campaigns should be included or excluded under the label ‘terrorism’. Some definitions specifically exclude state actors as possible terrorists, whereas others include states. Some definitions restrict the notion of terrorism to attacks on civilians only, whereas other definitions would include military and police targets under non-war conditions. Some limit terrorisms to violent acts with a political purpose, whereas others also include terrorism for criminal purposes. Most definitions (implicitly or explicitly) consider terrorism as an illegitimate method, irrespective of its political goals or purposes. However, a few (rather exceptional) definitions specifically claim that armed struggle for certain just purposes is legitimate, irrespective of means. The emerging consensus, however, is that terrorism is primarily an extremism of means, not one of ends. Twentieth-century terrorism has come of age. In Britain, children of this age of terrorism are old enough to exercise their franchise. It was in the mid-1960s that the word itself began to gain (or. very retrospectively, to regain) international headline currency: around 1964, when the Palestine Liberation Organisation came into being, as an umbrella organisation for the previously disparate radical Palestinian groupings.