Terrorism (n.)

Original post

This keeps coming up. So a quick word about terrorism.

The word “terrorism” is notoriously difficult to define. How is it different from crime, and war? How can we use it to mean something other than “things we think are very bad”?

Any useful definition of terrorism should reference terror. And the -ism suggests that it must be a system, with a philosophy.

So I submit that a useful definition of terrorism is:

• An act of violence ...
• ... with a political purpose ...
• ... which pursues its aim through its psychological rather than material effects.

Thus, as an example, the 9/11 attacks are terrorism in a way that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was not. Pearl Harbor was an attempt to affect geopolitics by destroying American ships that could be used to disrupt Japanese military ambitions in Asia. 9/11, spectacular as it was, did not meaningfully affect American capacity for action — it was intended to change American thinking and motivations.

This makes terrorism a distinctively modern phenomenon, because it depends upon news media repeating the story of terrorist acts for them to be effective.

Refined version (December 2024)

use of theatrical violence to create political change through its frightening social & psychological impact rather than material effect

Virtues of this approach:

• It includes & excludes many, if not most, of the obvious things it should.
• It is neither too expansive, too narrow, or too close to something else that already has a name.
• It rests on neither on individuals’ feelings about a particular tactic or cause, nor on legality or justification, rather on the act and its releation to its context.
• It admits how state military, police, and covert action can be terrorist without casting a wide net which would call any state use of force “terrorism”.
• It registers how terrorism may target the state, or other institutions, or even private individuals.
• It does not stretch the concept of “violence” to include all acts of bloodless vandalism, but registers how bloodless theatre can still constitute a meaningfully frightening threat of violence.
• It makes clear why terrorism has grown in the era of mass media without ignoring how it has earlier examples.
• It explains the tendency of Davids to use terrorism against Goliaths while also recognizing terrorist acts which flow the other way.
• It points toward an understanding of why terrorist attacks inspire disgust, and an understanding of why terrorism tends to be enacted by zealots, without defining terrorism as “anything extremist radicals do”.
• It justifies the term “terrorism” because “frightening social & psychological impact” is central to the definition.