modern definition assumes that the targets are civilians and the perpetrators are non-state actors: terrorist acts are perpetrated by clandestine organizations or illegal groups that are not directly tied to the institutions of government (although they may have support emanating from other countries). According to the strictest interpretation of the term with its emphasis on civilian casualties, several of the most famous attacks against U.S. targets would not constitute acts of terror. The 1983 attack against the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, the attack in 2000 against the USS Cole in Yemen, and, to a lesser extent, the attack against the Pentagon on 9/11, all targeted military rather than civilian personnel.
Although there were instances of political violence to overthrow governments and assassinate world leaders from the seventeenth century on (for example, Guy Fawkes's attempt to kill King James I and blow up the British parliament in 1605), the concept of terror as a systematic use of violence to attain political ends was first codified by Maximilien Robespierre during the French Revolution. Robespierre deemed la terreur to be the “emanation of virtue” that delivered “prompt, severe, and inflexible” justice as “a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most pressing needs.”10 The Reign of Terror, a period of violence that lasted for one year between 1793 and 1794, represented the internecine conflicts between two political foes, the Jacobins and the Girondins, and was punctuated by mass executions of so-called enemies of the Revolution. The more extremist Jacobins exterminated thousands of potential enemies, regardless of their sex, age, or condition, in a battle between competing ideologies.
Our understanding of terrorism has shifted since the French Revolution to mean the deliberate targeting of civilians by non-state agents intending to cause fear and panic and so bring about political change. The U.S. State Department acknowledges, however, that there is no single definition of terrorism. It uses the term to mean premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience. “International terrorism” means terrorism involving citizens or the territory of more than one country. In their definitions, scholars tend to place more emphasis on terrorists' intention to inspire fear among a target audience; the aim of persuasion transcends the harm caused to the immediate victims.11
All of this is to say that, in effect, there is no clear agreement on exactly what terrorism is. Each organization and institution has its own definition, which tends, not surprisingly, to ensure that any attack against it counts as terrorism. The military does not emphasize that the victims have to be civilian, and business definitions do not suggest that an act of terror has to be purely political. By one recent count, there were in excess of 110 different definitions of terrorism and no clear consensus by international legal agencies about which was correct.
For members of anarchist political groups in the nineteenth century, being called a terrorist was a badge of honor. In 1901, anarchists assassinated American president William McKinley. His successor, Teddy Roosevelt, vowed to exterminate terrorism everywhere. He proposed deporting all anarchists back to their countries of origin, although many had not committed crimes and were opposed to terror. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson authorized Attorney General Palmer to round up all anarchists and ship them to the Soviet Union.12
The 1993 and 2001 attacks against the World Trade Center were certainly not the first (or second) occasions when New York's Financial District was targeted. Another anarchist, Mario Buda, blew up a wagon full of explosives there on September 16, 1920. The dynamite-laden wagon passed by lunchtime crowds and stopped across the street from the headquarters of the J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street, on the Financial District's busiest corner. Its cargo, 100 pounds (45 kg) of dynamite with 500 pounds (230 kg) of heavy, cast-iron sash weights, exploded in a timer-triggered detonation that sent thousands of slugs tearing through the air.13 The horse and wagon were blasted into small fragments.14 Forty people were killed and two hundred injured. There was immediate panic and a national emergency was declared. Capitalism survived but it was widely assumed that President Wilson's roundup of anarchists was the motivation behind the blast.
According to UCLA professor David C. Rapoport, “The Russian writer Stepniak described the terrorist as ‘noble, terrible, irresistibly fascinating, uniting the two sublimities of human grandeur, the martyr and the hero.' Dynamite, a recent invention, was the weapon of choice for the male terrorist, because it usually killed the person who threw the bomb also, demonstrating that he was not an ordinary criminal.”15 A successful terrorist had to know how to fight and how to die, and the most admirable death occurred after a court trial where he or she accepted responsibility, and used the occasion to indict the regime. One of the earliest anarchists, the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich, embraced the term “terrorist.” At her trial she indignantly insisted that she was a terrorist, not a murderer. Such distinctions would be difficult to make today.
According to Rapoport, terrorism has changed significantly over the decades. The groups that have emerged and the goals they espouse have adapted to changing global circumstances and, often, to the changing nature of how states deal with them. Rapoport argues that four waves of terrorism have defined the modern world. The first wave began in the 1880s with the anarchists. The second wave, an anticolonial movement beginning in the 1920s and lasting through the 1960s, pitted many small and new states against their colonial masters to help shake off imperial rule. Some forty years later, the New Left wave married terrorism with communism and was particularly popular in Latin America. Finally, beginning in 1979 with the Iranian revolution, which provided both inspiration and, occasionally, funds, a religious wave fused terror with religious justifications for violence.
The anticolonial wave included a wide variety of groups and organizations that not only directed their attacks against the colonial masters at home but also, when they had the means to do so, took the violence to the countries of the imperialists. This wave was the most diverse in the ways it brought together wildly different organizations, ranging from Palestinian terrorist groups to the Huk rebellion in the Philippines and the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. Some of the leaders of terror groups during the anti-colonial wave became legitimate leaders in their own right when that period ended. The transition from terrorist-cell leader to president or prime minister has resulted in confusion over who is a terrorist and who is a freedom fighter, a distinction that continues to plague our understanding of political violence. This is particularly evident when one considers that more former terrorist leaders than American presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Most terrorist organizations have understood their goals to be revolution, secession, or national self-determination. The principle that a people should govern itself was a legacy of the American and French revolutions; the concepts of self-determination and national identity played key roles in both upheavals. Later, President Wilson's Fourteen Points, his hoped-for outcome of World War I, emphasized the right of all peoples to self-determination and freedom from colonial rule. To this day, the heads of terrorist movements often see themselves as the future leaders of their people. But the terms “people” and “self-determination” can both be ambiguous.16 The drive for self-determination may prompt leaders of terrorist movements to dream of a future in which they replace the current regime or government and transform the political landscape. However, this process requires that the population as a whole supports what the group does in its name.
Most terrorist organizations begin quite small, as a dedicated group of true believers, existing on the outer edges of society, who use violence to spread their message. They begin by engaging in criminal activity—drug-smuggling, bank-robbery, hostage-taking, and the like—to fill their war chests. Once they obtain the money to acquire more sophisticated weapons, they raise the stakes by challenging the government, their rivals, or the institutions of the state such as the army or the police. With every attack they launch, the organizations hope that the state will reveal its brutality. When governments overreact, this plays right into the terrorists' hands.
Many civilians die as a result of heavy-handed counter-terrorist responses, and those individuals who
