Introduction.

• Author: Jabara, Abdeen

AN AXIOM OF ACADEMIC DISCOURSE is that war is an extension of politics but by other means. Over the course of history, as a result of the innate brutality of war, certain rules of conduct for warfare have been agreed upon and legally solemnized in international conventions. While these rules of conduct are frequently violated in the conduct of warfare and often not punished by the international legal order when they are, they nonetheless provide a framework for considering military actions and their consequences even if they are not always adhered to.

The international community has also considered and adopted a position regarding the legality of war itself. This position is reflected in the Charter of the United Nations. Offensive wars are illegal while defensive wars are permitted.

The term "terrorism", has, because of horrific killing of civilians by groups of individuals or an individual who is ideologically motivated, and the attendant media coverage, that surround them has been so laden with emotion that it is most difficult to examine it as a legal and socio-political manifestation. Moreover, the concept of "terrorism" has not been given the benefit of an international legal consensus through which a unified international effort to eradicate it might be conducted.

Former U.S. Secretary of State in the Carter Administration, Warren Christopher, very succinctly observed that terrorist acts in the name of religion and ethnic identity have become "one of the most important security challenges we face in the wake of the Cold War." Christopher's statement raises a number of interesting questions relating to how one is precisely to define terrorism, what and whose security is threatened by it, and how the end of the Cold War did or did not contribute to the rise of terrorism. But the change in what is viewed by the United States as the single biggest area of growth for terrorism can be seen in the annual State Department report to Congress on terrorism.

The 1980 State Department roster of terrorist organizations listed very few religious organizations. In the 1998 report, however, over half of the organizations listed were religious. Interestingly, this period of two decades is one which witnessed the greatest change in the post World War II international order: namely, the fall of Communism in and the breakup of the former Soviet Union.

Various commentators, scholars, and legal experts have sought to define exactly what terrorism is. One of these I believe correctly sets the stage for a discussion of what terrorism is. This scholar maintains that:

the designation of terrorism is a subjective judgment about the legitimacy of certain violent acts as much as it is a descriptive statement about them.

In his seminal examination of terrorism, Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories and Literature (with Albert J. Jongman, et al, Rev. ed., Amsterdam, Oxford, New York: North Holland Publishing, 1988), Alex Schmid recorded 109 different definitions of terrorism by social scientists and lawyers. In a rather lengthy definition, he attempted to collect the most agreed upon elements among the various writers on the topic:

Terrorism is a method of combat in which random or symbolic victims serve as an instrumental target of violence. These instrumental victims share group or class characteristics which form the basis for their selection for victimization. Through previous use of violence or the credible threat of violence other members of that group or class are put in a state of chronic fear (terror). This group or class, whose members' sense of security is purposefully undermined, is the target of terror. The victimization of the target of violence is considered extra-normal by most observers from the witnessing audience on the basis of its atrocity, the time (e.g., peacetime) or place (not a battlefield) of victimization, or the disregard for rules of combat accepted in conventional warfare. The norm violation creates an attentive audience beyond the target of terror, sectors of this audience might in turn form the main object of manipulation. The purpose of this indirect method of combat is either to immobilize the target o f terror in order to produce disorientation and/or compliance or to mobilize secondary targets of demands (e.g., a government) or targets of attention (e.g., public opinion) to changes of attitude or behaviour favouring the short or long term interests of the users of this method of combat. (pp.l-2)

What is crucial in this attempt to define terrorism is that (1) it is not value laden (Good vs. Evil) and (2) it seeks to understand the existence of terrorism in a rather utilitarian context.

Thus, just as a political scientist would hold that war is politics by other means, so too is terrorism. It exists because of the disparity of power between an aggrieved group and the holder of dominant power and is an attempt to alter that relationship and to press a list of grievances. In some cases terrorism is resorted to only as an action of last resort, or when other effective avenues of complaint are cut-off or non-existent.

Another source of serious confusion in the definition of terrorism arises because of the different contexts in which it occurs. The most glaring example of this is the existence of the use of the word "terrorism" in a struggle against a dominant occupying colonial power (the French in Algeria, the Jews in Palestine and the Afrikaners in Southern Africa) and the use of terrorism in an ideological battle between systems of economics and governance. In this later category falls the efforts in the Reagan Administration and among many Cold War warriors in the media, entertainment industry and elsewhere, to label the former Soviet Union as the chief sponsor and promoter of...