about essay of terrorism

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Essay on Terrorism

India has a lengthy history of terrorism. It is a cowardly act by terrorist organisations that want to sabotage the nation's tranquillity. It seeks to instil fear among the population. They seek to maintain a permanent climate of dread among the populace to prevent the nation from prospering. Here are a few sample essays on Terrorism .

100 Words Essay on Terrorism

Terrorism is the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political and personal aims. It is a global phenomenon that has affected countries worldwide, causing harm to innocent civilians, damaging economies, and destabilizing governments. The causes of terrorism are complex and can include religious extremism, political oppression, and economic inequality.

Terrorist groups use a variety of tactics, including bombings, kidnappings, and hijackings, to achieve their goals. They often target symbols of government and military power, as well as civilians in crowded public spaces. The impact of terrorism on society is devastating, leading to loss of life, injury, and psychological trauma.

Combating terrorism requires a multifaceted approach, including intelligence gathering, law enforcement, and military action. Additionally, addressing underlying issues such as poverty and political marginalization is crucial in preventing the radicalization of individuals and the emergence of terrorist groups.

200 Words Essay on Terrorism

Terrorism is a complex and ever-evolving threat that affects countries and communities around the world. It involves the use of violence and intimidation to achieve political or ideological goals. The causes of terrorism can vary, but often include religious extremism, political oppression, and economic inequality.

To truly understand the impact of terrorism, it's important to consider not only the physical harm caused by terrorist attacks but also the emotional and psychological toll it takes on individuals and communities. The loss of life and injury caused to innocent civilians is devastating and can leave families and communities reeling for years to come. In addition, terrorism can cause physical damage to infrastructure and buildings, as well as economic disruption, leading to decreased tourism and investment.

To effectively combat terrorism, it's important to take a holistic approach that addresses not only the immediate threat of terrorist attacks but also the underlying issues that can lead to radicalization and the emergence of terrorist groups. This can include addressing poverty and economic inequality, promoting political and religious tolerance, and providing support and resources to individuals and communities at risk of radicalization.

It's also important to remember that the fight against terrorism is not just the responsibility of governments and law enforcement agencies, but also of individuals and communities. By promoting understanding and compassion, and by standing up against hate and extremism, we can all play a role in preventing terrorism and creating a more peaceful world.

500 Words Essay on Terrorism

According to a United Nations Security Council report from November 2004, terrorism is any act that is "intended to result in the death or serious bodily harm of civilians or non-combatants to intimidate the population or to compel the government or an international organisation to do or abstain from doing any act."

The Origins of Terrorism

The development or production of massive numbers of machine guns, atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, nuclear weapons, missiles, and other weapons fuels terrorism. Rapid population growth, political, social, and economic problems, widespread discontent with the political system, a lack of education, racism, economic inequality, and linguistic discrepancies are all important contributors to the emergence of terrorism. Sometimes one uses terrorism to take a position and stick with it.

The Effects Of Terrorism

People become afraid of terrorism and feel unsafe in their nation. Terrorist attacks result in the destruction of millions of items, the death of thousands of innocent people, and the slaughter of animals. After seeing a terrorist incident, people become less inclined to believe in humanity, which breeds more terrorists.

Different forms of terrorism can be found both domestically and overseas. Today, governments worldwide are working hard to combat terrorism, which is an issue in India and our neighbouring nations. The 9/11 World Trade Centre attack is considered the worst terrorist act ever. Osama bin Laden attacked the tallest building in the world’s most powerful country, causing millions of casualties and the death of thousands of people.

The major incidents of the terrorist attack in India are—

12 March 1993 - A series of 13 bombs go off, killing 257

14 March 2003 - A bomb goes off in a train in Mulund, killing 10

29 October 2005 Delhi bombings

2005 Ram Janmabhoomi attack in Ayodhya

2006 Varanasi bombings

11 July 2006 - A series of seven bombs go off in trains, killing

26 November 2008 to 29 November 2008 - A series of coordinated attacks killed at least 170.

According to this data, India has experienced an upsurge in terrorist activity since 1980. India has fought four wars against terrorism , losing more than 6000 persons in total. Already, we have lost around 70000 citizens. Furthermore, we lost over 9000 security staff. In this country, about 6 lakh individuals have undergone.

Agencies In India Fighting Terrorism

There are numerous organisations working to rid our nation of terrorism. These organizations operate continuously, from the municipal to the national levels. To stop local terrorist activity, police forces have various divisions.

The police departments have a specialized intelligence and anti-terrorism division that is in charge of eliminating Naxalites and other terrorist organizations. The military is in charge of bombing terrorist targets outside of our country. These departments engage in counterinsurgency and other similar operations to dismantle various terrorist organisations.

There are numerous organisations that work to prevent terrorism. Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) , National Investigation Agency (NIA) , and Research and Analysis Wing are a few of the top organizations (RAW) . These are some of the main organizations working to rid India of terrorism.

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Essay on Global Terrorism for Students and Children

500+ words essay on global terrorism.

Global Terrorism

The world has changed significantly since the September 11 attacks. Security has become an all-encompassing concern. People nowadays plan their vacations according to the factor such as whether the destination is safe or not, which route possess the least danger. Thus, after terrorist strikes took place people no longer feel safe in their own countries.

As we know about the attack on Twin Tower on September 11 in the USA in which militants associated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaida hijacked four airplanes and carried out suicide attacks against targets in the United States.

Among four planes hijacked, two of the planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York City, a third plane hit the Pentagon Washington D.C., while the fourth plane crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. These attacks eventually led to attack in Afghanistan by the USA to demolish Mullah Omar’s regime which is called War On Terror.

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War on Terror

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, an international military initiative was launched by the United States. This initiative was called the War on Terror. According to President Bush, this war was targeted at the radical network of terrorists as well as to the governments who supported them.

US and allied troops were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, both believed to be home to terrorist cells and leaders. Lastly, President Barak Obama’s administration formally called an end to the War and announced the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden had allegedly been killed by US Navy Seals and Al-Qaeda wasn’t considered the threat it once used to be.

However, 2014 saw the emergence of ISIS or ISIL. The jihadist organization was dubbed a terrorist group by the UN. This led to the formation of a new operation called Operation Inherent Resolve that would target terror in South Asia and the Middle East.

Threat to Humanity

The word terrorism indicates that extremists who use terror tactics use to develop fear in the hearts of people everywhere. They succeed in it because they target civilians in places where they would ideally be safe such as schools, malls, shopping thoroughfares, pubs, nightclubs, churches, and mosques.

Also, the shock value of these tactics is much higher. Terrorism is a strategy that various organizations use to achieve their aims by targeting innocent people. Terrorist attacks affect public morale and generate an atmosphere of fear. These attacks create divides between people from different regions, ethnicities, and religions. Instead of coming together to fight this threat, people are suspicious of each other and close themselves up.

Terrorism is very much a reality of modern times. The mere threat of a terrorist attack is enough to generate panic and fear among the general populace. We cannot deny the fact that global terrorism has affected policy decisions to a great extent. The internet has given terrorist organizations a global platform to spread their agenda and recruit more people. However, it may be time for a more militaristic solution to the problem of global terrorism.

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Essay on Terrorism

Students are often asked to write an essay on Terrorism in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Terrorism

Understanding terrorism.

Terrorism refers to the use of violence, often against civilians, to achieve political goals. It’s a form of fear-based manipulation, aiming to create panic and disrupt peace.

Impacts of Terrorism

Terrorism harms societies both physically and psychologically. It leads to loss of lives, property, and can cause trauma. It also hampers economic growth and societal harmony.

Countering Terrorism

Countering terrorism requires global cooperation. Nations must share intelligence, enforce strict laws, and promote education and understanding to prevent radicalization. Remember, peace and unity are our best defenses against terrorism.

Also check:

Paragraph on Terrorism
Speech on Terrorism

250 Words Essay on Terrorism

Terrorism, a term that sends chills down the spine, is an act of violence primarily intended to create fear, disrupt societal structures, and promote political or ideological agendas. It is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, which has been escalating in frequency and intensity worldwide.

The Root Causes

The root causes of terrorism are multifarious. It can be triggered by political instability, socio-economic disparities, religious fanaticism, or ethnic tensions. Often, it is a combination of these factors, creating a fertile breeding ground for extremist ideologies.

The Impact of Terrorism

The impacts of terrorism are far-reaching and devastating. Beyond the immediate human toll, it disrupts economic stability, social harmony, and political structures. It instills fear, leading to changes in behavior and attitudes, and can even alter the course of history.

Counter-Terrorism Strategies

Counter-terrorism strategies are as diverse as the causes of terrorism. They range from military interventions to intelligence operations, from diplomatic negotiations to socio-economic reforms. However, the most effective strategies are those that address the root causes of terrorism, rather than merely responding to its symptoms.

Terrorism, a grave threat to global peace and security, requires a comprehensive and holistic approach to be effectively countered. By understanding its root causes and impacts, we can devise strategies to combat it, ensuring a safer world for future generations.

500 Words Essay on Terrorism

Introduction to terrorism.

Terrorism, a term that sends chills down the spine of many, is a complex phenomenon that has been the subject of extensive study and debate. It is characterized by acts of violence or threats aimed at creating fear, disrupting societal order, and advancing political, religious, or ideological goals.

The Evolution of Terrorism

Historically, terrorism was primarily a tool of the weak against the strong, a way to destabilize oppressive regimes or draw attention to a cause. However, the advent of the 21st century has seen its evolution into a more global menace, with the rise of transnational terrorist networks like Al-Qaeda and ISIS. The digital age has made it easier for these groups to recruit, radicalize, and coordinate attacks, making terrorism a borderless problem.

The Psychology of Terrorism

Understanding the psychology of terrorism is crucial in tackling it. Many terrorists are not psychopaths or inherently evil people, but individuals manipulated into believing that their violent actions are justified. Factors such as social exclusion, economic deprivation, political oppression, and religious indoctrination can contribute to this mindset. This underscores the importance of addressing root causes to prevent terrorism.

Terrorism’s impacts are multifaceted. The immediate effect is loss of life and property, but the ripple effects are far-reaching. It instills fear and insecurity, disrupts economic activity, and can lead to restrictive security measures that infringe on civil liberties. Moreover, it can exacerbate social divisions and fuel cycles of violence and retaliation.

Counter-terrorism strategies must be as multifaceted as the problem they aim to solve. Military and law enforcement responses are necessary to protect citizens and bring perpetrators to justice. However, these approaches should be paired with efforts to address the underlying social, economic, and political conditions that breed terrorism.

Preventive measures include promoting social inclusion, economic development, and political reforms. Moreover, countering extremist narratives online and offline is crucial to prevent radicalization. International cooperation is also essential given the transnational nature of modern terrorism.

Conclusion: The Future of Counter-Terrorism

The future of counter-terrorism lies in a balanced approach that combines hard and soft power. While military and law enforcement measures are necessary, they are not sufficient on their own. The fight against terrorism must also be a fight for hearts and minds, addressing the root causes of terrorism, and building inclusive societies where extremist narratives find no fertile ground.

In conclusion, terrorism is a complex problem that requires a nuanced understanding and multifaceted response. It is not just a security issue, but a social, economic, and political one. By addressing it in this holistic manner, we can hope to make progress in the ongoing struggle against this global menace.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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How Terrorism Is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence

Virginia Held, How Terrorism Is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence , Oxford University Press, 2008, 205pp., $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780195329599.

Reviewed by Igor Primoratz, University of Melbourne

This is a book on terrorism and political violence more generally, written by a philosopher and accordingly focusing on conceptual and moral, rather than empirical or historical, questions. The book is meant for fellow philosophers and political theorists, but it is written clearly and without philosophical jargon, and will be accessible, and of much interest, to the general reader too.

While political violence is a traditional topic in political and moral philosophy, terrorism -- the type of political violence generally considered most difficult to defend -- was not much discussed before the attacks in the US on 11 September 2001. Virginia Held is one of the few philosophers who gave it sustained attention before it became a fashionable topic. The present book is a collection of seven essays she has published over the last twenty-odd years and one previously unpublished paper. Some essays discuss terrorism or political violence generally, while others look into such related issues as the ways the media deals with political violence, or collective responsibility for ethnic hatred and violence. There is also an essay on the methods of moral inquiry.

In her approach to moral questions, Held combines consequentialism, deontological ethics and the ethics of care. The relevance of the last approach to discussing issues of political violence is rather limited, and Held's position on terrorism and political violence is grounded in consequentialist and deontological considerations of a more traditional type. So is just war theory, but Held's views are not a version of that theory. Indeed, she doubts that just war theory can be of much help in understanding and judging contemporary armed conflicts.

The title of the book might be thought somewhat misleading, as Held does not so much seek to show how terrorism is wrong as how it can be right. To be sure, a title highlighting the latter prospect probably would not have been a good idea in the current atmosphere of the "war on terror." This "war" is both driven and defended by a "moral clarity" claimed by leaders of some major powers and by many analysts and commentators. Held rightly challenges this facile "moral clarity," according to which all terrorism is morally the same, clearly distinct from war, and a monopoly of insurgents, who are both amoral and utterly irrational and fanatical, and therefore never to be engaged with in dialogue or negotiation. She goes on to argue that we should not adopt a sweeping moral rejection of all terrorism, whatever the cause it serves, the circumstances in which it does so, and the consequences of refraining from it; that terrorism is not "uniquely atrocious"; and that it is not necessarily morally worse than war.

The scope and import of any moral assessment of terrorism depends on just what is meant by "terrorism". Accordingly, Held discusses at some length the question of how the term should be defined. The usage over the two centuries or so since the term entered political and moral discourse in the West has been notoriously confusing, fraught with moral emotions and political passions, and plagued by relativism and double standards. It is in such cases that philosophy can demonstrate its relevance to public debates by clarifying central concepts and main positions, spotting missteps in argument, exposing prejudice and double standards, and thus facilitating more rational and discerning moral deliberation and choice. Most definitions of terrorism crafted by philosophers acknowledge the two traits that make up the core concept underlining all shifts in descriptive and evaluative meaning: terrorism is violence aiming at intimidation (fear, terror). Beyond this, philosophers tend to disagree, most importantly on whether terrorism is violence against civilians (non-combatants, innocent people), or can also target members of the military and security services and highly placed government officials. This is the question of a narrow vs. wide definition. A wide definition is in line with common use over two centuries, whereas a narrow definition is revisionary. Yet a narrow definition may be more appropriate in the context of moral assessment of violence and terrorism. Surely there is a considerable moral difference between planting a bomb in an office of (what is considered) an extremely oppressive government and killing a number of its officials, and planting a bomb in a coffee shop and killing a number of common citizens.

Held prefers a wide definition, for reasons I do not find convincing. One is common use. Held points out that the attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, or much Palestinian violence directed at Israeli soldiers, would not count as terrorism on a narrow definition, while the bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima would, and finds these implications unacceptable. To me, they seem just right. She quotes Walter Laqueur's remark that "most terrorist groups in the contemporary world have been attacking the military, the police, and the civilian population" (p. 55) as showing the inadequacy of a narrow definition. But surely the fact that a group has engaged in terrorism to an extent sufficient to consider it a terrorist group does not turn every act of political violence committed by the group into an act of terrorism. Finally, Held rejects narrow definitions on the ground that "it is not at all clear who the 'innocent' are as distinct from the 'legitimate' targets. We can perhaps agree that small children are innocent, but beyond this, there is little moral clarity" (pp. 19-20). Yet even if only "small children" were morally protected against violence that would be a weighty consideration, as indiscriminate political violence against civilians or common citizens is bound to kill and maim children too. Moreover, there are other classes of civilians that are just as clearly innocent in the relevant sense, i.e. innocent of the (alleged) injustice or oppression: opponents of the government, those too old or infirm to take part in political life, or those inculpably ignorant of the immorality of their government's policies.

The book offers two somewhat different definitions of terrorism: as "political violence that usually spreads fear beyond those attacked" and "perhaps more than anything else … resembles small-scale war" (p. 21), and as political violence employed with "the intention either to spread fear or to harm non-combatants" (p. 76). Both definitions run together war and terrorism, and imply that an act of war proper, i.e. one aimed at a legitimate military target, counts as terrorism. For, as Trotsky pointed out in his defense of the "red terror", "war … is founded upon intimidation… . [It] destroys only an insignificant part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and breaking their will" ( Terrorism and Communism , Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1961, p. 58). Held accepts this implication of her position; I find it problematic.

Philosophers working with a wide definition of terrorism usually distinguish terrorism that targets the military and high government officials and terrorism that attacks common citizens, and argue that the former type of terrorism can be morally justified in certain circumstances, while the latter type is never, or almost never, justified. Held does not take this line. Her book offers two different justifications of terrorist violence, and both apply to the latter as well as the former kind of terrorism.

The first is in terms of the responsibility of citizens in a democracy for what their government does on their behalf. This justification is only suggested at several points in the book and is never developed and defended from likely objections. Held does not make it clear whether she sees common citizens as proper objects of terrorist violence because, as voters, they authorize the government's actions and policies (p. 20), or on account of various types and degrees of support they give the government (pp. 56, 78). Both these lines of argument are open to serious queries.

Held's second justification of terrorism, presented in chapter 4 )“Terrorism, Rights, and Political Goals”) is carefully spelled out. It focuses on the issue of human rights. When human rights of a person or group are not respected, what may we do in order to ensure that they are? On one view, known as consequentialism of rights, if the only way to ensure respect of a certain right of A and B is to infringe on the same right of C, we will be justified in doing so. Held does not accept such trade-offs in rights with the aim of maximizing their respect. But she points out that rights sometimes come into conflict, whether directly or indirectly. When that happens, we cannot avoid comparing the rights involved in terms of their stringency and making certain choices. That applies to the case of terrorism too. Terrorism violates some human rights of its victims. But its advocates claim that in certain circumstances a limited use of terrorism is the only way of bringing about a society in which the human rights of all will be respected.

Even when that is so, it is not enough to make resort to terrorism justified. But it will be justified if an additional condition is met: that of distributive justice. If there is a society where the human rights of a part of the population are respected, while the same rights of another part of the population are being violated, and if the only way of putting an end to that and bringing about a society in which human rights of all are respected is a limited use of terrorism, and finally, if terrorism is directed against members of the first group, which until now has been privileged as far as respect of human rights is concerned -- then terrorism will be morally justified. This is an argument of distributive justice, brought to bear on the problem of violations of human rights. It is more just to equalize the violations of human rights in a stage of transition to a society where the rights of all are respected, than to allow the group which has already suffered large-scale violations of human rights to suffer more such violations (assuming that in both cases we are dealing with violations of the same, or equally stringent, human rights). Human rights of many are going to be violated in any case. "If we must have rights violations, a more equitable distribution of such violations is better than a less equitable one" (p. 88).

This is an original, deontological cum consequentialist justification of terrorism. Neither the indispensable contribution of terrorism to bringing about equal respect of human rights of all nor the justice in the distribution of violations of such rights in the transition stage is, in itself, enough to justify its use. Each is necessary, and jointly the two are sufficient for its justification. Obviously, a critique that reduces Held's position to either of its prongs falls short of the mark. So does the objection that terrorism is as a matter of fact highly unlikely ever to help usher in a better, more just society. If so, that tells against terrorism, rather than against Held's (or any other) stringent moral requirements for a morally defensible recourse to it.

Another objection is that in allowing for sacrificing such basic human rights as the right to life and to bodily security of individual victims of terrorism for the sake of a more just distribution of violations of the same rights within a group in the course of transition to a stage where these rights will be respected throughout that group, Held adopts a collectivistic position that offends against the principles of separateness of persons and respect for persons. In response, Held argues that

to fail to achieve a more just distribution of violations of rights (through the use of terrorism if that is the only means available) is to fail to recognize that those whose rights are already not fairly respected are individuals in their own right, not merely members of a group … whose rights can be ignored. … Arguments for achieving a just distribution of rights violations need not be arguments … that are more than incidentally about groups. They can be arguments about individuals' rights to basic fairness. (pp. 89-90)

Still, a common citizen belonging to the relatively privileged section of the population has done nothing to forfeit her right to life. If she is killed by a terrorist seeking to make the distribution of right to life violations in the entire population more just, her right to life is violated for reasons to do with the group: for the sake of more justice within the group. This has nothing to do with her sins of commission or omission, and in this sense Held's is a collectivistic argument -- and an argument that I, for one, do not find convincing. Held argues that, if we fail to resort to terrorism in the circumstances described in her argument, we thereby fail to recognize that individuals belonging to the disadvantaged section of the population "are individuals in their own right," rather than merely members of a group whose human rights can be ignored. This argument is predicated on moral equivalence of acts and omissions, and on ascription of negative responsibility. This, too, I find problematic. We do not fail to respect the right to life of disadvantaged individuals when we fail to kill or maim other individuals, personally innocent of the plight of the former. The disadvantaged individuals do not have a right that we should engage in terrorism in their behalf, and we do not have a duty to do that. Indeed, I believe we have a duty not to do that.

Whether Held's two-prong justification of terrorism can be successfully defended against this and other possible objections or not, it remains an original, complex, and highly important position on the morality of terrorism. The essay presenting it is the centerpiece of Held's book and her most valuable contribution to the discussion of terrorism as far as fellow philosophers are concerned. The general reader will find much of interest in all the essays in this book. In the wider context of public debate about terrorism and the "war" against it, Held provides a strong antidote to the simplistic deliverances of "moral clarity" many of our political leaders and "public intellectuals" claim to possess.

Terrorism in the United States of America Essay

Introduction.

Terrorism is a serious problem affecting the United States of America that is likely to worsen in the coming years. The number of terrorist groups operating within the borders has increased over the past decade. Data provided by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) shows that white supremacists pose the greatest risk to the nation’s security. Moreover, anarchists and religious extremists have been cited as perpetrators of terrorist activities within the US. Common types of terrorism include right-wing terrorism (white supremacists and anti-government extremists), left-wing terrorism, and religious terrorism. Recent events following the death of George Floyd have revealed the new face of terrorism in the US. The spread of false information, conspiracy theories, and incitements to violence are some of the means that terrorist groups are using to advance their agenda. Aryan Nations and the Ku Klux Klan are terrorist organizations that continue to promote racial and religious violence as well as anti-Semitic ideas.

Domestic Terrorist Organizations

Aryan nations.

Aryan Nations (AN) is a white supremacist terrorist organization that is headquartered in Hayden, Idaho. It is a form of right-wing terrorism that is anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi, and that was founded by Richard Girnt Butler in 1977. Its main objective is to establish a white state that excludes other races by fighting against people that pose a threat to the white race, including the Jews and African Americans (Perliger, 2020). Constructivism theory can be used to explain the development and motivations of AN. Originally, it was a branch of the Christian Identity church that has two core teachings: whites are the true Israelites and Jews originated from a union between Satan and Eve. The group has been involved in several criminal activities, hence its classification by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a terrorist threat in 2001. Moreover, it is founded on a wide spectrum of racist and anti-Semitic ideas that promote racial intolerance (Perliger, 2020). The organization has been described by the RAND Corporation as a pioneer nationwide terrorist network in the US.

Aryan Nations has a single leader who makes all the group’s decisions. Unlike other terrorist organizations, it lacks a hierarchical structure and its activities are determined by the leader. It has been infiltrated by the FBI through an informant. Dave Hall, the group’s propaganda minister was an informant who exposed the organization’s illegal activities (Perliger, 2020). He reported directly to Special Agent Tym Burkey, a security officer who was helping Dayton’s organized Jewish community fight the group’s hate campaign. AN is linked to other terrorist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), National Alliance, and The Silent Brotherhood (Perliger, 2020). The group is funded privately by individuals who support its ideologies and through its involvement in criminal activities. It lacks a strong organization and communication strategy, and it relies on the internet to conduct recruitments and spread its ideologies.

In recent years, wrangles have developed within the organization since the death of its founder, and splinter groups have emerged. It weakened in 2001 after losing its Northern Idaho compound where it was headquartered (Perliger, 2020). The group might disintegrate in the future because of its dwindling number of followers, leadership wrangles, and a lack of finances to fund its activities. Law enforcement agencies have heightened surveillance on groups and individuals deemed to promote terrorism in the US. Therefore, people might be afraid of donating to their initiatives and joining them as members for fear of victimization and prosecution.

Ku Klux Klan

The KKK refers to a domestic left-wing terrorist group that uses fear to advance its white supremacist ideologies. The original group was disbanded in the 1870s, and it was revived in 1915 as a new outfit. The organization had more than 4 million members in the 1920s, and it was financed from member contributions and the sale of publications and costumes. Its objectives include the suppression of African Americans, Catholics, Jews, immigrants, leftists, and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community (Jones et al., 2020). Its motivations and ideologies can be explained using the constructivism theory because terrorism is a social construct. The group operates primarily in the Southern United States. They are active in several states, including Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, and North Carolina among others. Affiliate groups include Noble Klans of America, United Klans of America, the White Knights of Texas, and the Rebel Brigade Knights True Invisible Empire among others.

The group’s organization involves a hierarchical structure that includes a titular head, leaders for each congressional district, and county heads. The overall leader is referred to as the Grand Dragon while the head of a congressional district is referred to as the Grand Titan. The counties are overseen by a head known as the Grand Giant, who is responsible for organizing militia members and supplying them with weapons. The Grand Dragon makes the group’s most critical decisions and receives frequent reports from district heads regarding the organization’s activities. The KKK is funded primarily by individuals who support the group’s ideologies. Counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) refers to a series of activities conducted by the FBI between 1956 and 1979 to disrupt political organizations that destabilized the US (Perliger, 2020). COINTELPRO-White Hate program involved the infiltration of the KKK by FBI agents through overt techniques that included paying informers, bribing Klansmen, and the use of wiretaps and bugs.

The KKK has experienced a steady decline in membership in the past decade. However, the organization continues to promote its ideologies and recruit more people. Its new techniques include creating new websites, opening accounts for donations, and creating content that spreads its ideologies (Jones et al., 2020). In the future, the organization is likely to plateau because of poor leadership, wrangles within the group, and the inability to create and maintain alliances. Moreover, the group has numerous affiliate hate groups. Therefore, the lack of a stable leadership system is a risk to the group’s stability. Moreover, increased surveillance and monitoring by security agencies hamper their activities around the country.

Terrorism is a serious threat to the security of the United States of America. For many decades, security agencies in the country have implemented several measures to curb the rise in terrorism within the country’s borders. Right-wing, left-wing, and religious forms of terrorism are common in the US. Aryan Nations (AN) and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) are terrorist groups that have operated in the US for decades. They are funded mainly by individuals who subscribe to their ideologies. Their involvement in racial and anti-Semitic criminal activities renders them, terrorist groups, as classified by the FBI. The groups might disintegrate in the future because of leadership wrangles and the lack of funding. Moreover, increased surveillance by security agencies has hampered their recruitment and fundraising activities.

Jones, S. G., Doxsee, C., & Harrington, N. (2020). The escalating terrorism problem in the United States . Center for strategic and International Studies. Web.

Perliger, A. (2020). American zealots: Inside right-wing domestic terrorism . Columbia University Press.

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IvyPanda. (2022, June 8). Terrorism in the United States of America. https://ivypanda.com/essays/terrorism-in-the-united-states-of-america/

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IvyPanda . (2022) 'Terrorism in the United States of America'. 8 June.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Terrorism in the United States of America." June 8, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/terrorism-in-the-united-states-of-america/.

1. IvyPanda . "Terrorism in the United States of America." June 8, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/terrorism-in-the-united-states-of-america/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Terrorism in the United States of America." June 8, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/terrorism-in-the-united-states-of-america/.

The Ku Klux Klan in the US: Historical and Cultural Information
The Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan Organization in the 1860-1960s
Ku Klux Klan, Its Creation History and Activities
Social Issues: Police Protection of the Ku Klux Klan
Domestic Terrorism in the United States of America
Ku Klux Klan and Fear-Fueled Hatred
The Ku Klux Klan Role in Southern Politics
The History of Ku Klux Klan: A Terrorist Organization Founded in the Southern States After the American Civil War
Adolf Hitler's Anti-Semitic "Final Solution"
The Use of Intelligence Collection Systems
Counterterrorism and Intelligence
Task Force and the Fusion Center: Terrorism Prevention
Fusion Centers: The Role in Terrorism Prevention
Australian Anti-Terrorism Laws

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The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism

Introduction: Writing the History of Terrorism

Carola Dietze is a professor of modern history (Chair) at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. Her research focuses on the history of violence, security, and the media as well as on migration and the history of ideas, universities, and historiography in Europe, Russia, and the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her publications include The Invention of Terrorism in Europe, Russia, and the United States (2021, published in German in 2016 and in Russian in 2021), and “Legitimacy and Security in Historical Perspective: A Case Study in the History of Terrorism,” in Conceptualizing Power in Dynamics of Securitization: Beyond State and International System edited by Regina Kreide and Andreas Langenohl (Baden-Baden, 2019). She is a member of the editorial board of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. In 2006 Dietze was awarded the German Historical Association’s prize for the best doctoral thesis in the field of history, i.e., from prehistory to contemporary history. The thesis was published in German as Nachgeholtes Leben: Helmuth Plessner, 1892–1985, as well as in Dutch and French translations.

Published: 14 April 2021
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This chapter analyzes the most important trends in the writing of the history of terrorism since the beginning of terrorism research in the late nineteenth century up to today. It presents the origins of terrorism studies in Western social sciences and international relations, and it contextualizes the standard narrative of the history of terrorism put forward by the political scientists David C. Rapoport and Walter Laqueur. The chapter traces major developments in the history of terrorism in professional historiography in the Soviet Union or Russia as well as Europe and the United States during and after the Cold War, and especially since the attacks on September 11, 2001, and it outlines the results and effects of that historiography. On the basis of the evaluation of the scholarship available to date, the article maps out the rationale and the contours of the new global history of terrorism pursued in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism .

Terrorism and its history have been the topic of considerable public, political, literary, artistic, and academic attention, since this specific tactic of violence was invented concurrently with the advent of modernity. 1 It therefore can come as no surprise that the first academic treatises on terrorism as a subject of inquiry began to appear in the nineteenth century. 2 They were a reaction to the series of assassination attempts in Russia and to the “‘golden age’ of anarchist terrorism, 1880–1914,” 3 when an astounding number of monarchs, prime ministers, presidents, governors, and other members of governments and the wider population were attacked especially in Europe, Russia, and the United States, but also in other countries, such as Argentina and China. 4

It was not until the 1970s, however, that in the Western world systematic research on the phenomenon of terrorist violence and its origins began. In the post–World War II era, terrorism had mainly been employed in the struggles over decolonization in Africa and Asia and drew the attention of few researchers in Western academia. 5 In the 1970s terrorist tactics began to be adopted in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan by groups such as the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion; RAF), the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse; BR), the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the Weather Underground, and the Japanese Red Army (Nippon Sekigun [JRA]). 6 Reactions to these manifestations of terrorist violence in highly industrialized nations were manifold: intense police work was accompanied by prominent and often severely contested legal and executive measures. 7 Moreover, there were also academic endeavors to analyze and thereby help contain terrorist violence.

Researchers from different disciplines in Western academia turned to the systematic inquiry of the phenomenon and different types of political violence in general and to the study of terrorist attacks specifically. Most of these researchers were social scientists, mainly political scientists and scholars in the field of international relations. They strove to better understand and explain the causes, types, effects, and functioning of terrorism and in this way find possibilities to prevent terrorist violence. 8 As for the history of terrorism, many of these social scientists perceived it as an indispensable part of their work to give an overview of important examples of terrorist violence in the past. The historical perspective, with its developmental narrative and its comparative approach to terrorism in different cultural, historical, and religious settings, enabled them to situate, characterize, analyze, and even theorize the then current phenomena of terrorist violence. 9 For reasons such as these, the history of terrorism often occupies a crucial place in publications and entire oeuvres of the social scientist pioneers in the field of terrorism studies.

The expertise acquired by the pioneer researchers of terrorism in the social sciences was in high demand right away. A considerable number of these researchers would therefore receive positions in think tanks and serve as consultants to governments on counterterrorist policy strategies. They would also often comment on the recurring attacks in the national news media. Moreover, they developed university courses and study programs, or founded journals and research institutions, focused on terrorism and counterterrorism. For example, in 1969 David C. Rapoport taught what was probably the first course on terrorism in the United States, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). 10 The two most important journals in the field, Terrorism —now Studies in Conflict and Terrorism —and Terrorism and Political Violence were launched in 1977 and 1989, respectively. 11 In 1985 Paul Wilkinson set up the Terrorism Research Unit in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen, and in 1994 he and Bruce Hoffman went on to establish the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV) at the University of St. Andrews School of International Relations—the first research center for the study of terrorism in Europe. 12 Last but not least, the social-science pioneers and their students published books and anthologies that have become standard reference works for anybody interested in studying terrorism, regardless of disciplinary affiliation. 13 In this way, these pioneers and their students successfully established terrorism studies as a specific academic field, and they gained the privilege and power of interpreting terrorist violence for influential policy makers as well as for broad national and international audiences.

Historians and the History of Terrorism Up to the Year 2000

In the newly defined field of terrorism studies, professional historians were few and far between. This observation is in need of explanation, especially since the writing of history from its very beginnings in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War —as far as the Western tradition is concerned—typically focuses intently on individual and collective political violence. Recounting, analyzing, and explaining manifestations of political violence—assassinations, coups d’état, rebellions, revolutions, terror, civil wars, and wars between empires and states—have belonged and still belong to the noblest (and often also best-selling) task of the historian. Many historians are therefore indeed experts on political violence of the past, and if political violence follows certain patterns they can, moreover, contribute important insights to the analysis of violent phenomena in the present.

Yet, professional historians have typically shunned the topic of terrorism. 14 The reasons for their reticence are not evident and, with few exceptions, can only be conjectured. One of the few historians to have indicated why he is hesitant to tackle the topic is the highly distinguished military historian and strategic studies expert Sir Michael Eliot Howard. He once wrote in a book review: “[Terrorism is a] huge and ill-defined subject [that] has probably been responsible for more incompetent and unnecessary books than any other outside the field of sociology. It attracts phonies and amateurs as a candle attracts moths.” 15 Howard perceives terrorism as an unpleasant, even obnoxious research topic that is messy in more than one way. To take this observation one step further, historians’ reluctance to deal with the topic of terrorism perhaps was (and to some extent still is) attributable to the fact that they fear researching the history of terrorism might entangle them in contemporary politics and leave them without the distance they require to examine the subject objectively.

Other, more structural reasons for historians’ reservations about terrorism research may be found in the history of historiography. Since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, academic historiography has tended to focus primarily on large structures and processes of national interest, such as the state, domestic or foreign policy, nation building, the church, industrialization, and social movements. When historians did choose to do biographical research on individuals, they usually focused on prominent and important individuals in government and politics, in the economy and society, or in literature and the arts. Terrorists usually do not belong to these categories or fields of investigation and may therefore have seemed tangential or irrelevant to the research questions generated by an emphasis on structures, processes, and personalities. 16 As a result, even though political violence in general is a rich field of study in academic historiography, there has been very little research on terrorism. 17

The observation that professional historical research has been scarce until recently holds true even though professional historians had already begun to study terrorist perpetrators, incidents, and movements in the nineteenth century. 18 And it holds true even though there is one important exception to this rule: the historiography on prerevolutionary Russia, where terrorism obviously influenced the course of history. In 1866 a student named Dmitrii Vladimirovich Karakozov tried to shoot Tsar Alexander II. The tsar was not hurt, but in the wake of the attempt he abandoned the liberal reform policies he had promoted since the beginning of his reign. In response, a group calling itself Narodnaia Volia (People’s Will) was founded in 1879. Its members carried out a number of spectacular assassination attempts on the tsar, finally killing him on March 13 [March 1], 1881 using terrorist tactics. In the face of events such as these, experts in nineteenth-century Russian history have found it necessary to treat the history of terrorism.

In Russia, methodical inquiry into terrorism and its history began soon after the Revolution of 1905. 19 The revolution liberated Narodnaia Volia’s members from prison, and many of them used their unexpected freedom to describe their experiences in their memoirs. 20 Moreover, the Revolution of 1905 achieved some liberalization of the tsarist autocracy and its censorship. Historians could now begin to describe and analyze in independent, source-based studies the assassination attempts on Tsar Alexander II and other representatives of the state. 21 In 1917 the February Revolution and the October Revolution led to the opening of the state archives. As a result, research into the history of terrorism intensified, reaching its first peak in 1929 in connection with the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of Narodnaia Volia. 22

Soviet scholarship was not allowed to continue uninterrupted, however: it came to a halt in the mid-1930s, because by that time the prevailing opinion in Soviet academia was that Narodnaia Volia and the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Partiia sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov; PSR) were bourgeois associations striving for a liberal society. Therefore, these terrorist movements were regarded not as predecessors of the revolutionary transformation of Russia, but as enemies of Marxism. For about three decades research on terrorism and its history was nearly impossible. 23 It was not until the 1960s that professional historians in the Soviet Union returned to researching the history of terrorism. After Stalin’s death, the First Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, pursued a policy of de-Stalinization and in this context announced a new cultural policy in 1956. It paved the way for a number of new studies on non-Bolshevik revolutionary movements in tsarist Russia that had used terrorist tactics. 24 In sum, by the end of the 1960s a considerable body of Russian-language source editions and studies on nineteenth-century terrorism in tsarist Russia had been published.

By the end of the 1960s, a number of prominent historians in Western countries had also taken up the topic. Initially, most were specialists in the study of Eastern Europe and Russia. They built on the Russian-language research, contributed to it, and wrote their own interpretations of events for their Western reading public. 25 Moreover, in the 1970s, following the lead of social scientists, a few historians open to social-scientific methods in the study of history also turned to the history of terrorism. These Western historians presented broad, comparative studies on a number of cases of political violence, protest, and resistance in the past, 26 as well as in-depth research on significant movements, parties, and groups in prerevolutionary Russia that had used terrorism, placing them in their respective historical contexts and analyzing the causes and effects of their violence. 27 The role of women in the revolutionary movement became a topic of special inquiry. 28 The insights and implications of some of these historians’ work reach far beyond the cases investigated. For instance, in his study The Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party before the First World War , the Eastern European historian Manfred Hildermeier ultimately reflects on the emergence and role of political violence in agrarian societies that undergo processes of modernization, a topic of current and continuing relevance in societies around the world.

In 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian and Ukrainian interest in reassessing the non-Bolshevik revolutionary movements without the necessity of taking Soviet ideology into account led to another surge in history writing on this topic. 29 Concurrently, a new generation of Eastern European historians in the West also turned to the history of Russian terrorist movements. 30 Toward the end of the millennium, few professional historians had decided to devote themselves to the study of terrorism, and those historians in both the East and the West who did, focused primarily on the terrorist movements in prerevolutionary Russia. Thus it was that a corpus of systematic research on questions related to the history of terrorism existed mainly for prerevolutionary Russia, and not for other states.

By contrast, in the twentieth century the history of terrorism in the United States did not play much of a role in the country’s national historiography. This was due not least to the fact that terrorism was not seen as homegrown in the United States, but as foreign. 31 There are several reasons for this perception. For one, the terrorist attacks that occurred in the United States were rarely labeled as such. Instead, they were called “acts of resistance” against the politics of Reconstruction following the Civil War, or “labor unrest,” or “mass shootings” perpetrated by “lone gunmen.” 32 In the historiography on left-wing radicalism, scholars often carefully avoided using the term “terrorism” in order to prevent stereotyping. Moreover, if the term was applied to people and groups, from the actions of outlaw Jesse James and of Confederate guerrillas during the Civil War to the bombings of Chicago’s Haymarket Square and the buildings of the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street, in the majority of these studies the terrorist aspect remained peripheral. Thus, although numerous studies on class conflict in the United States, on American anarchism, and on the Ku Klux Klan have been produced by historians since the beginning of the twentieth century and particularly since the 1970s, 33 the primary focus in these studies has not been on the violence involved. The American historian Beverly Gage concluded that although, at the end of the twentieth century, Americans had “ histories of terrorism,” what “did not exist was a coherent historiography of terrorism, a definable way to think about the role such violence has (or has not) played in the American past.” 34 And similarly, for Western Europe there were a number of studies dedicated to certain people, groups, or prominent attacks, 35 but no systematic, in-depth research on the phenomenon of political violence comparable to that found in the historiography of Russia.

Reviewing the entire body of literature taken into account here, we see that the time frame covered by historians in both the East and the West was fairly broad. Collectively and in some cases individually as well, these scholars scrutinized the early-modern and modern eras. Owing to the specific methods and requirements of their discipline, however, they rarely addressed developments and events that took place after the end of World War II. The explanation for this hesitancy to choose more recent topics is straightforward: professional historians rely on archival sources and other written documents or documented oral material. Not surprisingly, in the 1970s such material was rarely available for the then active clandestine terrorist groups, as well as for the then ongoing counterterrorist policies and security measures. 36 Historians therefore had (and in many cases still have) to wait for such documents to become accessible. Their opportunity to research the topic would come with their access to the material.

For these reasons, in the 1970s contributions to the study of terrorism by professional historians could not be useful and readily applicable in the same way as the contributions of the social-scientist pioneers of terrorism studies. This explains why historians working on the topic of terrorist violence had to settle for a relatively marginal position in the attention of policy makers and broad audiences as well as in the emerging field of terrorism studies. None of the professional historians active in terrorism research gained the privilege and power of interpretation comparable to that of the early social scienctists. 37 This became even more obvious after 9/11.

Writing the History of Terrorism in the New Millennium

Since the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, on September 11, 2001, terrorism, terrorism studies, and the history of terrorism have attracted more and more attention. This is why, in the wake of 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks across the world, innumerable new works on these topics have appeared in academia. 38 Some of the authors of this literature are the pioneers of terrorism studies; 39 others represent a new generation of experts; 40 some authors were political scientists who were now turning to the topic; 41 and some were journalists or literary writers dealing with the subject for the first time. 42 Whatever their background, all these authors usually intended to introduce students and the wider public to the phenomenon of terrorism, giving interpretations of terrorist violence and its place in the twenty-first century and striving to explain its global surge. Certainly, books belonging to this genre of literature vary considerably in substance, focus, and perspective, but whatever their exact content, and just like the classic introductions to the field written by the pioneers of terrorism studies since the 1970s, in their writings the authors of most of these new interpretations of terrorism addressed historical questions—either explicitly by including a chapter dedicated to the history of terrorism or by pointing to what they regarded as incidences of terrorism in world history, or implicitly by interpreting the past through the present.

As was the social-scientific terrorism literature of the 1970s, the interpretations of the history of terrorism written right at the beginning of the twenty-first century were overwhelmingly rereadings of familiar historical events based on the available literature, rather than investigations into new archival and other primary sources. They also tended to place past events of terrorism and their periodization into the framework of the standard narrative of terrorism studies and influential metanarratives in the social sciences (such as the sequence of the premodern, modern, and postmodern eras), rather than into the frame of specific national and international historical contexts and developments. This is hardly surprising: with few exceptions, most of the authors were, again, academics who had been trained as social scientists. Philosophers, journalists, and pundits also presented prominent and thought-provoking interpretations of 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks that were in many respects different and even contradictory, but all of them interesting and influential. 43 And again, taken together, these introductory chapters, narratives, and interpretations explicitly or implicitly suggested ways of reading the history of terrorism.

Certainly, there were also historians who reacted to the attacks on September 11, 2001. But because historical research typically is laborious and time-consuming, their contributions began to appear only toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Their initial contributions roughly fall into four categories: first, there are monographs and anthologies giving large overviews of terrorism and its history since antiquity; 44 secondly, there are books and special issues of journals covering terrorism since the beginning of the modern era up until today; 45 thirdly, there are publications on the history of specific types of terrorism, such as car bombings or hijackings; 46 and fourthly, there are contributions dealing with prominent cases, such as the book on Karakozov’s attempt to assassinate Tsar Alexander II in 1866 by the historian of modern Russia Claudia Verhoeven, the study on Vera Zasulich’s murder of General Fedor Trepov in St. Petersburg in 1878 by the Russian and Eastern European historian Ana Siljak, the monograph on Émile Henry’s attacks in fin de siecle Paris by the French and European historian John Merriman, and the analysis of the Wall Street bombing in 1920 by the American historian Beverly Gage. 47 The authors of these books, anthologies, and special issues mostly based their studies on published and in some cases also on archival sources including works of art and fiction, as well as on scholarly historical research and writing.

At the same time, toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, historical research appeared on the terrorism and counterterrorism carried out during the 1970s. Around the year 2000—thirty years after their formation as prescribed by the respective public records acts in many Western countries—state archives began to declassify certain files associated with national efforts to fight terrorist groups, making these files available for research. Moreover, some victims’ family members as well as a few former members of terrorist organizations began to speak and write about their experiences and memories. Contemporary historians were now able to start researching terrorist groups, such as the Red Army Faction in West Germany and the Weathermen in the United States. 48 Among the most frequently treated research topics were the terrorists’ political ideas, communication policies, media reception, and public debates on attacks, as well as the states’ reactions more generally. 49 Ulrich Herbert used a generational approach to analyze the perspectives of the “generation of 68” toward state, society, and violence; 50 and Jeremy Veron and Petra Terhoeven, as well as the authors of the volume An International History of Terrorism , applied comparative and transnational approaches to investigate the connections and interrelations of terrorist groups and their audiences in Western Europe, the United States, and beyond. 51 Still, historical research on terrorism and counterterrorism in the 1970s has only just begun, and many important questions remain to be investigated.

The social-scientist perspective on the history of terrorism can also be seen in these texts. Either most of the contributions by historians published toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century use the framework of the history of terrorism established by the social-scientific pioneers of terrorism studies, or they still fit into this frame even if they do not refer to it explicitly. Usually, the authors of these historical publications did not aim at questioning or challenging these narratives. The approach to the frame of reference changed with a number of publications that started appearing at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. They still have to be considered academic reactions to 9/11 and to the universal increase of terrorist violence thereafter.

What characterizes the publications by professional historians released since 2010 is that quite a number of these studies present fresh interpretations of the overall history of terrorism. Their authors arrive at these reinterpretations by using different sets of source material and methods of history writing, and they present different narratives. For example, the cultural historian Mikkel Thorup—one of the first to offer such a reevaluation of the standard narrative—uses more or less well-known political tracts and the classic approach of history of ideas as it is applied to the intellectual history of political theory. With the help of this approach, he intends to show that “the state form determines its challengers,” and that it does so not in a conscious or intentional way, but because the state “is the privileged descriptor and all-important center of attention. Changes in how the state organizes, describes and legitimates itself will have profound consequences for how it conceptualizes challenges and how it can be fought, both legitimatorily [ sic ] and violently.” 52 Somewhat similarly, the historian of modern Russia Martin A. Miller integrated into his narrative of the history of terrorism “the violence of governments and insurgencies into a single narrative format as a way of understanding terrorism in its broadest historical representation.” 53 In an article published earlier, Richard Bach Jensen also argued for an essential interconnection between government action and terrorist violence (as well as other factors) in explaining the origins of anarchist violence. 54 Other studies began to reconstruct and analyze little-known cases in addition to the prominent ones and investigated larger time frames in the history of terrorism and counterterrorism based on published and archival sources, as well as on the scholarly social scientific and historical literature. 55 Whatever the precise narrative and its basis, however, a common denominator of all these publications is that—in different ways and with varying emphases—they pay increased attention to the dynamics and interactions between terrorism, on the one hand, and the state, public, and media actions and reactions, on the other, in order to analyze and explain the emergence and development of terrorism during larger time frames. These dynamics and interactions thus become an integral part of the narrative, “bringing the state back in” (Theda Skocpol) to the history of terrorism.

In all these and other studies mentioned previously, research by professional historians has begun to yield results. And as more material becomes available over time, it can be expected that more historical studies will be produced. But how did these results and historical research more generally change the ways in which the history of terrorism is conceived? The answer to this question first requires a review of those interpretations and narratives, which are still dominant in the field of terrorism studies.

Major Narratives of the History of Terrorism

The standard narrative of the global history of terrorism since the 1970s was presented by the polymath Walter Laqueur and the American political scientist David C. Rapoport. Laqueur published his book Terrorism in 1977. 56 This pioneering empirical study covers all aspects of terrorism as a phenomenon of political violence, including its history. Laqueur takes into account a remarkably broad range of terrorist phenomena. As early forms of terrorism, Laqueur mentions the Jewish Sicarii in their fight against the Roman Empire, the Assassins in medieval Persia, and the Indian Thugs. According to Laqueur, the turning point toward modern terrorism is the French Revolution, when the word “terror” ( terreur ) became laden with political and secular meaning. In Laqueur’s opinion, the origins of modern terrorism lie in the Enlightenment and the rise of the revolutionary principles of democracy and nationalism, and especially in the idea of nationhood. As the first high point of terrorist violence he describes the nihilist and anarchist “propaganda of the deed” of the 1880s and 1890s. 57 Furthermore, Laqueur examines nationalist terrorism as exemplified by the Irish, Armenian, and Macedonian separatist movements, and he also addresses right-wing groups such as the Romanian Iron Guard, the German Free Corps, and the Zionist Irgun and Lehi (whose name derives from the acronym LEHI, for Lohamel Herut Israel [“Fighters for the Freedom of Israel”]), as well as the Muslim Brotherhood. 58

Rapoport, who also began to publish on terrorism and its history in the 1970s, developed an influential theoretical approach to the history of terrorism. The theory explains the evolution of terrorism on the basis of historical patterns, making it possible, at least to a certain extent, to predict future developments of the phenomenon. In essays such as “Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions” and in his “four wave theory,” 59 Rapoport argues the existence of a religiously inspired premodern terrorism, like Laqueur citing the Sicarii, Assassins, and Thugs as examples. For Rapoport, modern terrorism began in 1879 in Russia and comprises four ideological waves: anarchist (1878–1919), anticolonial (1920s–early 1960s), New Left (mid-1960s–1990s), and religious (1979–?). He defines a wave as a “cycle of activity in a given time period” and exhibiting an international character, in which “similar activities occur in many countries driven by a common predominant energy shaping participating groups and their mutual relationships.” As the names of these waves suggest, each is driven by a different energy. Rapoport maintains that a wave lasts for approximately a generation. This prognostic capability of theory of waves is one reason his theory is much valued by researchers studying terrorism. 60 Rapoport explains the emergence of the first wave as having been made possible by advances in transportation and communication technology (the invention of the telegraph, the expansion of railways, and the founding of daily newspapers) and having been fueled by the dissemination of democratic ideas and the discovery of a strategy of terror by Russian revolutionaries. Each new wave is then characterized by a new ideology as well as new technologies of communication and weaponry. 61

This narrative of the forerunners of terrorism found in ancient times in religious violence and tyrannicide, the origins of revolutionary terrorism in the terror of the French Revolution, and its evolution by way of Narodnaia Volia in tsarist Russia and anarchist individuals in Western Europe and the United States is today considered valid by the overwhelming majority of the current literature on terrorism and its history. This literature also includes a basic consensus on classifying terrorism according to the categories of social-revolutionary, ethnic-nationalistic, and radically right-wing, even though these three types are not equally integrated into the history of terrorism. In the 1990s, religious terrorism was added as a fourth category. 62

Since the late 1990s and even more prominently since 2001, two contrary counternarratives have begun to challenge the standard narration of the history of terrorism. According to the first counternarrative, modern terrorism begins with the 1972 attack against the Israeli Olympic team in Munich. 63 This interpretation results from an emphasis on the role of technology in this violent attack. The taking of hostages in Munich was the first act of terrorism to be broadcast on television in real time to a worldwide audience. This fact is indeed noteworthy. But while technical innovations may indeed justify the marking of a turning point within the history of terrorism, they do not indicate the beginning of (modern) terrorism, because the tactic of exploiting the media technology then available had already been developed and tested frequently.

The second counternarrative posits that terrorism is a universal phenomenon spanning all of human history. Terrorist violence, argue the authors advocating this approach, has always existed and has been experienced all over the world. 64 The distinction between this interpretation and the standard narrative can be explained by the differences in their understanding of terrorism. Those who view terrorism as an anthropological phenomenon have a broad conception of this form of political violence. For Caleb Carr, terrorism is “warfare deliberately waged against civilians with the purpose of destroying their will to support either leaders or policies that the agents of such violence find objectionable”; 65 and for Martin A. Miller, it is a form of violence encompassing both insurgent terrorism and state terror. 66 Such definitions broaden the history of terrorism into a history of murder, terror, and psychological warfare, which covers a multitude of different violent phenomena ranging from Greek tactics for intimidating opponents, to the Spanish Inquisition, to National Socialist and Stalinist state terror, to the bombing of cities by German and Allied Forces in World War II and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are important subjects in a history of violence, but they should not be lumped in with the history of terrorism, lest it lose analytical incisiveness regarding its actual topic and invite revanchist interpretations. 67 Neither of these counternarratives represents a persuasive alternative for a history of terrorism.

The Significance of Place and Time in the History of Terrorism

Within the standard narrative of the history of terrorism, the main focus lies on Russia. Even if Laqueur and Rapoport both mention different beginnings and forms of terrorism, they concurrently argue that the decisive and potent manifestation of modern terrorism originated in Russia, and that the most important organization in the history of terrorism was the Russian group Narodnaia Volia, founded in 1879. After all, it was the members of Narodnaia Volia who self-confidently professed to be terrorists, and it was they who assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881. So—at least at first glance—there are indeed good and historically precise arguments to be made for highlighting the part that Russia played in the history of terrorism, not least because terrorism played such a decisive role in Russian history.

Furthermore, the times and circumstances under which the standard narrative of the history of terrorism was developed may have encouraged a focus on Russia. Laqueur and Rapoport developed the standard narrative of the history of terrorism in the 1970s—during the middle of the Cold War. In the eyes of many historians who were researching and writing during the Cold War, the importance to world history of the series of assassination attempts that Russian terrorists staged in 1866 and again after 1879 can scarcely be overstated. The “hunt” that the members of Narodnaia Volia carried out against their “crowned game” destabilized the tsarist empire and halted the political, economic, and social reforms that Tsar Alexander II had launched and promoted since early in his reign. The destabilization and the end of the reform processes, in turn, were important preconditions and causes for the revolutions in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century: the Revolution of 1905, and the February Revolution and October Revolution of 1917. 68 The Bolshevik October Revolution, from which emerged the Soviet Union and ultimately the armed confrontation with the West, was one of the pivotal events for the Cold War world. This was also true of events that had paved the way for the revolution, such as the terrorist attacks carried out by Narodnaia Volia and the Socialist Revolutionary Party, even if both groups were opposed to and rivals of the Bolsheviks. These groups had contributed to the destabilization of the tsarist state by means of repeated terrorist attacks and thus were important in leading to the Russian Revolution.

Another factor has to be taken into account as well. Based on the then-current experience with terrorist attacks in highly industrialized countries in the 1970s, social-science experts in terrorism studies and historians of terrorism alike tended to pay attention mainly to social-revolutionary terrorism (as compared to its ethnic-nationalist, far-right, or religious manifestations). The Russian terrorist movements fit the bill precisely.

Moreover, the history of historiography and its authors played a role in developing this strong focus on Russia. Facilitating it was the fact that a number of reliable source editions and a fairly extensive corpus of scholarly historical research and writing on the history of terrorism in Russia were readily available in the 1970s, just when the standard narrative of the history of terrorism was being developed. The reasons are easy to understand. The existing literature in Russian and other European languages that had been published on the topic since the late nineteenth century assured historians of terrorism that they were on solid ground here, and the source editions and detailed accounts by Soviet researchers based on archival sources published before the 1930s and since the 1960s lent themselves to synthetic, comprehensive narratives for Western audiences, who, because of language barriers, had very limited access to the original studies. 69 The availability of such editions and research publications was especially valuable during the Cold War, when Soviet archives were not easily accessible by researchers from abroad. In short, the history of historiography of terrorism shaped its very content.

Last, but not least, the writing of history is always pursued by historians who have their own personal histories. Thus, any historiography has to take into account the biographies and backgrounds of the authors who wrote the histories in question. Emigrants from Russia as well as Eastern and Central Europe seem to have become especially prolific and prominent in the study of terrorism. They had fled the violence of the Russian Revolutions and the ensuing civil war, or the persecution before and after the Nazi takeover in Germany and Austria, Reichspogromnacht (also known as Kristallnacht ), World War II, and the Holocaust. They had emigrated to Palestine/Israel or to Western European countries, and to the United States, and in their new home countries they had taken up the study and writing of history, often speaking all the relevant European languages fluently. 70 Perhaps not least because of such personal experiences, some of them—Adam B. Ulam and Walter Laqueur, for instance—turned an attentive eye to the role that violence had played generally in history and politics and especially in Russian as well as Eastern and Central European history, in order to better understand the origins of the events that had uprooted them and their families. 71 An additional reason might be that they, as recent immigrants, recognized the opportunity that lay in turning to the history of terrorism, a field that was perhaps regarded as messy and lacking in prestige, but that was understudied in the West.

On the basis of their personal experiences and in the context of the Cold War, some of these emigrants from Russia and from Eastern and Central Europe tended to stress the importance of Narodnaia Volia, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and the Russian Revolution or drew even more long-range connections between earlier Russian history and the global history of terrorism. One such example is Albert Parry. Born and raised in Russia, he escaped a White Army firing squad, and then fled the country and its civil war for the United States, where he wrote a book on the history of terror and terrorism (Parry does not differentiate between these terms) that is insightful in many respects. 72 In it he points to the many different phenomena of violence that he considers to lie at the root of terror and terrorism in East and West. Time and again, however, he returns to the special role that Russia played in the history of political violence in general and in the history of terror and terrorism specifically: “From the heritage of the Mongol-Tatar enslavers and torturers,” Parry writes, “carried on and improved upon by such native insurgents as Razin and Pugachev, derives much of the terror of that giant bloody upheaval, the Russian Revolution. And from that Revolution stems much of the political terror in the world today.” 73 Thus, according to Parry, important roots of the history of terror and terrorism lay in the thirteenth-century struggles of European Russians with the peoples of Central Asia. Through the Russian Revolution and the political measures effected by the Soviet Union, these forms of terrorism and terror became important phenomena of world history. Parry’s sweeping historical narrative, influenced by his personal history, is incorrect; the claims and connections it suggests cannot stand up to the scrutiny of historical research. But at the time of the Cold War it was well received, perhaps not least because it accorded so well with the prevailing mindset of the era.

With the end of the Cold War, the global significance of the Russian Revolution waned. Moreover, a number of terrorist groups that had been active in Europe for many years and connected to social-revolutionary ideologies one by one began to enter peace negotiations and renounce violence. The era of political-secular terrorism—according to the standard narrative of the history of terrorism—seemed to be ending.

Yet, despite the supposed end of this era, the tactic of terrorism lived on, as signified at the latest by the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. In the political arena, these attacks were immediately interpreted in historical terms, but the interpretations were contradictory. On the one hand, commentators and politicians alike emphasized the new and unprecedented aspects of this violence. The American secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, spoke of “a new kind of war,” and President George W. Bush of “a new kind of evil.” 74 Such views went hand in hand with the instant conviction of the transformative power of these attacks and their historical significance worldwide: “America, in the spasms of a few hours, became a changed country,” Lance Morrow remarked in Time magazine. 75 Other commentators spoke of a “turning point” in history, a fundamental “break in the development of humanity,” and the beginning of a new “age of terrorism.” 76 Interpretations such as these were decidedly future oriented, because they seemed to suggest that 9/11 was an event without precedent, without history. 77

On the other hand, different interpretations of the 9/11 terrorist attacks turned the attention of politicians, academics, and the general public to what—according to the standard narrative of the history of terrorism—could be called “holy terror,” or pre- and postmodern, religious terrorism. 78 As a consequence of this new focus of attention, another line of tradition, already present in the standard narrative, now came to the fore: that linking the current terrorist attacks perpetrated by Muslims to the medieval Islamic sect of the so-called Assassins, the Ismaili. 79 This narrative seemed to gain more plausibility as the tactic of suicide terrorism became more prominent. 80 Important examples in addition to the 9/11 attacks include the repeated suicide attacks by Lebanese and Palestinian groups, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade against American, French, and Israeli targets since the early 1980s, and the attacks on London’s public transport system on July 7, 2005, to name but a few. 81 The fact these suicide attacks were perpetrated by Muslims strengthened this narrative, even though, starting in 1987, it was members of the non-religiously based Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka who had been responsible for the majority of suicide attacks.

As they had during the Cold War, when terrorism experts looked to Russian history for the origins of terrorism, after 9/11 many authors and commentators maintained that the Assassins and the Islamic history of martyrdom had exerted an influence on, and found a receptive audience in, modern suicide terrorists. Some authors tried to locate the origins of terrorism and specifically of an Islamic history of violence in medieval Persia, Iraq, and Syria. 82

These attempts to trace the origins of terrorism to medieval Persian or Russian history or to declare the phenomenon entirely unprecedented are unconvincing in the face of historical analysis. Clearly there have been too many examples of terrorist attacks since the nineteenth century for the 9/11 attack to be thought of as new. The use of passenger planes as weapons in a suicide attack was of course unprecedented, and the attacks created a great deal of havoc. Moreover, they were especially deadly in that an exceptionally high number of people from all over the world, who worked in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, were killed. The terrorist tactic itself was not new, however. Furthermore, attempts to trace the origins of terrorism to medieval Persian or to Russian history take current phenomena as a starting point and suggest (more or less) sweeping genealogies that are based largely on prima facie analogies. In the construction of some of these genealogies, striking forms of war and violence along with vague political or religious connections serve as reference points in drawing lines of tradition across seven or eight centuries, ignoring all differences in detail and all the changes in almost every sphere of life that have since occurred and that distinguish these societies. It would not be difficult to point to a large number of cruel wars and horrifying forms of violence in Western societies, however, including religiously based tyrannicide and the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) in Europe, or the wars between conquerors or settlers and indigenous Americans in the New World, or the lynching of African Americans and others in America, to give just a few examples. Why should phenomena of violence such as these figure any less prominently in tracing the origins of terrorism? Furthermore, one cannot escape noticing that attempts to trace the beginnings of terrorism to medieval Persian or Russian history ascribe the emergence of this phenomenon of political violence to the culture and history of the West’s then-current geopolitical opponent. Together with the idea that the 9/11 attacks were unprecedented, all three narratives suggest that it is unnecessary to look for the origins and causes of terrorism in the history of those who present these narratives: the history of the West.

In conclusion, from a historical perspective none of the major narratives of the history of terrorism that have been and still are dominant in the field of terrorism studies is entirely convincing. Moreover, studies by professional historians since 2010 and the fresh interpretations of the history of terrorism they offer challenge these major narratives by stressing the dynamics and interactions between terrorism, the state, the public, and the media in order to understand and explain the history of terrorism since its emergence. Both these results call for a new historical approach to the global history of terrorism.

A New Global History of Terrorism

This Handbook presents a reevaluation of the major narratives in the history of terrorism, by exploring the emergence and the use of terrorism in world history from antiquity up to the twenty-first century on the basis of new historical research. Because it is impossible for any one historian to possess in-depth knowledge of all the relevant sources and to keep up with the specialized literature that has to be considered in so large a field of study, such an exploration necessarily is a collective endeavor. Therefore, this volume brings together a number of professional historians whose expertise lies in different places and eras. The contributors have also pursued a variety of approaches in their earlier research. To be sure, all had studied the phenomenon of violence in history before, violence that in its various forms (such as assassination, guerrilla war, revolution, or terror) was important for their respective time and place. But not all of the contributors carried out research on terrorism before contributing to this Handbook , and only a few of them would describe themselves as having a special focus on the history of terrorism. Furthermore, in their chapters they consult a wide-ranging set of sources, which they analyze using different methodologies. For these reasons, the chapters of this Handbook offer a wide variety of innovative and original perspectives on the history of terrorism.

In light of the breadth and diversity of the research covered by this Handbook , two guidelines ensure its cohesion. The first is a common definition of terrorism. The German sociologist Peter Waldmann defines it as “violence against a political order from below which is planned and prepared [ planmäßig vorbereitet ] and meant to be shocking. Such acts of violence are supposed to spread feelings of insecurity and intense fear, but they are also meant to generate sympathy and support.” 83 The term “political order” in the original German terminology can include the social and economic order of a society, so Waldmann’s definition also includes right-wing terrorists (such as the National Socialist Underground [NSU] in Germany or Anders Behring Breivik in Norway) and social-revolutionary terrorists (such as the nineteenth-century anarchists). Waldmann underlines the political dimension expressed in the political intentions and objectives of the violence committed by the terrorists. 84 Terrorism is thus a politically motivated strategy of resorting to spectacular violence with the goal of producing a powerful psychological effect in a society—fear on the one hand, sympathy on the other—in order to compel political change. This view limits the concept of terrorism to underground acts of violence against an inherently more powerful opponent (bottom-up), whereas acts of violence by the state against the population (top-down) are called “terror.” And even if one can find a wealth of definitions of terrorism in the general literature on this topic, more recent research literature reflects broad international agreement on the elements identified in this definition. 85 Therefore, the contributors to the Handbook have used this definition, as far as was feasible for them with regard to their respective fields.

The major narratives in the history of terrorism, taken together, constitute the second guiding principle. Because the Handbook intends to reevaluate these narratives on the basis of new empirical research, basic statements constituting these narratives indicate crucial fields of study. This holds true for the standard narrative of terrorism presented by Laqueur and Rapoport as well as for the two narratives challenging this standard narration: the one maintaining that modern terrorism begins with the 1972 attack against the Israeli Olympic team in Munich, and the other stating that terrorism is a universal phenomenon spanning the entirety of time. 86 The historical reevaluation in this Handbook takes all of these narratives into account either implicitly or explicitly.

Of these three narratives of the history of terrorism, the standard narrative certainly poses the greatest challenge for historical reevaluation. For instance, it is imperative to study the question of whether there existed a premodern terrorism that mainly had religious goals, a modern terrorism fighting for secular-political aims, and a postmodern terrorism that is primarily motivated by religion. Then, for each of these time frames, the question arises of whether terrorism was actually perpetrated by the groups that the authors of the standard narrative have suggested. Regarding premodern religious terrorism, for example, the question arises of whether the Sicarii, the Assassins, and the Thugs actually used terrorist tactics, and if so, with what objective. Thus, the statements set forth in the standard narrative of the history of terrorism served as a selection criterion in deciding, for this Handbook , what required study regarding the emergence and use of terrorism in world history, from antiquity up to the twenty-first century. Of course, there are always other topics that warrant inclusion as well.

At the core of the standard narrative is the problem of the relationship between terrorism and modernity. The term “modernity” has at least two different basic meanings, one temporal and one substantive: “modern” can be used to denote an epoch in world history—the modern era—but it can also be used to characterize distinct phenomena and processes, such as industrialization or urbanization. However, there is no general agreement on how to flesh out these two meanings. When does the modern era start? When does it end? Suggestions for the beginning of the modern era range from the emergence of nominalism in the European High Middle Ages via Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press and the Reformation around 1500 to the political and industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, the substantive meaning of the term is as contested as the temporal one. In this respect, technological processes are as important as “big developments” such as urbanization, migration, mobility, and internationalization. Moreover, there are cultural aspects of modernity, its “promissory notes” (Björn Wittrock), that were able to create new affiliations and identities even in places and at times where the substantive changes were marginal. 87 All these aspects of modernity have to be taken into account when examining possible links between modernity and the emergence of terrorism.

However, this coming together of technological innovations, enormous socioeconomic developments, and modern culture is precisely the point where the expertise of historians is called for. It is where their work has to begin. Rapoport and Laqueur both argued that the concept of modern terrorism originated in the French Revolution with the birth of modern democracy, and they repeatedly emphasized the importance of technological, societal, and intellectual developments for the emergence of terrorism in the nineteenth century as well as the changes it underwent in the twentieth. But how exactly did these factors—technological innovations, immense socioeconomic developments, and modern culture—come together to bring forth the new form of political violence that we today call terrorism? Exactly how and where did this transformation of political violence take place? How did it work? Who contributed what? And concerning the time frame we have to ask: What was the starting point? What traditions and practices in the use of political violence already existed that were subject to the transformations unfolding in modern society? What kinds of events were its precursors? Did the phenomenon of terrorism as Waldmann defined it exist prior to the invention of the term in the French Revolution—for example, in the European religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? If so, what does that mean for our assumptions about the relationship between terrorism and modernity?

And finally, there is the question of transfer and reception. According to the standard narrative of terrorism studies, modern rebel terrorism originated in Europe and quickly spread to other parts of the world, such as the Balkans, Asia, and South America. If terrorism and modernity are linked, the question arises of whether there are causal links between their spread: did somebody using terroristic methods in China or the Philippines have to embrace certain techniques and ideas that might be characterized as modern? In other words: Did terrorism spread with modernity? Where and at what time was it taken up, and in what ways? What were the preconditions in different societies that made the concept and the method of terrorism appear to certain groups to be an interesting and relevant tool? How was it linked to the general global movement of goods, people, and ideas?

The contributions assembled in this Handbook provide specific answers to questions such as these and thus shape a new history of terrorism. And it might well be that questions such as the ones above and the answers provided are of current relevance if we want to understand the upsurge of terrorism worldwide and find long-lasting political responses.

Acknowledgments

I wrote most of this chapter while I was a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; DFG), and I would like to express my gratitude to the Foundation for its support of my work. Some of the thoughts presented here were presented in an initial version in the radio feature “Der Anschlag und seine Geschichte: Was wir aus den tatsächlichen Ursprüngen des Terrorismus lernen können,” broadcast on April 23, 2017 by Deutschlandfunk in the series “Essay & Diskurs.” My thanks go to Wolfgang Schiller for inviting me to contribute to the series and for his encouragement and support when formulating these ideas. Moreover, I am indebted to Richard Bach Jensen, Andrea Meyer-Fraatz, and Franziska Schedewie, whose corrections and critiques were extremely valuable. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

For a critique of the concept of modernity, see my “Toward a History on Equal Terms: A Discussion of Provincializing Europe ,” History and Theory 47, no. 1 (2008): 69–84. In this text and this volume, however, the term is employed according to common usage.

See, e.g., Alphons Thun, Geschichte der revolutionären Bewegungen in Russland (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1883); Cesare Lombroso and Rodolfo Laschi, Il delitto politico e le rivoluzioni in rapporto al diritto (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1890). Thun was a professor of national economies, and Lombroso was an Italian medical scientist, psychiatrist, and anthropologist. Lombroso’s study was very influential in its time. It appeared in German translation in 1891 and in French translation in 1892.

Richard Bach Jensen, “The United States, International Policing, and the War against Anarchist Terrorism, 1900–1914,” Terrorism and Political Violence 13, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 15–46, at 16; reprinted in Terrorism: Critical Concepts in Political Science , vol. 1, The First or Anarchist Wave , ed. David C. Rapoport (London: Routledge, 2006) , 369–400, at 371.

See Richard Bach Jensen, “Daggers, Rifles and Dynamite: Anarchist Terrorism in Nineteenth Century Europe,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 1 (2004) : 116–153, at 116.

One of these few is Martha Crenshaw. See her Revolutionary Terrorism: The FLN in Algeria, 1954–1962 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 1978), and Terrorism in Africa (New York: G. K. Hall; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1994).

For more on these terrorist groups and their attacks, see p. 7, nn. 49–51.

For an analysis and assessment of these security policies by one of the pioneers in the field of terrorism studies, see David Carlton, The West’s Road to 9/11: Resisting, Appeasing, and Encouraging Terrorism since 1970 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Seminal works in English from this pioneering research period are David Carlton and Carlo Schaerf, eds., International Terrorism and World Security (London: Croom Helm, 1975); Yonah Alexander, ed., International Terrorism: National, Regional, and Global Perspectives (New York: Praeger, 1976); Yonah Alexander and Seymour Maxwell Finger, eds., Terrorism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives , with a foreword by Hans J. Morgenthau (New York: John Jay Press, 1977); Yonah Alexander, David Carlton, and Paul Wilkinson, eds., Terrorism: Theory and Practice (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979); Martha Crenshaw, “The Causes of Terrorism,” Comparative Politics 13, no. 4 (July 1981): 379–399; Martha Crenshaw and Irving Louis Horowitz, eds., Terrorism, Legitimacy, and Power: The Consequences of Political Violence; Essays (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983); Alex P. Schmid and Janny de Graaf, Violence as Communication: Insurgent Terrorism and the Western News Media (London: Sage, 1982); Alex P. Schmid, Political Terrorism: A Research Guide to Concepts, Theories, Data Bases and Literature , with a bibliography by the author and a world directory of “terrorist” organizations by Albert J. Jongman (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1984).

See esp. the publications of Walter Laqueur: Terrorism (Boston: Little, 1977), reprinted as A History of Terrorism: With a New Introduction by the Author , 2 nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), and The Terrorism Reader: A Historical Anthology (New York: New American Library, 1978), published in a new and supplemented edition as Voices of Terror: Manifestos, Writings, and Manuals of Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Other Terrorists from Around the World and Throughout the Ages (New York: Reed Press, 2004); and of David C. Rapoport, Assassination and Terrorism (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1971), “Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions,” American Political Science Review 78, no. 3 (1984): 658–677, “Why Does Messianism Produce Terror?” in Contemporary Research on Terrorism , ed. Paul Wilkinson and A. M. Stewart (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), 72–88, and “Four Wave Theory,” first presented as a paper to the American Political Science Association in 1985. For the respective titles see n. 59.

See his web page at UCLA, College: Social Sciences, Political Science, Distinguished Professor Emeritus David Rapoport, Biography, accessed February 19, 2021, https://polisci.ucla.edu/person/david-rapoport/ . See also Jeffrey Kaplan, “Waves of Political Terrorism,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia: Politics, Oxford University Press 2016, accessed February 19, 2021, https://oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228637-e-24 .

Cf. the web page of the publisher Taylor & Francis for the two journals: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=uter20 and https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ftpv20 .

See the information given on the Centre’s web page, “About CSTPV,” https://cstpv.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/# .

Standard works in English, many of which have become standard works for students of terrorism across the world, are Grant Wardlaw, Political Terrorism: Theory, Tactics, and Counter-Measures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); James M. Poland, Understanding Terrorism: Groups, Strategies, and Responses (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988); Martha Crenshaw, ed., Terrorism in Context (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995) ; Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Clifford E. Simonsen and Jeremy R. Spindlove, Terrorism Today: The Past, the Players, the Future (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000); David C. Rapoport, ed., Inside Terrorist Organizations (London: Frank Cass, 2001); Charles Townshend, Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat (New York: Random House, 2006) ; Gus Martin, Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives, and Issues , 3 rd ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2010). Most of these books have seen several editions.

Carlton observes a similar tendency for the higher echelons of the fields of security studies and international relations as represented for example by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, the United Kingdom’s Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), and “most of the leading Western journals in the international relations field.” See Carlton, The West’s Road to 9/11 , 3–4, at 4.

Michael Howard, as cited in Bruce Hoffman, “Current Research on Terrorism and Low-Intensity Conflict,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 15, no. 1 (1992): 25–37, at 25. Carlton, The West’s Road to 9/11 , 4 also gives this quotation.

There are exceptions to the rule, however, such as Menachem Begin, who fought against the British mandatory government in the 1940s and later became prime minister of Israel; and Gerry Adams, who is said to have been a high-ranking member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the 1970s before he was elected president of Sinn Féin and member of the British House of Commons.

Isabelle Duyvesteyn, a global historian and international studies scholar, the historian of international relations Beatrice de Graaf, the modern historians Robert Gerwarth, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, and Sylvia Schraut have come to similar conclusions. See, e.g., Isabelle Duyvesteyn, “The Role of History and Continuity in Terrorism Research,” in Mapping Terrorism Research: State of the Art, Gaps and Future Direction , ed. Magnus Ranstorp (New York: Routledge, 2006) , 51–75; Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Beatrice de Graaf, “Terroristen en hun bestrijders, vroeger en nu,” in Terroristen en hun bestrijders, vroeger en nu , ed. Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Beatrice de Graaf (Amsterdam: Boom, 2007), 7–12; Robert Gerwarth and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, “Internationalising Historical Research on Terrorist Movements in Twentieth-Century Europe,” European Review of History 14, no. 3 (2007): 275–281, at 275; Sylvia Schraut, “Zentrale Begriffe und Konzepte,” in Terrorismus und politische Gewalt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018) , 15–63.

They contributed in two distinct roles: as historical researchers and as contemporary pundits. For an early French study on a perpetrator of what is now discussed as one of the earliest cases of terrorist violence, see Louis-François du Bois, Charlotte de Corday, essai historique, offrant enfin des détails authentiques sur la personne et l’attentat de cette héroïne; avec pièces justificatives, portrait et fac-simile (Paris: Librairie historique de la Révolution, 1838). For a prominent German example of a historian-pundit, see Heinrich von Treitschke, “Der Socialismus und der Meuchelmord,” Preußische Jahrbücher 41, no. 6 (1878): 637–647. For examples of nineteenth-century terrorism research in disciplines other than history, see n. 2.

For an informative overview and in-depth discussion of the Russian historiography on terrorism as well as its political contexts, see the historiographical introductions in Mikhail Gerasimovich Sedov, Geroicheskii period revoliutsionnogo narodnichestva (Iz istorii politicheskoi bor’by) (Moscow: Mysl, 1966), 3–54, esp. 24–28 (focusing on Narodnaia Volia); Mikhail Ivanovich Leonov, Partiia sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov v 1905–1907 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPĖN, 1997), 3–25; Roman Aleksandrovich Gorodnitskii, Boevaia organizatsiia partii sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov v 1901–1911 gg . (Moscow: ROSSPĖN, 1998), 3–26, esp. 5f. (both focusing on the Socialist Revolutionary Party and its fighting organization). For an English-language overview, see Anke Hilbrenner and Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, “Introduction: Modern Times? Terrorism in Late Tsarist Russia,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 2 (2010): 161–171.

The most famous example is the 1921 autobiography by Vera Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist , trans. Camilla Chapin Daniels and G. A. Davidson (New York: International, 1927). On the Russian-language historiography on terrorism in this period, see esp. O. V. Shemiakina, “Istoriografiia narodnicheskogo dvizheniia glazami ego uchastnikov,” Vestnik RGGU: Seriia literaturovedenie, iazykoznanie, kul’turologiia 1 (2017): 132–139.

See esp. the studies by Mikhail Konstantinovich Lemke, Ocherki osvoboditel’nogo dvizheniia “shestidesiatykh godov” po neizdannym dokumentam s portretami (1908; The Hague: Mouton, in cooperation with Europe Printing, Vaduz, 1968); and Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Kornilov, Obshchestvennoe dvizhenīe pri Aleksandre II, 1855–1881: Istoricheskīe ocherki (Moscow: Tovarishchestvo tipografīi A. I. Mamontova, 1909).

A case in point is Dmitrii Vladimirovich Karakozov, who perpetrated the first assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander II in 1866. See, e.g., the Russian sources and research published on him, his background, and his attempt on the tsar’s life: Aleksei A. Shilov, “Iz istorii revoliutsionnago dvizheniia 1860-ch gg.,” Golos minuvshago 10–12 (1918): 159–168; V. P. Alekseev and B. P. Koz’min, Politicheskie Protsessy 60-kh g.g. materialy po istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Rossii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1923); Aleksei A. Shilov, “Pokushenie Karakozova 4 Aprelia 1866 g.,” Krasnyi arkhiv 17, no. 7 (1926): 91–137; M. M. Klevenskii and K. G. Kotel’nikov, eds., Pokushenie Karakozova: Stenograficheskii otchet po delu D. Karakozova, I. Khudiakova, N. Ishutina i. dr. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo tsentrarchiva R.S.F.S.R., 1928); Boris Jakovlevich Bukhshtab, “Posle vystrela Karakozova,” Katorga i ssylka: Istoriko-revoliutsionnyi vestnik 5 (1931): 50–88, at 78; B. I. Gorev and B. P. Koz’min, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie 1860-kh godov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo vsesoiuznogo obshchestva politkatorzhan i ssyl’no-poselentsev, 1932).

See Sedov, Geroicheskii period , 45f.; Leonov, Partiia sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov , 10f.; Gorodnitskii, Boevaia organizatsiia , 5, 10; Hilbrenner and Schenk, “Introduction,” 162.

See esp. the source edition of S. N. Valk, S. S. Volk, B. S. Itenberg, and Sh. M. Levin, eds., Revoliutsionnoe narodnichestvo 70-kh godov XIX veka: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov , 2 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1964); and the studies of R. V. Filippov, Revoliutsionnaia narodnicheskaia organizatsiia N. A. Ishutina—I. A. Khudiakova (1863–1866) (Petrozavodsk: Karel’skoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1964); Ė. S. Vilenskaia, Revoliutsionnoe podpol’e v Rossii (60-e gody XIX v.) (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka,” 1965); Sedov, Geroicheskii period ; Stepan Stepanovich Volk, Narodnaia Volia, 1879–1882 (Moscow: Nauka, 1966); Nikolai Alekseevich Troitskii, “Narodnaia Volia” pered tsarskim sudom 1880—1894 gg. , 2 nd expanded and revised ed., (Saratov: Izdat. Saratovskogo universiteta, 1983); Evgeniia Levovna Rudnitskaia, Russkaia revoliutsionnaia mysl: Demokraticheskaia pechat 1864–1873 g. (Moscow: Nauka, 1984).

For such studies in English, see, e.g., Edward Hallett Carr, Michael Bakunin (London: Macmillan, 1937); Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia [Italian Orig. 1952], trans. Francis Haskell, revised ed. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960); Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism (London: Cassell & Company, 1957); Oliver H. Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries February to October 1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958).

See esp. the anthologies by Eric John Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays (London: Weidenfeld, 1973), including essays from the years 1961–1972; and Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Gerhard Hirschfeld, eds., Social Protest, Violence, and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe (London: Macmillan, in association with Berg Publishers for the German Historical Institute, 1982) .

Notable studies by historians of Russia and Eastern Europe teaching in Western Europe, Israel, and the United States from this period are for example Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (1967; repr., Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), chap. 2; Philip Pomper, The Russian Revolutionary Intelligentsia , 2 nd ed. (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1993); Maureen Perrie, The Agrarian Policy of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party from Its Origins through the Revolution of 1905–1907 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Adam Bruno Ulam, In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1977); Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party before the First World War [German Orig. 1978] (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Astrid von Borcke, Gewalt und Terror im revolutionären narodničestvo: Die Partei Narodnaja Volja (1879–1883); Zur Entstehung und Typologie des politischen Terrors im Russland des 19. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Bundesinstitut für Ostwissenschaftliche und Internationale Studien, 1979); Jacques Baynac, Les socialistes-révolutionnaires de mars 1881 à mars 1917 (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1979); Norman M. Naimark, Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement under Alexander III (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Deborah Hardy, Land and Freedom: The Origins of Russian Terrorism, 1876–1879 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987); Nurit Schleifman, Undercover Agents in the Russian Revolutionary Movement: The SR Party, 1902–14 (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); Hannu Immonen, The Agrarian Program of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1900–1914 (Helsinki: SHS, 1988). On this see esp. Leonov, Partiia sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov , 14–17.

See esp. Barbara Alpern Engel and Clifford N. Rosenthal, eds., Five Sisters: Women against the Tsar , with a foreword by Alix Kates Shulman (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976); Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), chap. 5; Jay Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983); Barbara Alpern Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Barbara Alpern Engel, Women, Gender and Political Choice in the Revolutionary Movement of the 1870’s , Research Paper 66 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Marjorie Mayrock Center for Soviet and East European Research, March 1988). See also the book by the Menshevik writer Vera Broido, Apostles into Terrorists: Women and the Revolutionary Movement in the Russia of Alexander II (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1978).

See the source editions of Viktor Efimovich Kel’ner, ed., 1 marta 1881 goda: Kazn imperatora Aleksandra II; Dokumenty i vospominaniia (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1991); Oleg Vital’evich Budnitskii, ed., Istoriia terrorizma v Rossii v dokumentakh, biografiiakh, issledovaniiakh , 2. expanded and revised ed. (Rostov-on-Don: Feniks, 1996); Oleg Vital’evich Budnitskii, ed., Zhenshchiny-terroristki v Rossii (2. Rostov-on-Don: Feniks, 1996); Evgeniia Levovna Rudnitskaia, ed., Revoliutsionnyi radikalizm v Rossii: Vek deviatnadtsatyi; Dokumental’naia publikatsiia (Moscow: Arkheograficheskii tsentr, 1997); N. I. Delkov, A. A. I. Ushakov, A. A. Chernobaev, and E. I. Shcherbakova, eds., Politicheskaia politsiia i politicheskii terrorizm v Rossii (vtoraia polovina XIX–nachalo XX vv.): Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 2001); as well as the studies by V. M. Chernov, V partii sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov: Vospominaniia o vos’mi liderakh . Publication, introduction, edition and commentaries by A. P. Novikov and K. Khuzer. (Saint Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2007); K. N. Morozov, ed., Individual’nyi politicheskii terror v Rossii, XIX–nachalo XX v. Materialy konferentsii (Moscow: “Memorial,” 1996); Leonov, Partiia sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov ; Gorodnitskii, Boevaia organizatsiia ; Oleg Vital’evich Budnitskii, Terrorizm v Rossiiskom osvoboditel’nom dvizhenii: Ideologiia, ėtika, psichologiia (vtoraia polovina XIX–nachalo XX v.) (Moscow: ROSSPĖN, 2000); Valerīi M. Volkovins’kii and Īvanna V. Hīkonova, Revoliutsīinii terorizm v Rociīs’kīI imperiī i Ukraina (druga polovina XIX—pochatok XX ct.) (Kiev: Starii cbīt, 2006). Ekaterina Igorevna Shcherbakova, “Otshchepentsy”: Put k terrorizmu (60-e–80-e gody XIX veka) (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2008) contains a number of crucial sources.

See esp. Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Anna Geifman, Russia under the Last Tsar: Opposition and Subversion, 1894–1917 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999); Anna Geifman, Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000); Leonid Grigor’evich Praisman, Terroristy i revoliutsionery, okhranniki i provokatory (Moscow: ROSSPĖN, 2001).

Michael Kronenwetter, Terrorism: A Guide to Events and Documents (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004), vii; Michael Fellman, In the Name of God and Country: Reconsidering Terrorism in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 1.

Kronenwetter, Terrorism , vii–viii.

On violence in the United States in connection with class conflict, see Robert Hunter, Violence and the Labour Movement (London: Routledge & Sons, 1916); Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (New York: Viking Press, 1931); Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and esp. Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969). On the Ku Klux Klan, see David Mark Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1965 (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1965); Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (London: Secker & Warburg, 1971).

Beverly Gage, “Terrorism and the American Experience: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 98, no. 1 (2011): 73–94, at 81.

For Austria, Germany, and Switzerland see, e.g., Julius Hans Schoeps, Bismarck und sein Attentäter: Der Revolveranschlag Unter den Linden am 7. Mai 1866 (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1984); Harald Seyrl, Der Tod der Kaiserin: Die Ermordung der Kaiserin und Königin Elisabeth von Österreich-Ungarn am 10. September 1898 im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Darstellung (Vienna: Edition Seyrl, 1998). For France see, e.g., Jean Maitron, Ravachol et les anarchistes (Paris: Julliard, 1964); Association Française pour l’histoire de la justice, ed., L’assassinat du Président Sadi Carnot et le procès de Santo Ironimo Caserio (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1995).

There are a few exceptions, however. See, e.g., Jonathan Stevenson, “We Wrecked the Place”: Contemplating an End to the Northern Irish Troubles (New York: Free Press, 1996).

Thus also Schraut, “Zentrale Begriffe und Konzepte,” 25.

Thus also, e.g., Frank Trommler, “Foreword,” in War and Terror in Historical and Contemporary Perspective , ed. Michael Geyer (Washington, DC: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 2003), v. The holdings of the Library of Congress may be taken as an indicator of this wealth of literature. Even before the first decade of the twenty-first century had passed, a search for the term “terrorism” in the LC Catalog Quick Search would result in the note “Your search retrieved more records than can be displayed. Only the first 10,000 will be shown.”

For notable studies by pioneers of terrorism studies, who—under the impression of new events and their contexts—expanded earlier interpretations in interesting ways, see esp. Carlton, The West’s Road to 9/11 ; Walter Laqueur, No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Continuum, 2003); James M. Poland, Understanding Terrorism: Groups, Strategies, and Responses , 2 nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005). For a contribution from French terrorism studies pioneers and experts in English, see Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin, eds., The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al Qaeda (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007) .

See, e.g., Thomas R. Mockaitis, The “New” Terrorism: Myths and Reality (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007); Peter R. Neumann, Old and New Terrorism: Late Modernity, Globalization and the Transformation of Political Violence (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).

See, e.g., Brenda J. Lutz and James M. Lutz, Global Terrorism (London: Routledge 2004); James M. Lutz and Brenda J. Lutz, Terrorism: Origins and Evolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Brenda J. Lutz and James M. Lutz, eds., Global Terrorism , 4 vols. (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008).

For interesting and in some respects especially original and thought-provoking interpretations by journalists and publicists, see, e.g., Caleb Carr, The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare against Civilians; Why It Has Always Failed, and Why It Will Fail Again (London: Little, Brown, 2002); Andrew Sinclair, An Anatomy of Terror (London: Macmillan, 2003); Kronenwetter, Terrorism ; Matthew Carr, The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism from the Assassination of Tsar Alexander II to Al-Qaeda (New York: New Press, 2006) .

See, e.g., Noam Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors, Old and New: International Terrorism in the Real World , new ed. (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002); Paul Virilio, Ground Zero (London: Verso, 2002); Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002); Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays (London: Verso, 2003); Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2003); John Gray, Al Quaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (London: Faber & Faber, 2003); Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2006).

For publications in English covering this large time frame, see esp. Brett Bowden and Michael T. Davis, eds., Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2008); Randall D. Law, Terrorism: A History (Cambridge: Polity, 2009) ; Randall D. Law, The Routledge History of Terrorism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015) .

For publications at least partly in English, see esp. European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 14, no. 3 (September 2007), ed. Robert Gerwarth and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt; Modern Times? Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia , ed. Anke Hilbrenner and Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, special issue, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas , N.F. 58, no. 2 (2010); Michael Burleigh, Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism (London: Harper Press, 2008).

See, e.g., Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (London: Verso, 2007); Annette Vowinckel, Flugzeugentführungen: Eine Kulturgeschichte (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2011).

See Ana Siljak, Angel of Vengeance: The “Girl Assassin,” the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia’s Revolutionary World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008); Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakosov: Imperial Russia, Modernity and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), John M. Merriman, The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009); Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Thus also Schraut, Terrorismus und politische Gewalt , 152f.

For Germany, see esp. Klaus Weinhauer, Jörg Requate, and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, eds., Terrorismus in der Bundesrepublik: Medien, Staat und Subkulturen in den 1970er Jahren , (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2006); Andreas Elter, Propaganda der Tat: Die RAF und die Medien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008); Hanno Balz, Von Terroristen, Sympathisanten und dem starken Staat: Die öffentliche Debatte über die RAF in den 70er Jahren (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2008); Beatrice A. de Graaf, Nicole Colin, Jacco Pekelder, and Joachim Umlauf, eds., Der “Deutsche Herbst” und die RAF in Politik, Medien und Kunst: Nationale und internationale Perspektiven (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008). For the United States, see esp. Bernardine Dohrn, William Ayers, and Jeff Jones, Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970–1974 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006); Mark Rudd, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (New York: William Morrow, 2009); Arthur M. Eckstein, Bad Moon Rising: How the Weather Underground Beat the FBI and Lost the Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).

See Ulrich Herbert, “Drei politische Generationen im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Generationalität und Lebensgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert , ed. Jürgen Reulecke (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003), 95–114.

For a comparative study on Germany and the United States, see esp. Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004); for a study on transnational connections and influences with a special focus on Germany and Italy, see Petra Terhoeven, Deutscher Herbst in Europa: Der Linksterrorismus der siebziger Jahre als transnationales Phänomen (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2014); for different case studies with a transnational component, see Jussi M. Hanhimäki and Bernhard Blumenau, eds., An International History of Terrorism: Western and Non-Western Experiences (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013).

Mikkel Thorup, An Intellectual History of Terror: War, Violence and the State (London: Routledge, 2010), ix–x.

Martin A. Miller, The Foundations of Modern Terrorism: State, Society and the Dynamics of Political Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) , 2.

See Jensen, “Daggers, Rifles and Dynamite,” 116, 143. See also Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Beatrice de Graaf, “Terroristen en contraterrorisme: continuïteit en discontinuïteit,” in Terroristen en hun bestrijders, vroeger en nu , ed. Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Beatrice de Graaf (Amsterdam: Boom, 2007), 139–147.

See esp. Richard Bach Jensen, The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) ; Elun T. Gabriel, Assassins and Conspirators: Anarchism, Socialism, and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (DeKalb, IL: NIU Press, 2014); Marcus Mühlnikel, “Fürst, sind Sie unverletzt?” Attentate im Kaiserreich, 1871–1914 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2014); Iuliia Safronova, Russkoe obshchestvo v zerkale revoliutsionnogo terrora, 1879–1881 gody (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2014); Carola Dietze, The Invention of Terrorism in Europe, Russia an the United States , trans. David Antal, James Bell and Zachary Murphy King, revised and expanded from the German edition (London and New York: Verso 2021; a Russian translation is published in Moscow by Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2022); “Explosive Melange: Terrorismus und imperiale Gewalt in Osteuropa,” ed. Anke Hilbrenner and Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal, special issue, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas , N.F. 66, no. 4 (2016); Tim-Lorenz Wurr, Terrorismus und Autokratie: Staatliche Reaktionen auf den Russischen Terrorismus 1870–1890 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, [2017]); Schraut, Terrorismus und politische Gewalt ; Carola Dietze, “Legitimacy and Security from a Historical Perspective: A Case Study in the History of Terrorism,” in Conceptualizing Power in Dynamics of Securitization: Beyond State and International System , ed. Regina Kreide and Andreas Langenohl (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2019) , 135–173.

Laqueur, Terrorism , reprinted as A History of Terrorism .

Laqueur, A History of Terrorism , 7–12.

Ibid., 12–14, 16–18.

See esp. Rapoport, “Fear and Trembling”; Rapoport, “Why Does Messianism Produce Terror?”; David C. Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism,” in Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy , ed. Audrey Kurth Cronin and James M. Ludes (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004) , 46–73; David C. Rapoport, “Terrorism,” in Encyclopedia of Government and Politics , vol. 2, ed. Mary E. Hawkesworth and Maurice Kogan (London: Routledge, 2004), 1049–1077; David C. Rapoport, Terrorism: Critical Concepts in Political Science , 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 2006) ; David C. Rapoport, “Generations and Waves: The Keys to Understanding Rebel Terror Movements,” February, 20, 2021, https://international.ucla.edu/institute/article/5118 . For his earlier work, see n. 9.

Rapoport, “Generations and Waves.” See also Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism”; Rapoport, “Terrorism”; Kaplan, “Waves of Political Terrorism.” On the reaction to his theory, see, e.g., Berto Jongman, “Research Desiderata in the Field of Terrorism,” in Mapping Terrorism Research: State of the Art, Gaps and Future Direction , ed. Magnus Ranstorp (New York: Routledge, 2006), 255–291; Kaplan, “Waves of Political Terrorism,” 10–14.

See, e.g., Rapoport, “Terrorism,” 1051f., 1067.

See, e.g., Grant Wardlaw, Political Terrorism: Theory, Tactics, and Counter-Measures , 2 nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chaps. 1–3, or Peter Waldmann, Terrorismus: Provokation der Macht (Munich: Gerling Akademie, 1998), reprinted as Terrorismus: Provokation der Macht; Das Standardwerk , 2 nd , completely revised ed. (Hamburg: Murmann, 2005), chap. 3.

An example of this view is John Deutch, “Terrorism,” Foreign Policy 108 (1997): 10–22.

See Bowden, and Davis, Terror ; Carr, The Lessons of Terror ; Kronenwetter, Terrorism ; Lutz and Lutz, Global Terrorism ; Lutz and Lutz, Terrorism ; Law, The Routledge History of Terrorism ; the relevant chapters in a series of general survey books, e.g., in Martin, Understanding Terrorism .

Carr, The Lessons of Terror , 6.

Miller, The Foundations of Modern Terrorism , 2.

The importance of analytically precise distinctions is emphasized by, e.g., Ariel Merari, “Terrorism as a Strategy of Insurgency,” in The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al Qaeda , ed. Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007) , 12–51; Sylvia Schraut, “Terrorismus und Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Terrorismusforschung in Deutschland , ed. Alexander Spencer, Alexander Kocks, and Kai Harbrich (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft, 2011), 99–122, at 106. For a case from Germany available in English, see Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air , trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2009).

For a succinct, contemporary explication of this connection, see Astrid von Borcke, “Violence and Terror in Russian Revolutionary Populism: The ‘Narodnaya Volya,’ 1879–83,” in Social Protest, Violence, and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe , ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld (London: Macmillan Press in association with Berg Publishers for the German Historical Institute, London, 1982), 48–62, at 48f. For later presentations of similar arguments, see, e.g., Anna Geifman, Death Orders: The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism in Revolutionary Russia (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International, 2010), e.g., 3f.

For this literature, see esp. nn. 19–24.

For a partly autobiographical portrait of the group fleeing Germany as youth, see Walter Laqueur, Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2001).

This might hold true, even though Adam B. Ulam explicitly refers to his “enduring addiction to the detective story” when he traces the reasons for studying prerevolutionary terrorism in Russia. See his Understanding the Cold War: A Historian’s Personal Reflections [2000], 2 nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008), chap. 21, quotation at 241. See also Walter Laqueur, Thursday’s Child Has Far to Go: A Memoir of the Journeying Years (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992), where he traces the topics of his intellectual engagement until 1951 (see esp. 335–345).

Albert Parry, Terrorism: From Robespierre to Arafat (New York: Vanguard Press, 1976).

Donald H. Rumsfeld, interview with Tony Snow, Fox News Sunday , September 16, 2001, 9:05 A.M. EDT, accessed January 16, 2016, http://archive.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=1887 ; and George W. Bush, remarks by the president upon arrival: the South Lawn, September 16, 2001, 3:23 P.M. EDT, accessed January 16, 2016, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010916-2.html .

Lance Morrow, “The Case for Rage and Retribution,” Time , Wednesday, September 12, 2001, accessed December 4, 2016, http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,175435,00.html .

E.g., Reed Johnson, “Will War on Terrorism Define a Generation? Historians Ponder to What Extent the Attacks Will Be a True Turning Point for Society,” Los Angeles Times , September 23, 2001, E1; Ralf Beste et al., “Wir sind eine Welt,” Spiegel Online , September 15, 2001, accessed January 7, 2016, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-20128594.html ; Martin Klingst and Gunter Hofmann, “Ich will nicht nur Sicherheit: Bundesinnenminister Otto Schily über die Schwierigkeiten, eine Strategie gegen den neuen Terror zu finden,” Die Zeit , September 17, 2001, 4.

Thus also Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Leena Malkki, “The Fallacy of the New Terrorism Thesis,” in Contemporary Debates on Terrorism , ed. Richard Jackson and Samuel J. Sinclair (London: Routledge, 2012), 35–42.

On the concept of “holy terror” or religious terrorism, see esp. Rapoport, “Why Does Messianism Produce Terror?”; Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). Both authors point out that this type of violence can arise from all major religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

For the Assassins’ place in the standard narrative of terrorism, see esp. Laqueur, A History of Terrorism , 8–9; Rapoport, “Why Does Messianism Produce Terror?,” 72f.; Rapoport, “Fear and Trembling,” 659f. and 664–668. On the medieval sect of the Ismailis (i.e., the Assassins, in the Western tradition) and the interpretations surrounding them, in English see the classic work of Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Secret Order of Assassins: The Struggle of the Early Nizârî Ismâʻîlîs against the Islamic World (1955; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Farhad Daftary, The Ismā’īlīs: Their History and Doctrines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990); Farhad Daftary, The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Ismaʻilis (London: Tauris, 1994); Farhad Daftary, A Short History of the Ismailis: Traditions of a Muslim Community (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); Meriem Pagès, From Martyr to Murderer: Representations of the Assassins in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Europe (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014).

On suicide terrorism as a specific kind of terrorism and its rise and spread since the 1990s, see Laqueur, No End to War , chap. 4; Hoffman, Inside Terrorism , chap. 5; and esp. Robert A. Pape, “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 3 (2003): 343–361, reprinted in Lutz and Lutz, Global Terrorism , 311–346. See also Christoph Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing , trans. Helena Ragg-Kirkby (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Robert Anthony Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005); Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005); Nasra Hassan, “Suicide Terrorism,” in The Roots of Terrorism , ed. Louise Richardson (New York: Routledge, 2006), 29–42; Assaf Moghadam, The Globalization of Martyrdom: Al Qaeda, Salafi Jihad, and the Diffusion of Suicide Attacks (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

On the suicidal character of the attacks on September 11, 2001, see esp. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report , authorized ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, [2004]); on suicide attacks by the Tamil Tigers and by Lebanese and Palestinian groups, see, e.g., Laqueur, No End to War , chap. 4; Hoffman, Inside Terrorism , chap. 5; Pape, Dying to Win , esp. chap. 8; Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism , chaps. 3 and 4. On the July 7 attacks in London, see Moghadam, The Globalization of Martyrdom , chap. 6.

See, e.g., Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon , 20–28; Bloom, Dying to Kill , 4–11; Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism , 9; James M. Poland, Understanding Terrorism: Groups, Strategies, and Responses, 3 rd ed. (Boston: Prentice Hall, 2011), 23f.; Jeremy Spindlove and Clifford Simonsen, Terrorism Today: The Past, the Players, the Future (Boston: Pearson, 2013), 32. For a different perspective, see, e.g., the introduction in Moghadam, The Globalization of Martyrdom . See also Pape, Dying to Win , who draws these long historical lines (11–14, 33–35) while emphasizing that “the presumed connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism is misleading” (3).

Waldmann, Terrorismus , 12, with minor changes, as translated in Carola Dietze and Claudia Verhoeven, “Introduction,” paper presented at the Conference on Terrorism and Modernity: Global Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Political Violence, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, October 23–26, 2008, 6.

Waldmann, Terrorismus , chaps. 1–2, at 12.

For Germany see also Friedhelm Neidhardt, “Zur Soziologie des Terrorismus,” Berliner Journal für Soziologie 1, no. 2 (2004): 263–272; from the perspective of security policy, Kai Hirschmann, Terrorismus (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2003), 7–9; from the criminological viewpoint, Anne Wildfang, Terrorismus: Definition, Struktur, Dynamik (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2010). For the Netherlands, see Erwin Roelof Muller, Ramón F. J. Spaaij, and A. G. W. Ruitenberg, Trends in terrorisme (Alphen aan den Rijn: Kluwer, 2003), 2–3. For the United Kingdom and Ireland, see Charles Townshend, Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 1; Richardson, What Terrorists Want , chap. 1. For the United States, see Laqueur, A History of Terrorism , 79; Martha Crenshaw, “Thoughts on Relating Terrorism to Historical Contexts,” in Terrorism in Context , ed. Martha Crenshaw (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995) , 3–24; Hoffman, Inside Terrorism , chap. 1, 40–41. For Israel, see Boaz Ganor, Defining Terrorism: Is One Man’s Terrorist Another Man’s Freedom Fighter? (Herzliya: International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, the Interdisciplinary Center, 1998); Ariel Merari, “Terrorism as a Strategy of Insurgency.” For Russia, see Murat Islamovich Dzliev, El’zad Seifullaevich Izzatdust, and Mikhail Pavlovich Kireev, Sovremennyi terrorizm: Sotsial’no-politicheskii oblik protivnika (Moscow: Akademiia, 2007), chap. 1.1, 28–35. For Australia, see Grant Wardlaw, Political Terrorism , chap. 1.1. The Italian sociologist Donatella Della Porta, Clandestine Political Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 9–10, likewise singles out these elements to define her term “clandestine political violence.”

For an overview over these narratives and the most important statements they contain, see above, pages 9–11.

Björn Wittrock, “Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000): 31–60. The skeptical stance toward the concept of “modernity” set forth in my “Toward a History on Equal Terms” certainly is compatible with the recognition of the fact of “big developments” and the “promissory notes” of the term “modernity” and therefore does not preclude such an approach, as Dietze, The Invention of Terrorism and my chapter in this Handbook show.

Carr, Matthew . The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism from the Assassination of Tsar Alexander II to Al-Qaeda . New York: New Press, 2006 .

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Dietze, Carola . The Invention of Terrorism in Europe, Russia an the United States , trans. David Antal, James Bell and Zachary Murphy King, revised and expanded from the German edition. London and New York: Verso 2021, originally published in German as Die Erfindung des Terrorismus in Europa, Russland und den USA, 1858–1866 . Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2016 .

Dietze, Carola . “Legitimacy and Security from a Historical Perspective: A Case Study in the History of Terrorism.” In Conceptualizing Power in Dynamics of Securitization. Beyond State and International System , edited by Regina Kreide and Andreas Langenohl , 135–173. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2019 .

Duyvesteyn, Isabelle . “The Role of History and Continuity in Terrorism Research.” In Mapping Terrorism Research. State of the Art, Gaps and Future Direction , edited by Magnus Ranstorp , 51–75. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006 .

Hoffman, Bruce . Inside Terrorism . Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006 .

Ivianski, Zeev . “The Terrorist Revolution: Roots of Modern Terrorism.” In Terrorism: Critical Concepts in Political Science , Vol. 1, The First or Anarchist Wave , edited by David C. Rapoport , 73–94. London: Routledge, 2006 .

Jensen, Richard . “ Daggers, Rifles and Dynamite: Anarchist Terrorism in Nineteenth Century Europe. ” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 1 ( 2004 ): 116–153.

Jensen, Richard Bach . The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–1934 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 .

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Laqueur, Walter . Voices of Terror: Manifestos, Writings, and Manuals of Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Other Terrorists from Around the World and Throughout the Ages . New York: Reed Press, 2004 .

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Law, Randall D. The Routledge History of Terrorism . London: Routledge, 2015 .

Miller, Martin A. The Foundations of Modern Terrorism . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 .

Mommsen, Wolfgang J. , and Gerhard Hirschfeld , eds. Social Protest, Violence, and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe . London: Macmillan Press in association with Berg Publishers for the German Historical Institute, 1982 .

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Rapoport, David C. , ed. Terrorism: Critical Concepts in Political Science. London: Routledge, 2006 .

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Schraut, Sylvia . Terrorismus und politische Gewalt. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018 .

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Walther, Rudolf . “Art.: Terror, Terrorismus.” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland , vol. 6, edited by Otto Brunner , Werner Conze , and Reinhart Koselleck , 323–444. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990 .

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Terrorism Essay

Essay on Terrorism

Terrorism is a blunder committed by the terrible individuals around us. To demonstrate their strength, a group of people attempts to govern a specific arena. Terrorism has a negative impact on both society and personal life. As a result of their acts, a large number of families are destroyed. Regrettably, the number of crimes in India is increasing on a daily basis. Ancient India was ruled by a monarchy, and the ruling was a source of pride for the king. However, India later accepted democracy, and everyone is treated equally under the Indian constitution. Even so, some cowards try to keep their power over the impoverished and weak.

Terrorism represents the foolish act done by the cruel people around us. The bunch of groups tries to rule the certain arena to show their power. Terrorism had a adverse effect on the society as well as a personal life. Their number of families gets destroyed due to their actions. In India, it's sad to say, but the number of crimes is increasing day by day. Ancient India was in Monarchy where ruling was a pride to the king, but later on India accepted democracy and everyone is treated the same under the Indian constituent. Still some cowards try to maintain their dominance over poor and helpless people.

Who could forget the date 26th November, better known as 26/11! Where 10 terrorists entered the country and attacked the economic city in India. Bringing grenades, pistols, automated rifles and other destructive weapons they almost destroyed the city and shocked the Indians in the midnight. The people are helpless, weaponless and in their own world of enjoyment at the railway station, hotels and in the drives on the roads, and suddenly a danger happens in their lives, which they did not expect.

Osama Bin Laden was the greatest terrorist in the world! People are still afraid of hearing his name. He had destroyed a building named ‘world-trade center’ with the help of an airplane. It has also been stated in the reports that frequently Osama had been amorphous with him. Even the police themselves got confused and captured the wrong one. After his death there was lots of time still required to recognize the originality of him.

Lying in court is an offense. Frequently the needy and poor people lie in court for the sake of a certain amount of money. But, this money would be a help to criminals outside the world. Even, we purchased CDs and DVDs at an economic rate. To save a certain amount of money, we help piracy. These pirates invest this money in the armonony and indirectly we are sponsoring a bullet in every war which would be used against us only.

The origin of terrorism starts with a little things. The first pen stolen from a friend could even lead to mortal works. Everything has a start and if left unmanaged, they can leave the astray and lose the right path. In the school, if the adverse effects of being bad are explained properly with illustrations to some real life examples, the students may get aware about all the facts and take an initiative to stop the spread of crime. Instead of making criminals with heroic roles in the television serials, the more heroic movie super cops are to be made. Instead of writing biographies of terrorism supporters, write articles about terrorism demonization. The start of this cleaning starts from home, if you have a child, teach them the ways to be a great person in good habits rather than supporting him when he starts stealing something. Terrorism has an end, if we are united the terrorism can be thrown is out of the windows!

Various Forms Of Terrorism

Political terrorism, which raises mass concern, and criminal terrorism, which involves abduction for ransom money, are the two sorts of terrorism. Political terrorism is significantly more essential than criminal terrorism since it is carried out by well-trained personnel. As a result, apprehending them in a timely way becomes increasingly challenging for law enforcement agencies.

Terrorism has spread across the country and around the world. Regional terrorism is the most dangerous type of terrorism. Terrorists feel that dying as a terrorist is a priceless and sacred experience, and they will go to any extent to attain it. Each of these terrorist groups was founded for a different motive.

Who can forget November 26th, often known as "26/11"? Ten terrorists infiltrated the country and assaulted India's economic centre. They nearly devastated the city and astonished the Indians by bringing explosives, pistols, automatic rifles, and other lethal weapons. People are defenceless, without weapons, and engrossed in their own realms of pleasure at the railway station, motels, and on the highways when an unanticipated menace enters their life.

The Origins of Terrorism

The invention or manufacture of vast quantities of machine guns, atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, nuclear weapons, missiles, and other weapons fuels terrorism. Rapid population expansion, political, social, and economic issues, public dissatisfaction with the country's system, a lack of education, corruption, racism, economic disparities, and language disparities are all key factors in the development of terrorism. Terrorism is sometimes used to establish and maintain one's stance. Despite the contrast between caste and terrorism, the most well-known riots have taken place between Hindus and Muslims.

Consequences of Terrorism

Individuals are filled with fear as a result of terrorism, and people of the country feel vulnerable as a result. Millions of goods have been destroyed, thousands of people have died, and animals have been slaughtered as a result of terrorist assaults. People lose trust in humanity after seeing a terrorist attack, which fosters more terrorists. Terrorism comes in many forms and manifests itself in different parts of the country and outside.

Terrorism is becoming a problem not just in India, but also in our neighbouring countries, and governments throughout the world are battling it. The World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001, is considered the world's worst terrorist strike. Osama bin Laden launched an attack on the world's tallest tower, resulting in millions of injuries and thousands of deaths.

FAQs on Terrorism Essay

1. Who was Osama bin Laden?

Osama Bin Laden was the world's greatest terrorist! Hearing his name still makes people fearful. With the help of an aeroplane, he had destroyed the 'world-trade centre.' According to the rumours, Osama had been amorphous with him on several occasions. Even the cops got mixed up and arrested the wrong person. There was still a lot of time required after his death to acknowledge his uniqueness.

2. Identify the countries that are the most impacted by terrorism.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Syria were the countries most hit in 2014, with the highest number of terrorist incidents. This year has been dubbed "Terrorism Year." Furthermore, it has been reported that these five countries were the primary targets of 78 per cent of all attacks last year. Apart from them, there are 39 countries that endured the most attacks, and their index rating is based on the severity and frequency of attacks they experienced.

3. What is the true cause of terrorism?

Terrorism is defined as the use of violence for a specific purpose. This motivation could stem from a sense of social and political injustice, or just a belief that violence can bring about change. The main cause of terrorism is usually perceived unfairness or rage against specific societal conditions. Many people join terrorist groups out of desperation or to exact personal vengeance on powerful authorities. Terrorism is also a result of strong feelings of injustice. Millions of young people aspire to make a difference by utilising violence as a tool for social upheaval. As a result, in order to combat these extremists, we must provide them with alternatives to violence that can be useful to them.

4. What is the best way to combat terrorism?

The reduction of terrorism threats and the safeguarding of the state, its interests, and citizens against all types of terrorist activity are two of the State Security Service's top priorities in the battle against terrorism. It is critical to detect and suppress operations carried out by international terrorist groups and anyone linked to them. It is necessary to conduct an active search for persons linked to terrorist organisations. Enhancing the capacity of readiness and reaction to terrorist threats should receive special focus.

5. Give an overview of the history of terrorism.

The term "terrorist" was coined by François-Nol Babeuf, a French philosopher, in 1794. As a result of his denunciation of Robespierre's regime as a dictatorship, the Brunswick Manifesto threatened Paris with military punishment and complete devastation. This threat, however, only fueled the Revolution's determination to overthrow the monarchy. Tyranny, according to ancient philosophers, was the greatest political threat to Greco-Roman civilization prior to the French Revolution. Philosophers in the Middle Ages were also preoccupied with the concept of tyranny.

6. Explain the historical background of terrorism.

The word "terrorist" was first used in 1794 by François-Noël Babeuf who was a French philosopher. He denounced Robespierre's regime as a dictatorship therefore Brunswick Manifesto threatened Paris that the city would be subjected to military punishment and total destruction. But this threat only increased the Revolution's will to abolish the monarchy.

Prior to the French Revolution, ancient philosophers wrote tyranny as the greatest political threat to Greco-Roman civilization. Medieval philosophers were similarly occupied with the concept of tyranny.

7. How to fight against terrorism?

One of the main priorities of the State Security Service in fighting against terrorism is the reduction of the risks of terrorism and the protection of the state, its interests and citizens against all forms of terrorist activities. The detection and suppression of activities carried out by international terrorist organizations and persons related to them is important. Active search of individuals connected with terrorist organizations needs to be conducted. Considerable attention should be paid in enhancing the capabilities of readiness and responses to terrorist threats.

8. What is the real reason behind terrorism?

Terrorism is the use of violence for a certain cause. This cause may be due to the perceived social and political injustice or simply a belief that violence can lead to change.

Usually perceived injustice or anger against a certain social conditions is the main cause that foster terrorism. Many people join terrorist groups because of poverty or to take their personal revenge from the powerful authority. Strong feelings of injustice also results in terrorism. There are millions of young people who want to create change by using fight as the tools for social upheaval. So, in order to counter these extremists we need to give them alternatives to violence which can prove beneficial for them.

9. Name the countries which are most affected by terrorism.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria are the most affected countries which suffered the largest number of terrorist attacks in 2014. This year is called the year of terrorism.

Also it has been recorded that these five countries were the major victims of 78% of all attacks that happened last year. Apart from these countries there are 39 countries which saw the greatest number of attacks, and their index ranking is calculated against severity and frequency of attacks they experienced.

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An Essay on Terrorism

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Essay on terrorism

What is terrorism?

In the most comprehensive sense, terrorism is an intentional use of indiscriminate violence as a mechanism to create terror or fear in order to achieve a political, religious, or ideological objective. Terrorism is a form of asymmetric warfare. It is the use of violence against innocent civilians or non-combatants. The word terrorism has gained popularity following the attacks on the World Trade Centers New York in September 2001 also referred to as the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

History of terrorism

The nuisance of terrorism is as old as the Roman Empire. The roots and practice of terrorism can be traced back at least to the first century AD. The word terrorism itself was used for the first time to describe the acts of the Jacobin Club during the reign of terror in the French Revolution.

Types of terrorism

State-Sponsored terrorism

It is pursued in order to achieve such clearly stated foreign policy objectives. Massive-scale state-sponsored terrorism reemerged in international politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Now, along with religious terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism has greatly altered the design of terrorist attacks around the world. Since its independence, India has been having the same problems from Pakistan.

Ideology-oriented terrorism

Ideology-oriented terrorism is typically categorized into two: left-wing and right-wing terrorism.

Left-wing terrorism

It is violence against the ruling class, mostly by the lower classes, motivated by leftist ideology. These include the Red Army faction or the Baader Meinhof Gang in former West Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Maoist groups in India and Nepal.

Right-wing Terrorism

Right-wing groups tend to seek to protect the status quo or to return to some past situation that they feel should have been preserved. Examples of this include: fascism in Italy, nazism in Germany, white supremacist movements in the USA known as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

Religious terrorism

Terrorist groups are notably motivated by religion. Religious terrorism is more destructive in nature. These groups are motivated either in whole or in part by a religious imperative that considers violence as a sacred duty. The theology of ISIS is in accordance with the Wahabi theological ideology.

Criminal Terrorism

Terrorist activities are used to aid in crime and criminal profit. For instance, in narco-terrorism, narcotics traffickers attempt to influence the policies of the Government by systematic threat or use by violence.

Ethnic terrorism

It is deliberate violence by a subnational ethnic group to advance its cause. Such violence usually focuses either on the creation of a separate state or on the elevation of the status of one ethnic group over others. Tamil Nationalist groups in Sri Lanka, insurgent groups in North East India, and the Khalistan movement are examples of ethnonationalism terrorist activities.

Reasons behind the terrorism

There are many reasons which make people or a group terrorist. Those reasons are political, religious, poverty, and lack of education.

The main cause of terrorism is perceived socio-political or historical injustice and a belief that violence will lead to change. People who choose this path when they have been stripped off their land or rights are denied the same. Examples- Hamas group of Palestine, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam ( LTTE), Maoists and the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA)

Terrorist groups use a specific religious ideology to inspire people to join terrorist groups. For example, ISIS and Al-Qaeda use Islamic ideology making people follow them.

Socio-e conomic

Many people who join terrorist groups are illiterate and poor. Terrorism can spread like a virus in vulnerable and marginalized communities. These people can easily be pursued by terrorism groups.

A lack of employment and unequal growth encourages unemployed youth to indulge in criminal acts and narcotics.

However, the above arguments are partially true. Of the 9/11 conspirators, eight were engineers by education. Osama bin Laden’s father owned the largest construction company in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. So, terrorism is not always a result of illiteracy and poverty.

Intolerance

Because of the increasing population and decreasing resources, intolerance is growing in society. Increasing globalization of the society come to transcend national boundaries spreading terrorism.

The ineffective anti-terrorism legislation and misplaced judicial activism are somehow also responsible for growing terrorism.

Structural issues

There are structural inadequacies in the state apparatus namely weaknesses in the intelligence structure -human as well as technical, inadequate modernization of police paramilitary forces and the Armed Forces, unimaginative media management and coverage, reactive response, and slow government decision-making lack of clear strategy and policy on internal security.

In the Indian context, the reasons over the past few years have been numerous. Our consolidation as a secular, federal, and democratic state is still evolving and the fundamentalist forces often exploit a diversity of our multi-ethnic and multi-religious society.

Role of technology Terrorism is spreading fast in the modern era as technology is now available to conduct acts of terror and the targets of terrorism are more widespread than ever before. Sophisticated means of communications such as electronic media, print media, social media, and the Internet help terrorists to quickly promote their ideology and hate campaign and exploit cyber terrorism. There are secure and encrypted messaging apps like Telegram. It is the very messaging platform at Isis used to claim responsibility for attacks. For instance, the PlayStation primarily is a gaming device. Experts believe that ISIS terrorists use PlayStation to communicate. One can send private messages via the PlayStation Network. The FBI and the CIA believe that potential terrorists have been communicating via these networks. In the case of 26/11 Mumbai attacks, the terrorists came armed not just with guns and grenades but also carrying cell phones, GPS devices, and other high-tech gear. This level of sophistication is worrying. In the Christchurch massacre of New Zealand, the attack was not reported by bystanders or by security cameras at mosques. This had been live-streamed by the shooter himself on Facebook.

Global Terrorism Index (GTI) 2019

This report is annually released by the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace. As per this report, India as the seventh-worst terrorism affected the country. Jammu & Kashmir is India’s most affected region by terrorism in 2018. Most of these attacks were perpetrated by the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). 8,437 Indians have lost their lives since 2001 at the hands of terrorists.

Why is India a victim of terror?

India is suffering from ethno-nationalist, religious, left-wing, and narco-terrorism. Some well-known examples of terrorist activities in India are Mumbai attacks of 26/11, 1993 Mumbai serial bomb blasts, attack on Akshardham temple in 2002, Mumbai train blasts 2006, Parliament attacks of 2001 attacks on Armed Forces camps in Pathankot and Uri.

India is geographically located between Asia’s two principal areas of illicit opium production -the Golden Crescent and the Golden Triangle. This leads to a heavy influx of drugs and arms.

Pakistan and China

India has a hostile neighbor in the form of Pakistan with a land border of 3,400 kilometers. Pakistan sponsors state terrorism and fundamentalist forces, particularly through its inter-services intelligence, also known as ISI.

Also, India has unresolved border issues with China. And China has active military and nuclear cooperation with Pakistan.

Porous border

India shares a contiguous and porous border with smaller SAARC nations such as Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka. Accompanying problems such as illegal migration and smuggling in the border belt and resulting social tensions create a conducive environment for terrorism.

India has a long sea border of more than seven thousand kilometers prone to pirating and smuggling. During the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, terrorists had used sea routes to enter the country.

Terrorism has no religion Another troubling trend is that the so-called war on terror is seen as a war against Islam. This is irrational and dreadful for Muslims, as they now face religious discrimination and are socially disadvantaged. The Koran clearly says, ‘let there be no compulsion in religion’. Nothing could be more explicit than this. So, the entire mythology of the spread of Islam through the sword is unjustified. There is no sanctity of the Koran to spread the faith with the sword. If it was about religion, Christchurch would not have happened. Brenton Tarrant was a white supremacist and part of the alt-right. The dark face of terrorism neither has religion nor nationality. The religious interpretation is idiosyncratic. There are other political and social factors. These things are complex and this is where nuance is necessary.

Impact of terrorism

According to ourworldindata.org , over the past decade, terrorists killed an average of 21,000 people worldwide each year. Terrorism accounted for 0.05% of global deaths in 2017.

Schools have been bombed and burned in Gaza, Syria, Somalia, Nigeria, and elsewhere across the world in the last decade. Teachers were killed, and students were recruited as child soldiers.

Foreign investment

Terrorism affects FDI in many ways. Terrorism leads to insecurity and uncertainty in the country. This causes a lack of trust in foreign investors, forcing them to divert their resources from the host country to other, peaceful countries. Costly security measures decrease the returns on FDI. Terrorism also harms local infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, and communications. It prohibits foreign investment by raising the costs of doing business.

Domestic investment

Terrorism also reduces domestic investment as it becomes difficult for domestic investors to invest in a panic-ridden environment. In addition, public investment is also severely damaged as government projects such as roads, highways, canals, dams, bridges, highways, hospitals, and school construction also brought to an end in the presence of terrorist activities.

Tourists usually avoid visiting the city that has been attacked. For tourism-dependent economies, terrorist attacks can hit even harder.

A recent example is Sri Lanka (Easter bombing). Sri Lanka has made significant progress thanks to a tourism boom post 25-year civil war ended. However, the Easter bombing changed the picture. Among those killed in bombings were 45 foreigners. Tourists fled: the number of arrivals dropped. For several days following the attack, many businesses remained closed. A huge share of jobs was lost in the tourism sector.

Similarly, in Kashmir, tourism is the biggest source of livelihood in the state. But, terrorism ruined the tourism industry. The owners of hotels, guest houses, and houseboats, whose business is entirely dependent on the influx of tourists, suffer huge economic losses. By threatening visitors from visiting Kashmir, the terrorists are strangling a major source of jobs and making those who have become unemployed potential recruits to Pakistan-inspired separatism by violence.

Government spending

Terrorist attacks also increase defense and security spending and this reduces economic growth. If the cost of terror decreases, more money could be allocated to spending on infrastructure and that would lead to higher growth.

Steps already taken to combat and end terrorism

India has already achieved progress on various institutional and legislative mechanisms aimed at combating terrorism.

After the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, a national investigation agency also known as the NIA was formed to counter terrorist acts in the future.

The National Intelligence Grid also known as NATGRID is an integrated intelligence grid. It will link the databases of several departments and ministries of the government of India. NATGRID aims to gather detailed intelligence patterns that intelligence agencies can readily access. It collects and collates a variety of data from government databases such as tax and bank account information, credit card activity, visa and immigration records, and itineraries of train and air travel.

India has a multi-agency center also known as MAC for counterterrorism with a mandate of sharing terrorism-related intelligence inputs on a day-to-day basis.

Various legal frameworks are created such as the Terrorist And Disruptive Activities Act and the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 2002, along with the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and the NIA Act of 2008.

How to overcome terrorism?

From the understanding of the nature of international terrorism that we are facing today, it is clear that a long term strategy is required to fight against terrorism. It has to be comprehensive on all fronts.

Core strategy

The strategy needs to be evolved to protect core values. These core values are to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity, to consolidate as a secular, federal, democratic state with freedom of speech, equality, and justice, to promote socio-economic growth and development.

Socio-economic dimension

Socially, India must continue to promote liberal and secular polity by media, intelligentsia, and religious institutions.

There is a need to develop all regions more evenly throughout the country with greater development effort in the remote weaker sections of the society. Economic empowerment of the poor especially in areas like J&K and the Naxal belts would automatically drive out the extremist elements and their ideologies would be abandoned.

Education reforms

Education is the antidote against terrorism. Education provides the confidence and analytical skills youngsters need to condemn hatred and violence. We must teach values of peace, non-violence, fraternity. So, no one will be able to brainwash young minds.

Also, there is a tendency to brand students from madrasas as terrorists. This further, alienate Indian madrasas. There is an urgent need to de-stigmatize madrasas as a breeding ground for terrorism and address the outdated education system in the Madrasahs by modernization.

Upgrading communication systems

There is also a need to develop our communication networks so that television and telecommunication can spread to remote and border areas which are currently under the constant reach of Pakistani propaganda.

Military strategy

India should clearly spell out a counterterrorism doctrine. This should address the causes and not the symptoms alone. The aim of military operations is to create a secure and suitable environment so that social, economic, and political issues can be addressed effectively.

Effective border surveillance and management is also required to check infiltration. This should be achieved through technical means of surveillance backed by highly mobile specialized forces the other than the present system which is manpower intensive.

Foreign-based terrorists must be targeted at the bases, training camps, and sanctuaries to end the surrogate terrorism or the proxy wars.

India must leverage its improved ties with the first world countries. Platforms of multinational bodies like the UN, G20, BRICS, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization should be utilized to further India’s agenda of anti-terrorism.

International cooperation

International terrorism can not be confronted alone successfully as has been our experience so far. All nations must join hands to combat it. Countries have to cooperate by intelligence exchange, joint operations, and investigations.

Pakistan sponsored proxy war

It must be further exposed and international pressure should be applied. We have to convey more vigorously the justness of our cause and Pakistan’s support for terrorism by both state and non-state actors, as well as trying to isolate Pakistan within the international community. A strong message must be conveyed to Pakistan.

Lessons from other nations

We have to learn from the experiences of other nations. However, at the same time, we need to realize clearly that a situation is particular to us and there are no direct lessons to learn except a revaluation of our own experience.

A strategy must be pragmatic and cannot be similar to the US model of global capacity or the Israeli strategy of massive and immediate retaliation, as the respective environment and capabilities are different.

Dr. Salman Farsi was said to have been involved in the Malegaon blasts. He was acquitted eight years later. By this time, he had nothing to fall back upon. He is a qualified Unani doctor. But, he even took to rearing goats to meet his needs. These outcomes can be easily avoided. The media, instead of calling each accused a terrorist, may perhaps restrict itself to calling them only an accused, and avoid displaying their photographs as if they have been convicted.

Other steps

There is a need to adopt proactive policies to confront the terrorists at the roots of the ideology of fundamentalists social evils and sources of terror funding like narcotics and drug trade.

India also needs to strengthen its anti-terrorism laws. There is a need to modernize and enlarge intelligence networks, State Police and paramilitary forces in training equipment and ethos.

There should be enough preventive measures against nuclear biological and chemical attacks as well as cyber terrorism.

This unconventional war can not be won by conventional methods. It can only be won by showing that our values are stronger, better, fairer, and more humane than the alternative. The values that will rule the future of humanity are those of peace, tolerance, liberty, respect for diversity, and not those of reaction, discord, and hatred.

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BIOTERRORISM

Digital Divide In India

Israel Is Falling Into an Abyss

An illustration showing a person in a red room looking out a window at cypress trees and a crow, which are also reflected in a large shadow from the window onto the floor. The room has one side table and a wooden chair that has been knocked onto its side.

By David Grossman

Mr. Grossman is the author of numerous works of fiction, nonfiction and children’s literature.

As the morning of Oct. 7 recedes into the distance, its horrors only seem to be growing. Again and again, we Israelis tell ourselves what has become part of the formative story of our identity and our destiny. How for several hours Hamas terrorists invaded the homes of Israelis, murdered some 1,200 people, raped and kidnapped, looted and burned. During those nightmarish hours, before the Israel Defense Forces snapped out of its shock, Israelis had a harsh and concrete glimpse of what might happen if their country not only suffered a punishing blow but also actually ceased to exist. If Israel were no longer.

I have talked with Jewish people living outside of Israel who have said that their physical — and spiritual — existence felt vulnerable during those hours. But more than that: Something of their life force had been taken, forever. Some were even surprised by the magnitude to which they needed Israel to exist both as an idea and as a concrete fact.

As the army began to strike back, civil society was already enlisting en masse in rescue and logistical operations, with many thousands of citizens volunteering to do what the government should have been doing were it not in a state of feckless paralysis.

At the time of publication, according to data from the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7. They include many children, women and civilians, many of whom were not Hamas members and played no part in the cycle of war. “Uninvolved,” as Israel calls them in conflictese, the language with which nations at war deceive themselves so as not to face the repercussions of their acts.

The renowned kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem coined a saying: “All the blood flows to the wound.” Nearly five months after the massacre, that is how Israel feels. The fear, the shock, the fury, the grief and humiliation and vengefulness, the mental energies of an entire nation — all of those have not stopped flowing to that wound, to the abyss into which we are still falling.

We cannot put aside our thoughts of the young girls and women, and the men, too, it seems, who were raped by attackers from Gaza, murderers who filmed their own crimes and broadcast them live to the victims’ families; of the babies killed; of the families burned alive.

And the hostages. Those Israelis who for 146 days have been held in tunnels, some possibly in cages. They are children and elderly people, women and men, some of whom are ailing and perhaps dying of insufficient oxygen and medication, and of hopelessness. Or perhaps they are dying because ordinary human beings who are exposed to absolute, demonic evil often lose the innate will to live — the will to live in a world in which such evil and cruelty are possible. In which people like those Hamas terrorists live.

The enormity of the Oct. 7 events sometimes erases our memory of what came before. And yet alarming cracks were appearing in Israeli society some nine months before the massacre. The government, with Benjamin Netanyahu at its head, was attempting to ram through a series of legislative steps designed to severely weaken the Supreme Court’s authority, in that way dealing a lethal blow to Israel’s democratic character. Hundreds of thousands of citizens took to the streets every week, all those months ago, to protest the government’s plan. The Israeli right wing supported the government. The entire nation was becoming increasingly polarized. What was once a legitimate ideological argument between right and left had evolved into a spectacle of profound hatred between the various tribes. Public discourse had turned violent and toxic. Talk was heard of the country dividing into two separate peoples. And the Israeli public felt that the foundations of its national home were shaking and liable to crash.

For those of you who live in countries in which the concept of home is taken for granted, I should explain that for me, through my Israeli lens, the word “home” means a feeling of security, defense and belonging that envelops one’s mind in warmth. Home is a place where I can exist with ease. And it is a place whose borders are acknowledged by everyone — in particular, by my neighbors.

But all these, for me, are still engulfed in a yearning for something that has never been fully achieved. At present, I fear that Israel is more fortress than home. It offers neither security nor ease, and my neighbors harbor many doubts and demands of its rooms and its walls and, in some cases, of its very existence. On that awful black Saturday, it turned out that not only is Israel still far from being a home in the full sense of the word, it also does not even know how to be a true fortress.

Nevertheless, Israelis are justifiably proud of the swift and efficient way they rally to offer mutual support when the country is threatened, whether by a pandemic like Covid-19 or a war. All over the world, reserve duty soldiers got on planes to join their fellow soldiers who had already been called up. They were going “to protect our home,” as they often said in interviews. There was something moving in this unique story: These young men and women rushed to the front from the ends of the earth to protect their parents and grandparents. And they were prepared to give their lives. Equally stirring was the sense of unity that prevailed in the soldiers’ tents, where political opinions were not important. All that mattered was solidarity and comradeship.

But Israelis of my generation, who have been through many wars, are already asking, as we always do after a war: Why does this unity only emerge in times of crisis? Why is it that only threats and dangers make us cohesive and bring out the best in us, and also extricate us from our strange attraction to self-destruction — to destroying our own home?

These questions provoke a painful insight: The profound despair felt by most Israelis after the massacre might be the result of the Jewish condition into which we have once again been thrown. It is the condition of a persecuted, unprotected nation. A nation that, despite its enormous accomplishments in so many realms, is still, deep down inside, a nation of refugees, permeated with the prospect of being uprooted even after almost 76 years of sovereignty. Today it is clearer than ever that we will always have to stand guard over this penetrable, fragile home. What has also been clarified is how deeply rooted the hatred of this nation is.

Another thought follows, about these two tortured peoples: The trauma of becoming refugees is fundamental and primal for both Israelis and Palestinians, and yet neither side is capable of viewing the other’s tragedy with a shred of understanding — not to mention compassion.

One more shameful phenomenon has come to the surface as a result of the war: Israel is the one country in the world whose elimination is most openly called for.

In demonstrations attended by hundreds of thousands, on the campuses of the most respected universities, on social media and in mosques all over the world, Israel’s right to exist is often enthusiastically contested. Reasonable political criticism that takes into account the complexity of the situation can give way — when it comes to Israel — to a rhetoric of hatred that can only be cooled (if at all) by the destruction of the state of Israel. For instance, when Saddam Hussein murdered thousands of Kurds with chemical weapons, there were no calls to demolish Iraq, to wipe it off the face of the earth. Only when it comes to Israel is it acceptable to publicly demand the elimination of a state.

Protesters, influential voices and public leaders should ask themselves what it is about Israel that provokes this loathing. Why is Israel, of the planet’s 195 countries, alone in being conditional, as if its existence depended on the good will of the other nations of the world?

It is sickening to think that this murderous hatred is directed solely at a people who less than a century ago were, in fact, almost eradicated. There is also something galling about the tortuous and cynical connection between Jewish existential anxiety and the desire expressed publicly by Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and others that Israel cease to exist. It is furthermore intolerable that certain parties are attempting to force the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a colonialist framework when they willfully and stubbornly forget that Jews do not have another country, unlike the European colonialists with which they are falsely compared, and obscure the fact that Jews did not arrive in the land of Israel in conquest but seeking safety; that their powerful affinity with this land is almost 4,000 years old; that this is where they emerged as a nation, a religion, a culture and a language.

One can imagine the malicious glee with which these people step on the Jewish nation’s most brittle spot, on its sense of being an outsider, on its existential loneliness — that spot from which it has no refuge. It is this spot that frequently dooms it to make such fateful and destructive mistakes, destructive for both its enemies and itself.

Who will we be — Israelis and Palestinians — when this long, cruel war comes to an end? Not only will the memory of the atrocities inflicted on each other stand between us for many years, but also, as is clear to us all, as soon as Hamas gets the chance, it will swiftly implement the goal clearly stated in its original charter: namely, the religious duty to destroy Israel.

How, then, can we sign a peace treaty with such an enemy?

And yet what choice do we have?

The Palestinians will hold their own reckoning. I as an Israeli ask what sort of people we will be when the war ends. Where will we direct our guilt — if we are courageous enough to feel it — for what we have inflicted upon innocent Palestinians? For the thousands of children we have killed. For the families we have destroyed.

And how will we learn, so that we are never again surprised, to live a full life on the knife’s edge? But how many want to live their lives and raise their children on this knife’s edge? And what price will we pay for living in constant watchfulness and suspicion, in perpetual fear? Who among us will decide that he does not want to — or cannot — live the life of an eternal soldier, a Spartan?

Who will stay here in Israel, and will those who remain be the most extreme, the most fanatically religious, nationalistic, racist? Are we doomed to watch, paralyzed, as the bold, creative, unique Israeliness is gradually absorbed into the tragic wound of Judaism?

These questions will likely accompany Israel for years. There is, however, the possibility that a radically different reality will rise up to contend with them. Perhaps the recognition that this war cannot be won and, furthermore, that we cannot sustain the occupation indefinitely, will force both sides to accept a two-state solution, which, despite its drawbacks and risks (first and foremost, that Hamas will take over Palestine in a democratic election), is still the only feasible one?

This is also the time for those states that can exert influence over the two sides to use that influence. This is not the time for petty politics and cynical diplomacy. This is a rare moment when a shock wave like the one we experienced on Oct. 7 has the power to reshape reality. Do the countries with a stake in the conflict not see that Israelis and Palestinians are no longer capable of saving themselves?

The coming months will determine the fate of two peoples. We will find out if the conflict that extends back more than a century is ripe for a reasonable, moral, human resolution.

How tragic that this will occur — if indeed it does — not from hope and enthusiasm but from exhaustion and despair. Then again, that is the state of mind that often leads enemies to reconcile, and today it is all we can hope for. And so we shall make do with it. It seems we had to go through hell itself in order to get to the place from which one can see, on an exceptionally bright day, the distant edge of heaven.

Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen.

David Grossman is the author of numerous works of fiction, nonfiction and children’s literature. His writing has been translated into more than 45 languages. His novel “A Horse Walks into a Bar” won the Man Booker International Prize.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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