Week 1: Introducing the unit

Greetings!

This is the first post on the new unit blog for The Security Society. As the term progresses, I'll be using this space to reflect on each week's teaching and discussions, focusing on any aspects of what we've covered which seem particularly important or particularly difficult.

I think the key point to stress from this first week is that terrorism is very far from being a neutral topic: when it comes to talking about terrorism, the discussion is almost always political in some way. Definitions of terrorism, in particular, are always political. You can see why when you consider that how heavily loaded the word 'terrorist' is: it's not a label that very many people would want to claim for themselves. Usually, in practice, it's a label that governments apply to their political enemies.

In the lecture, I looked at four different ways of defining terrorism, all of which have their problems. One approach is to use a broad definition, either by using vague and general terms ("acts of violence with political motives") or by putting several different precise definitions together ("the use or threat of personal violence or property damage to achieve political or religious ends"). The problem with this kind of definition is that it includes far too much: you can't take it literally without classifying Bryan Ferry's son Otis as a terrorist, for example.

The obvious alternative to a broad definition is a narrow definition: an example is Paul Wilkinson's definition (quoted in the lecture), which can be paraphrased as "the premeditated use of violence aiming to cause fear in non-combatants so as to induce them to change their political behaviour". This is fine as far as it goes - it 'catches' a wide variety of terrorist actions but leaves out a lot of things we wouldn't call terrorist. The (inevitable) problem is that it also leaves out a lot of things we would, usually, call terrorist. Some analysts of 1970s European extreme-left 'urban guerrilla' groups have argued that the word 'terrorist' should be reserved for neo-Fascist armed groups, because extreme left groups were usually a lot more precise in their use of violence: when they shot a prison officer or a politician, it was generally because they wanted to kill or injure that person, not to terrify or intimidate anyone else. But this is also true of most actions by the IRA in the North of Ireland - and it would be very odd to write about terrorism in Ireland and leave out the IRA, on the grounds that their violence wasn't indiscriminate enough.

In practice both the broad definition and the narrow one implicitly rely on an extra, unstated qualification. Terrorism in practice is defined as "all acts which meet the broad definition, as long as they're the kind of thing we call terrorism" - or else as "only those actions which meet the narrow definition, unless they're the kind of thing we call terrorism".

This brings us on to the label-based definition, which I associated with the 'weak' version of critical terrorism studies. According to this definition, there is no definition. 'Terrorism' is nothing other than a label applied by governments; all it means is "the kind of thing we call terrorism". From this standpoint, the choice of 'terrorism' as a label is entirely political: a 'terrorist' act, or a 'terrorist' group, may be less violent than one which doesn't carry that label. A particularly important point is that the labelling is done by governments (and their sympathisers) and applied to groups they regard as their enemy. (An extreme example of this approach was the American journalist who wrote in 2005 that the occupying forces in Iraq had killed "many thousands of terrorists".) As a result, actions carried out by governments, even unfriendly governments, will very rarely be classified as terrorist; actions carried out by our own government never will.

If you adopt the label-based definition - and there are certainly worse options - it gives you one big problem: you can't use the word 'terrorist' yourself. If you feel that certain acts simply, unarguably are terrorist and you want to be able to say so, you may be better off with the fourth, critical definition. According to this final definition, 'terrorism' is a meaningless and highly politicised label, but we can make it meaningful by giving it a consistent definition. This definition should be something similar to the narrow definition, but applied across the board and without any unstated qualifications. So terrorism, according to the critical definition, would be "the premeditated use of violence aiming to cause fear in non-combatants so as to induce them to change their political behaviour, whatever the source of the violence is". A history of terrorism in Ireland written using the critical definition would not only exclude many actions by the IRA - it would include many actions by the British Army. This, from the point of view of an adherent of the critical definition, would be a good thing.

As I said at the outset, all definitions of terrorism are political - some are just more obviously political than others.

Read Richard Jackson's article - his argument is more subtle than my brief paraphrase suggests - and have a look at the Ganor paper, which takes a more traditional view. Also, do a bit of research on definitions of terrorism for the portfolio activity, and - most importantly - think about it for yourself: what do you think a definition of terrorism should include and exclude?