How Terrorism is Defined: A Genealogical View

Introduction

The question of terrorism was propelled into view for both the general public and the global academia after September 11th, 2001. Though the United States had been the target of terroristic acts by various groups of mostly Arab Muslim actors for years previously, the 9/11 attacks were significant enough for the US government to launch the Global War on Terrorism directed at these groups. The definition of terrorism itself was the subject of many discussions for scholars, and many methods of categorizing terroristic acts have been devised. For many, the basic qualification of such a violent act being directed at civilians is enough for it to be given the title of “terrorism.” However, the definition of “terrorism” is not fixed, and historically it has not always prioritized violence against civilians as its defining feature. To demonstrate this, I will discuss three main time periods in which terrorism was a prominent idea: the French Revolution, colonial India, and the War on Terror.

The French Revolution and State Terrorism

The term “terrorism” as a political concept first appeared as a description for Robespierre’s “reign of terror” during the French Revolution, although, as Ahmed Galal Ezeldin was right to point out, similar acts of terrorism were carried out by historical states prior to the French Revolution such as the Ancient Athenian and Egyptian governments (1987). According to Jonathan Fine, the first user of the term terrorism to describe this regime was French Philosopher Babeuf in the year 1794 (2010). In the Anglosphere, the Irish thinker Edmund Burke wrote in 1795:

Thus a complete Military Government is formed. It has the strength, and it may count on the stability of that kind of power… Every other ground of stability, but from military force and terrour, is clean out of the question. To secure them further, they have a strong corps of irregulars, ready armed. Thousands of those Hell-hounds called Terrorists, whom they had shut up in Prison on their last Revolution, as the Satellites of Tyranny, are let loose on the people. The whole of their Government, in its origination, in its continuance, in all its actions, and in all its resources, is force; and nothing but force (1999, p.359).

This critical view of the revolution from Burke shows that the term “terrorist” carried an aspect of negative connotation almost from its very inception. French historian Sophie Wahnich argues that the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” were created by the Thermidorian Reaction as a retroactive delegitimizing of a revolution’s justified self-defense (2012). However, it is true that the term “terror” was also applied positively before that as a descriptor for the regime by the Jacobins themselves. Robespierre characterized the usage of terror by the state as “nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice… an emanation of virtue” (1794). The Jacobin reign of terror involved the targeting of civilians, no doubt, but that was far from the internal operating logic of the revolution. In the September Massacres, revolutionaries saw sovereign violence as the vox populi and the defense of the “patrie in danger”: the patrie, or country, consisted of patriotic citizens, while counter-revolutionaries and traitors were the enemies of the patrie. This was the foundational “emotional economy” that propelled what Wahnich called the “demand for terror” (2012, p.28). Terror was not conceived as targeting civilians by non-state actors but as a form of emergency justice within the revolutionary legal framework wielded against enemies of the state.

The logic of this state terror with its main qualification being the usage of force against counter-revolutionaries continued into Bolshevik Russia. A 1918 Missourian newspaper described the Bolshevik repression of the Petrograd workers’ democratic movement as “methods of extreme terrorism” (“Volga’s Defender,” p.8). The article was written in a tone sympathetic to the workers and peasants in Petrograd. We see in Bolshevik and Soviet terror a continuation of the Jacobin reign of terror: both are revolutionary acts of violence acted upon constructed groups of “counter-revolutionaries”. Of course, it follows that by this time the state was no longer applying the term “terrorist” to itself, and instead using it as a general category for political rivals of the party leadership. During the Great Purge which happened 20 years after the state terrorism at Petrograd, the targets of the Moscow Trials were nominally “terrorists” (“Red Plot,” 1937, p.3). The target of terrorism is far from simply any civilian, but a carefully defined category of threats to the current regime. In this way, terrorism was constructed by the state, but in terms of its own actions: it is violent political repression against enemies of its sovereignty.

Terrorism in Colonial India and the Beginning of International Terrorism

       Tracing the evolution of terrorism in British Colonial India is an interesting way to see how the concept of terrorism was incorporated by the state as a legal tool for security. In Foucauldian terms, the terrorist is not a criminal to be judged but a risk to be managed, preempted, or eliminated: a figure constructed by systems of surveillance, categorization, and control aimed at preserving the circulation and safety of the population (Foucault, 2009). In the early 19th century, British authorities such as William Henry Sleeman constructed the figure of the “thug” as part of a hereditary criminal class, which can be identified as some sort of “proto-terrorist” (McQuade, 2022). The term was racialized and culturalized, presenting violence as endemic to Indian religious and social traditions (especially via the goddess Kali), thereby prefiguring terrorism as something irrational, fanatical, and rooted in cultural pathology. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, groups such as the Jugantar and Anushilan Samiti engaged in targeted political assassinations mainly of British officials, and were labeled as religious fanatics and “barbarian assassins.” An example of this was recorded by Joseph McQuade in his genealogy of terrorism in Colonial India:

In June 1915, two Muslim brothers belonging to the 8th Cavalry went on a killing spree in a military barracks in Jhansi that resulted in the deaths of their British officers and several others. A report at the time claimed that there was ‘nothing whatever to indicate any political agitation or agency’ behind the crime, and that the brothers were instead ‘known to be surly, ill-disciplined fanatics.’ The report goes on to describe the brothers as ‘abnormally addicted to prayers and religious observances’, providing as evidence the fact that both men obtained charms from their Pir, or spiritual guide, prior to committing the murders… While the colonial intelligence branch described the first two charms as being intended towards the spiritual protection of the brothers, the third was apparently ‘believed to protect the person in possession of it against a reigning tyrant’. The report similarly acknowledges that the brothers found the idea of going to war ‘exceedingly distasteful to them and their relations’, further hinting at the underlying political motivations… (2022, p.80).

The targets of the assassinations were military officials, not civilians. And although these events carried a political intent, the rhetoric employed by the state was deliberately used to strip them of their political meaning. After World War I, the Government of India made legal measures such as the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act to suppress revolutionary movements, deliberately labeling the actors of political violence as “terrorists.”

       After the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1934, Britain pushed the League of Nations to define and police “international terrorism.” Interestingly, “the USSR was particularly concerned about the possibility of states exploiting terrorist activities as a means for disguised intervention in the political affairs of other states” (McQuade, 2022, p.222). It is here when “terrorist” became a global legal figure defined by opposition to sovereignty, not by violence against civilians.

9/11 and International Terrorism Today

       Lisa Stampnitzky argues that the discourse of terrorism post 9/11 was “characterized by a politics of anti-knowledge, an active refusal of explanation itself” (2013, p.187). Discussions of broader causes of terrorism were often denounced as “victim blaming,” and the discussion was framed in moralist terms. Terrorism was attributed to being “evil” and not much more. The events leading up to 9/11 and the War on Terror post-9/11 continued to reinforce the idea that the definition of terrorism is not based fundamentally on civilians as targets but on opposition to sovereign power. The Beirut US Marine Barracks bombing of 1984 was one of these cases, where the primary target was American military personnel. Newspapers in the US were unanimous in calling the perpetrators “terrorists,” as exemplified by an article published by The Palladium-Times which described the event as “a suicide terrorist bombing” (“Bomb Blast,” 1983, p.1). Another similar case was the USS Cole Bombing in 2000, an Al-Qaeda attack which only targeted American Navy personnel.

       Counter-terrorism in the US was expressed through harsher government surveillance. Updated NSA regulations and the PATRIOT Act were installed quickly after 9/11. The label of “terrorist” was also narratively attributed to Muslim, Arab and brown people (Corbin, 2017). Terrorism is again a method of Foucauldian security: people are surveilled and categorized as a means of managing the population.

       It was also characteristic of US counter-terrorist measures in the Middle East that civilians were targeted under the perception that they fit certain characteristics associated with terrorists. These acts of war were called “signature strikes.” According to McQuade, “in regions where terrorists are known to operate, the simple fact of being a ‘military-aged male’ is sometimes considered sufficient grounds for establishing guilt” (2022, p.2). The fact that terrorism can:

1. Be defined when its targets are not civilians and

2. Be flipped on its head to result in the targeting of civilians in the name of counter-terrorism

is the best illustration of how the definition of terrorism is not based solely on civilians being the target.

Conclusion

This essay was aimed at demonstrating the fundamental logic behind the definition of terrorism: it is something that was continuously redefined through history based on the perpetrator’s opposition to a regime or sovereign power, as opposed to being defined by its target. Both state terrorism and terrorism by non-state actors can and did target civilians, but that is not why they were historically labeled “terrorism,” and as I have shown throughout this essay, violent acts which targeted only military personnel were still labeled “terrorism” based on their political intent or the race/class of the perpetrators. This analysis of terrorism has shown that the definition of terrorism is constructed based on opposition to sovereign power.

References

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Robespierre, "On Political Morality",” LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY: EXPLORING THE FRENCH REVOUTION, https://revolution.chnm.org/d/413

Red Plot Verdicts Dictated by Stalin, Says Leon Trotsky. (1937, January 31). St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 3.

Stampnitzky, L. (2013). Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism.” Cambridge University Press.

Volga’s Defender Pleads for Aid. (1918, December 9). St. Joseph’s Gazette, 8.

Wahnich, S. (2012). In Defense of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution. Verso.