Is 'terrorism' a useful category?
Is 'terrorism' a useful category?
A response to Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi's defense of the 'terrorist' label.
If you read an Associated Press newswire, or an article from a newspaper that follows AP style, you will rarely see the term terrorism as a neutral description. The AP stylebook states:
The terms terrorism and terrorist have become politicized, and often are applied inconsistently. Because they can be used to label such a wide range of actions and events, and because the debate around them is so intense, detailing what happened is more precise and better serves audiences.
Therefore, the AP is not using the terms for specific actions, people or groups, other than in direct quotations or when attributed to authorities or others. Instead, we describe specific atrocities, massacres, bombings, assassinations and other such actions.
I tend to agree, and I follow this rule in my own writing. The term was originally used to describe the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, emerged again in the late Cold War to describe urban guerrilla activity, and then became an all-purpose label for Islamist (or just Muslim) political violence. Today, the term deceives more than it explains; it’s often used to make people associate faraway violence with the threat of another 9/11.
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a scholar whom I respect a lot, disagrees. In response to the debate over whether the recent Israeli bombing operation in Lebanon was an act of terrorism, Al-Tamimi writes that “the term can be used in clear parameters and has some use in distinguishing different kinds of tactics of violence,” although he does not believe that it should apply to the Israeli operation.
Unlike the U.S. government, which defines international terrorism as what terrorists do and terrorists as whoever we say, Al-Tamimi defines terrorism as “an instance where an actor attacks civilians as the sole or primary target.” For example, he believes that the Islamic State blowing up a checkpoint is not terrorism, while the Islamic State blowing up a crowded market is terrorism.
This definition is more consistent than the way terrorism is used in politics and media, yet it still falls short. The most obvious inconsistency is the problem of “state terrorism.” For instance, The New York Times published evidence in 2019 that the Russian military was deliberately bombing hospitals in Syria. Russia has also been apparently targeting civilian infrastructure and civilian shelters inside Ukraine.
Closer to home and further back in history, the Allied bombing campaigns during World War II deliberately targeted German and Japanese civilian populations. While the United States did drop warning pamphlets on Japanese cities targeted by firebombing, these warnings were not really actionable, telling Japanese to either abandon their homes for an indefinite period or overthrow their government. In other words, they are not very different in content from modern-day bomb threats.
Labeling these actions terrorism would be morally and logically consistent, but would it be analytically useful? When Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky talks about “Russian terrorism,” it is an attack on Russia’s morals, not a diagnosis of a problem with specific policy solutions. The methods of defending against air raids or countering other state violence against civilians do not overlap much with the methods of stopping bombings and shootings by underground groups.
Al-Tamimi’s definition could be narrowed down to “an instance where a non-state actor attacks civilians as the sole or primary target.” Of course, that would seem to rule out the category of “state sponsored terrorism,” and capture a lot of criminal violence that isn’t ordinarily thought of as terrorism.
The FBI tries to exclude that type of crime from its definition of domestic terrorism by specifying that domestic terrorists commit violence in order “to further ideological goals.” That distinction is not as neat as it may seem. The criminal underworld has often given birth to political rebellions, and would-be revolutionaries have often degenerated into petty gangsterism. When Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar tried to eliminate threats to his power by setting off car bombs and blowing up airliners, does it fit into the category of terrorism?
At best, terrorism is a useful ad hoc category for security forces, who might want to separate the methods and resources they use to deal with violent political plots from their routine crimefighting and public order duties. Even so, dedicated counterterrorism units seem to reliably suffer from mission creep and become instruments to repress nonviolent opposition.
For example, I heard from an FBI official at a think tank event that the FBI has four different subsections for domestic terrorism: Racial, Anti-Government, Abortion-Related, Environmental. (Islamist violence, even when it is entirely homegrown, is handled by the international terrorism section.) These categories are products of a specific time in American society; they will shift as the threats shift. And the focus on “environmental terrorism” is a reflection of political lobbying by industrial interests rather than any real threat posed by environmentalists.
For those of us in academia and the media, the emotionally-charged debates around the term make terrorism more trouble than it’s worth. The AP’s advice remains the best: “detailing what happened is more precise and better serves audiences.” We don’t need terrorism to “describe specific atrocities, massacres, bombings, assassinations and other such actions.”