Dear class,

Thank you for your patience today in class – and for the excellent points you all raised. It was interesting to see that some of you did in fact try to bring arguments or points made in the readings, while others tried to reason through the definitional issues from their own standpoint. Interesting also that in a matter of 20-30 mns, you managed to raise or highlight pretty much every single major issue that plagues the definition of terrorism. This suggests that the “problems” with the concept of terrorism are evident. The fascinating thing about the whole discussion is that although you all found the definitions problematic (and indeed they are), almost nobody wanted to do away with the word “terrorism” itself. Don´t worry, you are not alone in this dillemma: most experts would agree that although terrorism is an extremely problematic concept – filled with contradictions, overused, sometimes stretched out beyond all recognition – they would still like to keep it in our political vocabulary.

(For an interesting, thought-provoking discussion in favour of keeping terrorism in our political and analytical vocabulary, see this piece by Dr. Richard Jackson, one of the key scholars in the Critical Terrorism Studies movement.)

That alone is indicative of the power of words. Speaking of words and definitions, if you have 10 mns, take a look at the Wikipedia entry for “definitions of terrorism”. While not excellent, nor very sophisticated  (it is, after, Wikipedia), it offers a very substantial listing of definitions used by various experts, states, institutions, etc., which complements the list I brought to class. For philosophical depth and clarity, I would advise you to consult the appropriate entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – which, among other merits, tackles the difficult issue of thinking about the moral aspects of terrorism (cf. section 2).

Regarding the latter, I would like to finish my final argument from our last class: that the way we think and feel about terrorism is inextricably linked to our conceptions of permissible and forbidden targets of political violence. The problem is that we tend to think of these two categories as in binary opposition: you are either a combatant OR a non-combatant. If you target the former, you are morally justified, if you target the latter you are commiting a terrorist act. However, as we saw during our class discussion, the matter is not as simple as that, and terrorism often eludes the neat definitional lines we wish to trace around it.

To help us think about the issue, I would propose the following exercise to you. First of all, when thinking about permissible and forbidden targets for political violence (or threat of violence), try to think in terms of a continuum, or a line. On one end of that line, as I said in class, is a newly born baby in just the most oppressive, dictatorial political regime you can imagine. Surely, (s)he has very little choice about the society (s)he lives in, or the political system (s)he is a part of. As such (s)he is a very good case for an almost perfect forbidden target – even the harshest terrorist would have to do some pretty sophisticated moral acrobatics to justify explicitly and purposefully targeting her/him.  On the other end of the spectrum you find an adult individual, living in a democratic, free society, who has volunteered to serve in the military, then volunteered to go into battle. This individual has voted for a militaristic government. (S)he is engaged in a legal war against a well-defined enemy, in accordance with her/his country’s national security policy. Such a person would fit very well the definition of a combatant, and is therefore seen in legal and philosophical terms as a legitimate target. (Notice I am not saying it is OK to kill soldiers, simply that our legal framework is based upon the assumption that in war, the killing of such combatants is a likely occurence, and, what’s more, morally and legally justified under the circumstances). The problem, as you may have already understood, is that the vast majority of the world’s population does not fit into either category. They fall somewhere in between, and often their position in that spectrum often changes over time, and according to circumstance.

Now, to throw a curve ball at you and complicate matters further, I’ll introduce the “principle of double-effect”. Basically, that means that one must make an important distinction between those individuals who are the intended targets of violence, and those who are its unintended (even if foreseeable) victims. So, if  I target a military installation in the middle of a crowded city, I can be pretty sure that on top of hitting my intended target (let’s say the headquarters of a particulalry nasty military unit involed in political repression, torture and various other war crimes), I will also cause civilian casualties. I can predict that these innocent people will die, but they are not the ones I want to hit. They are what has become known as “collateral damage”.

Now, to return to terrorism, many terrorist groups are very aware of the deep ressonance of these principles in most societies around the world. This is why, when such groups make public announcements about attacks, often they will go to great lengths to (i) explain why (they feel that) the targets are permissible, and (ii) make the distrinction between their intended targets and their unfortunate or unlucky victims. They are trying to engage in a public discursive context about the legitimacy and/or morality of their actions. In other words, given the negative connotations associated with the word “terrorism”, individuals and groups who commit such acts try to present or justify them on moral grounds. If they had no purpose, or if their violence was senseless or purely nihilistic, why would they go to such trouble? Examples abound of this. For instance, in Spain, ETA is known for setting bombs and then phone in warnings, so as to reduce the number of collateral damage, but nonetheless carry an attack against symnols of the Spanish state. Osama Bin Laden himself has sought to employ both strategies in his communiques. One the one hand, he has at times appealed to the American public to convert to Islam, or else to rise up and protest/stop the policies of the Bush administration, saying that this is the only way to be safe (i.e. not to be considered as legitimate targets for terrorist attacks by virtue of what he/AlQaida perceives as complicity with “aggressive” policies). On the other hand, he has launched into lengthy discussions of why Al-Qaida feels justified in targeting American civilians, arguing that they cannot be separated from the policies of the Bush administration – either passively (American civilians fail to act in ways that contest or stop those policies) or actively (by voting for the Bush team to be re-elected, paying taxes which are used for the war effort, or suppling “sons and daughters” to the U.S. military). Bin Laden often tries to cast the actions of al-Qaida as defensive against American and Israeli encroachment in the greater Middle East, or else to justify the targeting of civilians by arguing that the U.S. also targets civilians (when using such an argument, Bin Laden does not seem to care about the principle of double-effect and the issue of unintended victims).

None of this is to suggest that terrorists are in fact morally justified in their actions. But it does suggest that they care about moral justification. Once again, we go back to the issue of legitimacy. Terrorist groups take the issue very seriously, and want to resist the idea that both their targets and their resort to violence are illegitimate. This, in turn, brings us back to how contested the concept of terrorism really is.