What is Terrorism? Practical Research Questions and Solutions

By Ori Swed, Texas Tech University

11/12/23

Terrorism stands as one of the most controversial and politically charged terms in contemporary discourse. It carries a stigma of evil and illegitimacy that no individual or group desires to bear. It is a political term that is used in a political context and is designated by political actors to promote political agendas. Examples of that are the branding of Black Lives Matter as a terrorist group by pundits, media outlets, and political figures. This is while the group has never been legally designated as a terrorist organization or has been associated with terrorist activity. The term’s relativity and the power architecture behind the designation of who is a terrorist and who is not have been extensively explored among social scientists. An important study by Stampnitzky illustrates that the terrorist designation tells us who is the enemy, when is violence legitimate, and what is political.

Terrorism is a socially constructed term that alters and changes over time and space. The famous statement “one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter” has been resonating in this discussion, leading to the unclarity of who is a terrorist and how we can even attempt to define them. The deconstruction of the term made it hard to distinguish between one group to another. A string of studies even underlined the similarities between states’ coercive activities with the actions of terrorists, deconstructing the term further. Those studies suggest that the only difference between terrorism and state usage of coercive violence is in scale. This invited research on state terrorism.

The extensive deconstruction of the term makes it challenging to measure and study terrorism objectively. Broad deconstruction could potentially equate military actions with individual acts of hate.

Yet, even if hard to clearly define, terrorism is indeed a social phenomenon that has deep social, economic, and political implications. It is not a theoretical exercise. Consequently, scholars have been attempting to find ways to effectively measure and assess its implications empirically for legal and policy purposes.

First, these studies separate between state's actions and nonstate actions, namely, only nonstate actors can be terrorists. Violations committed by states are subject to a distinct set of rules, such as war crimes, as they are recognized legal entities operating within established norms and expectations. Second, the terrorist designation is a legal one. While the term "terrorist" is commonly used in everyday language (as evident in any Twitter argument…), its legal designation is the one that holds dire consequences for the subject. Different scholars examined the lists of terrorist groups, the legal language, and definitions to differentiate between hate crime, war crime, murder, and terrorism. Yet, comes with multiple limitations given that there are hundreds of different legal definitions of what is terrorism. Namely, there is more than one legal pathway to designate someone as a terrorist.

This brings us to one of the more popular approaches among scholars who study this phenomenon. Instead of looking at organizations, that evolve and change over time and raise the challenge of political sensitivities and biases, researchers have been focusing on nonstate actors’ actions. This approach follows Tilly’s understanding of “terrorism as a strategy;” one that can be exercised, along with other strategies by very different actors at different period of time.

The main datasets that focus on studying this phenomenon today focus on actions. They describe who did what, where, when, how, and what was the outcome of this activity, providing much information to assess. For example, the Global Terrorism Database, offers a comprehensive listing of terrorist activity (over 200,000 entries) by over 3,000 groups. Building on that approach, scholarship gained the capacity to measure terrorist activity worldwide, and more importantly, have a proxy to assess social, economic, and political trends associated with this phenomenon.

In the pursuit of understanding terrorism, grappling with its subjective nature, political instrumentalization, and evolving definitions demands a nuanced approach. By adopting empirical approaches that focus on non-state actors' actions, scholarship can move forward and unravel the intricacies of this phenomenon.