Terrorism

To begin to demystify terrorism then, is to raise the question of power relations. One might begin simply by noting that powerless groups often employ guerrilla methods to compensate for their military disadvantage; tactics ordinarily decried by powerful forces as uncivilized. The hit and run tactics of native tribes in North America were called "savage" by European colonials, who then used them later against the British in the American Revolution. The guerrilla forces of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were similarly denounced by the privileged patrons during the Mexican revolution. Today, the African National Congress, a resistance movement that advocates armed struggle against white minority rule, is termed "terrorist" by the South African government. (Perhaps the ANC would prefer to use air and naval forces against the apartheid government of South Africa if they were available.) All of this is not to argue that powerless groups are incapable of acts of violence that betray whatever cause they claim. The point is that the guerrilla tactics of the powerless are more apt to be labeled terrorist than martial force on the part of an established state.

Second, a focus on power relations goes beyond tactics to ask why some forms of political violence are described as terrorist, while others that bring greater human loss do not invite that label. If parties in conflict do not have equal standing, a double standard of terrorism may be expected to emerge. Thus the definitions of terrorism that prevail reflect such forces as the influence of office, access to the highly sophisticated and pervasive international media, and the "audience appeal" of common values, stereotypes, and symbols. A presidential address on terrorism will have a vast media audience, many of whom are predisposed to respond favorably to the symbols of office, the appeals to nationalistic imagery and the attribution of terrorism to ethnic, ideological and religious forces that already carry negative stereotypes.

Finally, differences in power on the international stage often obscure the reality of institutional terror. To focus on institutional terror means to critically analyze violent and coercive patterns that coalesce around fundamental human purposes, such as meeting material needs and resolving the questions of political rule. It poses the plausible yet disturbing thesis that people face grinding conditions of fear rooted in the very arrangements that promise to safeguard and better their lives. These arrangements are not confined to the societal level, nor do they recognize lines drawn on maps.

To this point, an international economic order may quite "normally" reproduce inequality on a world scale, quite efficiently and systematically transferring wealth from the southern to the northern hemispheres. In the lives of ordinary people, this means 450 million severely malnourished people, the deaths of 15 million children yearly from hunger or hunger-related illness, and in the poorest countries, the death of one child in four before the age of five. On another level, the political organization known as the modern state may be used alone or in alliance with others to advance or protect that order. In the name of security, it offers missiles; in the name of freedom, war; in the name of antiterrorism, terrorism. In the lives of ordinary people, the corruption of state power may be expressed in the knock on the door, mass arrests, disappearances, and summary execution. It may be a device for diverting water, occupying land, and sponsoring its settlement. It may mean capital punishment for those "without the capital," especially if the victims are of some ethnic or racial minority group.

Ultimately, terrorism is a label of defamation, a means of excluding those so branded from human standing. When applied in a one-sided fashion to those who struggle against established political structures, it is a means of organizing both the perceptions and reactions of others in the world community. Once so defined, those affected may become international lepers. Hence the nature of their movement; its objectives, ideology, and historical reason for being will be dismissed out of hand. Paradoxically then, the very label of terrorism has of itself assumed a terrifying power.