State terrorism

There is neither an academic nor an international legal consensus regarding the proper definition of the word "terrorism".[6][7] Some scholars believe the actions of governments can be labelled "terrorism".[8] Using the term 'terrorism' to mean violent action used with the predominant intention of causing terror, Paul James and Jonathan Friedman distinguish between state terrorism against non-combatants and state terrorism against combatants, including 'shock and awe' tactics:

Shock and Awe" as a subcategory of "rapid dominance" is the name given to massive intervention designed to strike terror into the minds of the enemy. It is a form of state-terrorism. The concept was however developed long before the Second Gulf War by Harlan Ullman as chair of a forum of retired military personnel.[9]

However, others, including governments, international organisations, private institutions and scholars, believe the term "terrorism" is applicable only to the actions of violent non-state actors. This approach is termed as an "actor-centric" definition which emphasizes the characteristics of the groups or individuals who use terrorism; whilst act-centric definitions emphasize the unique aspects of terrorism from other acts of violence.[10] Historically, the term terrorism was used to refer to actions taken by governments against their own citizens whereas now it is more often perceived as targeting of non-combatants as part of a strategy directed against governments.[11]

Historian Henry Commager wrote that "Even when definitions of terrorism allow for state terrorism, state actions in this area tend to be seen through the prism of war or national self-defense, not terror."[12] While states may accuse other states of state-sponsored terrorism when they support insurgencies, individuals who accuse their governments of terrorism are seen as radicals, because actions by legitimate governments are not generally seen as illegitimate. Academic writing tends to follow the definitions accepted by states.[13] Most states use the term "terrorism" for non-state actors only.[14]

The Encyclopædia Britannica Online defines terrorism generally as "the systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective", and states that "terrorism is not legally defined in all jurisdictions." The encyclopedia adds that "[e]stablishment terrorism, often called state or state-sponsored terrorism, is employed by governments—or more often by factions within governments—against that government's citizens, against factions within the government, or against foreign governments or groups."[3]

While the most common modern usage of the word terrorism refers to political violence by insurgents or conspirators,[15] several scholars make a broader interpretation of the nature of terrorism that encompasses the concepts of state terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism.[16] Michael Stohl argues, "The use of terror tactics is common in international relations and the state has been and remains a more likely employer of terrorism within the international system than insurgents.[17] Stohl clarifies, however, that "[n]ot all acts of state violence are terrorism. It is important to understand that in terrorism the violence threatened or perpetrated, has purposes broader than simple physical harm to a victim. The audience of the act or threat of violence is more important than the immediate victim."[18]

Scholar Gus Martin describes state terrorism as terrorism "committed by governments and quasi-governmental agencies and personnel against perceived threats", which can be directed against both domestic and foreign targets.[5] Noam Chomsky defines state terrorism as "terrorism practised by states (or governments) and their agents and allies".[19]

Simon Taylor provides a definition of state terrorism as "state agents using threats or acts of violence against civilians, marked by a callous indifference to human life, to instill fear in a community beyond the initial victim for the purpose of preventing a change or challenge to the status quo."[20] These acts of violence can include both the types of state violence that some argue ought to be considered terrorism, such as: genocide, mass murders, ethnic cleansing, disappearances, detention without trial, and torture; and more widely accepted methods of terror including bombings and targeted killings.

Stohl and George A. Lopez have designated three categories of state terrorism, based on the openness/secrecy with which the alleged terrorist acts are performed, and whether states directly perform the acts, support them, or acquiesce in them.[21]

The Drownings at Nantes were a series of mass executions by drowning during the Reign of Terror in France

Aristotle wrote critically of terror employed by tyrants against their subjects.[22] The earliest use of the word terrorism identified by the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1795 reference to tyrannical state behavior, the "reign of terrorism" in France.[23] In that same year, Edmund Burke decried the "thousands of those hell-hounds called terrorists" who he believed threatened Europe.[24] During the Reign of Terror, the Jacobin government and other factions of the French Revolution used the apparatus of the state to kill and intimidate political opponents, and the Oxford English Dictionary includes as one definition of terrorism "Government by intimidation carried out by the party in power in France between 1789–1794".[25] The original general meaning of terrorism was of terrorism by the state, as reflected in the 1798 supplement of the Dictionnaire of the Académie française, which described terrorism as systeme, regime de la terreur.[24] Myra Williamson wrote:

The meaning of "terrorism" has undergone a transformation. During the Reign of Terror, a regime or system of terrorism was used as an instrument of governance, wielded by a recently established revolutionary state against the enemies of the people. Now the term "terrorism" is commonly used to describe terrorist acts committed by non-state or sub-national entities against a state. (italics in original)[26]

Later examples of state terrorism include the police state measures employed by the Soviet Union beginning in the 1930s, and by Germany's Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s.[27] According to Igor Primoratz, "Both [the Nazis and the Soviets] sought to impose total political control on society. Such a radical aim could be pursued only by a similarly radical method: by terrorism directed by an extremely powerful political police at an atomized and defenseless population. Its success was due largely to its arbitrary character—to the unpredictability of its choice of victims. In both countries, the regime first suppressed all opposition; when it no longer had any opposition to speak of, political police took to persecuting 'potential' and 'objective opponents'. In the Soviet Union, it was eventually unleashed on victims chosen at random."[28]

Military actions primarily directed against non-combatant targets have also been referred to as state terrorism. For example, the bombing of Guernica has been called an act of terrorism.[30] Other examples of state terrorism may include the World War II bombings of Pearl Harbor, London, Dresden, Chongqing, and Hiroshima.[31]

An act of sabotage, sometimes regarded as an act of terrorism, was the peacetime sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, a ship owned by Greenpeace, which occurred while in port at Auckland, New Zealand on July 10, 1985. The bomb detonation killed Fernando Pereira, a Dutch photographer. The organisation who committed the attack, the Directorate-General for External Security (DSGE), is a branch of France's intelligence services. The agents responsible pleaded guilty to manslaughter as part of a plea deal and were sentenced to ten years in prison, but were secretly released early to France under an agreement between the two countries' governments.[32]

Rooms of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum contain thousands of photos taken by the Khmer Rouge of their victims

During the Troubles, an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland from the 1960's to the 1990's, the Military Reaction Force (MRF), a counterinsurgency unit of the British Intelligence Corps, was tasked with tracking down members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). During the period when it was active, the MRF was involved in the killings of Catholic civilians in Northern Ireland.[33][34]

In November 2013, a BBC Panorama documentary was aired about the MRF. It drew on information from seven former members, as well as a number of other sources. Soldier H said: "We operated initially with them thinking that we were the UVF." Soldier F added: "We wanted to cause confusion."[35] In June 1972, he was succeeded as commander by Captain James 'Hamish' McGregor.[36]

In June 2014, in the wake of the Panorama programme, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) opened an investigation into the matter.[37] In an earlier review of the programme, the position of the PSNI was that none of the statements by soldiers in the programme could be taken as an admission of criminality.[38]

The chairman of the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee has said the twelve previous international conventions on terrorism had never referred to state terrorism, which was not an international legal concept, and when states abuse their powers they should be judged against international conventions which deal with war crimes, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law, rather than international anti-terrorism statutes.[96] In a similar vein, Kofi Annan, at the time the United Nations Secretary-General, said it is "time to set aside debates on so-called 'state terrorism'. The use of force by states is already regulated under international law".[97] Annan added, "... regardless of the differences between governments on the question of the definition of terrorism, what is clear and what we can all agree on is any deliberate attack on innocent civilians [or non-combatants], regardless of one's cause, is unacceptable and fits into the definition of terrorism."[98]

Dr. Bruce Hoffman has argued that failing to differentiate between state and non-state violence ignores the fact that there is a "fundamental qualitative difference between the two types of violence." Hoffman argues that even in war, there are rules and accepted norms of behaviour that prohibit certain types of weapons and tactics and outlaw attacks on specific categories of targets. For instance, rules which are codified in the Geneva and Hague Conventions on warfare prohibit taking civilians as hostages, outlaw reprisals against either civilians or POWs, recognise neutral territory, etc. Hoffman says "even the most cursory review of terrorist tactics and targets over the past quarter century reveals that terrorists have violated all these rules." Hoffman also says that when states transgress these rules of war "the term "war crime" is used to describe such acts."[99]

Walter Laqueur has said those who argue that state terrorism should be included in studies of terrorism ignore the fact that "The very existence of a state is based on its monopoly of power. If it were different, states would not have the right, nor would they be in a position, to maintain that minimum of order on which all civilized life rests."[100] Calling the concept a "red herring" he stated: "This argument has been used by the terrorists themselves, arguing that there is no difference between their activities and those by governments and states. It has also been employed by some sympathizers, and it rests on the deliberate obfuscation between all kinds of violence ..."[101]

• Barsamian, David (2001). "The United States is a Leading Terrorist State". Monthly Review.
• Kisangani, E. & Nafziger, E. Wayne (2007). "The Political Economy Of State Terror" (PDF). Defence and Peace Economics. 18 (5): 405–414. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.579.1472. doi:10.1080/10242690701455433. S2CID 155020309.
• Martin, Gus (2006). Understanding terrorism: challenges, perspectives, and issues. SAGE. ISBN 978-1-4129-2722-2.
• Nairn, Tom; James, Paul (2005). Global Matrix: Nationalism, Globalism and State-Terrorism. London and New York: Pluto Press.
• Primoratz, Igor (2004). "State Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism". In Primoratz, Igor (ed.). Terrorism: The Philosophical Issues. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-4039-1817-8.
• Selden, Mark; So, Alvin Y., eds. (2004). War and state terrorism: the United States, Japan, and the Asia–Pacific in the long twentieth century. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-7425-2391-3.
• Sluka, Jeffrey A., ed. (2000). Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-1711-7.
• Stohl, Michael & Lopez, George A. (1988). Terrible beyond Endurance?: The Foreign Policy of State Terrorism. Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-25297-6.

• Ruth Blakeley (2009). State Terrorism and Neoliberalism: the North in the South. Routledge. ISBN 978-0415686174.
• Chomsky, Noam & Herman, Edward S. (1979). The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Vol. 1. South End Press. ISBN 978-0-89608-090-4.
• Chomsky, Noam (1988). The Culture of Terrorism. South End Press. ISBN 978-0-89608-334-9.
• Curtis, Mark (2004). Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses. Vintage. ISBN 978-0-09-946972-8.
• George, Alexander (1991). Western State Terrorism. Polity Press. ISBN 978-0-7456-0931-7.
• Glover, Jonathan (1991). "State terrorism". In Frey, Raymond Gillespie (ed.). Violence, terrorism, and Justice. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-40950-6.
• Hayner, Priscilla B. (2000). Unspeakable truths: confronting state terror and atrocities. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-92477-1.
• Herbst, Philip (2003). Talking terrorism: a dictionary of the loaded language of political violence. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-32486-4.
• Herman, Edward S. (1982). The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda. South End Press. ISBN 978-0896081345.
• Kushner, Harvey W., ed. (2003). "State terrorism". Encyclopedia of Terrorism. SAGE. ISBN 978-0-7619-2408-1.
• Lerner, Brenda Wilmoth; K. Lee Lerner, eds. (2006). Terrorism : essential primary sources. Thomson Gale. ISBN 978-1-4144-0621-3.
• Nairn, Tom; James, Paul (2005). Global Matrix: Nationalism, Globalism and State-Terrorism. London and New York: Pluto Press.
• Oliverio, Annamarie (1998). The state of terror. SUNY Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-3708-7.

Prevention of terrorism

• The National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism
• State Terrorism and Counterterrorism