"Terror" is the unlawful use of violence by a government, or a private group or individual, in pursuit of a political goal. In modern regimes, laws forbid groups or individuals within the state from using violence against each other or the government. Governments themselves, which insist on a monopoly of the legal use of violence, in theory may only use violence against their citizens under circumstances well defined by legal codes, such as the execution of individuals judged guilty of capital offenses. The careful regulation of violence between states and individuals, therefore, is at the heart of current political systems. When a violent action initiated by a government, a group, or an individual outside of accepted legal norms takes place, an act of terrorism has occured. Terror represents a threat to established political regimes; it also allows those regimes to define the limits of acceptable violent activity.

Incidents like the attacks on the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon, the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, or the activities of Theodore Koszinski, the so-called "Unabomber", leave the impression that small groups of extremists or crazed individuals are the only originators of acts of terrorism. World history over the last two centuries, however, contains many examples of state-sponsored acts of terrorism against private citizens. In 1793-94 for example, during the French Revolution, deputies elected to the nation's representative body decreed "terror" to be "the order of the day". By this statement they meant that they were justified in suspending laws created only a few years before that governed the state's use of violence. Rules defining capital offenses, arrest procedures, and legal processes were rewritten to increase the state's power to execute those it perceived as its enemies. Revolutionaries thought the threats posed to the new regime by internal and external foes justified these measures, but the wave of blood-letting that ensued ultimately delegitimated the government they created, paving the way for Napoleonic dictatorship and compromising the French republican tradition for much of the nineteenth century. From the genocide committed by the Turkish government against the Armenians in 1914 to the Argentinian desaparecidos of the 1970s, the 20th century was replete with acts of state-sponsored terrorism. Often it has been these state-run operations that have inspired spectacular individual acts of terrorism in retaliation.

Questions to Consider

• What is the difference between "war" and "terrorism"?
• Name an act of state-sponsored terrorism within your lifetime. Why does it qualify as an act of terror?
• Name an act of terror committed by a private group or individual within your lifetime. Why does it qualify as an act of terror?

Related Links

• On the Terror During the French Revolution
  
• 1999 U.S.A. State Department List of Foreign Terrorist Organizations
  
• Hizballah (Party of God) Official Site
  
• Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia - People's Army Official Site
  

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