New Terrorism

Abstract

Most of the recent studies on terrorism assume contemporary terrorism to be something substantially different from what it used to be, although no consensus exists on how to designate it, when did it evolve into this new form or what is crucially different in it. Martha Crenshaw is the most important exception and criticises what she classifies as the “new terrorism school”. Most authors tend to see the intangibility of aims as the most typical characteristic of new terrorism. We take in consideration the two most important terrorist groups of our age—Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda—and show they have tangible objectives. Whereas it is unquestionable that the most brutal terrorism in our era is made in the name of religion—contrary to what Martha Crenshaw sustains—the importance of two of the exceptions (The Shining Path and the Tamil Tigers) invalidates the criteria. Most authors consider suicide terrorism to be a distinctive characteristic of “new terrorism”. While we acknowledge that the use of mass suicide terrorism was absent between the Second World War and the Islamic Revolution in Iran, it appears that Walter Laqueur’s distinction between the “mastermind” and the “instrument” in the modern terrorist operation is more fruitful to understand what we are dealing with. Other arguments for “new terrorism” such as new type of organisation, globalisation or new techniques are also dismissed, whereas the sheer brutality of the phenomenon is seen as unquestionably “new” and distinct in a Western perspective, but not necessarily so in a global one. The enormous effort to define terrorism as a new type of crime is therefore dismissed as useless when not counterproductive. On the contrary, the analysis of the motivations of terrorism is crucial, and the normative blurring under a mantle of euphemisms is considered to be an error.