A Survey of Terrorism, Second Edition

But, while the Narodna Obrana included among its members senior Serbian government officials, it was not an explicitly government-controlled or directly state-supported entity. This more militant and appreciably more clandestine splinter has been described by one historian as combining the more unattractive features of the anarchist cells of earlier years -- which had been responsible for quite a number of assassinations in Europe and whose methods had a good deal of influence via the writings of Russian anarchists upon Serbian youth -- and of the [American] Ku Klux Klan.

There were gory rituals and oaths of loyalty, there were murders of backsliding members, there was identification of members by number, there were distributions of guns and bombs. And there was a steady traffic between Bosnia and Serbia.

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This group, which continued to maintain close links with its parent body, was largely composed of serving Serbian military officers. It was led by Lieutenant-Colonel Dragutin Dmitrievich known by his pseudonym, Apis , himself the chief of the Intelligence Department of the Serbian general staff. With this key additional advantage of direct access to military armaments, intelligence and training facilities, the Black Hand effectively took charge of all Serb-backed clandestine operations in Bosnia.

Although there were obviously close links between the Serbian military, the Black Hand and the Young Bosnians, it would be a mistake to regard the relationship as one of direct control, much less outright manipulation. Clearly, the Serbian government was well aware of the Black Hand's objectives and the violent means the group employed in pursuit of them; indeed, the Serbian Crown Prince Alexander was one of the group's benefactors. But this does not mean that the Serbian government was necessarily as committed to war with Austria as the Black Hand's leaders were, or that it was prepared to countenance the group's more extreme plans for fomenting cross-border, anti-Habsburg terrorism.

There is some evidence to suggest that the Black Hand may have been trying to force Austria's hand against Serbia and thereby plunge both countries into war by actively abetting the Young Bosnians' plot to assassinate the archduke. Indeed, according to one revisionist account of the events leading up to the murder, even though the pistol used by Princip had been supplied by the Black Hand from a Serb military armoury in Kragujevac, and even though Princip had been trained by the Black Hand in Serbia before being smuggled back across the border for the assassination, at the eleventh hour Dmitrievich had apparently bowed to intense government pressure and tried to stop the assassination.

According to this version, Princip and his fellow conspirators would hear nothing of it and stubbornly went ahead with their plans. Contrary to popular assumption, therefore, the archduke's assassination may not have been specifically ordered or even directly sanctioned by the Serbian government. It was now used less to refer to revolutionary movements and violence directed against governments and their leaders, and more to describe the practices of mass repression employed by totalitarian states and their dictatorial leaders against their own citizens.

Thus the term regained its former connotations of abuse of power by governments, and was applied specifically to the authoritarian regimes that had come to power in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. The totality of party control over, and perversion of, government was perhaps most clearly evinced by a speech given by Hermann Goering, the newly appointed Prussian minister of the interior, in My measures will not be crippled by any bureaucracy.

Here I don't have to worry about Justice; my mission is only to destroy and exterminate, nothing more. This struggle will be a struggle against chaos, and such a struggle I shall not conduct with the power of the police. A bourgeois State might have done that. Certainly, I shall use the power of the State and the police to the utmost, my dear Communists, so don't draw any false conclusions; but the struggle to the death, in which my fist will grasp your necks, I shall lead with those there -- the Brown Shirts.

On the one hand, drawing inspiration from Hitler's ruthless elimination of his own political opponents, the Russian dictator similarly transformed the political party he led into a servile instrument responsive directly to his personal will, and the state's police and security apparatus into slavish organs of coercion, enforcement and repression. But conditions in the Soviet Union of the s bore little resemblance to the turbulent political, social and economic upheaval afflicting Germany and Italy during that decade and the previous one.

On the other hand, therefore, unlike either the Nazis or the Fascists, who had emerged from the political free-for-alls in their own countries to seize power and then had to struggle to consolidate their rule and retain their unchallenged authority, the Russian Communist Party had by the mids been firmly entrenched in power for more than a decade. Certainly, similar forms of state-imposed or state-directed violence and terror against a government's own citizens continue today.

Countries as diverse as Israel, Kenya, Cyprus and Algeria, for example, owe their independence at least in part to nationalist political movements that employed terrorism against colonial powers. For whoever stands by a just cause and fights for the freedom and liberation of his land from the invaders, the settlers and the colonialists, cannot possibly be called terrorist However, this usage now expanded to include nationalist and ethnic separatist groups outside a colonial or neo-colonial framework as well as radical, entirely ideologically motivated organizations.

Disenfranchised or exiled nationalist minorities -- such as the PLO, the Quebecois separatist group FLQ Front de Liberation du Quebec , the Basque ETA Euskadi ta Askatasuna, or Freedom for the Basque Homeland and even a hitherto unknown South Moluccan irredentist group seeking independence from Indonesia -- adopted terrorism as a means to draw attention to themselves and their respective causes, in many instances with the specific aim, like their anti-colonial predecessors, of attracting international sympathy and support.

In the early s, for example, terrorism came to be regarded as a calculated means to destabilize the West as part of a vast global conspiracy. Books like The Terror Network by Claire Sterling propagated the notion to a receptive American presidential administration and similarly susceptible governments elsewhere that the seemingly isolated terrorist incidents perpetrated by disparate groups scattered across the globe were in fact linked elements of a massive clandestine plot, orchestrated by the Kremlin and implemented by its Warsaw Pact client states, to destroy the Free World.

By the middle of the decade, however, a series of suicide bombings directed mostly against American diplomatic and military targets in the Middle East was focusing attention on the rising threat of state-sponsored terrorism. Consequently, this phenomenon -- whereby various renegade foreign governments such as the regimes in Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria became actively involved in sponsoring or commissioning terrorist acts -- replaced communist conspiracy theories as the main context within which terrorism was viewed.

Terrorism thus became associated with a type of covert or surrogate warfare whereby weaker states could confront larger, more powerful rivals without the risk of retribution. The former term revived the Moscow-orchestrated terrorism conspiracy theories of previous years while introducing the critical new dimension of narcotics trafficking. To a greater extent than ever in the past, entirely criminal that is, violent, economically motivated organizations were now forging strategic alliances with terrorist and guerrilla organizations or themselves employing violence for specifically political ends.

The growing power of the Colombian cocaine cartels, their close ties with left-wing terrorist groups in Colombia and Peru, and their repeated attempts to subvert Colombia's electoral process and undermine successive governments constitute perhaps the best-known example of this continuing trend. Terrorism had shifted its meaning again from an individual phenomenon of subnational violence to one of several elements, or part of a wider pattern, of non-state conflict. Why is Terrorism so Difficult to Define? Not surprisingly, as the meaning and usage of the word have changed over time to accommodate the political vernacular and discourse of each successive era, terrorism has proved increasingly elusive in the face of attempts to construct one consistent definition.

At one time, the terrorists themselves were far more cooperative in this endeavour than they are today.

The nineteenth-century anarchists, for example, unabashedly proclaimed themselves to be terrorists and frankly proclaimed their tactics to be terrorism. The members of Narodnaya Volya similarly displayed no qualms in using these same words to describe themselves and their deeds. However, such frankness did not last. The Jewish terrorist group of the s known as Lehi the Hebrew acronym for Lohamei Herut Yisrael, the Freedom Fighters for Israel, more popularly known simply as the Stern Gang after their founder and first leader, Abraham Stern is thought to be one of the last terrorist groups actually to describe itself publicly as such.

Indeed, it is clear from Marighela's writings that he was well aware of the word's undesirable connotations, and strove to displace them with positive resonances. Instead of arousing fear or censure, they are a call to action. To be called an aggressor or a terrorist in Brazil is now an honour to any citizen, for it means that he is fighting, with a gun in his hand, against the monstrosity of the present dictatorship and the suffering it causes. Instead these groups actively seek to evoke images of: What all these examples suggest is that terrorists clearly do not see or regard themselves as others do.

Cast perpetually on the defensive and forced to take up arms to protect themselves and their real or imagined constituents only, terrorists perceive themselves as reluctant warriors, driven by desperation -- and lacking any viable alternative -- to violence against a repressive state, a predatory rival ethnic or nationalist group, or an unresponsive international order. This perceived characteristic of self-denial also distinguishes the terrorist from other types of political extremists as well as from persons similarly involved in illegal, violent avocations.

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A communist or a revolutionary, for example, would likely readily accept and admit that he is in fact a communist or a revolutionary. Indeed, many would doubtless take particular pride in claiming either of those appellations for themselves. Similarly, even a person engaged in illegal, wholly disreputable or entirely selfish violent activities, such as robbing banks or carrying out contract killings, would probably admit to being a bank robber or a murderer for hire. The terrorist, by contrast, will never acknowledge that he is a terrorist and moreover will go to great lengths to evade and obscure any such inference or connection.

Terry Anderson, the American journalist who was held hostage for almost seven years by the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah, relates a telling conversation he had with one of his guards. The guard had objected to a newspaper article that referred to Hezbollah as terrorists. You are a terrorist, you may not like the word and if you do not like the word, do not do it. Another revealing example of this process of obfuscation-projection may be found in the book Invisible Armies , written by Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of the Lebanese terrorist group responsible for Anderson's kidnapping.

We don't see resisting the occupier as a terrorist action. We see ourselves as mujihadeen [holy warriors] who fight a Holy War for the people. It is a word with intrinsically negative connotations that is generally applied to one's enemies and opponents, or to those with whom one disagrees and would otherwise prefer to ignore. Use of the term implies a moral judgement; and if one party can successfully attach the label terrorist to its opponent, then it has indirectly persuaded others to adopt its moral viewpoint.

If one identifies with the victim of the violence, for example, then the act is terrorism. If, however, one identifies with the perpetrator, the violent act is regarded in a more sympathetic, if not positive or, at the worst, an ambivalent light; and it is not terrorism. The implications of this associational logic were perhaps most clearly demonstrated in the exchanges between Western and non-Western member states of the United Nations following the Munich Olympics massacre, in which eleven Israeli athletes were killed. The Third World delegates justified their position with two arguments.

The resultant definitional paralysis subsequently throttled UN efforts to make any substantive progress on international cooperation against terrorism beyond very specific agreements on individual aspects of the problem concerning, for example, diplomats and civil aviation. The opposite approach, where identification with the victim determines the classification of a violent act as terrorism, is evident in the conclusions of a parliamentary working group of NATO an organization comprised of long-established, status quo Western states. But this is not an entirely satisfactory solution either, since it fails to differentiate clearly between violence perpetrated by states and by non-state entities, such as terrorists.

This rationale thus equates the random violence inflicted on enemy population centres by military forces -- such as the Luftwaffe's raids on Warsaw and Coventry, the Allied fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, and the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War, and indeed the countervalue strategy of the post-war superpowers' strategic nuclear policy, which deliberately targeted the enemy's civilian population -- with the violence committed by substate entities labelled 'terrorists', since both involve the infliction of death and injury on noncombatants.

It is a familiar argument. Terrorists, as we have seen, deliberately cloak themselves in the terminology of military jargon. They consciously portray themselves as bona fide freedom fighters, if not soldiers, who -- though they wear no identifying uniform or insignia -- are entitled to treatment as prisoners of war POWs if captured and therefore should not be prosecuted as common criminals in ordinary courts of law. Terrorists further argue that, because of their numerical inferiority, far more limited firepower and paucity of resources compared with an established nation-state's massive defence and national security apparatus, they have no choice but to operate clandestinely, emerging from the shadows to carry out dramatic in other words, bloody and destructive acts of hit-and-run violence in order to attract attention to, and ensure publicity for, themselves and their cause.

They are no more innocent than the Palestinian women and children killed by the Israelis and we are ready to carry the war all over the world. But rationalizations such as these ignore the fact that, even while national armed forces have been responsible for far more death and destruction than terrorists might ever aspire to bring about, there nonetheless is a fundamental qualitative difference between the two types of violence.

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Even the most cursory review of terrorist tactics and targets over the past quarter-century reveals that terrorists have violated all these rules. Admittedly, the armed forces of established states have also been guilty of violating some of the same rules of war. By comparison, one of the fundamental raisons d'etre of international terrorism is a refusal to be bound by such rules of warfare and codes of conduct.

International terrorism disdains any concept of delimited areas of combat or demarcated battlefields, much less respect of neutral territory. Accordingly, terrorists have repeatedly taken their often parochial struggles to other, sometimes geographically distant, third party countries and there deliberately enmeshed persons completely unconnected with the terrorists' cause or grievances in violent incidents designed to generate attention and publicity. In striving to avoid appearing either partisan or judgemental, the American media, for example, resorted to describing terrorists -- often in the same report -- as variously guerrillas, gunmen, raiders, commandos and even soldiers.

A random sample of American newspaper reports of Palestinian terrorist activities between June and December , found in the terrorism archives and database maintained at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, provided striking illustrations of this practice. This slavish devotion to terminological neutrality, which David Rapoport first observed over twenty years ago, is still in evidence today. Different departments or agencies of even the same government will themselves often have very different definitions for terrorism.

Not surprisingly, each of the above definitions reflects the priorities and particular interests of the specific agency involved. The State Department's emphasis is on the premeditated and planned or calculated nature of terrorism in contrast to more spontaneous acts of political violence.

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The State Department definition, however, is conspicuously deficient in failing to consider the psychological dimension of terrorism. Unlike the State Department, this definition does address the psychological dimensions of the terrorist act described above, laying stress on terrorism's intimidatory and coercive aspects. The FBI definition further recognizes social alongside political objectives as fundamental terrorist aims -- though it offers no clearer elucidation of either. The Department of Defense definition of terrorism is arguably the most complete of the three.

It highlights the terrorist threat as much as the actual act of violence and focuses on terrorism's targeting of whole societies as well as governments. The Defense Department definition further cites the religious and ideological aims of terrorism alongside its fundamental political objectives -- but curiously omits the social dimension found in the FBI's definition. It is not only individual agencies within the same governmental apparatus that cannot agree on a single definition of terrorism. Experts and other long-established scholars in the field are equally incapable of reaching a consensus.

In the first edition of his magisterial survey, Political Terrorism: A Research Guide , Alex Schmid devoted more than a hundred pages to examining more than a hundred different definitions of terrorism in an effort to discover a broadly acceptable, reasonably comprehensive explication of the word. Walter Laqueur despaired of defining terrorism in both editions of his monumental work on the subject, maintaining that it is neither possible to do so nor worthwhile to make the attempt.

If we cannot define terrorism, then we can at least usefully distinguish it from other types of violence and identify the characteristics that make terrorism the distinct phenomenon of political violence that it is. Distinctions as a Path to Definition Guerrilla warfare is a good place to start. Terrorism is often confused or equated with, or treated as synonymous with, guerrilla warfare. This is not entirely surprising, since guerrillas often employ the same tactics assassination, kidnapping, bombings of public gathering-places, hostage-taking, etc.

Although the N-SARS survey focused on adults, we were also concerned about the reactions of children to the events of September Therefore, we asked adult respondents in households that included 1 or more children younger than 18 years whether any children in the household were "upset" by the events.

If so, we inquired further about the presence of 3 specific distress symptoms among children perceived to be most upset: Additionally, we used model-based least-squares means methods described by Korn and Graubard 21 to estimate the adjusted difference in prevalence rates between the New York City metropolitan area and the rest of the country, taking account of sociodemographic differences of the populations therein.

Table 2 shows the prevalence of probable PTSD related to the September 11 attacks associated with specific types of exposure to those events. The prevalence of probable PTSD during the second month following the terrorist attacks among persons who were in the New York City metropolitan area that day was Although the prevalence in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area 2. The prevalence of probable PTSD was also significantly associated with the number of hours of TV coverage of the attacks that participants reported watching on September 11 and in the following few days and with the number of different kinds of potentially traumatic events participants reported seeing.

The prevalence among those who reported that family, friends, or coworkers were killed or injured in the attacks and among those who reported being in the military or having close family members or loved ones in the military was considerably higher than among those who did not, but neither difference was statistically significant.

Although the prevalence of probable PTSD was significantly higher in the New York City metropolitan area than in the rest of the country, some or all of the difference could be attributable to differences in the sociodemographic characteristics of the populations of those areas. The model-based estimate of the difference in prevalence between the New York City metropolitan area and the rest of the United States, adjusted for sociodemographic differences in the respective populations using methods described by Korn and Graubard, 21 is 5.

In addition, we also modeled the association of a more detailed set of exposures with the full range of PTSD symptoms, using the PTSD symptom scale score as the dependent variable. Because the most direct exposures eg, having been in 1 of the attacked buildings the day of the attacks occurred in adequate numbers only in the New York City metropolitan area, we conducted these analyses among the subset of N-SARS participants who were in New York City on September With this full set of variables controlled for, only age, sex, having been in the WTC or surrounding buildings at the time of the attacks, and number of hours of TV coverage watched per day were significantly associated with PTSD symptoms Table 3.



The N-SARS findings for the broader measure of clinically significant psychological distress Table 4 indicate that during the second month after the attacks, Normative data suggest, however, that this level of distress is within the expected range for a general community sample. The only one of these variables with a significant bivariate association with the broader distress measure is hours of TV coverage watched per day.

We also modeled the associations of September 11 exposures with clinically significant psychological distress while controlling for selected sociodemographic characteristics, using the BSI global symptom index scale score as the dependent variable. We used the same set of sociodemographic characteristics and exposures that were included in the PTSD symptom model and, again, included only participants who were in the New York City metropolitan area on September With both the sociodemographic characteristics and the detailed exposures controlled, only sex, number of hours of TV coverage watched, and the TV content index were significantly associated with clinically significant psychological distress symptom levels Table 5.

The proportion indicating that at least 1 child was upset was highest in the New York City metropolitan area These differences were not statistically significant.



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The mean age of children perceived as most upset was 11 years, and there were no sex differences in terms of which children were perceived to be most upset. Adult reports indicated that Based on responses of a national sample of adults to a survey conducted in the second month following the terrorist attacks, the prevalence of probable PTSD related to the September 11 attacks was significantly higher in the New York City metropolitan area than in Washington, DC, other major metropolitan areas, or elsewhere in the United States. Given that the population of the New York City metropolitan area exceeds 10 million adults, the 5.

To provide perspective on the clinical relevance of our findings with respect to probable PTSD, we compared our results with those of other studies that have included both the PCL scale and clinical diagnosis. Blanchard et al 13 found that survivors of motor vehicle crashes with PTSD diagnosed via structured clinical interviews had a mean score of 60 on this scale and that for sexual assault survivors, the mean score was Together with the prevalence findings, this suggests that the elevated rates of probable PTSD in the New York City metropolitan area represent an important public health problem.

Despite these differences in methods, however, the 7. The low prevalence of probable PTSD in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, the other population center that was attacked, is somewhat surprising. Clearly, there are differences in the actual events in the 2 cities that could account in part for the prevalence difference.

These include that the Pentagon is more geographically isolated from the city than the WTC towers; that it is a military rather than a civilian target, possibly reducing the perception of personal vulnerability, vulnerability to attack, or identification with the victims; and that the crash into the Pentagon was much less devastating than the crashes into and collapse of the WTC towers, which produced spectacular visual images and an order of magnitude more deaths and injuries.

Although there is limited evidence linking indirect exposures to traumatic events via TV to posttraumatic stress symptoms in children and adolescents, 22 there is little empirical information about the association in adults. Similar models fit to our measure of nonspecific clinically significant psychological distress symptoms indicated that no direct exposure measures were associated with nonspecific distress symptom levels, but both hours of TV watched and the TV content index were.

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Documentation of these adjusted associations in a community sample of adults raises a number of important questions. The associations could be an indication that exposure via TV contributed to the development of the symptoms, that those who were already distressed by other September 11 exposures watched TV coverage as a coping mechanism, or that psychologically vulnerable persons are more likely to seek out such exposures via TV. Although the N-SARS findings do not speak definitively to the direction of causality, our findings suggest that the N-SARS measures of TV watching—both amount of coverage watched and the specific content—may be better conceived of as correlates of distress eg, a coping mechanism than as indices of exposure.

This is an issue that requires additional research, however, in designs that support more definitive causal inference. Studies of children in Oklahoma City after the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building found significant levels of psychological problems related to direct and indirect exposure and to TV viewing. Although the children's distress perceived by adults may be self-limiting, biased by the adults' own reactions, or otherwise without clinical significance, further examination of the reactions is clearly indicated.

Follow-up should involve direct assessments of children themselves as well as more detailed reports by their parents and teachers.

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The national scope, the oversampling in areas where the attacks occurred, and the use of instruments whose relationship to clinical diagnosis is well established are clear strengths of the N-SARS study. The study also has a number of limitations, however. First, the cross-sectional design and lack of preattack measures limit our ability to make causal inferences about the attacks and leave unanswered important questions about the long-term consequences of the attacks.

The latter can be addressed via subsequent waves of assessment of the study sample, which we hope to conduct. Second, the inferential power of the study is limited by several aspects of the sample design. The Knowledge Networks Web-enabled panel from which the sample was drawn makes feasible rapid assessment of community samples following unforeseeable events such as the September 11 attacks. Recruitment and retention of such panels, however, is a logistically complex process that contains multiple potential sources of nonresponse.

Since each such source is an opportunity for the introduction of bias, questions arise about the representativeness of the findings. The use of analysis weights that take account of the various components of nonresponse helps to minimize the potential for bias, and the fact that weighted estimates of the distributions of sociodemographic characteristics based on the N-SARS match well with the census estimates of those distributions Table 1 is reassuring.

Additionally, studies of first-stage nonresponse in the Knowledge Networks panel 25 have found little detectable bias in study outcomes. Nevertheless, findings based on probability samples with high levels of overall nonresponse should be confirmed by findings based on samples selected by methods that produce more complete response. Third, the use of screening measures rather than comprehensive clinical assessments to identify probable cases of PTSD and of clinically significant psychological distress increases the likelihood of misclassification with respect to these outcomes.

The cross-sectional design does not allow us to rule out the possibility that some N-SARS participants had prior histories of trauma and may have been already experiencing PTSD symptoms at the time of the attacks or that the attacks exacerbated symptoms in previously exposed individuals whose PTSD had been in remission. We did, however, use the "specific stressor" version of the instrument in an effort to minimize these threats to validity. Therefore, we believe that our PTSD findings must be interpreted with care but nonetheless have acceptable validity for providing estimates of the prevalence of probable PTSD related to the attacks of September We conclude that the major burden of probable PTSD in the second month following the September 11 terrorist attacks among adults was closely related to direct exposure to the events and that the prevalence in the New York City metropolitan area was much higher than elsewhere in the United States.

Nevertheless, although many Americans may have been upset by the attacks of September 11, a broad measure of nonspecific psychological distress indicates that the overall level of clinically significant psychological distress in the second month following the attacks was within normal limits for the country as a whole. Further research should document the course of disorder and recovery among adults with PTSD related to the September 11 attacks and determine whether the distress of children in their households, as reported by adult N-SARS respondents, is clinically significant.

American Psychiatric Association; N Engl J Med. A Review of the Empirical Literature. Accessed June 26, Psychiatric disorders among survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing. Population effects of the bombing of Oklahoma City. J Okla State Med Assoc. A national survey of stress reactions after the September 11, terrorist attacks. Psychological sequelae of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City. US Bureau of the Census. Accessed April 25, American Association for Public Opinion Research.