Terrorism and the Uses of Terror

Legitimacy and Non-State Political Violence

“…Waldron in particular seeks to characterise the mental state that arises when 'terrorization' removes the capacity for deliberation upon which even coercion normally relies. 55 Individuals suffering from this kind of abuse will be incapable of the kinds of input through which normal legitimacy requirements are fulfilled. The Arendtian analysis on which Scheffler draws offers a way of imagining too how the communal or social bonds necessary for solidaristic empowerment of the kind discussed here as 'legitimacy' could be rendered impossible by the seemingly ubiquitous intrusions of the state through informers or the secret police.…”

Monkeywrenching, Perverse Incentives and Ecodefence

“…6 Not surprisingly, philosophers have written quite a bit about the definition of ʻterrorismʼ over the last couple of years. See, for example, Coady (2004), Held (2004), and Waldron (2004). According to some of the proposed definitions of terrorism, ecosabotage would indeed qualify as a kind of terrorism.…”

Terrorism as war by other means: national security and state support for terrorism

“…But there are two major problems with this "terrorists as non-state actors" and "terrorism as tool of the powerless" approach. First, some of the relatively concrete definitions of terrorism (such as the one adopted in a 2005 U.N. General Assembly report, "any action constitutes terrorism if it is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a Government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act" 2 , or the one in the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, "the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives" 3 ) could indeed cover certain acts of states as well, such as the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States (WALDRON, 2004, p. 18), Indonesia's campaign of violence in East Timor between 1975(TANTER, BALL, & KLINKEN, 2005, or "dirty war" in Chile during the Pinochet regime (DINGES, 2004). Yet, for a mixture of political and academic reasons, state terrorism has been marginalized in terrorism studies (JACKSON, 2008).…”