Can certain political, economic and/or social contexts justify the
perpetration of acts of terrorism?
In assessing the case for justifying terrorist acts, it is first necessary to
define what is meant by ‘terrorism’ and how the concept may be situated in a
system of conventional morality.
For this purpose, a working definition must be specific enough to
distinguish terrorist acts from other acts of political violence. However, it must
also avoid the political and ideological casting that underpins many ‘official’
definitions of terrorism. In terms of public perceptions, governments and media
have continually muddied the waters and undermined progress towards a
definitive consensus by utilising the term ‘terrorism’ to describe various acts of
real or perceived extremism to which they themselves are politically opposed.
For example, the definition of terrorism currently used by the British
government—“the use, or threat, for the purpose of advancing a political,
religious or ideological cause, of action which involves serious violence against
any person or property”1—is deliberately vague, and may be subjectively
interpreted by judicial authorities in order to compromise or deny legitimate
rights to organised protest. Indeed, such a characterisation could conversely be
applied to certain law enforcement tactics used by the state against protest
groups in Britain and elsewhere. This is clearly not sufficient as a working
definition of terrorism.
Political scientists have supplied rather more useful denotations, although
many remain either too inclusive or exclusive for objective analysis. Bruce
1
Quoted in David J. Whittaker, The Terrorism Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), 3.
Hoffman points out that terrorism is “fundamentally and inherently political” in
motivation, and takes the form of a “planned, calculated and indeed systematic
act.”2 These are useful starting points by which to differentiate terrorism from
other forms of political (or criminal) violence.
However, Hoffman also asserts that terrorist acts are “perpetrated by a
subnational group or non-state entity.”3 Walter Laqueur upholds this distinction,
citing the state’s definitive monopoly on power (if not always popular mandate)
as differentiating state from sub-state terrorism.4 Igor Primoratz qualifies the
issue still further, recommending that the label of ‘terrorist state’ be reserved for
those that “do not merely resort to terrorism on occasion ... but employ it in a
lasting and systematic way.”5
This de facto exclusion of state terrorism is unsatisfactory, given the
historical record: the term ‘terrorist’ itself originated in reference to the policies
of the French Revolutionary government in 1789,6 and from the early 20th
century many major powers—most notably Nazi Germany and the USSR under
Iosif Stalin—have utilised both internal and external terrorist violence as
primary policy tools.7
Laqueur’s definition of terrorism—as “contributing the illegitimate use of
force to achieve a political objective when innocent people are targeted”8—does
however offer a valuable distinction: the nature of the target being nonBruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 2-3.
Ibid., 40.
4 Walter Laqueur, No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Continuum
International, 2003), 237.
5 Igor Primoratz, ‘State Terrorism and Counterterrorism’, in Georg Meggle (ed.), Ethics of
Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism (Lancaster: Gazelle, 2005), 72-3.
6 Edmund Burke, The Annual Register, or, a View of the History, Politics and Literature for the Year
1794 (London: G. Auld, 1799), 169.
7 Gus Martin, Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives and Issues, 2nd edition (Thousand
Oaks: Sage, 2006), 59, 110-12, 123-4.
8 Walter Laqueur, The Age of Terror (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 72.
2
3
combatant civilians or “innocents”, rather than military or government
personnel.
This echoes the argument put forth by Michael Walzer in his influential
Just and Unjust Wars: that the differentiation of various forms of political
violence, and their relation to existing legal and moral conventions, must focus
primarily on the status of the victim. Guerrilla warfare, for example, may be
distinguished from terrorism by several operational factors, but first among
them is the fact that guerrilla actions target military personnel or
communications rather than civilians. Indeed, in war even unarmed personnel
in opposing forces—those serving in supplies and logistics, for example—may
me made prisoners of war and are thus considered legitimate targets for capture
and ransom, if not for killing. In this respect, if not in others, guerrillas conform
to the ‘just war’ tradition.9
Similarly, Walzer makes the vital distinction between selectively targeting
the officials or agents of a state—i.e., assassination—and the random murder of
civilians.
In his assessment, assassination conforms to the revolutionary
‘political code’ in that it “[draws] ... the political parallel of the line that marks off
combatants from non-combatants [in war].” Thus, while the moral justification
for the assassin’s actions are largely dependent upon political perspective, the
assassin is nonetheless morally distinct from the terrorist, whose tactical
rationale is defined by the killing of civilians.10
It may therefore be useful in this context to refer to government officials
and agents as “political combatants”—although such a classification must, in
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: a Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 4th edition
(New York: Basic Books, 2006), 176-9.
10 Ibid., 197-9.
9
order to remain consistent, exclude those who are merely employed in state
apparatus in a non-executive capacity. This is important because the human
targets of terrorist actions are determined not according to their political roles
or state responsibilities—indeed, preferably, they have none—but simply on the
assumption of their perceived collective identity, whether that be nationality,
ethnicity, religion or whatever.
This emphasis upon the status of the victim is also critical when
considering any argument regarding justification for terrorist acts. As Tony
Coady points out, it “catches a central logical and moral aspect ... since terrorism
is frequently objected to because ‘the innocent’ are attacked.”11 This affirms
Walzer’s analysis of terrorism as being distinct from other forms of political
violence and situated outside the ethical code of ‘just war.’
It is also worth noting that a workable definition of terrorism must be
confined to the assessment of actions, rather than agendas, ideologies or
organisations. It is perfectly possible for a ‘terrorist’ organisation to engage in
acts of both terrorist and non-terrorist political violence, sometimes even
simultaneously, in pursuit of the same stated objective. The Provisional Irish
Republican Army (IRA) and the Red Army Faction (RAF) in Germany are two
such examples.12
Moreover, Peter Sederberg has proposed a qualification of terrorist
violence according to degree and focus, which is useful in considering cases for
C. A. J. (Tony) Coady, ‘Defining Terrorism’, in Igor Primoratz (ed.), Terrorism: the Philosophical
Issues (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 5.
12 Walter Enders and Todd Sandler, The Political Economy of Terrorism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 115; Martha Crenshaw, ‘The Psychology of Political Terrorism’, in John T.
Jost and Jim Sidanius (eds.), Political Psychology: Key Readings (New York: Psychology Press,
2004), 412-4; Stefan M. Aubrey, The New Dimension of International Terrorism (Zürich: vdf
Hochschulverlag AG, 2004), 37-9.
11
justification.
He distinguishes between ‘restricted terrorism’ that employs
‘discriminate means’—the application of limited violence against specific, preselected targets, i.e. the modus of assassination—and ‘unrestricted terrorism’
using unrestrained violence (‘indiscriminate means’) against random human
targets, for example train or airport bombings.13
In view of these factors, it seems reasonable to adopt a basic definition of
terrorism as being the systematic use of violence against non-combatants for the
purpose of conveying or advancing a political agenda. While this defines the
essential factors—nature of the target and basic motivation for the act—it
deliberately avoids such subjective qualifications as the degree of violence or
destruction it employs and the specific purposes it is intended to serve, either or
both of which may be considered in terms of justification.
This definition would exclude, for example, the 1944 assassination of
Walter Guinness in Egypt by the militant Zionist organisation Lehi: as the
Resident Minister of State for the British colonial occupation in the Middle East,
Guinness was selected as a target for political assassination (although Lehi also
committed terrorist acts in Egypt during the same period).14 Conversely, it
includes the IRA’s assassination of Louis Mountbatten in 1979—even though
Mountbatten himself was a statesman, naval officer and member of the British
royal family, and thus a viable target for political assassination—because a
Peter C. Sederberg, Terrorist Myths: Illusion, Rhetoric, and Reality (Richmond: University of
California Press, 1989), 34.
14 Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror, 1940-1949 (London: Frank Cass,
1995), 122-49.
13
civilian, Paul Maxwell, was also inadvertently killed in the attack:15 an example of
‘indiscriminate means’, albeit on a very small scale.
In defining terrorism, then, it is already clear that the deliberate killing of
noncombatants is impossible to justify as an ‘act of war’ under conventional
political circumstances. However, at the other end of the scale of magnitude
from the cases discussed above are those of the terror-bombing campaigns of the
Second World War, in which the weapons of war were directed against civilian
targets as a matter of government policy, and with the specific aim of destroying
civilian morale through shock and fear.16
Michael Walzer proposes that
terrorism of this nature may be justifiable in the exceptional political context of
‘supreme emergency’: “when we are face-to-face not merely with defeat but with
a defeat likely to bring disaster to a political community.”17 Therefore, the
British decision to use RAF Bomber Command against German cities (and
principally against civilian targets) would have been justifiable between 1940
and 1942, at the time when the alternative of a Nazi victory in Europe—a
possibility “literally beyond calculation, immeasurably awful”—seemed both
likely and imminent if such action were not taken.18 In reality, as Walzer points
out, the decision to deliberately target German cities with indiscriminate
bombing was not made until mid-1942, when the state of ‘supreme emergency’
had passed;19 but it is nevertheless possible to use his example in order to
Michael F. Noone and Yonah Alexander (eds.), Cases and Materials on Terrorism: Three Nations’
Response (den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1997), 387.
16 Beau Grosscup, Strategic Terror: the Politics and Ethics of Aerial Bombardment (London: Zed
Books, 2006), 179-84.
17 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 268.
18 Ibid., 253-5.
19 Ibid., 261-2.
15
envision a scenario in which such a strategy could be morally justified, if only by
the consequences of avoiding such action.
That said, Walzer’s reasoning is predicated upon a typologised notion of a
‘political community’: in his example, the nation state. The question of whether
the justification of ‘supreme emergency’ should also be available to sub-state
terrorist groups seems likely to invite arguments based on political
tendentiousness.
Any justifications offered for sub-state terrorism must, therefore, appeal
to a broader moral consensus if they are to be considered seriously. Gus Martin
observes that “those who practice revolutionary violence ... always claim to
champion noble causes and values.”20 This statement is no doubt factually
correct, but it does not follow that such groups’ claims are always inherently
false. Conversely, terrorist acts by revolutionaries are not always justifiable even
when their causes are genuinely just or moral.
The Kenyan Mau Mau Uprising of 1952-60 demonstrates the latter case.
No rational observer would question the legitimacy or popular support of the
Kenyan struggle for national liberation against the occupying British colonial
forces. It similarly incontestable, given the nature of the colonial administration
at that time, that political violence offered the only effective means to this end. 21
But while Mau Mau fighters effectively employed both guerrilla warfare and
assassination, towards the end of their campaign they also made a number of
terrorist attacks against both European and African civilians, mostly in
Martin, Understanding Terrorism, 5.
Bethwell A. Ogot, ‘Mau Mau and Nationhood: the Untold Story’, in E. S. Atiendo Odhiambo and
John Lonsdale (eds.), Mau Mau and Nationhood (Oxford: James Currey, 2003), 20-3.
20
21
‘response’ to earlier atrocities committed by the British.22
This cannot be
justified even in the context of the struggle against oppression: despite the
injustices that the Mau Mau had suffered, the legitimate targets of violence
remained the colonial authorities and the British Army—not farmers or settlers
who had no political stake in the conflict.
A further qualification may thus be added to the question of justification:
terrorism cannot be condoned where revolutionaries possess other means of
viable action (including other methods of political violence discussed above, such
as guerrilla war and systematic assassination) that could effect the same result
with fewer or no civilian casualties.
A refinement of this criterion is offered by Ted Honderich in his book
After the Terror. He proposes that terrorist action may in fact be justified by a
moral objective, provided that the action holds a ‘certainty or significant
probability’ of delivering its intended political objective.23
There are two significant flaws in this reasoning. The first and most
obvious is that a consequentialist argument of this nature can only be properly
assessed retrospectively, i.e. after the terrorist action and its effects have been
played out. Secondly and more importantly, it directly undermines the Kantian
maxim of categorical imperative, whereby innocent people (or in this case, their
murder) must never be treated as a means to an end.24 This is a primary
foundation of liberal philosophy and international law, as Tamara Meisels points
David Bonner, Executive Measures, Terrorism and National Security (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007),
184-8.
23 Ted Honderich, After the Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 115-20, 16270.
24 Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals [1785], translated by
Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (Teddington: Echo Library, 2006), 63-9, 104-7.
22
out in her response to Honderich: “In the end, Honderich’s views on terrorism
and its causes require him to do away with liberalism, from Kant to Rawls,
almost entirely.”25
Or, as Walzer asserts, “the destruction of the innocent,
whatever its purposes, is a kind of blasphemy against our deepest moral
commitments.”26
Moreover, this debate raises a relevant point: a grey area in Walzer’s
‘political code’ represented by the potential discrepancy between definitions of
innocents and civilians.
Take, for example, the symbolic murders of industrial and financial
capitalists by the Red Army Faction in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. 27
Actions such as the shooting of Dresdner Bank chairman Jürgen Ponto in 1977
used discriminate means against pre-identified targets. These targets might be
considered ‘ideological combatants’ from the RAF’s Marxist perspective, in that
they embodied the capitalist system in Europe and the socio-economic
‘structural violence’ it inflicted in the Third World. However, within a liberal
democracy a banker like Ponto is considered, both legally and by ethical
consensus, a civilian: hence, his murder must be defined as a terrorist act.
Any justification for these actions in the context of 1970s West
Germany—a representative democracy with a social market economy—would
be exceptionally far-fetched. Such an example could, however, be extrapolated to
the case of a ‘captive state’: one whose legal and constitutional apparatus have
Tamara Meisels, ‘The Trouble with Terror: the Apologetics of Terrorism—a Refutation’, in
Terrorism and Political Violence. Vol. 18, No. 3 (July 2006), 467-9, 479-80.
26 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 262.
27 Peter H. Merkl, ‘West German Left-wing Terrorism’, in Martha Crenshaw (ed.), Terrorism in
Context, 4th edition (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 166-8.
25
been entirely subverted by the interests of a tiny elite (the example of financial
capitalists remaining an apt one for the 21st century), to the systemic
impoverishment and political harm of the majority of its population.28
In this theoretical context, violence against such ‘non-innocent’ civilians
could be justified as morally equivalent to the political assassination of autocratic
statesmen or colonial officials.
In summary, three essential criteria have been identified, all of which
must be met in order for a terrorist act to be justified:
1) Where discriminate force is employed against specific targets (i.e. the
modus of assassination).
2) Where technically ‘noncombatant’ targets are nevertheless responsible
for incidences of structural violence and/or socio-political oppression.
3) Where there is no other viable means of progress or justice available
(legal, constitutional, military or political).
Plutocracies closely approximating such a model are by no means uncommon; Mexico is
possibly the best-known example. See Juan D. Lindau, ‘The Civil Society and Democratisation in
Mexico’, in Juan D. Lindau and Timothy Cheek (eds.), Market Economics and Political Change:
Comparing China and Mexico (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 201-5; Hugo G. Nutini and
Barry L. Isaac, Social Stratification in Central Mexico, 1500-2000 (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2009), 110-23.
28
References
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Issues (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Martha Crenshaw, ‘The Psychology of Political Terrorism’, in John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius
(eds.), Political Psychology: Key Readings (New York: Psychology Press, 2004).
Walter Enders and Todd Sandler, The Political Economy of Terrorism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006).
Beau Grosscup, Strategic Terror: the Politics and Ethics of Aerial Bombardment (London: Zed
Books, 2006).
Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror, 1940-1949 (London: Frank Cass,
1995).
Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
Ted Honderich, After the Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003).
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International, 2003).
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Timothy Cheek (eds.), Market Economics and Political Change: Comparing China and Mexico
(Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).
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Oaks: Sage, 2006).
Tamara Meisels, ‘The Trouble with Terror: the Apologetics of Terrorism—a Refutation’, in
Terrorism and Political Violence. Vol. 18, No. 3 (July 2006).
Peter H. Merkl, ‘West German Left-wing Terrorism’, in Martha Crenshaw (ed.), Terrorism in
Context, 4th edition (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007).
Michael F. Noone and Yonah Alexander (eds.), Cases and Materials on Terrorism: Three Nations’
Response (den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1997).
Hugo G. Nutini and Barry L. Isaac, Social Stratification in Central Mexico, 1500-2000 (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2009).
Bethwell A. Ogot, ‘Mau Mau and Nationhood: the Untold Story’, in E. S. Atiendo Odhiambo and
John Lonsdale (eds.), Mau Mau and Nationhood (Oxford: James Currey, 2003).
Igor Primoratz, ‘State Terrorism and Counterterrorism’, in Georg Meggle (ed.), Ethics of
Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism (Lancaster: Gazelle, 2005).
Peter C. Sederberg, Terrorist Myths: Illusion, Rhetoric, and Reality (Richmond: University of
California Press, 1989).
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: a Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 4th edition
(New York: Basic Books, 2006).
David J. Whittaker, The Terrorism Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003).