Introduction

Abstract

Recent years have been plagued by incidents that often eventuate in political violence such as terrorism and secessionist movements. A rather few examples of recent terrorist acts include the “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczinsky’s acts of violence against various individuals from the 1970’s through the 1990’s in the United States, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania, the 21 December 1988 bombing of Pan American flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, the 1996 abortion clinic and gay nightclub bombings in Atlanta in the year that followed the 1996 Olympic bombing (an act that is rather difficult to classify as genuinely terrorist), the constant bombings of Occidental Petroleum oil pipelines by FARC in Colombia during the past decade of its nearly 40-year civil war with the Colombian government, the 19 April 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, OK, and the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and U.S. Pentagon buildings. It must be kept in mind, however, that such well publicized incidents of terrorism tend to overshadow in the minds of many the fact that more regular terrorist acts occur in countries like Israel (by Israel and Israelis against Palestinians, and by HAMAS against Israel), Great Britain and Spain, just to name a few. Examples of secessionist movements include the Colonists secession¹ from the British Crown in 1775, the peaceful secession of Brasil from Portugal in 1822, the southern states in the U.S. and their united secessionist attempt from the U.S. northern states during the U.S. Civil War, the secessions of various former USSR republics into independent states during the early 1990’s, Quebec’s recent attempts to peacefully separate from Canada, Macedonia’s success in seceding, the recent creation of an independent Slovakia, as well as the current Basque separatist’s move to secede from Spain, and the civil wars that erupted in recent secessionist movements in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina.