Africa’s Responses to International Terrorism and the War against It

Abstract

That the history of “international terrorism” is as old as humans’ willingness to employ violence to affect politics and has been traced back to the Sicarii, who were a first-century Jewish group that murdered enemies and collaborators in their campaign to oust their Roman rulers from Judea, is now well known to many students of International Relations. Yet to this day, the word “terrorism”itself is so politically and emotionally charged that it has generated over one hundred definitions, greatly compounding the difficulty of providing a precise definition. The reason for the numerous and competing definitions hinges on the difficulty in agreeing on a basis for determining when the use of violence—directed by whom, at whom, and for what purpose—is considered legitimate. The majority of the definitions of “terrorism” have been written by state agencies directly associated with a government, and have been systematically biased to exclude governments from their definitions. Some of the definitions such as the Terrorism Act 2000 are so broad that they include the disruption of a computer system, even though no violence results.