Conceptualizing Terrorism

Abstract

In 1981, Irving Louis Horowitz claimed that, over the course of the 1970s, a shift had taken place within the United States in the grammar of official politics that saw terrorism become “front and center in the political stage.”² Indeed, this decade saw the US government recognize that terrorism was not the distant problem of foreign nations but one that increasingly threatened close to home. Anthony C. Quainton argues that in this very same period “terrorism” “became part of America’s popular political vocabulary,”³ highlighting that terrorism’s arrival in the vernacular occurred as the US government began to perceive itself as the victim of terrorism and mobilized the force of its institutional powers to contain the threat. A central premise of this chapter is that the ideas about terrorism that circulate in dominant culture in the Western world are largely the product of such institutional knowledges, formed in relation to the perceived threat of terrorism and the need for its “containment.”

Terrorism is terrorism when some (but which?) people think that it is terrorism.

Chalmers Johnson¹