Terrorism, War Against

The phenomenon of terrorism is not new: any authoritative history of terrorism (e.g., Laqueur 1977) would include, for example, references to anti-state terrorism of groups such as the Narodniki (Populists) in nineteenth-century Russia (e.g., assassination attempts on the tsars), the state terrorism of the Committees of Public Safety and General Security during the so-called Reign of Terror in the late eighteenth-century French Revolution, and anti-colonialist terrorism in Africa (e.g., Algeria) and elsewhere in the post-World War II period (Whittaker 2003). Moreover, counterterrorism, including police and military counterterrorism strategies, is a well-developed field of study (Hewitt 1984). However, the idea of a war against terrorism is quite recent. It has come into vogue primarily, it seems, as a consequence of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC by al-Qaeda operatives. The person most famously associated with prosecuting what he called a war against terrorism was US President George Bush in the aftermath of 9/11 (Coady and O'Keefe 2002). The idea brings together two prior notions, that of war and that of terrorism, both of which are somewhat vague and subject to ideological manipulation.