Can Terrorism Be Defined Analysis

What is “terrorism”? Terrorism is a hotly contested term that is subjected to the reader’s political alignments. Most readers can agree that “terrorism” is a form of political action through violence that seeks to instill fear into a population, but defining “terrorism” becomes more complicated when being applied to groups and organizations. Lisa Stampnitzky’s “Can Terrorism Be Defined?” addresses this issue by drawing three important questions from the difficulty of defining “terrorism”: first, who is the enemy? Second, when is violence legitimate? Third, what is political? These three questions are instrumental in understanding terrorism while also understanding why certain groups are labeled terrorists and why others are not. This bias of

This marked the beginning of US covert operations in Afghanistan. Over the course of the 1980’s this aid would result in the creation of an islamic extremist organization with global reach known as the Mujahideen. The Mujahideen was supplied and funded by American aid with the sole objective of “killing Russians.” The Carter and Reagan administrations saw Afghanistan as an opportunity to trap the Soviets in a long and bloody war; a ‘Soviet Vietnam’. While this object was achieved and helped to cause the fall of the Soviet Union, it also fostered the creation of an international framework for right-wing Islamists who originally “had no program outside of isolated acts of urban terror.” This raises Stampnitzky’s first question of “who is the enemy?”. Due to the political and international landscape, the United States armed a group of religious radicals on a global scale to combat the Soviet Union. In the process, the Untied States overlooked the tactics and history of the right-wing Islamists due to the fact that they were anti-communists. Twenty years later, this oversight would result in the labeling of this group as “terrorists” as they turned against the American government. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought with it the collapse of the American-Mujahideen alliance and a shift in opinion from both sides. The Mujahideen and subsequent off shoot known as al-Qaeda began to target American allies and America itself, seeing it as the new threat to right-wing Islam. While their policies and tactics had not changed since the Soviet-Afghan war, their enemy did and thus the American government began to label them as “terrorists”. This displays how the term “terrorist” is a political creation used to identify enemies of the state more than groups that apply terror as means to a political goal. In 1985, Ronald Reagan proudly proclaimed the