And who exactly is a “noncombatant”? If ISIS detonates a car bomb that kills US military advisers on the ground in Iraq, is that terrorism or an act of war? Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Imagesīut what exactly is a “combat zone” when we’re talking about the fight against international terrorist groups? For groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, the whole world is a combat zone.
A Trump supporter walks through the Capitol building with a Confederate flag. For example, many scholarly definitions of terrorism do not consider attacks against military targets in a combat zone to be terrorism - only attacks against civilians (or “noncombatants”). This can be confusing to non-experts (and sometimes experts, too). Treating ISIS as merely a “terrorist” organization fails to understand the way it operates, what its goals are, and how it maintains support and financing - all things that are critical to figuring out how it can be defeated.Īnalysts also try to define terrorism along very specific lines in order to separate it from other kinds of violence, such as acts of war. Photos: Trump supporters storm the US Capitol
ISIS also (briefly) functioned as a government, providing its version of law and order, repairing roads, keeping the electricity on, and even selecting textbooks for schools. That’s because although we often talk about “terrorist groups,” the reality is that most such organizations use a variety of tactics throughout their life span depending on their goals and capabilities at a given moment.įor instance, calling ISIS a terrorist group ignores the fact that in Iraq and Syria, ISIS often used more conventional military tactics - massing forces, launching complex operations, and taking and holding territory - in addition to carrying out terror attacks.
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Terrorism scholars and analysts primarily view terrorism as one tactic among many that groups (and in some cases individuals) use to achieve their goals - be they establishing a caliphate (like ISIS), gaining political and territorial independence (like Basque separatists in Spain), or persuading governments and corporations to act more responsibly toward animals or the environment (like the Earth Liberation Front).Ĭonsidering terrorism as a tactic helps scholars and analysts think more critically about these groups and how to deal with them. How analysts think: Terrorism as a tactic Understanding each of these ways the terrorism label is used is critical to understanding why different people call different things “terrorism” - and why it’s such a controversial, but important, term. It’s useful to think about terrorism as three different things: a tactic, a legal term, and a political label. If and how you apply the terrorism label depends in large part on who you are and what your purpose is in using that label. It’s not that we don’t have a definition of terrorism it’s that we have too many.
What people really mean is that there is no one standard definition of terrorism that everyone agrees on. It’s often said that there is no definition of “terrorism.” But that’s not quite accurate.
For example, Muslims in the United States and elsewhere have long objected that events linked to “radical Islam” are labeled as terrorism by politicians and the media far more often - and far quicker - than attacks by white supremacists or neo-Nazis. The debate over which acts should and shouldn’t be labeled “terrorism” is nothing new. Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, forcing their way inside and interrupting Congress’s certification of electoral votes. Others, however, have argued terms such as “insurrection” or “sedition” are more accurate. Ted Cruz, one of President Donald Trump’s key allies in Congress who helped legitimize the baseless conspiracy theories about the election that led to the violence, also called the attack “a despicable act of terrorism.” He’s not the only one using the “terrorism” label to describe Wednesday’s events.ĭC Mayor Muriel Bowser called the assault on the Capitol “textbook terrorism.” Texas Republican Sen. “Don’t dare call them protesters,” President-elect Joe Biden said Thursday, referring to the pro-Trump mob that had seized the US Capitol the day before.
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