Can A State Be ‘Terrorist’?

Abstract

A PARTICULARLY thorny problem in all the major contributions to the literature on terrorism has been the relationship between terrorism by factions and state acts of terror. It is interesting to note that most of the recent academic literature has sought to avoid getting bogged down in this aspect: in general all the authors of the works reviewed below accept that it is unreasonable to insist on encompassing analyses of the complex processes and implications of both regimes of terror and factional terrorism as a mode of struggle within the same covers. There is a rich and growing literature on what most authors now term state terror, but the term terrorism is now widely used to denote the systematic use of terror by non-governmental actors. Nevertheless we should not lose sight of the fundamental truth that one cannot adequately understand terrorist movements without paying some attention to the effects of the use of force and violence by states. Indeed some of the best historical casestudies of the use of factional terrorism as a weapon vividly demonstrate how state violence often helps to provoke and fuel the violence of terrorist movements. Historically it is easy to show how the violence perpetrated by autocratic and colonial regimes has almost invariably displayed a symbiotic relationship to the violence of resistance and insurgent movements. Several excellent scholarly studies of the struggle between the French forces and the FLN in Algeria have underlined this lesson. Martha Hutchinson in her fascinating study of the FLN,1 quotes Lebjaoui, former head of the FFFLN, forcefully attacking Massu's excuse that torture was a response to FLN terrorism: