Individual Terror: Concept and Typology

Abstract

Revolutionary terrorism ('individual terror') has been of central importance in recent history, receiving widespread publicity. Yet in historical research and political science, it has remained a virtual no-man's land. Indeed, it has as yet not even been adequately defined.1 The first question confronting the student of terrorist events since the end of the nineteenth century is whether or not we are dealing with a phenomenon possessing its own special features. Is this a new form of revolutionary violence? Or perhaps merely the continuation of ancient political assassination, somewhat perfected something in the nature of 'systematic assassination', which is differentiated from traditional political assassination in being, as Felix Gross puts it, 'a political method, a tactic guided by a strategy?'2 It will be argued here that political terror as practised in the modern world is qualitatively new a phenomenon essentially distinct from political assassination, as practised in the ancient and early modern eras. The modern terrorist not only uses methods different in kind from the political assassin, but also has a different view of his role, of society, and of the significance of his act. The immediate roots of 'individual terror' lie in the late nineteenth century, when its manifestations were not isolated incidents, but a continuous wave of new revolutionary violence with its own ebb and flow, which lasted until the outbreak of the first world war and the Russian Revolution. One act of 'individual terror' the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo started the 'Great War'; another, Dora Kaplan's attempt on the life of Lenin (30 August 1918), gave the pretext for the 'Red Terror'3 a period of uninterrupted anarchistic terror in Europe and the United States, terrorist warfare in Russia, and struggles for national liberation, using terror, in Ireland, Poland, the Balkans and India.