Blackwell Reference Online

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Like many words imported into scientific idiom from everyday life, “terrorism” is ideologically laden. Its empirical referent varies according to social groups, political organizations, geographical area, and historic period. Heterogeneous phenomena have thus often been conflated; subsumed under the same concept and thus deprived of heuristic capacity as well as descriptive utility.A first problem in the delimitation of the phenomenon relates to the very definition of political violence, of which terrorism would be an extreme form. In normal usage, the term “violence” refers to the illegitimate use of physical force against goods or persons (Graham and Gurr 1969: xvii; Tilly 1978: 176). Political violence is the use of physical force in order to damage a political adversary. In general, political violence consists of those repertoires of collective action which involve great physical force and cause damage to an adversary in order to attain political aims (della Porta and Tarrow 1987: 614). This definition is not, however, straightforward because the comprehension of terms like “great” or “damage” is also subjective. A certain degree of physical force is involved in many forms of protest that are usually not considered as violent per se. Moreover, all forms of protest seek to damage an adversary (della Porta 1995: 3).In addition, there is the problem of discriminating between political ... log in or subscribe to read full text