Old and New Terrorism

In the 1980s and 1990s, however, religious issues gradually found their way back into the mainstream political discourse. Many scholars detected a ‘religious revival’ – manifestations of which could be found on all continents and in all religions. As with Marxism and nationalism in earlier decades, the rise of radical religiously inspired political movements came to be reflected in a number of religiously oriented terrorist groups. This included militant Christian anti-abortionists in the United States, Jewish extremists in the West Bank, the Buddhist inspired cult Aum Shinrikyo, and various groups in the Muslim world ranging from Hezbollah and Hamas to Al Qaeda.

In fact, Hoffman showed that, whereas in the late 1960s, not a single terrorist group anywhere in the world could be described as religiously inspired, the share of religiously motivated groups had risen to nearly a third by the mid-1990s.

Finally, terrorism has become more violent. Needless to say, even ‘old’ terrorists often killed civilians, and – occasionally – their operations were aimed at producing large numbers of casualties. But killing people, especially civilians, was secondary to the communicative effects that could be achieved through a particular act of violence. In the mid-1970s, the American analyst Brian Jenkins coined the well-known expression that ‘terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead’. In the era of the ‘new terrorism’, the two considerations – violence and symbolic value – seem to have merged, with mass-casualty attacks against civilian populations being routine and intentional rather than ‘mistakes’ or ‘exceptions’ to be blamed on splinter groups or renegade elements.

There are plenty of statistics that bear out the rise of mass-casualty terrorism in no uncertain terms. Analysts may argue about exactly how steep the rise has been, but there appears to be a consensus that – however one manipulates the source data – the trend towards more mass-casualty attacks is consistent, significant and well-supported. For example, in the IRA’s thirty year campaign, there were just seven incidents in which the group killed ten or more people. By contrast, Al Qaeda has an average of 16 fatalities per attack, with 9/11 alone killing more people than the IRA had killed in three decades.

It seems clear, therefore, that the ‘new terrorism’ hypothesis – even if sometimes exaggerated and misused – is not entirely without substance. In my view, many of the changes can be attributed to – and indeed are an expression of – globalisation and late modernity. Cheap travel and the information revolution, for example, have made it possible for terrorist groups to establish diffuse networks, spanning continents and allowing for an unparalleled degree of flexibility and operational reach. No doubt, the same dynamics have also contributed to different mindsets and identities that have permitted terrorists to expand into transnational space.

Furthermore, it is the dialectics of globalisation and late modernity that need to be considered and understood. While providing immense benefits for an increasingly cosmopolitan elite, they have produced political paradigms that revolve around particularist forms of ethnic and religious identity, which reject the universal, secular and liberal aspirations that late modernity and globalisation are meant to promote. Religiously motivated terrorism is one of the results.

As far as the increasingly violent nature of terrorist violence is concerned, media saturation and desensitisation – prompting terrorists to engage in ever more vicious acts of violence in order to get through to their ‘audience’ – undoubtedly play a role. At the same time, the rise of particularist ideologies, which increasingly define entire populations as ‘infidels’ or ‘others’, remove the ideological constraints that would have prevented terrorists from employing violence against civilians.

Of course, it is important to maintain a sense of perspective. The transformation from ‘old’ to ‘new’ has neither been uniform nor has it been universal. Not all terrorist groups have suddenly turned into mass-casualty producing transnational networks. Some may have gone all the way, while others have partly transformed, picking and choosing from the menu of new options. This reflects the needs and strategies of particular terrorist organisations, and it also mirrors the peculiar ways in which the processes of late modernity and globalisation have unfolded. In my view, the consequences of ‘new terrorism’ are best understood not as a question of either or (‘new’ versus ‘old’) but, rather, in terms of degree (‘newer’ versus ‘older’).

The impression – frequently conveyed in the period immediately following the September 11 attacks – that the threat is unprecedented and that nothing can be learned from previous experiences is entirely untrue, therefore. Many of the long-established principles of counter-terrorism remain valid. Regardless of whether governments are dealing with ‘old’ or ‘new’, the aim must be to prevent terrorist attacks whilst maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of the population. In doing so, governments need to ‘harden’ potential targets; develop good intelligence in order to disrupt terrorist structures; bring to bear the full force of the law whilst acting within the law; address legitimate grievances where they can be addressed; and, not least, convey a sense of calm and determination when communicating with the public.

What’s new is the need for government structures to become more flexible and adaptive, mimicking – as far as possible – the terrorists’ network structures by pooling information across agencies and doing away with some of the hierarchies that impede lateral thinking. Counter-terrorism also needs to become more international, building trust and cooperation between governments across borders and continents, which poses enormous challenges, especially when those governments are serial human rights abusers. Governments must engage in the kinds of virtual spaces – especially the internet – in which young people are being radicalised and recruited; and they need to find new ways of promoting messages that counteract and/or soften the particularist discourse put forward by violent extremists.

The risk of catastrophic or apocalyptic terrorism remains. This risk, however, is not new nor is it very substantial. Walter Laqueur’s idea of terrorists operating earthquake machines is science fiction, and will remain just that. This is not to trivialise the danger or, more importantly, its potential consequences. Policy-makers are right, for example, in taking every measure possible to avert terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction. But there is nothing to suggest that apocalyptic terrorism constitutes a ‘trend’ based on anything we have seen or observed in the past few decades. The new terrorism is more lethal and in many ways more dangerous than its predecessor. But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports about the end of the world have been greatly exaggerated.

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