Difficulties In Defining Terrorism

Terrorism is one of the most commonly used words today and somehow, a widely accepted definition of terrorism does not exists, despite various efforts in trying to define the phenomenon by academic scholars, states and international organizations. How is it possible that such known and widely used term has not yet been defined? The main purpose of this paper is to try to answer the very question of why is it so difficult to come up with a universal definition of terrorism. Second part of this short paper will discuss how, the lack of definition of terrorism impact policy and scholarly research. Lastly, the essay will touch upon the effect mass media have on how general population perceive and define terrorism.

Difficulties in Defining Terrorism

However, is we determine that violence against military and security personnel can not be considered terrorism, how are we going to protect militaries from random violent acts aimed at attaining political or ideological goals during times of peace or when perpetrators are not fighting a foreign occupation or aggression? As we can see, not only separating terrorism from other violent tactics is problematic but also determining whether it is appropriate to label violent acts terrorism in situations where motivations of the perpetrators and social standing of their victims play a key role. Similarly, differentiating “freedom fighting” from terrorism is quite complex. As Alex Schmidt duly noted,

News media simply do not cover all terrorist attacks the same way. In a recent study conducted by Anthony Lemieux and Erin M. Kearns from Georgia State University, two researchers found that “In total, there were 89 attacks committed by different perpetrators in the United States between 2011 and 2015 in the United States, Muslims perpetrated 12.4 percent of those attacks” (Kearns and Lemieux 2016). Interestingly, they also found out that this small proportion of attacks by Muslims received staggering 44 percent of media coverage. Evidently, U.S. media outlets excessively highlight the smaller number of terrorist attacks by Muslims leading Americans to believe that Muslims are the ones to be blamed and