Political Violence Misliked: The Meaning of ‘Terrorism’

Public discourse often seems to imply that ‘terrorism’ is something about which we know three things: first, we know what it is; second, we know what is wrong with it and, hence, why the word has such negative connotations; and third, we know that it is impermissible. But all three beliefs are deeply controversial, as decades of philosophical debate and political scholarship have shown. This article spends some time, first, on the questions of defining terrorism and specifying what it is about paradigm cases of terrorism that might explain and justify the opprobrium associated with it. These questions are not only important for scholarship in international political theory but also have a direct relevance to very practical issues—for some, in fact, they are life and death issues as the practice of targeted killing of terror suspects shows. The question of whether the violence often identified as ‘terrorism’ when carried out by non-state groups might ever be permissible is complicated by the spectrum of contrasting practices that the word can be used to invoke.