21st-Century Terrorism: How Should we Respond?
| DOI | 10.1111/j.2041-9066.2010.00034.x |
| Date | 01 December 2010 |
| Author | Richard English |
| Published date | 01 December 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Feature |
might be. Widespread media coverage is, in
this sense, utterly vital to terrorist success in
gripping our attention.
Given this salience, no serious-minded
government could, in fact, treat terrorism
as negligible. Indeed there are two very
good reasons for prioritising our response
to terrorism as we consider this threat in
the context of the early 21st century. More
particularly, these are two arguments for
why it is so important that, for once, we
get our response right as we plan what we
should do.
Taking Terrorism Seriously
The first reason is that terrorism is so often a
product of wider, more significant problems.
Terrorist attacks may have comparatively
small-scale effects – compare the death toll
even of 9/11 with that of a major natural
disaster, or a formal war – but they do fre-
quently indicate much broader issues and
grievances that governments must address.
This has clearly been true of the varied
conflicts in Israel/Palestine, India, Pakistan,
Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Spain, Lebanon and
onward around much of the globe.
It is in this sense that we should reflect
on the degree to which we must address the
root causes of terrorism. There are those,
including the brilliant Harvard lawyer Alan
M Dershowitz, who have argued that this is
what we must not do. ‘We must take pre-
cisely the opposite approach to terrorism’,
Dershowitz has argued. ‘We must commit
ourselves never to try to understand or eliminate
its alleged root causes, but rather to place it be-
yond the pale of dialogue and negotiation’.
This seems to me misguided. Honest rec-
ognition that there are sometimes serious
21st-Century Terrorism:
How Should We Respond?
Do we pay too much attention to ter-
rorism? Statistically, it represents a
negligible threat. Leading Princeton
economist Alan B Krueger calculated that,
in 2005, the probability of an American be-
ing killed by terrorist violence was less than
one in 5 million. How terrifying is that?
Even very famous terrorist organisations
have sometimes managed to kill very few
people: the Baader-Meinhof group killed
fewer than 50 during more than two dec-
ades of activity.
By contrast, natural disasters, ongoing
atrocities of famine and avoidable disease,
even road accident fatalities, represent far
more likely causes of death and serious in-
jury. Yet if there is a terrorist bombing on
the day on which you read this article – in,
say, London or New York or Washington – it
will grab headlines and media attention to
such an extent as to eclipse even Pakistani
flood-style crises. And this would remain
true even if nobody was killed in the bomb-
ing in question.
Nor is it only media and popular attention
to terrorism that might seem exaggerated.
Government policies and pronouncements
seem far more orientated towards respond-
ing to terrorism than dealing with more
damaging problems. Compare the amount
of US money, time, energy and effort spent
on the war on terror with that devoted to
addressing global disease and starvation.
Part of the reason for this, of course, lies
in the very nature of terrorist violence itself:
its striking combination of unpredictable
lethality, spectacularly disturbing violence
and seemingly random target selection. The
chances are that it never will be you who
is in that building or on that subway when
the bomb goes off. But the point of so much
of this violence is to make you think that it
Terrorism continues to dominate headlines and policy-making alike. But are we right to consider terrorists a
genuine threat and, if so, how should we deal with the challenge they pose? Richard English investigates.
root causes behind terrorist action does
not legitimate terrorism at all. And it is fre-
quently possible to address the underlying
problems, which terrorists adduce as justi-
fication for their violence, in such a way as
actually to undermine support for terror-
ism itself. Indeed, it is very often the case
that terrorists’ supposed constituency will
be satisfied with redress falling far short of
what terrorists themselves have demanded
as necessary; examples surely include the
Basque Country in Spain, and Northern Ire-
land. To fail to acknowledge and respond to
such a reality risks causing greater disaffec-
tion than is necessary and even increasing
support for terrorist violence.
The second reason for taking the terrorist
threat very seriously is that, perhaps, the
limited scale of terrorist capacity might be
about to change in practice. One should
beware overly stark depictions of suppos-
edly ‘new’ terrorisms. Every recent decade
has had its own declaration of ‘new’ terror,
much of which, on closer inspection, proves
to be rather familiar. This has been depress-
ingly evident in the long wake of 9/11,
since when the number of publications on
terrorism has grown enormously, yet with
many evincing shaky knowledge of what
happened before 2001, or of the familiarity
of so much of what has been taking place
even after that atrocious attack.
Increased Threat
But is the terrorist threat greater in scale to-
day? Certainly, the White House currently
focuses much attention and anxiety on the
possibility that a nuclear terrorist threat is
before us. Many analysts think this to be an
exaggerated and misplaced fear, and that
76 Political Insight
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