Terrorist Studies and the Threat to Diplomacy†
| Author | Andrew Selth |
| DOI | 10.1177/000486908601900204 |
| Published date | 01 June 1986 |
| Date | 01 June 1986 |
114 (1986) 19 ANZJ Crim
TERRORIST STUDIES AND THE THREAT TO
DIPLOMACyt
Andrew Selth*
Almost every page of history offers some remark on the inviolable rights of ambassadors, and the
security of their persons, a security sanctioned by every clause and precept of human and revealed law.
Grotius,
De Jure Belli ac Pacis
(1625)
Over the past 15 years terrorism and counter-terrorism have become subjects for
analysis and academic debate in much the same way that guerrilla warfare and
counter-insurgency caught the interest of scholars and commentators in the 1950s
and 1960s. In 1968 the New
York
Times Index did not even include asubject
heading for terrorism, yet by the end of 1976 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
could compile a bibliography which cited 1277 books and articles on the subject'.
Four
years later Edward Mickolus published another bibliography on The
Literature
of
Terrorism which listed nearly 4000 entries, including a further 21
bibliographies and study guides', As Geoffrey Fairbairn once wrote, the number of
written works on international terrorism seems to be in danger of outstripping the
number of its victims",
The subject has now been approached from almost every conceivable angle.
Studies have been made of terrorist organizations, terrorist personalities, their
tactics and of specific terrorist incidents. Some authors have looked at modern
terrorism from an historical perspective, while others have concentrated on the
challenges to liberal democratic states and the difficulties of implementing effective
counter-measures. There are books and articles on the sociological and behavioural
aspects of the problem, the implications of terrorist acts for domestic and
international law, and the impact of these developments on the international
political and economic system. A number of the analyses which have appeared in
recent years have been excellent, but as Grant Wardlaw of the Australian Institute
of Criminology has pointed out, much of the literature is shallow and:
frequently characterized by repetitiveness, lack of originality and is heavily influenced by a sense of
moral outrage which prevents serious scholarship and proper analysis. Many treatments of terrorism,
although claiming to be scholarly, are little more than journalistic - quite obviously pitched at an
audience that willinglydevours tales of the macabre."
While most of these works - good and bad - mention the specific problem of
terrorist attacks on diplomats and diplomatic facilities as part of their overall
treatment of the subject, very few examine it in any detail. Even those studies which
concentrate on related aspects of international terrorism have tended to treat the
terrorist threat to diplomacy only in passing.
The
scant attention paid to this particular facet of the terrorist problem is not due
to an underestimation of its seriousness. Indeed, the danger has been one of
over-reaction. Rather, it is because terrorist attacks on diplomats and diplomatic
facilities are usually viewed as part of a global problem and rarely as a discrete
subject worthy of examination in its own right. It is not a phenomenon which has
tThis article was first published by the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National
University in 1985.
*The author is currently completing a study of the terrorist threat to diplomacy, for the Strategic and
Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University.
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