By:

Dr. Ali S. Awadh Asseri

(Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon)

             TOWARDS A FUNCTIONAL DEFINATION

     Despite such complexities, it is important to develop a rational understanding of terrorism. As Adrian Guelke points out,

understanding terrorism in general presents the problem that the term ‘terrorism’ entails an absolutist judgment that seems quite incompatible with the retention of any element of empathy for its perpetrators, or the situation that spawned them. The absence of empathy is a very evident feature of the literature on terrorism. It is most clearly reflected in a relative lack of interest in the explanations that those who are identified as terrorist have to offer for their actions. It is not difficult to suggest why. In the first place, no writer seeking to establish his or her credentials in the field of terrorism would wish to provide, or even appear to provide, any rationalization for an act of terrorism. In the second place, there is the problem of fitting the explanations that terrorists give into the framework provided by the concept of terrorism. There are ample reasons why the influence of terrorism on the modern world is worth examining, not in spite of, but in the light of, the barriers that exist to understanding the term. Furthermore, an elucidation of the issue of terrorism has a wider relevance to an understanding of both the nature of the world and of the age in which we live.[1]

Walter Laqueur argues for a rational understanding of terrorism, but in a slightly different way. According to him,

‘with all the misunderstandings, deliberate and involuntary, on the subject of terrorism, it is still true that people reasonably familiar with the terrorist phenomenon  will agree 90 per cent of the time about what terrorism is, just as they will agree on democracy or nationalism or other concepts. In fact, terrorism is an unmistakable phenomenon, even if the search for a scientific, all-comprehensive definition is a futile enterprise’. Any definition beyond ‘the systematic use of  murder, injury, and destruction, or the threat of such acts, aimed at achieving political ends’ will result in controversy, and arguments will go on endlessly. The position of the student of terrorism is not unlike that of a physician dealing with a disease, the exact causes of which remain unknown to this day, or a drug of which it is not known how precisely it functions. But this will not prevent him from diagnosing the disease, or from prescribing the drugs that are applicable.[2]

[1] Adrian Guelke, The Age of Terrorism and the International Political System (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 17.

[2] Walter Laqueut, No End to War: Terroerism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003), p. 238