Charlie’s Reviews > Does Terrorism Work?: A History > Status Update

Well, does it?

His argument so far is that:

(a) No political strategy ever achieves its full goal anyway, which we especially notice with terrorism because extremists tend to have impossibly lofty objectives that often get silently modified over the course of their struggle into a more realistic compromise

(b) Terrorism is often part of larger political project to state-build over a population (eg Hamas setting up social security systems), making it difficult to disentangle what success the terrorist violence itself had as part of a wider package of political activities

(c) It's amazing for getting publicity but, outside of the section of the population itself that relishes the catharsis of revenge, usually results in a bigger backlash from the wider public.

(d) That said, this is undercut when states overreact to terrorist violence with their own state terrorism, which terrorists gleefully embrace as bringing the population on their side (since states are much better at terrorism than small groups are, and the population is sometimes likely to side with the one doing less damage). The success of this is hard to judge since it requires a timescale of decades or centuries which requires different frameworks and ideologies to ultimately judge. The Irgun terrorist group arguably is an example of terrorist violence working since it set up the Israeli state that persists to this day, but the continued problems faced by said state aren't exactly a ringing endorsement of the strategy's long-term effectiveness.

(e) Life is short and most people don't join terrorism for the long term goals (even if they think they do). The adventurist urge to live an exciting life, earn financial recompense, the admiration of your peers, sexual desirability, and the camaraderie of violent struggle are an immense emotional reward for terrorists in the middle of their struggle even if in later life they come to regret the consequences. If the subconscious urge to live a meaningful life is one that we acknowledge as part of the human condition, then even the most bitter self-recriminations of IRA and ETA activists who now say the violence was pointless doesn't overwrite the fact that their younger selves had a great time doing it.

Huh, interesting! Has there been any focus in this book on the use of branding dissidents as terrorists as a state propaganda tool, even if the group in question doesn't technically meet the definition of a terrorist organisation? Or is it just focusing on groups that are unambiguously terroristic?

The introduction lays out a framework where he basically says that terrorism, if properly defined, would include states as well, but he brackets those out to focus on the specific concept of small groups consciously using terrorism to try and punch above their political weight, with the strict goal of figuring out if this is actually an effective strategy, independent of moral/emotional etc considerations, with the goal of informing future discussions and policy debates based on that finding.

By the ETA chapter though he can't help making moral condemnations which does feel like an academic slip-up where his embarrassment at being misunderstood is starting to get a little bit in the way of the project's seriousness.