Terrorism has existed since the dawn of civilisation. 2,500 years ago, the Chinese military genius Sun Tzu said: “Kill one, frighten ten thousand.” Such kind of violent intimidation prevailed in the 1790s in France during the Reign of Terror. In 1914, the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo by members of the Black Hand, a Serbian nationalist terrorist group, sparked a series of events that led to the start of the First World War.

In the years following the Second World War, many of Europe’s former colonies gained independence by employing tactics closely resembling the terrorist activities of today. The formation of the state of Israel offers perhaps the clearest example of state-forming terrorism. Beginning in the final years of the Second World War, Zionist terror groups succeeded in drawing attention to their cause by terrorist and unconventional attacks on the British outposts in Trans-Jordan, the British protectorate established at the end of the First World War.

Capitalizing on Western horror of the Nazi Holocaust and the resultant sympathy for the Jewish people, these terrorists (whose ranks included whole generations of future Israeli leaders) were able to gain United Nations recognition of Israel in 1948. In the 1980s, the United States sponsored the Nicaraguan contras, a group of disaffected Nicaraguans fighting to topple the communist government there. Their tactics included many examples of what could easily be described as terrorism. In the 1990s, groups motivated by religious imperatives, such as Aum Shinrikyo, Hizballah, and al-Qaida, have grown and proliferated.

There are literally dozens of definitions for the term “terrorism”. These variations have, over the history of terrorism, reflected the bias of those who have used them. Thus, we even talk, for instance, of “ecoterrorism”, “narcoterrorism”, even “household terrorism”. However, one quality shared by most definitions is that, although terrorism is violence, its intended effects go beyond the infliction of death, damage or pain. Those things regarded as terrorism usually involve violence directed against certain people or groups of people, with the intent of having an effect on a third party. Car bombs in crowded shopping centres are used not because the terrorist has a personal grudge against the shoppers. The victims are simply tools for the terrorists.

Unlike the average political or social terrorist, who has a defined mission that is somewhat measurable in terms of media attention or government reaction, the religious terrorist can justify the most heinous acts in the name of God. This makes of the religious terrorist the most dangerous of the kind as he is likely to emotionally manipulate respectable members of society who, being beyond suspicion, escape the monitoring of the authorities.

Moreover, terrorist groups are increasingly recruiting members with expertise in fields such as communications, computer programming, engineering, finance, and the sciences. Thus, terrorist actions today have succeeded in achieving a larger scale of destruction than the conventional attacks of the previous decades of terrorism.

Perceptions of what constitutes terrorism differ from country to country, as well as among various sectors of a country’s population. Thus, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.