POLSCI 1G06 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Solomon Judah Loeb Rapoport, Babbar Khalsa, Aum Shinrikyo
24 Mar 2014
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Political science 1g06 2013 ii lecture 8a international terrorism. A necessary first step before analyzing terrorism is to define it. There is a politics associated with defining terrorism. There are clear parallels between state violence and terrorist violence: both kill civilians, both are directed at obtaining political ends, both cause terror in their wake. Or what to make of the overused clich : one person"s terrorist is another person"s freedom fighter . Where the same act is considered illegitimate terrorism at one moment but a legitimate struggle for freedom at another, any objective categorization becomes questionable. In other words defining a group or an action as terrorist is an unavoidably political act. There is no obvious definition that would be accepted without vocal opposition from one quarter or another. The academic response to the definitional problem has been to either reject the term terrorism" as an objective label, or to divide terrorism into a number of forms:
