Killing Civilians or Holding Territory? How to Think about Terrorism

How should we conceptualize terrorism? Is it a tactic that can be utilized by any actor? Or is it a tactic that defines a class of actors? Or is it both? How do we relate the concept of a terrorist act to the concept of a terrorist organization? Debates over how best to define terrorism have chased the elusive goal of finding the correct definition. And the key lesson that has emerged from this endeavor is that we will not ever find a single, correct definition. Instead, our collective goal should be to find a useful operationalizable definition that can help us to understand the world better and act in accordance with what we understand. We strive to go beyond simply arguing about definitions and examine how the way we define terrorism impacts the research we do. In the end, different operationalizations in quantitative work have an important, sometimes crucial, impact on what we find when we test hypotheses about the use of different kinds of political violence. Importantly, classifying and theorizing also guide us toward measurement and modeling. For decades, the study of terrorism was characterized by a lack of agreement on definitional issues and proceeded using primarily case methods, focusing on a few, such as Israel or Northern Ireland, and received little attention from the larger scholarly community. Due to the events of September 11 and their impact on the United States and subsequently on countries around the world, scholars across disciplines are drawn to the study of this form of political violence and are increasingly using cross-national databases to investigate the causes and consequences of terrorism. Departing from the decades-long debate on definitions, we focus on areas that have been neglected, but are consequential in recent scholarship.