‘Propaganda by the Deed’ in Theory and Practice

Many analysts of the ‘terrorism’ phenomena locate the desire to cause terror as a key definitional concept: terrorists seek to cause terror. Such a conception risks obscuring the motivations for the act of terrorism, it is committed purely to terrorise. The idea that this type of political violence is an act of ‘propaganda by the deed’, however, is one commonly applied by the perpetrators themselves. The anarchist ‘terrorists’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and contemporary ‘jihadists’ both understood their acts, at least in part, as propaganda by the deed. Beyond just the creation of terror propaganda by the deed can be used as an alternative conceptual vantage point to examine and understand the motivations that lie behind acts of terrorism and the material conditions that give rise to these acts.