ABSTRACT
State terrorism is a central concern for critical terrorism scholars, and something that has preoccupied also the broader scholarship on terrorism since its early days. Significantly, state terror is a practice that predates modern terrorism by roughly two centuries. The topic remains, however, very much disputed theoretically and conceptually, while empirical research continues to be relatively scarce. This chapter walks you through the main theoretical contributions on state terrorism and discusses some of the controversies in the literature, definitions, types of state terrorism, and issues associated with its research.
