ABSTRACT
State terrorism is one of a number of coercive tools that have regularly featured in the foreign policy practices of liberal democratic states from the North. State terrorism should be understood as a threat or act of violence by agents of the state that is intended to induce extreme fear in a target audience, so that they are forced to consider changing their behaviour in some way. Many examples of state terrorism are explored in this study. One such example is the disappearance of civilians at the hands of the state. Disappearances are a key tool of state terrorism, and were used widely by numerous Latin American states during the Cold War; they are designed to terrorise a target group through the kidnap of an individual. Relatives are rarely notified of the whereabouts of the victim, resulting in extreme anxiety about their fate. A wider audience is also targeted through these acts, since colleagues and other acquaintances of the victim are both anxious about the victim’s whereabouts, and fearful that they may be the next victim. Yet in mainstream policy, media and academic circles, terrorism tends to be understood as the targeting of the members or interests of liberal democratic states largely located in the North by fanatical groups which are supplied and controlled by ‘rogue’ states or elements, usually located in the South. This is only partially accurate. It is the case that non-state groups have carried out attacks against the people and property of Northern liberal democracies, and the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon on 11 September 2001 by Al-Qaida were the most devastating against Northern targets by such a group. Non-state terrorist organisations have also enjoyed varying levels of backing from some governments. The condemnation of such attacks and of state support for them is appropriate and necessary. But far less attention is given to the terror perpetrated by states, particularly liberal democratic ones. State violence results in far more deaths than non-state terrorism does. An estimated 170-200 million civilian deaths were caused by state-instigated mass murder, forcible starvations and genocide in the twentieth century alone (Rumell 1994). Many forms of state violence, including mass murder and genocide, involve terrorising large sectors of the population. While deaths by terrorist groups account for, on average, a few hundred per year, in the last two decades, 300,000 people have been ‘disappeared’ by state agents worldwide (Sluka 2000a). Despite this, much public debate on terrorism tends to ignore state terrorism, especially state terrorism by
Northern liberal democratic states, with most politicians, journalists and academics only showing an interest in state terrorism by ‘rogue states’ or non-democratic authoritarian regimes. Even scholarship on state violence by repressive regimes tends not to define such violence as state terrorism, as I will show. Conventional assumptions about who the main perpetrators of such violence are fail to tell the full story about who is culpable, meaning many acts of terror occur with impunity.
