ABSTRACT
FOR THIRTY YEARS, certainly in the Western world, Libyans and their leader, Colonel Quaddafi (also known as Qaddafi, Khadafi) have been regarded as the pre-eminent exponents of state terrorism. Why, though, should any state and state leader deliberately adopt terrorist policies? To understand how this can come about and how the rest of the world responds to it, a number of issues deserve scrutiny. First, an outline of the geographical context. Second, how is the persona of Quaddafi best described? Third, since Libya is a revolutionary state, what ideals and policies energise political action and lead to violence? Fourth, what are the initiatives and the scale of state-sponsored violence as it has been directed at other countries? Fifth, what has been the shape of international response to sponsored terrorism? Why is it that Libya’s relations with the United States, in particular, have deteriorated so markedly since the early 1980s? Finally, is it possible to see an end to the terrorism, which, at the end of the 1990s, has been much reduced in scale?
