ABSTRACT
Political science seems all too eager for a model, or at best a few models, that will enable generalizations suitable to its empirical discourse and instrumental aims. Understanding terrorism primarily as a form of opposition to the State and to the rule ofLaw,1 political science aspires to a schematic and exhaustive typology of terrorism. However, terrorism is in fact such a complex conjunction of socio-cultural, psychological and political factors that a conceptually satisfying schema ofterrorism is likely to remain elusive, at least for the time being. One way to begin is to address questions of the terrorist's self-image and motivation, because the difficulties that confront us as we grapple with these elements of the phenomenon are instructive: they reveal the persistence and inadequacy of the ethnocentric Western will to generalize from notions of egopsychology implicit in current analyses. For example, Joseph Margolin's dismissal of crude beliefs that 'the terrorist is a psychotic' or a 'highly irrational individual' rejects some common pitfalls, only to revert to the search for a generalizing behaviorist model: 'It must be assumed that the terrorist is human. Whether rational or irrational, he is governed as we all are by the same laws of behavior. ,2 I would not dispute that terrorists are human. They are; they are socially produced, out of a specific cultural context; consequently, their behavior can not be understood by the crude - or even by the careful-application of pseudo-scientific laws of general behavior. We need to examine the specific mediating factors that lead some societies under pressure, among many, to produce the kinds of violent acts that we call terrorist. A universalizing model may in fact be applicable to the factors that belong in the explicitly political realm, but I shall be dealing with culturally specific factors which resist such generalization.3
