ABSTRACT

Terrorist violence differs from ordinary crime principally by the presence of an altruistic motive and an ideological justification. In terrorism, ideology is allimportant, as an organization’s ideological foundation frames the world-view of its members and thus provides a sense of collective identity. Moreover, ideology is instrumental in identifying the enemy, while also providing the necessary explanation and justification for its targeting. In addition, it is again the ideology of a group which determines its core objectives and the strategy for how and by what means these objectives are to be achieved. And finally, ideology is also a critical component in determining a group’s ambitions, as well as the overall perception of urgency for armed action in order to fulfil these aspirations. At the operational level, then, the group’s core strategy translates into the frequency and intensity of its military operations, in that different ideologies provide different levels of acceptability of mass-casualty and indiscriminate targeting. Consequently, the tactics and targeting preferences of a group are also very much influenced by the given group’s belief system. Overall, the understanding of a group’s ideology is one of the most important aspects of predictive threatassessment of terrorist violence. Over the last 20 years, there have been alarming developments in the trends in

international terrorism: a continual decrease in terrorist incidents, which has, however, been accompanied by an increasing number of overall casualties in those fewer incidents. In other words, terrorist attacks are becoming increasingly lethal. Besides the rising average casualty rate, qualitative analysis of all terrorist attacks seems to provide additional support for this claim: while the deadliest incidents prior to the 1980s involved ‘only’ dozens of fatalities, in the 1980s and 1990s, in the most lethal attacks, they numbered hundreds, and in the new millennium the plateau has reached into the thousands for the first time in history. Similarly, until 9/11, there had been only 76 terrorist bombings in which more than 25 people had been killed. Over the course of the next four years, this number has more than tripled. One of the most common explanations for this trend of increasing lethality

has been the proliferation of terrorist campaigns inspired by religion. According to Bruce Hoffman, who was one of the first scholars to identify this causal link:

‘The fact that for the religious terrorist violence inevitably assumes a transcendent purpose and therefore becomes a sacramental and divine duty arguably results in a significant loosening of the constraints on the commission of mass murder. Religion, moreover, functions as a legitimizing force, sanctioning if not encouraging wide scale violence against an almost openended category of opponents. Thus religious terrorist violence becomes almost an end in itself – a morally justified, divinely instigated expedient toward the attainment of the terrorists’ ultimate ends. This is a direct reflection of the fact that the terrorists motivated by a religious imperative do not seek to appeal to any constituency but themselves and the changes they seek are not for any utilitarian purpose, but are only to benefit themselves. The religious terrorist, moreover, sees himself as an outsider from the society that he both abhors and rejects and this sense of alienation enables him to contemplate – and undertake – far more destructive and bloodier types of terrorist operations than his secular counterpart.’ (Hoffman, 1993: 12)

As can be seen from the previous quote, an integral part of the argument concerns the core characteristics of religious terrorists, which allegedly set them aside from their secular counterparts. This important hypothesis has contributed to the wide perception that religious terrorists are by default more lethal and more dangerous than secular terrorists, a finding that has a profound impact on the methods of predictive threat-assessment. However, in practice there has been considerable disagreement about the uniformity of categorization of groups as ‘religious’, as opposed to ‘ethnic’ or ‘nationalist’. This essay will attempt to shed more light on this issue by providing an alternative perspective on the characteristics of masscasualty terrorism.