ABSTRACT
Over the past 15 years, the variety of terrorism strains confronting the world has declined. In the 1980s, left-wing, right-wing, state-sponsored, single-issue, religious, anarchist, and ethnic terrorism infected the international arena. Each strain was different in terms of objectives, strategy, targeting patterns, tactical tendencies, operational area, and operational code. The common element which bound all of these strains together was their selection of violence as a method to redress a particular grievance, caused in most cases by a state, but sometimes by another group or issue. In the 1990s, several of these terrorism strains weakened significantly. Left-wing terrorism declined after the disintegration of the USSR and the East European communist states. State-sponsored terrorism declined as a result of the disintegration of the USSR and the 1991 Gulf War. Anarchist and right-wing terrorism strains were never powerful and prevalent in the 1980s and did not become so in the 1990s. The ethnic and religious terrorism strains, however, proliferated in the 1990s, fuelled primarily by the numerous ethnic conflicts that surfaced after the disintegration of the USSR and Yugoslavia, and by a militant tendency with an Islamic orientation that spilled out of Afghanistan. At present (November 2005), the ethnic and religious terrorism strains con-
tinue to cause the international community the most concern and to create the most international ‘headaches’ and crises. In January 2005, the author identified 99 groups that used political terrorism: 45 had a religious agenda, 30 an ethnic agenda, 10 were left-wing groups, five were right-wing, and four were singleissue militant movements. More than 70% of militant groups in the world today have either an ethnic or a religious agenda. In about 5% of these cases, the two agendas merge; that is, a group would have an Islamic revolutionary orientation with a separatist agenda. Separatism is one of the characteristics of ethnic terrorist or insurgent groups. The fact is that from 1968, the generally accepted beginning of the modern phase of terrorism, until the present, the most prevalent agenda for terrorist or insurgent groups has been an ethnic one. Ethnicity has been a primary generator of political violence over the past two decades. The main by-product of such ethnic conflict has been the emergence of either ethnic insurgent or ethnic terrorist groups, whose objectives have been independence, autonomy, or the reunification of a splintered homeland. Since the end of the Cold War, ethnic militancy has become a major security
and political ‘headache’ for the international community. Palestine, Northern
Ireland, the Basque region, Chechnya, East Timor, Kurdistan, Burundi, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Punjab, Mindinao, Tibet, Kosovo, Bosnia, Abkhazia, Sudan, Cyprus, Nagorno-Karabakh and Aceh are some of the ethnic battlefields that have caused consternation and concern for the international community over the past 15 years. In time, Iraq, and possibly Afghanistan, may be added to this list. Potentially explosive ethnic issues exist in both countries. The international public has also become familiar with these battlefields primarily because violence was used by one or more parties to these conflicts. The more violence the conflict produced, the more familiar it became to the international public. Violence, especially at the sub-state level, has always attracted attention and publicity. While the evolution of these ethnic conflicts, the actors involved, the motivations for their involvement, and the international community’s response to them is often complicated, their basic cause is relatively simple: the existence of a grievance on the part of a discontented ethnic community.
