ABSTRACT
Introduction Much is said about old and new terrorism.1 If one talked or taught about the subject even a decade ago, the stress was usually placed on how it was rational for terrorists to avoid killing too many people if the goal was to increase support for their political agenda. That particular generalization no longer seems very accurate.2 Public beheadings and events resulting in thousands of casualties are not intended to impress observers with the righteousness of their cause; yet at no point in time is terrorism activity entirely homogeneous. That is, jihadists are not the only groups who employ terrorist tactics. They compete for attention with Tamil separatists, old Marxists engaging in kidnapping for profit, and even the stray anachronistic anarchist. In any given decade, the nature of terrorist activity is less than monolithic. Since old and new forms of terrorism tend to occur at the same time, it is difficult to make generalizations that assume behavioral homogeneity. Should we make a distinction, therefore, between old and new terrorism? We argue in the affirmative. We begin with the assumption that terrorism is a tactic or family of tactics adopted by political groups engaged in asymmetrical struggles with more powerful groups – a point well developed in Table 1.1, which compares war, insurgency, and terrorism. The greater the symmetry between two opposing groups in conflict, the greater is the tendency for groups to pursue the war end of the continuum. The less the symmetry, the greater is the penchant of at least one group to favor the terrorism end. However, these generalizations do not imply that all groups engaging in terrorism will utilize precisely the same tactics, fight in the same locales, or demand the same things. We maintain that there is variation in the groups that utilize terrorist tactics from decade to decade as old groups win, are eradicated, or suffer exhaustion. As old groups disappear, new groups are apt to emerge, but not necessarily in the same places and for the same reasons. A metaphor for dealing with heterogeneity in terrorism groups and tactics is the wave. A wave is a buildup of surface water caused primarily by wind. Below the wave is a mass of water of varying temperature and visibility. The waves that we see may look different than the body of water immediately below.
