ABSTRACT
The following chapter is devoted to the analysis of the international discourse on terrorism since the attacks during the Olympic Games in Munich in September 1972. The central aim consists in analyzing whether and how a hegemonic order has been established. The preceding chapter already established the structure of the two empirical chapters: first, I reconstruct how terrorism has been construed as a threat to international peace and security. While equating terrorism with danger sounds consensual and justified to modern ears, throughout history terrorism has described entirely different things to different people. Emphasizing the historical contingency of the current interpretation of terrorism, the first part of chapter four outlines the development of the term terrorism from its first known appearance during the French Revolution to the attempts to find a universal definition of the phenomenon at the level of the UN starting in 1972. By identifying different hegemonic strategies in the discourse that share the common aim of constructing terrorism as the antagonistic Other, the analysis reveals the enormous difficulties of contemporary efforts to forge a global consensus on a definition of international terrorism.
