ABSTRACT
Continuing research to determine the effectiveness of terrorism to deliver overarching strategic goals is likely to be a futile exercise. The range of overlapping and mutually clashing forms of political action in operation in society make it almost impossible to establish a causal link between terrorism and achievement or frustration of terrorists’ end goals. Despite the inherent centrality of emotion to terrorism, there remains a relative paucity of literature which interrogates the emotive power of terrorism and its implications for counter-terrorism. This chapter argues that assessing the power of terrorists to evoke emotionally driven responses from the state might be one way to think more usefully about the effectiveness of terrorism. It argues that while terrorism studies have recently ignored the ethnonationalist content of terrorism, focusing heavily on religious motivations, ethnonationalist terrorism has continued to be a feature of the new millennium. It goes on to suggest that the continued salience of ethnicity and nationalism for individual and group identity means that terrorism perpetrated for ethnonationalist purposes might thus be effective in ways that other kinds of terrorism are not. It draws case studies from the Algerian War of Independence and the conflict in Northern Ireland as illustrative examples.
