ABSTRACT
This chapter aims: to subject current efforts to claim that "rogue" regimes are the primary drivers of contemporary Islamist terrorism – and thus to portray Islamist terrorists as being effectively the "proxies" of states – to critical scrutiny; to highlight some illustrative aspects of the actual history of state interactions with terrorist groups; and finally to develop a new categorization scheme for better identifying and distinguishing between different levels of state involvement in terrorism. One of the most contentious and misunderstood issues surrounding modern terrorism is the extent to which diverse nation-states have been involved in using violence-prone extremist groups as surrogates or proxies. Many terrorism specialists tend to be conservatives, Cold War liberals, or realists who have all too often adopted the self-serving perspectives of their own governments concerning the origin and nature of terrorism. Direct state terrorism is terrorism carried out, more or less overtly, by members of the state's security forces.
