ABSTRACT

The history of terrorism teaches us many things. One valuable lesson is that those who employ terrorism as well as those affected by it are capable of holding a number of seemingly incongruous and ambiguous views about the nature of terrorism, and political violence more generally. It is important to acknowledge the implications of this for our understanding of terrorism particularly if we are to help psychological perspectives on terrorism move beyond their still pre-paradigmatic nature. Upon closer inspection, it is not difficult to see how the strategy of terrorism is littered with paradoxes. Terrorists seek to establish a captive audience through the propagation of terrible deeds, while simultaneously erecting barriers between them and their intended audience as a result of what they have just done. Similar paradoxes are found in the actions of those who are tasked with responding to the terrorist. We may well be aware of how certain responses to terrorism increase support for the terrorist, yet we find it inhuman and absurd to resist engaging terrorists in ways other than those we assume are deserving of the acts of cowards. It is naturally easier to attempt to prevent future instances of some action by immediately punishing it than it is to try to find some other way of perhaps redirecting that behaviour, or what underpins it (i.e. the expected consequences of engaging in that behaviour) elsewhere. The idea may appear unusual because by implication then we admittedly already know how, in several ways, we probably should not respond to terrorism. The issue then becomes not ‘How do we fight terrorism?’, but ‘Why aren’t we doing it in ways we all seem to agree on as being appropriate?’.