ABSTRACT
The recent surge of interest in just war theory is attributable in no small part to the significant and prolific rise in terrorist activity over the past decade. Of course, terrorism is not a new phenomenon. The term ‘terrorism’ was first coined during the French Revolution in the eighteenth century, and terroristic activities go back as far as Ancient Rome. The IRA (Irish Republican Army) employed a sustained campaign of terrorism against the British in the 1970s, and ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) have been blowing things up in Spain for the past forty years. What has lately changed is the amount of interstate terrorism. In the past, terrorism was a largely domestic problem, with small groups using violence against their own governments or occupying forces in a bid to change domestic policies. Now, terrorism has an undeniably international dimension, crossing borders in a way that seems to take it beyond the realm of ‘ordinary’ criminal violence and into the realm of warfare. These international terrorists primarily seek to change not the domestic policies of their own countries, but the foreign policies of the countries they target. In this chapter, we will look at whether there is anything conceptually distinctive about terrorism, and whether there is anything morally distinctive about terrorism. We will also consider whether terrorism can ever be morally justified.
