ABSTRACT
Terrorism takes many forms, varying through time as well as across continents. It is a protean force whose metamorphic ability baffles those who study it and daunts those who fight it. While terrorism has always been inspired by multiple sources (anarchistic, secular, religious), each age has produced its waves of terror. To simplify, “four waves” can be identified that run concomitantly with different periods. The “first wave” occurred during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when terrorism became a weapon of anarchistic revolutionaries, most of whom were of European origin. By the middle of the twentieth century, a “second wave” of terrorism had migrated to Africa or Asia and been put to use by anti-colonial nationalist movements. Once abandoned by Africans and Asians, terrorism found its way back to Europe and took root in the Middle East. The 1970s and 1980s saw a “third wave” of terrorism take root in Europe and veer strongly toward the extreme left (Marxist-Leninism) or extreme right (neofascism); in Northern Ireland and the Middle East terrorism arrived in the guise of a nationalist agenda. By the turn of the century, terrorism had entered another phase. Strains of Islam joined with terrorism, and terrorism took on a religious cast in what Rapoport calls the “fourth wave” of terrorism.1
