ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a clear summation of what constitutes terrorism—political objectives, violence or the threat of violence, a target audience, an organization, the involvement of non-state actors, and an effort to increase the power of the terrorist group. Terrorism as a word in its usual usage today has a connotation of evil, indiscriminate violence, or brutality. The classification of terrorism, imperfect as it must be since it deals with real world situations, facilitates understanding the complexity of terrorist organizations and their goals—whether these goals are religious, national or ethnic, composed of more than one major element, or designed to support the state authorities. Political objectives are what separate terrorist acts from other forms of violence. Terrorist groups frequently avoid such individuals because they are unreliable and thus dangerous to the organization. A definition of terrorism needs to be separated as much as possible from evaluations of the groups using violence and their targets.
