Inspiration and the origins of global waves of terrorism

Studies in Conflict and Terrorism

Volumn 30, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 97-112

  Sedgwick, Mark ^a  

^a AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO   (Egypt)

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EID: 33846017676     PISSN: 1057610X     EISSN: 15210731     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10576100601101042     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. David C. Rapoport, "The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism," in Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy, Audrey Cronin and James Ludes, eds. (Georgetown University Press, 2004), pp. 46-73.
2. This statement might be disputed. It is defended by implication later in this article.
3. Rapoport, "Four Waves."
4. Oxford English Dictionary.
5. Walter Laqueur, "Interpretations of Terrorism: Fact, Fiction and Political Science," Journal of Contemporary History 12 (1977), p. 14.
6. The PKK is difficult to classify. Sometimes the cult of personality appears more important than either nationalism or socialism. See PaulWhite, Primitive Rebels or RevolutionaryModernizers? The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey (London: Zed Books, 2000), pp. 129-161.
7. The Muslim Brothers presented their ideology as an alternative to socialism, nationalism, and so on, but in fact subsumed much socialist and nationalist rhetoric under Islamic colors. The classic account remains Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
8. The MB origin of the 1948 bombings of Jewish targets in Cairo is not certain, but seems likely. Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 69, 93.
9. When nationalism arrived in the Arab world during the nineteenth century, it was generally agreed that patriotism was a virtue. The problem was in deciding whether the patrie should be defined in religious, geographical, or linguistic terms. This problem has never been satisfactorily resolved. When a contemporary Arab speaks of "the Muslims," what is really meant may actually be "the Arabs."
10. This was one of the defining differences between Bolshevism and its rivals, the Anarchists and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The definitive argument against "individual terror" (that it is a distraction from the real task of organizing the masses, and also distracts the masses) was made by Leon Trotsky; see his "The Collapse of Terror and of its Party," Przeglad Socyaldemocratczny, May 1909, and "Terrorism," Der Kampf, 1911 (available in many text archives as "Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism"). Lenin frequently made the same point, ultimately derived from Marx.
11. Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 183-184.
12. Discussions with various Islamists. This interpretation is in line with the discussions of many ulema of the classical period, who were little concerned with the objectives of jihad, but is at variance with the interpretations that have been mainstream since the 1850s. For an excellent discussion of the historical development of the doctrine of jihad, see Rudolph Peters, Islam and Colonialism: The Doctrine of Jihad in Modern History (The Hague: Mouton, 1979).
13. Élisabeth Campos, "Les Doukhobors, 'Lutteurs de l'esprit'," Équipe de recherche sur le terrorisme et l'antiterrorisme, Centre international de criminologie comparée, Montreal, 2005. Available at (http://www.erta-tcrg.org/doukhoborsintro.htm) [1 May 2006].
14. Robert T. Holden, "The Contagiousness of Aircraft Hijacking," The American Journal of Sociology 91 (1986), pp. 874-904.
15. For example, Manus I. Midlarsky, Martha Crenshaw, and FumihikoYoshida, "Why Violence Spreads: The Contagion of International Terrorism," International Studies Quarterly 24 (1980), pp. 262-298.
16. The Internet changes this slightly: Someone who has not yet decided to adopt a terrorist strategy might find themselves browsing instructions on techniques.
17. Recent controversy over the State Department's 2003 Patterns of Global Terrorism has illustrated how dependent all such calculations are on difficult measurements and definitions.
18. This excludes from this article's consideration the many groups operating in failed or failing states in Africa (including Somalia), in Mexico between 1911 and 1920, or more recently in Burma and former Yugoslavia.
19. Exact figures are not available. The Prussian interior ministry recorded 24 deaths and 285 injuries over a 10-day period during the year 1932, these figures of course relating only to Prussia, not to Germany as a whole. The Nazis themselves claimed 70 "martyrs" during the first 8 months of 1932; assuming that they inflicted at least as many casualties as they received, this would suggest something like 150-200 deaths for the whole year. Richard Bessel, "Violence as Propaganda: The Role of the Storm Troopers in the Rise of National Socialism." In The Formation of the Nazi Constituency 1919-1933, Thomas Childers, ed. (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1986), p. 133. As Bessel says, these figures are "mild" by comparison to Turkey in the 1980s or even to Northern Ireland after 1969 (p. 135), but they are still significant. The impact of violence is only indirectly related to mortality, of course.
20. Frederick Mundell Watkins, The Failure of Constitutional Emergency Powers under the German Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939), p. 59.
21. This comment is based on a review of usage of the word in over a hundred scholarly articles of the period.
22. Watkins, Failure of Constitutional Emergency Powers, pp. 54-55 and 58-59.
23. Hans Mommsen, The Rise and Fall ofWeimar Democracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 418.
24. Bessel, "Violence as Propaganda," pp. 131, 137-138, and 143.
25. For a classic account of this classic group, seeMartha Crenshaw Hutchinson, Revolutionary Terrorism: The FLN in Algeria, 1954-1962 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978).
26. The use of orange shirts in the Ukraine in 2004-05 also has nothing to do with SA-style terrorism, of course.
27. See, for example, the appendix to Peter H. Merkl, TheMaking of a Stormtrooper (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
28. 1937 for the campaign in Manchuria that was of such importance for theory, or 1948 for the start of Mao's final campaign.
29. Either with twelve men in 1921, or with seventy, the number Mao used in his 1965 address to a visiting Palestinian delegation. John K. Cooley, "China and the Palestinians," Journal of Palestine Studies 1(2) (winter 1972), p. 25.
30. Cengiz Çandar, "A Turk in the Palestinian Resistance," Journal of Palestine Studies 30 (2000), p. 70.
31. Çandar, "A Turk," pp. 76, 80-81.
32. Douglas J. Macdonald, "Communist Bloc Expansion in the Early Cold War: Challenging Realism, Refuting Revisionism," International Security 20 (1995), pp. 152-188.
33. Airplane hijacking was first used systematically by Cubans seeking transportation to or from Cuba. See Robert T. Holden, "The Contagiousness of Aircraft Hijacking," American Journal of Sociology 91 (1986), p. 880.
34. These were perhaps first developed in Italy as the "archipelago solution" to the problem of infiltration.
35. Not least in their ideology. The author has not seen a good discussion of their ideology, but finds it hard to believe that it is identical to the Maoism of the 1950s to the 1970s.
36. The consensus is that lack of support for Batista mattered more than events in the Sierra Maestra.
37. David B. Edwards, "Summoning Muslims: Print, Politics, and Religious Ideology in Afghanistan," Journal of Asian Studies 52 (1993).
38. Hizbullah was itself more inspired by events in Iran than in Afghanistan, of course.
39. For a defense of this thesis, see Mark Sedgwick, "Al-Qaeda and the Nature of Religious Terrorism," Terrorism and Political Violence 16 (2004), pp. 795-814.
40. Popularized to the extent that it was even used in Peru by striking miners.
41. For the Philippines, see Benedict Anderson's Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti- Colonial Imagination (New York: Verso, 2005), which the author has not at the time of writing been able to consult himself.
42. Louise Nalbanian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties Through the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), pp. 176-77.
43. For a participant account, see Bank Ottoman: The Memoirs of Armen Garo, Simon Vratzian, ed., Haig T. Partizian trans. (Detroit: Armen Topouzian, 1990).
44. Mariam Vardaninan, author of the Hunchakian's program, was a former member of Narodnaya Volya. The other Hunchakian leaders had less direct contacts, but came from the same milieu. Some were former members of Zemlya i Volya. Nalbandian, Armenian Revolutionary Movement, pp. 113-114, 152.
45. Risto Stefov, "The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO)," Maknews. com, 2 August 2005, available at (http://www.maknews.com/html/articles/stefov/stefov71.html) [1, May 2006].
46. M. Sükrü Hanioglu. The Young Turks in Opposition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 92.
47. Peter Heehs, "Foreign Influences on Bengali Revolutionary Terrorism 1902-1908," Modern Asian Studies 28 (1994), pp. 537-538.
48. Donald M. Reid, "Political Assassination in Egypt, 1910-1954," International Journal of African Historical Studies 15 (1982), p. 627.
49. In the case of the Armenians, an earlier local insurgency against the Ottomans was also clearly of great importance: That of the Bulgarians in 1876. The Bulgarians had won autonomy (and then independence) from Istanbul largely as a result of Western European reactions to "atrocities" committed by Ottoman irregulars during counterinsurgency operations. The Armenians evidently hoped that similar reactions by the Ottomans and then by the Western European powers would lead to a similar result. In the event, atrocities were again committed, but for various reasons did not lead to the same reactions as the Bulgarian atrocities had.
50. Such a book was brought to the first meeting of the earliest Ottoman opposition group, the Patriotic Alliance, in 1865. Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 21.
51. Heehs, "Foreign Influences," p. 534.
52. Bhupendranath Datta, Swami Vivekananda Patriot-Prophet: A Study (Calcutta, 1954), p. 167,
53. quoted in Heehs, "Foreign Influences," p. 534.
54. Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the ModernWorld: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 29.
55. Heehs, "Foreign Influences," p. 534.
56. Though not in complimentary terms: Tsou Jung called, in Su-pao (a newspaper that was also discussing anarchist ideas) for "a constructive revolution like the English, American, or French, not a barbaric one like that of the [recently defeated] Boxers or Carbonari." J. Lust, "The 'Su-pao' Case: An Episode in the Early Chinese Nationalist Movement," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 27 (1964), p. 419.
57. For details, see T. R. Ravindranathan, "Bakunin in Naples: An Assessment," Journal of Modern History 53(2) (June 1981), pp. 189-212.
58. J. Bowyer Bell, Terror out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977), p. 84.
59. It is difficult to disentangle truth from imagination in the newspaper accounts of "Takfir wa Hijra," which followed the Egyptian state in seeing that group in political terms. However, the group can also be seen as a non-political group that turned to violence for non-political reasons, and thus came into conflict with the Egyptian state. It might then have developed into a primarily political group, but did not have time. This is much the view taken by Abdel Azim Ramadan, "Fundamentalist Influence in Egypt: The Strategies of theMuslim Brotherhood and the Takfir Groups," in Fundamentalisms and the State, Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 159. Aum is a more difficult case. It is hard to say whether Aum initially aimed at taking power (which would certainly make it political) or at preparing to enter a power vacuum that it expected to develop (which would be an aspect of millenarianism, more religious than political).
60. Daniel A. Metraux, "Religious Terrorism in Japan: The Fatal Appeal of Aum Shinrikyo" (Asian Survey 35, 1995, pp. 1140-1154) is a good treatment, but does not resolve this question. In both cases, the internal dynamics of the group have more in common with those of an archetypal New Religious Movement than with a political group, although there are interesting overlaps between these two dynamics.