Law, Randall. D. (2020) - The Origins of Modern Terrorism. The Cambridge World History of Violence, 532-558

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The Origins of Modern Terrorism

randall d. law
Although wars, classic insurrections and genocides have claimed far more
lives, terrorism has become the very face of modern conflict and turbulence,
particularly since the attacks of September 11, 2001. But terrorism has a much
longer history: in fact, recognisably ‘modern’ terrorism has existed for more
than two centuries. This chapter surveys terrorism from the late eighteenth
to the early twentieth centuries and analyses its emergence as a peculiarly
modern form of violence in the context of the clash between the growth of
state power and the emphasis on individual rights and entitlements.
The word ‘terrorist’ was first used in English by Edmund Burke in 1795 in
a passing comment denouncing the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.1
The terms ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ were rarely invoked in the following
decades but entered wide if idiosyncratic circulation in the last decades of the
nineteenth century. Those who used or advocated insurrectionary or sym-
bolic political violence frequently embraced the word ‘terrorism’ to describe
their own behaviour, even as it began to enter broader usage as a convenient
epithet to use against those whose motives or means of waging a struggle
were deemed illegitimate by political elites or dominant populations. When
scholars, legal authorities and international agencies began to turn their
attention to ‘terrorism’ in earnest in the middle of the twentieth century,
the phenomenon was understood to overlap broadly with insurgency, that is,
asymmetric warfare waged against a state by a group or a population not
legally recognised as a sovereign entity. Only in the wake of the ascendance
of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the emergence of ‘international
terrorism’ in the late 1960s did observers analytically distinguish terrorism
from other forms of violence. Policy-oriented academics – usually from the
social sciences – began to emphasise several core features: first, that it was
1 Edmund Burke, ‘Fourth Letter . . . to the Earl Fitzwilliam’, in The Works of the Right
Honourable Edmund Burke, 12 vols. (London: Nimmo, 1887), 6:70.
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violence against civilians outside of the normal bounds of war; second, that
its intent was to achieve political change by intimidating state authorities or
the broader population; and third, that it was, by definition, carried out
against states by sub-state groups.
In the 1980s, a minority within academia began to focus on the symbolic
nature of terrorism and to characterise it as a communicative act, which
untethered the study of terrorism from the increasingly lengthy list of
criteria that was used to define it. Such an approach made clear that
terrorism could be used by both states and non-states, against soldier and
civilian alike, and within and beyond the confines of war. Those who
advocated this approach identified terrorism as a strategy that sought to
change the behaviour of the many by violently targeting the few and argued
that those who use terrorism pick symbolically charged targets and take
advantage of the subsequent media attention to communicate their grie-
vances, recruit new followers, terrorise and provoke their enemies, and –
they hope – achieve political change.
But just as the study of terrorism has evolved, so has terrorism itself.
Terrorism can be treated as a dynamic, evolving strategy in many different
ways. Sometimes this is done via the broader effort to link the emergence
of ‘modern’ terrorism to one or more ‘modern’ phenomena – such as mass
media or certain weapon technologies – or the development of ‘modern’
self-consciousness or subjectivity.2
This chapter locates the emergence of modern terrorism in the parallel
growth of the rhetoric and the reality of, on the one hand, state power and
nationalism and, on the other, of individualism, individual entitlements and
individual rights. To put it more polemically, modern terrorism is democratic
violence for a democratic era. This has multiple meanings. First, much
terroristic violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was carried
out in pursuit of liberating ‘the people’ from coercive state authority and
asserting their rights, both individual and collective. Second, modern terror-
ism is individualised and small scale, not only in terms of the perpetrator and
the victim, but also in the narratives that are created in which members of
society are encouraged to see themselves as the personal victim of the
violence. Third, modern terrorists assert the power of the individual who
strikes back heroically against an all-powerful state but often on behalf of
causes that have a deeply social, even ‘mass’ element.
2 See Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth
of Terrorism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).
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RANDALL D. LAW
Democracy, Revolution and Terrorism

The roots of modern terrorism are deep and can be found in the slow
emergence of state power, the ideology of democracy and the conception of
the individual. Early European writers, such as St Augustine (d. 430), widely
referenced the ‘common good’ and the duty of the powerful to safeguard
certain traditional rights of the people. Later scholars, such as John of Salisbury
(d. 1180) and Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), countenanced violence to protect those
traditional rights of society or to punish those who ruled as tyrants. But such
violence differed from modern terrorism in many ways: it was only to be used
by society’s elite against those individuals who were directly responsible for
tyranny in order to restore society’s natural harmony. But the Protestant
Reformation, the English Civil War (1642–51), John Locke (d. 1704) and
America’s Founding Fathers democratised and secularised violence and intro-
duced the possibility of revolutionary, not just conservative political violence.
The French Revolution (1789–94) was the real watershed moment in the
intertwined histories of terrorism, state terror, democracy, nationalism and
individualism. Revolutionaries introduced a new language of both individual
and collective rights, as well as justifications for state power based on them.
Meanwhile, attacks on symbols of royal and aristocratic power grew in
number and intensity and resonated powerfully among revolutionaries and
the broader population. As the Revolution grew more radical, its proponents
carried out even more displays of symbolic violence, such as attacks on Church
property and aristocratic reactionaries. The coming of war in 1792 between
France and its conservative neighbours drew a European-wide battle line
between popular and monarchical sovereignty. When the moderate
Charlotte Corday assassinated the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat in the
summer of 1793, revolutionaries interpreted it as a violent act meant to
intimidate supporters of the new French republic. With the Revolution
under assault at home and abroad, radicals ruled France as a dictatorship and
deployed terror on a massive scale to cement and extend state power and, at
least rhetorically, to establish liberty. The targets of this violence were the anti-
democratic pillars of the old order as well as revolutionaries who either
insufficiently supported the use of terror or supported popular rather than
state power. Approximately 17,000 people were executed by the authorities
during the Reign of Terror, but unofficial numbers are easily double that.3 The
moderate revolutionary Jean-Lambert Tallien, who helped organise the arrest
3 Hugh Gough, The Terror in the French Revolution, 2nd edn (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), p. 109.
534
of Maximilien Robespierre and end the Reign of Terror, identified the essence
of the radical regime: ‘if the government of terror pursues a few citizens for
their presumed intentions, it will frighten all citizens’.4 What differentiated
‘terror’ from the state’s other violent actions, such as the prosecution and even
execution of criminals, was that ‘terror’ was used against potential criminals and
was thus essentially symbolic.
When the Bourbon dynasty and European conservative elites were restored
after Napoleon’s defeat, sub-state, conspiratorial groups became the principal
users of what today we would recognise as terrorism. One example was the
Carbonari, who plotted terrorist actions that they hoped would spark popular
revolutions against the monarchies of France and Italy. Carbonari plans
included prison breaks, assassinations, and coordinated efforts to sow chaos.
In the end, Carbonari cells, which were active in the 1810s and early 1820s, did
little beyond recruiting members, hatching plots, and engaging in Masonic-
inspired oaths and rituals that were awash in symbolism and revolved around
bloodthirsty denunciations of the Catholic Church and monarchical tyranny.
The more important point is that groups such as the Carbonari represent
the transition from terrorism as a state to a sub-state phenomenon. In theory,
the goals (civil liberties, popular sovereignty, representative assemblies) and
the enemies (religious and secular tyrants) remained the same. But with the
political and military defeat of Napoleon, the revolution and the violent
means that would be necessary to achieve and secure it went underground.
The French revolutionaries had been state actors, developing as terrorists
after they had seized the reins of state authority. Only after 1815 did ‘revolu-
tionary’ acquire the meaning that today seems commonsensical, that of the
underground conspirator dedicated to seizing power and the use of violence
to overturn the current order and establish a new one.
The conservative powers of Restoration Europe – the most significant of
which were France, Prussia, and the Russian and Habsburg empires – identi-
fied themselves as opponents of revolution and protectors of the traditional
pillars of society: monarchy, nobility and the church. These governments
used the military as well as traditional legal, economic and social privileges to
preserve their holds on power, but they also increasingly turned to new, even
‘liberal’ forces to preserve their position. Chief among these forces was
industrialisation. Conservative states co-opted or aligned themselves with
emerging capitalists through contracts, favourable tax policies, the provision
4 ‘J.-L. Tallien on the Terror’, in Laura Mason and Tracey Rizzo (eds.), The French
Revolution: A Document Collection (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 266.
535
RANDALL D. LAW
of critical infrastructure (roads, canals, ports and eventually railroads), and

the use of law and force to quell labour disturbances.
The Industrial Revolution encouraged and was accompanied by other
‘revolutions’ that led to the growth of the size, reach and effectiveness of
bureaucracies, militaries and security forces – in short, the growth of state
power. This bureaucratic expansion took many forms, including the growth
of the means to surveil, tax and conscript citizens, as well as to shape lives and
dominate spaces through the development of infrastructure, public works
and public health.5 Another manifestation of urbanisation and bureaucratisa-
tion was the establishment in the second quarter of the nineteenth century of
permanent, uniformed police forces which could be used, on the one hand, to
combat crime and ensure a minimal level of safety and, on the other, to
suppress labour gatherings and disturbances as well as public protests for
more rights and freedoms.
Meanwhile, during the mid nineteenth century the intellectual framework
for terrorism developed despite the lack of terrorist acts per se. The crucial
figure was Karl Heinzen, a Prussian radical democrat who participated in the
upheavals of 1848–9 in his homeland. Shortly thereafter he published a series
of articles entitled ‘Murder’, in which he stated that although killing is always
immoral, in practice the state praises its soldiers for killing during war, its
patriots for acts of tyrannicide during ‘proper’ revolutions, and its hangmen
for executing criminals. Meanwhile, the state denounces those who fight for
democracy, liberty and the people’s rights. Heinzen argued that states are
themselves simply the expression of the interests of the wealthy and that the
concepts of morality and justice are relative. Therefore, governments should
not be able to reference those standards when violently oppressing their
opponents. Moreover, true freedom fighters should not shrink from using
violence. ‘Let us, then, be practical’, he wrote. ‘Let us call ourselves mur-
derers as our enemies do, let us take the moral horror out of this great
historical tool.’ The dilemma that freedom fighters faced was that states
possessed more than just the faux moral and legal standing to suppress
democratic movements; modern states also had the economic, logistic and
demographic ability to overwhelm those who would take up arms against
them. The answer, Heinzen said, was for revolutionaries and democrats to
fight against well-armed states by using terror, conspiratorial organisation
and destructive new technologies – in a word, terrorism (although he did not
5 Among others, see Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London: Fontana,
1989) and Oliver MacDonagh, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A
Reappraisal’, Historical Journal 1.1 (1958), 52–67.
536
use it). In the end, he drew the Machiavellian conclusion: ‘the path to
Humanity’ could pass successfully ‘through the zenith of Barbarity’.6 In
doing so, Heinzen appropriated the moral arguments of the Enlightenment
concerning civil rights, democracy, liberty and emancipation, but used them
to justify terror, violence, even mass murder. These rhetorical devices were
later used by many movements and individuals – which, of course, were
unlikely ever to have heard of his name – that have used terrorism.
Russian Revolutionary Terrorism

The theory and practice of terrorism became a major fixture of the modern
world in the last third of the nineteenth century in many places, but it
achieved the most prominence in three distinct forms: Russian revolutionary
terrorism, international anarcho-terrorism, and American white supremacist
terrorism. Those behind each of these forms theorised and carried out
terrorism on behalf of society against what they described as the overarching,
tyrannical power of the state, and yet proponents of each movement indivi-
dualised the violence to a greater or lesser extent.
Tsarist Russia was a land with little experience of representative institu-
tions, civil liberties or the rule of law. The leaders of the revolutionary
movement that developed there in the third quarter of the nineteenth
century were devoted to the emancipation of the serfs, an emphasis on
local governance and a massive reapportionment of the land – in toto,
a generic form of agrarian socialism known in Russia as ‘populism’. They
vacillated between working towards the development of a popular revolu-
tionary movement through education and agitation and, when tsarist police
infiltration and repression blocked that possibility, the use of targeted assas-
sination. The earliest attempt on the life of the tsar by a revolutionary was
carried out by Dmitri Karakozov against Tsar Alexander II in 1866. The return
of revolutionary terrorism was marked in 1878 by attacks on St Petersburg’s
governor general Fyodor Trepov by Vera Zasulich (unsuccessful) and on
Nikolai Mezentsov, the head of the tsar’s secret police, by Sergei Kravchinsky
(successful). Both assassins were ideologically populists. While Zasulich’s
attempt was primarily an act of revenge meant to punish Trepov for his
beating of a jailed revolutionary, Kravchinsky’s attack had a much broader
motive, about which he later wrote at great length. He imagined that
6 Karl Heinzen, ‘Murder’, in Walter Laqueur (ed.), Voices of Terror: Manifestos, Writings
and Manuals (New York: Reed, 2004), pp. 57–67, at 58, 62, 67.
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RANDALL D. LAW
individual acts of targeted violence against the state’s leaders could actually
change the regime’s behaviour – this because and not in spite of the vast gulf
between the power of the state and its subjects. On the one hand, he believed
that it would be virtually impossible for the authorities to find all the
individual assassins who could hide within the broader population.
Meanwhile, assassinations of prominent figures would create popular heroes
who could keep alive the revolutionary movement and inspire the emer-
gence of new activists. On the other hand, Kravchinsky theorised that these
violent acts would encourage a bunker mentality on the part of the tsar and
his ministers which would diminish the government’s effectiveness and
encourage its repressive tendencies, leading, in turn, to the creation of
a true mass movement that could eventually topple the tsar and his system.7
In the late 1870s, Russians formed the first-ever large-scale conspiratorial
organisation devoted to the use of revolutionary terrorism. The People’s
Will, as it was known, probably did not have more than a few score hardcore
members, but its several thousand supporters across Russia were organised
into cells, whose members were unaware of each other’s names and loca-
tions. These cells engaged in agitation, raised money, recruited members and
supplied safe houses. Within the central organisation, members specialised in
distinct fields, such as surveillance, counterespionage, forgery, smuggling and
explosives. The group’s leaders debated among themselves about how best
to deploy their violence: Nikolai Morozov argued for a massive campaign of
terrorism that would destabilise Russia and lead to peasant rebellions, while
others proposed using targeted assassinations as a prelude to a coup. The
organisation’s nominal chief, Lev Tikhomirov, eventually prevailed: like
Kravchinsky, he believed that the principal purpose of terrorism was sym-
bolic in that it could keep the movement alive, undermine the legitimacy of
the tsar and his regime, and eventually pave the way for some sort of
revolution. More to the point, he later confessed that the commitment to
violence came before the rather tortured efforts to validate its purpose.8
Although Morozov left when his dream of a widespread campaign was
discarded, he captured the group’s mood when he claimed that terrorism
‘should make the struggle popular, historical, and grandiose’.9 After six failed
7 Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Underground Russia (New York: Scribner, 1883), pp. 38–42,
256–64.
8 Deborah Hardy, Land and Freedom: The Origins of Russian Terrorism, 1876–1879 (Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 1987), pp. 154–6.
9 Nikolai Morozov, ‘The Terroristic Struggle’, in Feliks Gross, Violence in Politics: Terror
and Political Assassination in Eastern Europe and Russia (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), pp.
110–12, at 110.
538
attempts on the life of the tsar, the People’s Will finally succeeded in
assassinating Alexander II on 1 March 1881, by blowing up his sled with hand-
tossed explosives. No popular revolution erupted, and the tsar’s son,
Alexander III, rolled back reforms and launched a major crackdown on
even mild subversion after he came to the throne.
Anarchist Terrorism in Europe and Russia

The second form of political violence during this period was anarcho-
terrorism, which was shaped not only by horror at the consequences of
rapid industrialisation and growing state power in Europe and the United
States but also by complicated political and ideological developments across
the political spectrum. As middle-class support for liberal democracy grew,
most embittered workers turned to socialism. That movement inspired few
terrorists during this era, however, because socialists found that they could
make more progress in terms of improving workers’ lives through large-scale
organising. And many conservative leaders, such as Germany’s Otto von
Bismarck, found that they could blunt the revolutionary impulse by imple-
menting limited reforms and even turn some workers towards the state by
harnessing nationalism. Gradualism – from both the Left and the Right –
threatened to undermine more radical movements, such as revolutionary
Marxism, which preached that workers could only truly be emancipated
when the system was completely overthrown. Even those Marxists com-
mitted to the use of violence rarely turned to terrorism, however. As the
Russian revolutionary Lev Trotsky put it in 1911, ‘if we rise against terrorist
acts, it is only because individual revenge does not satisfy us’.10 Terrorism
was ahistorical, Trotsky argued, since it was the work of small groups rather
than of entire social classes.
The radicals most threatened by the partial amelioration of working-class
demands and the growing might of centralised states were anarchists. Like
socialists, anarchists lamented what they understood to be working-class
repression at the hands of capitalists and the states that they controlled. But
anarchists decried the solutions proposed by socialists, which were seen as
the substitution of one kind of repression for another. Anarchists denounced
the state itself – regardless of who controlled it – as repressive, since it always
represented the power of one segment of society over another.
10 Lev Trotsky, ‘Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism’, Der Kampf (November 1911),
www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1911/11/tia09.htm.
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RANDALL D. LAW
Most anarchists were peaceful, even pacifistic, but a small fringe of the
movement turned to violence in the hopes of bringing about a liberating
revolution. But if they were few in number – as were the number of
casualties – their impact was significant. Anarchist terrorists struck targets
in Europe, Russia, South America and the United States, and their violence
stretched from the 1880s to its last gasp in the early 1920s. While some
anarchist attacks were carried out by small cells and loosely affiliated net-
works, individuals were responsible for most of the mayhem.
Anarcho-terrorists acted on a range of motives, but three stand out. The
first was articulated by Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian who was one of the key
anarchist theorists of the nineteenth century. He theorised that individual
attacks, motivated by anything from thievish greed to altruistic idealism,
could foment chaos and wear down the state, eventually creating opportu-
nities for revolutionaries to overthrow the state and establish self-governing
communes. ‘Everything in this fight is equally sanctified by the revolution’,
Bakunin declared. ‘[Never mind that those destined to perish] will call it
terrorism!’11 While his vision of an anarchist heaven-on-earth never materi-
alised, his strategy of using essentially random violence to create
a revolutionary moment has become second nature to modern radicals
willing to use terrorism, particularly against civilians.
The second motive behind anarcho-terrorism was best articulated by the
Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin who popularised the phrase ‘propaganda
of the deed’. For him, this meant acts of violence or even simple insubordina-
tion that, through visceral, immediately experienced examples, pushed com-
moners past their passivity, their sense of inferiority, and their ingrained
reluctance to act against their oppressors. In other words, violence was
empowering. For Kropotkin, the significance of terrorism – a word he rarely
used but a concept that he clearly evoked – lay almost entirely in its impact on
the perpetrator and not the victim.
The European most associated with the direct promotion of terroristic
‘propaganda of the deed’ was the German Johann Most, who published the
anarchist newspaper Die Freiheit (Freedom), first in Germany and then in
New York after he emigrated in 1882. Most essentially brought the
Bakuninist and Kropotkinite justifications for terrorism together. He claimed
that terrorism could ‘stoke the fire of revolution and incite people to revolt in
any way we can’.12 Most did not just encourage propaganda of the deed; the
11 Laqueur, Voices, p. 70.

12 Quoted in Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976),
pp. 44–5.
540
pages of Die Freiheit contained detailed descriptions of how to make and

deploy poisons, dynamite and letter bombs. And after he moved to the
United States, he spoke to rapturous audiences at anarchist clubs across the
country – a speech in Chicago reportedly drew 6,000 – and directly contrib-
uted to the spread of the doctrine of the propaganda of the deed in the New
World.
Terrorist actions in Europe during this period were often prompted by the
desire to avenge fellow anarchist revolutionaries. This was the case in France
in the first half of the 1890s, when a string of intertwined bombings killed only
a handful of victims but horrified and entranced the nation. The attacks were
carried out, in two separate threads, first as responses to the suppression of
a parade and a strike and then proceeded as reactions to the arrests of the
others. Also notable was the nature of the targets, which included the home
of a judge and a prosecutor, the headquarters of a mining company, cafés, the
French Chamber of Deputies itself, and finally, in 1894, the French president,
Sadi Carnot, who was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist. The terrorists
used their trials to rail against the evils of capitalism and state power and to
plead for other anarchists to take up the fight. Although these anarchists did
not personally know each other, their actions created the impression – fanned
by the government and the newly ascendant mass-circulation newspapers –
that France was beset by a widespread anarchist conspiracy. The irony was
that the combination of the state’s lopsided monopoly on the use of legit-
imate violence and the development of a labour movement that alternated
between compliance and mass organisation meant – again contrary to the
perception of most – that terrorism primarily existed as an individual cri de
cœur against the power of the state.
The same could be said for Russia, where, after a nearly two-decade lull,
terrorism reached dizzying heights of destructiveness during and shortly after
the 1905 Revolution. In that year, terrorism was only one of many kinds of
violence and disruption alongside organised political opposition, peasant
revolts, massive labour strikes, and mutinies by soldiers and sailors. Only
Tsar Nicholas II’s last-minute concessions of a limited constitution,
a legislature and limited civil rights prevented the collapse of the state.
Even then, terrorist violence was only finally brought down to manageable
levels by 1911.
The most frequently told story of these years is the return of targeted
assassination by the Combat Organisation, a small, secret group that carried
out terrorist operations on behalf of the populist Socialist Revolutionaries
(SRs). The SRs, who aspired to build a mass movement, valued terror for its
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ability to attract recruits, keep pressure on the state, and potentially create
a revolutionary situation. The Combat Organisation assassinated two ministers
of the interior (essentially national police chiefs) and a host of other officials,
including the tsar’s own uncle, the Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich.
While these attacks garnered headlines at home and abroad, they did not
and could not seriously undermine the state itself. Far greater damage was
done to both the state and society by a tidal wave of uncoordinated terrorist
violence that swamped Russia during and for some time after 1905. Anna
Geifman has estimated that nearly 17,000 people were killed or wounded in
these terrorist attacks from 1905 to 1910.13 While local Socialist Revolutionary
cells were responsible for some of these attacks, the vast majority were
carried out by anarchists. While some were undoubtedly political, many
were crimes sheathed in ideology, such as was the case with so-called
‘revolutionary expropriations’. These were robberies and murders carried
out to raise funds for revolutionary purposes or, as was often the case, for
personal gain but with the Bakuninist claim that such crimes struck at the
capitalist system.
Anarchist Terrorism in the United States

The United States has a long and bloody history of labour-related violence,
which formed the backdrop for sporadic outbursts of terrorism. The first
such eruption occurred in the eastern Pennsylvania coal fields in the 1860s
and 1870s. When a few dozen company managers and bosses were killed,
the authorities blamed their deaths on the Molly Maguires, supposedly an
underground group with roots in the Irish Whiteboys and other secret
societies. Twenty miners were eventually executed after sensationalistic
trials based on flimsy evidence. Today, historians doubt that the Mollies
even existed as an organised group. But the spectre of conspiratorial
violence carried out by immigrants with ties to Old World movements
set the tone for much of what was to follow. Middle America, the country’s
political leaders and the mainstream media came to understand American
terrorism as essentially the work of outsiders or hyphenated Americans. For
the next fifty years, the dominant image of the American terrorist was of
a heavily whiskered foreigner with an unpronounceable name and a bomb
hidden under an overcoat.
13 Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 21.
542
It is important to note, however, that the bulk of labour-related violence

was carried out not by terrorists but by state militias or armed strike breakers,
such as during the Homestead strike (1892), the Pullman strike (1894), the
Ludlow massacre (1914) and the Battle of Blair Mountain (1921). A second key
point is that the majority of the workers who went on strike or organised
were relatively non-ideological, and those who did profess an ideology could
be classified as socialists. Socialists and labour activists did occasionally use
terrorism, though, such as the October 1910 bombing of the headquarters of
the Los Angeles Times, which was locked in a debilitating dispute with its
union. The blast killed twenty-one non-union employees. This sort of vio-
lence tended to be closely connected to specific labour grievances and
economic issues.
Most sub-state labour-related terrorism in the USA was carried out by
anarchists who always formed a radical fringe of the labour movement; one
estimate puts the number of anarchists in the USA at the time of the move-
ment’s peak in 1885 at 7,000. Even then, violent anarchists lay at the fringe of
the fringe. Not surprisingly, they attracted the lion’s share of national atten-
tion, in part because of their violent rhetoric. One anarchist paper, for
instance, exhorted its readers: ‘Dynamite! . . . It brings terror and fear to
the robbers . . . A pound of this good stuff beats a bushel of ballots hollow –
and don’t you forget it!’14 Anarchist rhetoric also differed from that of the
mainstream labour movement by focusing significant energy on the state and
its war against individual liberty. Quite tellingly, most anarchist violence in
the USA was carried out by individuals or extremely small cells, even as it was
characterised by authorities and the mainstream press as the leading edge of
a massive and violent revolutionary movement.
The story of anarchist violence in the United States begins with the
Chicago Haymarket Riot of 1886. After hundreds of thousands of workers
marched and went on strike across the United States on 1 May demanding the
eight-hour work day, demonstrations continued in Chicago, in part to protest
police violence at a local strike. On 4 May, as a demonstration led by
anarchists wound down, someone threw a bomb, killing eight policemen.
What followed was America’s first red scare, a nationwide panic during
which the authorities went on a witch hunt for violent revolutionaries and
newspapers fanned the fears of middle America. Chicago police rounded up
anarchists and used the hysteria to suppress socialists and union activists.
14 Quoted in Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1984), p. 170.
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RANDALL D. LAW
Despite a paucity of evidence, eight defendants were found guilty and five
were sentenced to death. Those on the left loudly denounced the verdict as
a miscarriage of justice. By 1893, the governor of Illinois agreed and issued
pardons. But there had been a bomb, and trial evidence revealed that a small
group of anarchists had made bombs and plotted to use them at some time.15
In a country rife with labour-related tension and conflict, terrorism had
become the fault line, crystallising for the bulk of the population the danger
of labour, immigrants and even rampant individualism, while clarifying for
those on the left the horrifying demagogic power of the state.
The first red scare of 1886 stigmatised the American labour movement and
the campaign for the eight-hour work day, but labour organisation soon
picked up again. In fact, from 1897 to 1920, total union membership increased
tenfold. Just as importantly, evidence suggests that wages grew and the
average work week shrank during this period for unionised workers more
than for non-union workers.16 Ironically, the creeping success of American
labour organisers alarmed not just industrialists and their government back-
ers but also anarchists, who – as in Europe – feared that the slow amelioration
of working-class disaffection threatened their claims that only a revolution
could fundamentally right society’s wrongs. Afraid that they would lose their
audience, anarchists doubled down on terrorism. But they also shifted even
more clearly towards a rhetorical emphasis on the evils of statism and the
importance of individual liberty.
Thus it is significant that the most high-profile incidences of American
anarcho-terrorism around the turn of the century were individual acts of
propaganda of the deed. In 1892, the Russian-American anarchist
Alexander Berkman attempted to kill Henry Clay Frick, chairman of
the board of Carnegie Corporation, in retaliation for Carnegie’s violent
clampdown on striking steel workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania. And
in September 1901, Leon Czolgosz shot and killed US President William
McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Just
before his execution, Czolgosz, an anarchist and former steelworker
born in the United States to Polish immigrants, stated, ‘I killed the
President because he was the enemy of the good people – the good
working people. I am not sorry for my crime.’17
15 Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the
Gilded Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 59–63, 77–8, 119, 187-8 n. 5.
16 Leo Wolman, The Growth of American Trade Unions, 1880–1923 (New York: National
Bureau of Economic Research, 1924), p. 33, http://papers.nber.org/books/wolm24-1.
17 Robert J. Donovan, The Assassins (New York: Harper, 1955), p. 107.
544
Record-setting foreign immigration, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and

American involvement in World War I stoked fear in the United States of
Bolshies, workers, anarchists, terrorists and unassimilated foreigners. The
Immigration Act of 1917 legalised the deportation of resident aliens who
promoted assassination, and the Sedition Act of 1918 prohibited anti-
government speech. In 1919, these laws were used to take into custody
Luigi Galleani, an Italian immigrant who had taken Johann Most’s place as
America’s loudest and most notorious proponent of anarchism and propa-
ganda of the deed. That June, eight bombs set off outside the homes of
officials associated with the legislation produced three fatalities: a guard,
a bystander and one of the bombers. Pamphlets signed by ‘The Anarchist
Fighters’ that were found at the scene stated, ‘there will have to be murder:
we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will
destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions’. The dead bomber
was a colleague of Galleani; no other terrorists were arrested.18
A new moral panic ensued. US attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer
declared that America was under assault from ‘alien anarchists’, and a beefed-
up Bureau of Investigation rounded up 10,000 suspects over seven months.
The government eventually deported about 500 of those seized. The climax
of American anarchist terror came soon after. On 16 September 1920, a bomb
exploded on New York City’s Wall Street, killing thirty-eight and wounding
over 200 – the most destructive American terrorist attack until the 1995
Oklahoma City bombing. The authorities never found the culprit, but suspi-
cion fell on the few Galleanists who remained, in large part because of the
discovery of a nearby note from a group claiming to be the American
Anarchist Fighters. The note seemed to reference recent arrests: ‘Free the
political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you.’19
White Supremacist Terrorism in the United States

The tragic irony surrounding the American caricature of the foreign terrorist
was that in the Ku Klux Klan the United States produced a wholly domestic
terrorist movement during Reconstruction that gleaned more support and
shed more blood than any in Europe or Russia. Most importantly, Klan
18 Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1991), p. 149.
19 Quoted in Joseph T. McCann, Terrorism on American Soil (Boulder, CO: Sentient, 2006),
p. 64.
545
RANDALL D. LAW
terrorism actually proved to be successful, unlike most other sub-state terror

campaigns described in this chapter.
The American Civil War left over 600,000 men dead and devastated the
infrastructure of the American South. Moreover, it fundamentally trans-
formed the region’s culture, society and economy as well as destroying its
moral and ideological centre by ending slavery. Aided by the newly estab-
lished Freedmen’s Bureau, African Americans set up businesses, bought
property, worked their own land, attended schools and learned to read,
held public assemblies, and, in short, sought to live as free citizens for the
first time on a large scale in the American South. But Southern states
essentially tried to re-enslave African Americans through Black Codes,
which used vagrancy laws, employment contracts and penal labour to restrict
their movement and liberty. After ‘Radical’ Republicans surged into
Congress in 1866, they passed legislation that stripped former soldiers and
administrators of the Confederacy of the right to vote and sent troops to
reoccupy the South in order to safeguard African Americans’ newly won
franchise. Although they remained a majority in most areas of the South,
former Confederates – nearly all of them Democrats – quickly found them-
selves ruled by Republican coalitions of freed blacks, black and white
Northern ‘carpetbaggers’ who had come south, and white Southern ‘scala-
wags’ who cooperated with the new authorities.
Having lost the rebellion and unable to wage another open war of resistance
to protect their lost world, militant southern white Democrats responded by
launching a campaign of terrorism. The Ku Klux Klan became the centrepiece
of this resistance. Formed by early 1866, the Klan briefly existed as a centrally
organised movement but soon flourished as a patchwork of independent
chapters. Other extravagantly named local terrorist groups, such as the
Knights of the White Camelia, also emerged. Disparate in dress, ritual and
rhetoric, what united these cells was their devotion to white supremacy, an
unwillingness to buckle to renewed northern ‘aggression’, and a willingness to
use symbolic violence on a vast scale. The Klan and related groups killed
thousands of blacks who sought to live free and public lives, as well as
thousands of blacks and whites who supported the Republican Party – the
party of Abraham Lincoln, the North and emancipation.
Because of poor record-keeping and broad popular support in the South
we do not know the true extent of the casualties. What we do have are the
occasional local body counts. For example, twenty-five murders and 115
assaults on ‘innocents’ were reported between June and October 1867 in
Tennessee. Two hundred racially based murders occurred in Arkansas
546
between July and October 1868. And perhaps one hundred people were killed
in a single Florida county from 1865 to 1871.20 An avalanche of anecdotes from
memoirs, official reports and congressional testimonies make clear that
violence such as this was epidemic across most of the former Confederacy.
Across the South, masked riders delivered beatings and whippings, raped
women, burned down houses and schools, and shot, burned or lynched their
victims. Blacks were targeted when they registered or voted, acquired parcels
of land, taught or attended school, armed themselves or formed local militias
out of self-defence. According to a Mississippi Klansman, ‘when a leading
negro would make himself particularly obnoxious . . . and was considered
dangerous, he was selected as an example’.21 White Republicans who acted in
concert with blacks or supported them as teachers, business partners, tax
collectors, election officials, sheriffs or politicians were also attacked.
The US Congress passed laws to mobilise resources against the KKK, and
President Ulysses S. Grant sent federal troops on several occasions to take on
the Klan. But this was expensive, extended the divisiveness of the Civil War,
and created increasing resentment in the North. Federal support for
Reconstruction dried up, troops were slowly withdrawn, and courts were
starved of money to prosecute and punish Klan members and other white
supremacists. Violence against Republicans, black and white, grew, and white
supremacist cells evolved from nighttime arson, beatings and murder to open
organisation in militias. So too did the purpose of white supremacist violence
evolve: from instrumental terror meant to influence to functional violence
designed to occupy spaces and physically keep African Americans and white
Republicans away from polls. In 1876–7, the last Reconstruction era govern-
ments elected by blacks and whites were driven from office, and Union troops
fully withdrew. Soon thereafter, Klan violence largely evaporated – not
because the Klan had been suppressed, but because the Klan had won.
White supremacist violence was, of course, specifically intended to restore
the racial hierarchy upset by the Civil War. But it was often couched in the
rhetoric of protecting the people and their rights from an intrusive, aggressive
government. After all, the first white supremacist blow against Reconstruction
was struck when the actor John Wilkes Booth uttered the immortal words ‘Sic
20 Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998 [1987]), p. 46; George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The
Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1984), p. 105; Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern
Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995 [1971]), pp. 310–11.
21 Quoted in Trelease, White Terror, p. xliii.
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RANDALL D. LAW
semper tyrannis’ (‘Thus always to tyrants’) while assassinating Abraham

Lincoln in April 1865. As for the southern campaign of violence itself,
a South Carolinian Klan manifesto described it thus: ‘Defeated on the battle-
field, defrauded at the ballot box, we have but one remedy – the dagger that
was made illustrious in the hands of Brutus.’22 Anti-federal vitriol only
increased in the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, as can be seen in
the words of I. W. Avery, a historian and newspaper editor, from 1881:
‘Georgia was ruled under a scorching travesty of law, alternating with bayonet
despotism governed by mob caprice; [an] era of whimsical yet savage
tyranny.’23 As whites, southerners rebelled against black equality, ‘negroism’
and ‘negro rule’; as Americans, they rebelled against tyranny, statism and
outside intrusion. While those unsympathetic to the clearly racist argument
by which ‘negro rule’ and ‘savage [i.e., federal] tyranny’ were conflated might
wish to deny it, such an argument attracted many in the South during and after
Reconstruction and was instrumental in mobilising support for what we today
recognise as terrorism.
It is important to observe that white supremacist terrorism did not cease
with the end of Reconstruction. In the 1890s, the states of the former
Confederacy adopted new constitutions and new laws that fully implemen-
ted racial segregation. This is what we know as Jim Crow, but it was to all
intents and purposes American apartheid. It was enshrined in the law and
maintained by the authorities to be sure, but what really preserved it was
lynching. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, over 4,000 African
Americans were lynched from 1877 to 1950.24 Lynchings were mob violence
ostensibly carried out to achieve justice, but the accusations used to trigger
these murders were often fabricated. Victims were sometimes chosen arbi-
trarily or under the flimsiest of circumstances. In other words, individuals
were primarily lynched to send a message to the rest of the targeted popula-
tion to remain subservient. The author Richard Wright said in his autobio-
graphy, ‘The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to
happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in
the deepest layers of my consciousness.’25 One would be hard-pressed to
22 Quoted in J. Michael Martinez, Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the
Invisible Empire during Reconstruction (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007),
p. 119.
23 Quoted in Alan Conway, The Reconstruction of Georgia (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1966), p. 40.
24 Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd
edn (2017), https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/.
25 Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007 [1944]), p. 172.
548
come up with a clearer description of how terrorism – or, for that matter,
state terror – operates. Jim Crow established the legal basis for segregation.
But lynchings – that is, terrorism – were the occasional outbursts of violence
that helped preserve segregation.
Epilogue
Conspiratorial sub-state terrorism petered out in the 1920s and virtually
disappeared by the 1930s. One observer wrote in the 1933 Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences that terrorism had become something ‘irrelevant and
unnecessary’.26 Indeed, after the 1920 Wall Street bombing, anarchist vio-
lence precipitously declined. But terrorism did not go away; it simply reap-
peared in different guises. As noted above, white supremacist violence
moved from nighttime violence to daylight lynchings, which enjoyed
broad public support and quasi-state involvement – this was closer to state
terror than sub-state terrorism. And while sub-state Russian revolutionary
terrorism evaporated, it was replaced by Soviet state terror on a scale never
before seen (and probably not even dreamed of by Maximilien Robespierre
and Karl Heinzen). The 1930s and 1940s were, in fact, the age of state terror,
when totalitarian regimes in the USSR, Germany and Italy used mass,
organised violence to rid themselves physically of opponents but also – as
the terrorists of the nineteenth century – to intimidate enemies, motivate
supporters and shape societies.
But sub-state terrorism itself had not gone away; it had merely gone
dormant. It re-emerged in its classic guises in the decades after World War
II, at first principally as part of larger insurrectionary strategies by ethno-
nationalist groups seeking independence from European imperial powers. In
Palestine, two Zionist organisations – Irgun and LEHI – successfully spear-
headed the expulsion of the United Kingdom via a two-pronged effort that
highlighted the vulnerabilities of modern democracies. First, Irgun and LEHI
attacks undermined support among a war-weary British public to the point
that by 1947 newspapers back home began to call for British withdrawal from
the region. Second, these groups rallied support among the international
community, in part by demanding that Western powers live up to their
principles of promoting democracy and national self-determination as pro-
claimed in the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and the United Nations Charter of 1945.
26 Quoted in Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables,
and Faces of Terrorism (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 17.
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RANDALL D. LAW
Algeria’s struggle to free itself from France provides more insight into how
terrorism spread in the twentieth century at the paradoxical juncture of state
power and individual entitlement, particularly within the context of postwar
democracy. In 1954, the National Liberation Front (FLN) began its war of
independence against France, but its efforts to force Paris to the negotiating
table via a semi-conventional military campaign in the Algerian hinterland
made little headway. In a desperate but calculated bid to force Algerians inside
Algeria to choose sides and to garner attention beyond the territory’s borders,
the FLN launched a terror campaign in the colonial capital of Algiers, attacking
civilians, police and symbolic targets. This succeeded in provoking the French
military and settlers into disproportionate, reactive violence, which turned the
moral strength of liberal democratic France against itself, since constitutional-
ism appeared hypocritical in the light of the violence committed by French
counterterrorist forces when rooting out enemies who hid amidst the local
population. While FLN violence – against both French and Algerians – was
gruesome and widespread, the list of French human rights abuses was even
more appalling: massive cordon and arrest operations, the wholesale suspen-
sion of habeas corpus, the extensive use of torture, and perhaps 3,000 extra-
judicial executions.27 By 1960, the FLN was leading a mass movement that
could support a semi-conventional army in the countryside and enormous
popular demonstrations in the cities. In response, settlers demanded a hard line
in Algeria, which precipitated a constitutional crisis in metropolitan France and
to French departure from Algeria in 1962.
The Algerian conflict also produced an influential argument in favour of
terroristic violence. The psychiatrist-turned-anti-imperialist Frantz Fanon
argued that European colonialism had turned the colonised of Africa, Asia
and Latin America into self-loathing peoples who – in a twentieth-century
twist on Kropotkin – had become enablers of their own enslavement.
‘Violence’, Fanon wrote, ‘is a cleansing force . . . [It] frees the native from
his inferiority complex and . . . restores his self-respect.’28 And while Fanon
did not specifically prescribe terrorism as his preferred means of violence, its
use made perfect sense to colonised organisations and peoples that had little,
when compared to the great European imperial nation states in the way of
arms, funds, logistical support and trained troops. What independence-
minded groups knew, though, was that potentially they had overwhelming
numerical superiority, if only the native populace could be roused to action.
27 Ted Morgan, My Battle of Algiers: A Memoir (New York: Collins, 2006), p. 236.
28 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2005), p. 94.
550
Ethno-national separatists and liberation groups embraced terrorism as the

great equaliser, one that they believed could bridge the gulf between vastly
powerful modern states and oppressed, marginalised peoples.
In fact, the FLN’s strategy became a model for others. In Northern Ireland,
Palestine and the Basque region of Spain, independence movements sought
to use terrorism as the springboards from which to mount broader cam-
paigns with mass participation. While, respectively, the Provisional Irish
Republic Army, the various factions of the Palestine Liberation
Organization, and Basque Homeland and Liberty (known as ETA from its
name in Basque) occasionally gained significant support, none succeeded in
mounting widespread insurgencies. Not surprisingly, none of these move-
ments achieved full independence, although several gained partial autonomy
and increased rights for their peoples. In the case of Malaya in the 1950s, the
Malayan Communist Party fought against the local authorities and the British
Empire to achieve national independence under the guise of Marxism. But
the communist insurgency – which made liberal use of terrorism – failed at
least in part because it remained rooted in ethno-nationalist grievances that
appealed only to a small ethnically Chinese base.
During the second half of the Cold War, Marxist radicals in Europe, the
United States and Latin America used terrorism in an attempt to spur class-
based revolutions. But the ethno-nationalist movements of the mid century
cast a long shadow, since the most prominent groups – including the
Tupamaros of Uruguay, the Red Army Faction (originally known as the
Baader-Meinhof Gang) in West Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy and
Weatherman/Weather Underground in the United States – also invoked
Fanon’s anti-colonial rhetoric of violence-as-empowerment. Moreover, they
explicitly linked ethno-racial issues to economic concerns by identifying the
USA and its allies as imperial powers that oppressed Third World peoples
abroad (such as via the Vietnam War) and racial minorities and the poor at
home. Similar to the violent anarchists of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the leftist revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s operated
as individuals or in very small cells that used symbolic violence to publicise
their cause, to produce a crackdown from the fascist state and a revolutionary
crisis (as articulated by the Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella), and
subsequently a mass uprising. While US and European radicals attracted
a great deal of attention from media and the state and even a certain measure
of sympathy, primarily from middle-class students, in the end they did little
more than generate support for the authorities and discredit more moderate
movements. In Uruguay, the Tupamaros’ terrorism backfired even more
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spectacularly when mounting violence triggered a right-wing crackdown on

the radicals that was at first largely welcomed by the population but led to
more than a decade of police-state rule.
Since the 1980s, terrorism has been most associated with the rise of
jihadism and radical Islamism. Their origins stretch back to the formation
in Egypt in 1928 of the Muslim Brotherhood, which sought to create
a parallel, insulated society in which devout Muslims could seek spiritual,
social and cultural rejuvenation. Although the movement was mostly peace-
ful, occasional government crackdowns provoked violent responses and
halting efforts to create a secret organisation capable of exacting revenge.
By the 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood, which by this time had spread
throughout most of the Sunni Muslim Middle East, had failed to achieve
much success against the region’s authoritarian regimes which promoted
varying combinations of pan-Arab nationalism, Soviet-oriented socialism or
Western-oriented crony capitalism. As a result, the most radical Islamists
began to gravitate towards more widespread sub-state conspiratorial activity
and a willingness to use terrorism to facilitate a coup or build a larger
movement. But Sunni Islamist uprisings and terrorist campaigns in Syria,
Egypt and Saudi Arabia in 1979–81 failed to produce larger revolutionary
movements and instead led to violent state repression.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan opened up a new front and new
possibilities. Radical Islamists who had not found success at home travelled
to Afghanistan to fight in defence of Islam. The most famous of these
Islamists, Osama bin Laden, created the precursor to al-Qaeda in 1986 to
recruit and train Muslims from across North Africa, the Middle East and Asia
to fight against Soviet troops and the Soviet-backed Afghan government. The
Soviet Union withdrew its troops in 1988–9, and the Soviet-backed Afghan
government was defeated several years later. With no more reason to exist,
al-Qaeda nearly broke up in the mid 1990s, but bin Laden reimagined the
group, transforming al-Qaeda from an organisation devoted to local radical
Islamist insurgency to global jihadist terrorism.
The concept of Lesser Jihad – the defence of an Islamic community so as to
insure its ability to live under sharia – underpins radical Islamism. Groups
that embrace it essentially substitute Islam for other ideological organising
principles. But in jihadism, jihad became, in the words of Reza Aslan, the
basis of a ‘cosmic war’.29 Jihadism is characterised by a transnational effort to
recreate the Caliphate and a global understanding of the moral and cultural
29 Reza Aslan, How to Win a Cosmic War (New York: Random House, 2009), pp. 5–6.
552
fault line between Islam and the other, between good and evil. Another key
feature of jihadism is particularly relevant in the context of this chapter:
jihadists emphasise the ability of martyrdom essentially to erase personal sin,
even – or particularly – for secular Muslims who have only recently embraced
faith. This has meant that jihadist terrorist violence has become in recent
decades the ultimate expression of individual empowerment vis-à-vis statist
authority.
Bin Laden committed al-Qaeda to fighting against the United States, the
‘far enemy’ that some radical Islamists had long identified as the great power
that propped up the Middle East’s authoritarian regimes as well as the Jewish
state of Israel. Al-Qaeda’s escalating campaign of terrorist violence culmi-
nated with the attacks of September 11, 2001, that killed nearly 3,000 civilians
in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. The USA and its allies invaded
Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, which changed jihadist violence again.
Al-Qaeda evolved from a centralised conspiratorial organisation that planned
and carried out terrorist operations to an isolated band of leaders that sought
to influence global jihad by promoting a brand and backing what have been
called ‘franchises’ by many observers. In this manner, al-Qaeda eventually
endorsed local insurgent and/or terrorist operations in Iraq, Saudi Arabia,
Northern Africa, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria – a rival that
emerged from the chaos of the Syrian Civil War and the United States’
decision to withdraw from Iraq in 2011 – used slickly produced pamphlets,
extensive social media and gruesome videos to appeal directly to disaffected,
marginalised Muslims in Europe and the United States. Some travelled to
Afghanistan, Libya, Syria or Iraq to take part in insurgencies against local
authoritarian regimes or Western interveners, but others – variously referred
to as ‘self-radicalised’ or ‘lone wolves’ – remained at home where they carried
out jihadist attacks against soft targets. Examples of attacks that were inspired
but not directed by al-Qaeda or ISIS include the Fort Hood, Texas, mass
shooting (November 2009), the Boston Marathon bombing (April 2013), an
attack on several Parisian sites including the satirical paper Charlie Hebdo
(January 2015), the San Bernadino massacre (December 2015), the Nice,
France, truck attack (July 2016) and the London Bridge attacks (June 2017).
While the motivation in each of these terrorist attacks was ostensibly jihad-
ism, the pattern has been strikingly similar to the anarchist attacks of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: terrorist attacks carried out by
individuals or small cells that are personally unaware of each other but that
are drawn together into a widely dispersed movement via propaganda.
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These recent developments have brought us full circle. What we see in the
decades since the 1950s are refinements of tactics and strategies pioneered
from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. As it developed
across the nineteenth century, terrorism emerged as a strategy of symbolic
violence used against the few in order to influence the many. This was
true when used from above, as it was by French revolutionaries and
later Bolsheviks, Nazis and Italian Fascists, and from below, as by Russian
populists, European and American anarchists, and, in the USA, white
supremacists.
As described in this chapter, modern terrorism took on its particular forms
in large part because of a peculiarly modern paradox: the side-by-side devel-
opment of powerful states and entitled individuals. This paradox remains at
the core of both democracy and terrorism, linking two facets of the modern
world in ways that continue to surprise and befuddle. Within this context, the
truism that one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter takes on new and
startling meaning.
Bibliographical Essay
The best single-volume introductions to modern terrorism are Bruce Hoffman, Inside
Terrorism, 3rd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017) and Charles Townshend,
Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Also
see Alex P. Schmid, The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research (London: Routledge,
2011).
The most-cited effort to organise all of modern terrorism into a historical framework is
David C. Rapoport, ‘The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism’, in Audrey Kurth Cronin and
James M. Ludes (eds.), Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy (Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press, 2004), pp. 46–73. Martha Crenshaw [Henderson] (ed.),
Terrorism in Context (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001 [1995])
provides a valuable methodological introduction and surveys of key movements and
periods. Two standard works that survey the history of terrorism are Randall D. Law,
Terrorism: A History, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016) and Gérard Chaliand and
Arnaud Blin (eds.), The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to ISIS, rev. edn (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2016). For an extensive reference work, see Randall D. Law
(ed.), The Routledge History of Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2015). Particularly valuable for
its analysis and descriptions of the interaction of state and sub-state terrorisms is Martin
A. Miller, The Foundations of Modern Terrorism: State, Society and the Dynamics of Political
Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
The most important work to examine terrorism as a cultural and linguistic construct is
Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of
Terrorism (London: Routledge, 1996). For a primer on critical terrorism studies, see
Richard Jackson et al., Terrorism: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
554
2011). On the development of the field of terrorism studies itself, see Lisa Stampnitzky,
Disciplining Terror: How Experts and Others Invented Terrorism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013).
The best anthology of primary sources is Walter Laqueur (ed.), Voices of Terror:
Manifestos, Writings and Manuals of al Qaeda, Hamas, and Other Terrorists from around the
World and throughout the Ages (New York: Reed, 2004).
On terror/ism in the French Revolution, see David Andress, The Terror: The Merciless
War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005). On Karl
Heinzen, see Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, ‘From the Dagger to the Bomb: Karl Heinzen
and the Evolution of Political Terror’, Terrorism and Political Violence 16.1 (2004), 97–115.
The best work on the political and social milieu in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries that produced modern terrorism is Adam Zamoyski, Phantom Terror: Political
Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789–1848 (New York: Basic Books, 2015).
On Russian revolutionary terrorism, see Franco Venturi, The Roots of Revolution:
A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1960) and Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary
Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
For general works on anarchism and anarcho-terrorism, see James Joll, The Anarchists,
2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) and Richard Bach Jensen, The
Battle against Anarchist Terrorism, 1878–1934: An International History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014). On Johann Most: Frederic Trautmann, The Voice of Terror:
A Biography of Johann Most (Westport: Greenwood, 1980). For France: John Merriman, The
Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (New York:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). For Spain: J. Romero Maura, ‘Terrorism in Barcelona
and its Impact on Spanish Politics 1904–1909’, Past & Present 41 (1968), 130–83.
The literature on terrorism in America is large and growing quickly. On the Molly
Maguires, see Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998). The classic study of the Haymarket Riot is Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). For a revisionist account, see
Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the
Gilded Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). The best work on terrorism in the United
States in the nineteenth century is Michael Fellman, In the Name of God and Country:
Reconsidering Terrorism in American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). For
anarchist violence and the Red Scare of the 1910s–20s, see Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street
Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
The most valuable survey of the Ku Klux Klan is Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The
Ku Klux Klan in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 [1987]). On Reconstruction,
see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, rev. edn
(New York: HarperPerennial, 2014). The two best studies of Klan and white supremacist
violence during Reconstruction are George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of
Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984) and Allen
W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995 [1971]). On lynching in America, see
Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York:
Random House, 2002). For a pictorial account, see James Allen, Without Sanctuary:
Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000). The Equal Justice
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RANDALL D. LAW
Initiative has published the most complete tally of racially inspired lynchings in Lynching in
America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd edn (2015). The full report can be found
at https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/.
For a general overview of ethno-nationalist terrorism, see Daniel Byman, ‘The Logic of
Ethnic Terrorism’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 21.2 (1998), 149–69. Not surprisingly, there is
a large and growing body of literature on the various ethno-nationalist/anti-colonial conflicts
of the 1940s–70s. For an excellent analysis of the various struggles waged against Britain mid
century, see Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame: Britain’s Dirty Wars and the End of
Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). On the role of terrorism and insurgency in the
formation of Israel, see Bruce Hoffman, Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917–1947
(New York: Knopf, 2015). A well-regarded account of the Malayan Emergency is Noel Barber,
War of the Running Dogs: Malaya, 1948–1960 (London: Cassell, 2004 [1971]). The classic study of
the Algerian War of Independence is Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962
(New York: NYRB, 2006 [1977]); the new standard is Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared
War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). For two excellent comparative analyses, see
Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria,
Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003) and John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya
and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005 [2002]). For two distinctly different
takes on Yasser Arafat and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, see Barry Rubin and Judith
Colp Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and
Saïd Aburish, Arafat: From Defender to Dictator, rev. edn (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004).
A comprehensive account of the Basque struggle is Ludger Mees, Nationalism, Violence, and
Democracy: The Basque Clash of Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). On the IRA
and Northern Ireland, see Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003).
For a valuable survey and analysis of the radical leftist movements of the 1960s–80s, see
Michael Freeman, Freedom or Security: The Consequences for Democracies Using Emergency
Powers to Fight Terror (Westport: Praeger, 2003). A definitive history of the Tupamaros is
yet to be written. In the meantime, the best account is Pablo Brum, The Robin Hood
Guerrillas: The Epic Journey of Uruguay’s Tupamaros (Scotts Valley: CreateSpace, 2014). See
also Carlos Marighella, Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla (Montreal: Abraham Guillen
Press, 2002 [1969]). On the various movements in the USA and Europe, see
Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten
Age of Revolutionary Violence (New York: Penguin, 2015); Stefan Aust, Baader-Meinhof: The
Inside Story of the R.A.F. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Donatella Della Porta,
‘Left-Wing Terrorism in Italy’, in Martha Crenshaw [Henderson] (ed.), Terrorism in
Context (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001 [1995]), pp. 105–59.
In recent decades, the market has been flooded with books on jihadism and radical
Islamism; many are deeply polemical and of limited value. Among the best works are
Reza Aslan, How to Win a Cosmic War (New York: Random House, 2009); Mary Habeck,
Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2007); Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002); Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
(New York: Modern Library, 2003). For the early history of the Muslim Brotherhood, see
Brynjar Lia, The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement,
556
1928–1942 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). On the key figure in the modern
history of Islamism, see John Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) and Albert Bergesen (ed.), The Sayyid Qutb
Reader (London: Routledge, 2007).
On Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and 9/11, see Peter Bergen, The Osama bin Laden I Know:
An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader (New York: Free Press, 2006); Steve Coll, Ghost Wars:
The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden (New York: Penguin, 2004); Leah
Farrall, ‘How al-Qaeda Works’, Foreign Affairs 90 (March–April 2011), 128–38;
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf,
2006). Bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s statements are collected in Raymond Ibrahim (ed.), The Al
Qaeda Reader (New York: Doubleday, 2007). The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are
exhaustively covered in Jason Burke, The 9/11 Wars (New York: Penguin, 2011) and
Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan
(New York: Penguin, 2018).
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26

The Origins of Modern Terrorism

Democracy, Revolution and Terrorism

of critical infrastructure (roads, canals, ports and eventually railroads), and

Russian Revolutionary Terrorism

Anarchist Terrorism in Europe and Russia

11 Laqueur, Voices, p. 70.

pages of Die Freiheit contained detailed descriptions of how to make and

Anarchist Terrorism in the United States

It is important to note, however, that the bulk of labour-related violence

Record-setting foreign immigration, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and

White Supremacist Terrorism in the United States

terrorism actually proved to be successful, unlike most other sub-state terror

semper tyrannis’ (‘Thus always to tyrants’) while assassinating Abraham

Ethno-national separatists and liberation groups embraced terrorism as the

spectacularly when mounting violence triggered a right-wing crackdown on

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