Original Source: wikipedia.org
| TERRORISM | ||||
| 18TH CENTURY | ||||
| FROM | TO | DETAIL: | ||
| 1795 | “Government intimidation during the Reign of Terror in France.” The general sense of “systematic use of terror as a policy” was first recorded in English in 1798 | |||
| TERRORISM | ||||
| 20TH CENTURY | ||||
| FROM | TO | DETAIL: | ||
| 1916 | Gustave LeBon: “Terrorization has always been employed by revolutionaries no less than by kings, as a means of impressing their enemies, and as an example to those who were doubtful about submitting to them….” | |||
| 1937 | League of Nations convention language: “All criminal acts directed against a State and intended or calculated to create a state of terror in the minds of particular persons or a group of persons or the general public.” | |||
| 1987 | A definition proposed by Iran at an international Islamic conference on terrorism: “Terrorism is an act carried out to achieve an inhuman and corrupt (mufsid) objective, and involving [a] threat to security of any kind, and violation of rights acknowledged by religion and mankind.” | |||
| 1988 | A proposed academic consensus definition: “Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons, whereby – in contrast to assassination – the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators.” | |||
| 1989 | United States: premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents. | |||
| 1992 | A definition proposed by Alex P. Schmid to the United Nations Crime Branch: “Act of Terrorism = Peacetime Equivalent of War Crime.” | |||
| TERRORISM | ||||
| 21ST CENTURY | ||||
| FROM | TO | DETAIL: | ||
| 2002 | European Union: “. . . given their nature or context, [acts which] may seriously damage a country or an international organisation where committed with the aim of seriously intimidating a population.” | |||
| 2003 | India: Referencing Schmid’s 1992 proposal, the Supreme Court of India described terrorist acts as the “peacetime equivalents of war crimes.” | |||
| 2005 | United Nations General Assembly‘s statement with relation to terrorism: “Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them.” | |||
| 2008 | Carsten Bockstette, a German military officer serving at the George C. Marshall Center for European Security Studies, proposed the following definition: “political violence in an asymmetrical conflict that is designed to induce terror and psychic fear (sometimes indiscriminate) through the violent victimization and destruction of noncombatant targets (sometimes iconic symbols).” | |||
| 2014 | Contained in a Saudi Arabia terrorism law taking effect 1 February 2014, the following definition has been criticized by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for being overly broad: “Any act carried out by an offender in furtherance of an individual or collective project, directly or indirectly, intended to disturb the public order of the state, or to shake the security of society, or the stability of the state, or to expose its national unity to danger, or to suspend the basic law of governance or some of its articles, or to insult the reputation of the state or its position, or to inflict damage upon one of its public utilities or its natural resources, or to attempt to force a governmental authority to carry out or prevent it from carrying out an action, or to threaten to carry out acts that lead to the named purposes or incite [these acts].” | |||
