Abstract

Essentially, terrorism is nothing more than a method that may be adopted by a wide range of ideologies and for an equally wide range of objectives. It is not integrally linked to any ideology. It will be adopted as long as it is calculated to have significant potential for success. Such success, within the terrorist paradigm, may not be defined on the same criteria that are held by stable societies and state systems. Within the paradigm of a protracted war of terrorist attrition, apparent failures are conceived of as way stations to success… . Essential to the potential for the ‘success’ of terrorism is the legitimacy that terrorism has in the eyes not only of the terrorists themselves, but of a substantial public – including many in the victim societies who accept or propagate the ‘false sociologies’. The de-legitimisation of terrorism – at the level of the de-legitimisation of genocide – would, consequently, have to precede coherent international and national policy responses. For such a process of delegitimisation to occur, it is essential to take up each of the ‘false sociologies’ that have been advanced in support of terrorism and demonstrate that they derive from questionable or fallacious reasoning.