Terrorism and Historical Motivations

/in /by

Terrorism and Historical Motivations

Introduction

Many people dismissively throw around the term, terrorist. It has, historically, been applied to many acts and individuals that were not terrorists. To avoid confusion, and to set the groundwork for this entire course, we need to understand what it means to be called a terrorist. In conjunction with defining the term, we also need to understand the traditional motivations behind it, to better develop plans to mitigate it.

Suppose you are a captain in a local police municipality that employs several hundred officers and services a medium-sized metropolitan area. Your police chief has expressed an interest in developing a means to prevent, respond to, and recover from possible terrorist attacks. He is a careful and thoughtful politician, and realizes that there is a substantial number of people within the city that, due to the current political environment, feel that the police view them as terrorists without any just cause to do so. Therefore, he has assigned you to educate him about terrorism, what law enforcement can do about it, how to mitigate it, and how to build community relations to help in this endeavor. But first, he wants to start with the historical causes of terrorism both internationally as well as domestically. Specifically, he has asked for two interoffice memos to be addressed to him.

Discussion Post:

  • Define the term, terrorist.
  • Evaluate whether there any special considerations when deciding to utilize the term or not.
  • Differentiate between the historical causes of terrorism in relation to their motivations and results (left, right, ethnic separatist, and religious terrorism).
  • Provide a historical example of each type (left, right, ethnic separatist, and religious terrorism).