Responding to the terrorist threat Security and crisis management

Although various scholars trace the origins of political terrorism to the French Reign of Terror (1793-94), such tactics have maintained a trenchant position in the political calculus within and between nations throughout recorded history. However, since the late 1960s there has been a marked increase in the phenomenon of domestic, international, and transnational terrorism, and current estimates predict that the magnitude of these developments will continue in the future. Predict ably, these developments have generated an unprecedented interest in political terrorism, which has manifested itself in a proliferation of books, articles, congressional hearings and reports, conferences, and media exposes. Yet, while this literature offers a wide range of useful insights into the root causes, logic, and characteristic attributes of political terrorism, as well as a substantial number of case studies, the overall thrust is too narrowly focused on the terrorist. We fully agree with S.D. Vestermark that for those with operational responsibilities or the task of developing concrete response policies, the usefulness of the literature on terrorism is limited by its overemphasis on "defining new and exotie terrorist possibilities, and in exploring the various legal and philosophical dilemmas in defining the 'terrorist'... Such displays implicitly affirm how 'terrible' the problem of terrorism really is -without offering solutions."