284 CHAPTER EigHT ■ War and Strife
vio l ence. Like revolutionary guerrilla warfare, nonviolent re sis tance deliberately places
ordinary people at grave risk of harm in the pursuit of po liti cal objectives. Unlike
guerrilla warfare or terrorism, however, nonviolent re sis tance avoids the use of vio
lence as a means of protest. Prominent examples of nonviolent re sis tance include Mohan
das Gandhi’s re sis tance to British rule in the 1940s and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr.’s civil rights movement of the 1960s. Another strategy for overcoming a mate
rially more power ful adversary is terrorism.
terrorism
Terrorism, a par tic u lar kind of asymmetric conflict, is increasingly perceived as a seri
ous international security threat because the causes that motivate terrorists to murder
defenseless civilians have become increasingly transnational rather than local, and
because advances in WMD technology have made it theoretically pos si ble for substate
actors to cause state level damage (say, with a nuclear bomb smuggled by a terrorist into
a major metropolitan area). Though they did not involve WMD, Al Qaeda’s attacks
against U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, against cities on U.S. soil in 2001, and in the
London Underground and buses in 2005 were justified in the group’s eyes as a religious
imperative that recognized neither the state nor the international system of states.
Because a core feature of terrorism is the deliberate harm of noncombatants, “ter
rorists” are necessarily outlaws: by definition, outlaws neither observe the law nor are
protected by it. Scholars of terrorism, a moribund subfield of international relations
inquiry until 2001, today disagree on a universal definition of terrorism, but most defi
nitions share three key ele ments:
- It is po liti cal in nature or intent.
- Perpetrators are nonstate actors.
- Targets are noncombatants, such as ordinary citizens (especially young children
or the el derly), po liti cal figures, or bureaucrats.
One con temporary terrorism expert, Audrey Kurth Cronin, adds a fourth ele ment: ter
ror attacks are unconventional and unpredictable.^20 Terrorism has often been called
the strategy of the weak, but this argument begs the question of what “power” actu
ally is. Is power only the material power to kill, or can it reside in the power of ideas?
Gandhi, for example, did not overcome the British and win India’s in de pen dence by
means of violent revolution. The power of ideas proved decisive. Terrorists also hope
to harness the power of ideas: they invariably justify their vio lence by reference to
immortality imagery. This imagery tends to take one of three classic forms: nation
alist, Marxist, or religious. In each case, terrorists intend their violent acts to preserve
the nation, the proletariat, or the faithful, and ensure its immortality. In the Irish