Anticolonial Terrorism: Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood to 1954

This chapter looks at the rise of anticolonial terrorism in Egypt, and especially at the role played by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. It argues that assassination became established among anticolonial nationalists in Egypt before the Brotherhood was founded and was then briefly practiced by the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, however, generally preferred other varieties of violence, which it understood as jihad. Some of these were more obviously acts of political violence than others. The use of violence was never part of the Brotherhood’s main strategy, however, and in the end it proved disastrous for them. They definitively abandoned terrorism in about 1968.

Introduction: Writing the History of Terrorism

This chapter analyzes the most important trends in the writing of the history of terrorism since the beginning of terrorism research in the late nineteenth century up to today. It presents the origins of terrorism studies in Western social sciences and international relations, and it contextualizes the standard narrative of the history of terrorism put forward by the political scientists David C. Rapoport and Walter Laqueur. The chapter traces major developments in the history of terrorism in professional historiography in the Soviet Union or Russia as well as Europe and the United States during and after the Cold War, and especially since the attacks on September 11, 2001, and it outlines the results and effects of that historiography. On the basis of the evaluation of the scholarship available to date, the article maps out the rationale and the contours of the new global history of terrorism pursued in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism.

“Deeds, Not Words”: Right-Wing Terrorism in Twentieth-Century Europe

This chapter focuses on the manifestations and characteristics of right-wing terrorism in twentieth-century Europe, particularly on developments in Germany and Italy. When viewed from a comparative perspective, a central characteristic for right-wing terrorism is the Tatglaube, the faith in deeds. Although the worldview justifying such terrorism is grounded in racism, ethnocentrism, and nationalistic concepts of superiority, the decisive factor is violence as an end in itself, a violence that generally forgoes any justifying pattern of argument and strives to annihilate the enemy physically. The repertoire of actions taken and the formulized language of right-wing terrorism have remained largely unchanged throughout the twists and turns of twentieth-century history. Nevertheless, it is possible to differentiate various phases of right-wing terrorism, which were also influenced, in turn, by the political and societal environment. Despite the ethnocentric and nationalistic worldview from which this terrorism springs, it also becomes evident here that right-wing terrorism has always been marked by transnational influences, particularly since the end of the twentieth century.

The Evolution of Jewish Terrorism

While Jewish violence and terrorism, both early and contemporary, is closely correlated with one particular territory—Palestine or Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel)—the chapter utilizes Rapoport’s four-waves framework in order to show that the evolution of Jewish terrorism was shaped by global dynamics and developments. More specifically, we will argue that whereas Jewish terrorism in Palestine and later in Israel consists of only two periods—the nationalist (1930s–1950s), which corresponds with the anticolonial wave, and its derivative, the nationalist-religious (1970s–present), which overlaps with the religious wave—the two missing waves, both of which were left-wing revolutionary, had a tremendous impact on political and social processes in Israel in general, and on the evolution of Jewish terrorism in particular. We conclude by discussing the implications of the similarities and differences between Jewish religious violence and other types of religious political violence.

Terrorism and Theocracy: The Radical Resistance Movement against Roman Rule in Judea

This chapter discusses a case of ancient terrorism, the fight of the most radical branch of the Judean resistance movement against Roman rule in the first century ce by means of kidnapping and assassination. Ancient Judean terrorism was not only provoked by the foreign occupation, but also fed on the fertile ground of social antagonisms within Judean society. The zealot ideology of the Sicarii was fueled by theocratic, even apocalyptic beliefs, closely intertwined with radically egalitarian visions of society. Spectacular actions against the Roman Empire and its indigenous collaborators finally instigated the Judean War. Though modern terrorism has many different facets, the religiously motivated Islamic type shows parallels with the ancient Judean paradigm—in methods, but even more in ideology, which is based on comparable political and social conditions.

Terrorism as Third Front: The Radicalization of the New Left in Italy and West Germany

Which factors were responsible for the radicalization of the 1968 protest movement? Why did Germans and Italians develop such a fascination with the notion of guerilla warfare? And why were the terrorist organizations that developed there so long-lived? The reasons are partly to be found in unresolved problems of postfascist societies. New Left activists criticized the lack of domestic democracy and idealized the “anti-imperialist” fighters in the global south. But as this chapter shows, radicalization also developed through transnational interaction in the European public spheres, specifically through a mixture of solidarity and rivalry between the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades. The history of German and Italian left-wing terrorisms was, therefore, closely connected by multiple symbolic ties from the first shootings to the final showdown of the kidnapping and murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer during the German Autumn of 1977 and of Aldo Moro just a few months later.

The Invention of Terrorism in Nineteenth Century Europe, Russia, and the United States

This chapter examines the emergence of terrorism. It argues that five men invented terrorist tactics in a transnational learning process between 1858 and 1866 in Europe, the United States, and Russia. After a systematic reflection on terrorism’s sociopolitical logic and its preconditions, the chapter analyzes Felice Orsini’s attempt to assassinate Napoleon III and the media reactions. This case is interpreted as the beginning of the invention of terrorism. News of Orsini’s deed traveled to America and had inspired John Brown, who changed his tactics from guerilla war to terrorism when he planned his raid on Harpers Ferry. Oskar Wilhelm Becker, John Wilkes Booth, and Dmitrii Vladimirovich Karakozov were the three most significant imitators of both Orsini’s and Brown’s deeds. They finalized the tactic by universalizing it politically and developing the claim of responsibility (Bekennerschreiben). With these developments the terrorist tactic as we know it today was fully developed.

Epilogue: Shock and Awe

This epilogue proposes a conceptual apparatus to explain the paradoxical fact that, as the chapters in this volume amply demonstrate, terrorism’s shocking acts of violence mean simultaneously to immobilize and mobilize its targets’ intellectual and aesthetic functions. It excavates a strand in the history of philosophy—from Plato to Burke, Arendt, Benjamin, and Rancière—that sees shock not as leading to the paralysis of our capacity to perceive and understand events, but rather as being related to thaumazein (wonder, amazement) and theoria. This philosophical understanding of shock not only grounds the logic of terrorism, especially in its classical incarnation as “propaganda of the deed,” but also exposes the roots of a counterlogic that can activate the kind of knowledge required for the development of a genuinely historical theory of terrorism.

“The Beauteous Terrorist”: Russian Women and Terrorism in Literature at the Turn of the Century

Based partly on sensationalized journalistic accounts of the lives of famous Russian terrorists, such as Vera Zasulich, and partly on the memoirs of radicals such as Sergei Kravchinksii, English-language novels at the turn of the nineteenth century depicted female terrorists as fascinating and, for the most part, beautiful. Embodying seemingly contradictory gender characteristics, female terrorists were described as both ruthless and compassionate, violent and kind. Given the supposedly tyrannical nature of the Russian regime, their revolutionary devotion was fully justified. Therefore, despite the need to adopt masculine bravery and heroism, they were still fully feminine, and often alluring. They became heroines, or “beauteous terrorists.”

Early Modern Forerunners of Terrorism in Europe

First, this chapter explores political violence in the late Middle Ages and the early modern era. Even though the term terrorism did not exist before the French Revolution, political phenomena that closely resembled various forms of modern-day terrorism have been known and feared since the fourteenth century. The late Middle Ages and the early modern period witnessed the assassinations of numerous princes. The authorities as well as the populace feared organized gangs of criminals in the pay of rival political or religious leaders. These gangs were said to attack the civilian population using arson and mass poisoning in order to destabilize whole states. The fear of the terrorist “state destroyer” was part and parcel of state building from its very beginning. Secondly, the chapter discusses nineteenth-century historiography about early modern political violence. Nineteenth-century historians refused to interpret early modern political crime as terrorism: they either denounced it as lacking any political concept or vindicated it as justifiable resistance.