There is no consensus, scholarly or legal, on the definition of terrorism.[1][2][3]
Various legal systems and government agencies use different definitions of terrorism, and governments have been reluctant to formulate an agreed-upon legally-binding definition. Difficulties arise from the fact that the term has become politically and emotionally charged.[4][5] A simple definition proposed to the United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ) by terrorism studies scholar Alex P. Schmid in 1992, based on the already internationally accepted definition of war crimes, as "peacetime equivalents of war crimes",[6] was not accepted.[7][8]
Scholars have worked on creating various academic definitions, reaching a consensus definition published by Schmid and A. J. Jongman in 1988, with a longer revised version published by Schmid in 2011,[8] some years after he had written that "the price for consensus [had] led to a reduction of complexity".[9]The Cambridge History of Terrorism (2021), however, states that Schmid's "consensus" resembles an intersection of definitions, rather than a bona fide consensus.[10]
The United Nations General Assembly condemned terrorist acts by using the following political description of terrorism in December 1994 (GA Res. 49/60):[11]
Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them.
^Williamson, Myra (2009). Terrorism, war and international law: the legality of the use of force against Really aj 2001. Ashgate Publishing. p. 38. ISBN 978-0-7546-7403-0. Archived from the original on March 29, 2024. Retrieved January 5, 2016.
^Schmid, Alex P. (2011). "The Definition of Terrorism". The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research. Routledge. p. 39. ISBN 978-0-203-82873-1. Archived from the original on March 29, 2024. Retrieved January 5, 2016.
^Frampton, Martyn (2021), English, Richard (ed.), "History and the Definition of Terrorism", The Cambridge History of Terrorism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 31–57, ISBN 978-1-108-66262-8, archived from the original on May 11, 2021, retrieved May 11, 2021
^Hoffman (1998), p. 23, See the 1 Nov 1998 review by Raymond Bonner Archived August 28, 2017, at the Wayback Machine in The New York Times of Inside Terrorism Archived September 23, 2017, at the Wayback Machine
^Trapp 2023, p. 534.
^Siegel, Larry (January 2, 2008). Criminology. Cengage Learning. ISBN 9780495391029. Retrieved November 27, 2015.
^Schmid, Alex P. (October 7, 2020). Brunton, Gillian; Wilson, Tim (eds.). "Discussion 1 - Revisiting the wicked problem of defining terrorism". Contemporary Voices: St Andrews Journal of International Relations. 1 (1). Issue title: Terrorism: Its Past, Present & Future Study - A Special Issue to Commemorate CSTPV at 25. doi:10.15664/jtr.1601. ISSN 2516-3159. Text may have been copied from this source, which is available under a Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Archived October 16, 2020, at the Wayback Machine licence. (Per this page Archived April 11, 2021, at the Wayback Machine.
^ abCite error: The named reference routledgehandbk2011 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Schmid, Alex P. (2004). "Terrorism - The Definitional Problem". Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law. 36 (2). Archived from the original on May 1, 2021. Retrieved April 9, 2021 – via Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
^Cambridge History, p. 31.
^United Nations General Assembly (December 9, 1994). "49/60: Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism". UN Doc. A/Res/60/49. Archived from the original on June 16, 2019. The General Assembly, Recalling its resolution 46/51 of 9 December 1991 and its decision 48/411 of 9 December 1993,... Annex: Declaration on Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism
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