There is neither an intellectual nor a global lawful agreement regarding the suitable definition of terrorism; many lawful systems and government agencies define terrorism differently and the global community is unable to arrive at a common definition of terrorism (Armstrong, 2010). According to Armstrong (2010), the states can and often do commit acts of terrorism themselves and thereby act as agents of terrorism.
Moreover, the geographies of state terror can be divided in to communal, individual, and geographic space; the last is mainly well-known when contrasted to non-state terror because of its correlation to human uniqueness, the destruction of which is the objective of state terror (Armstrong, 2010). The main question is whether states can commit terrorism; this almost completely depends on one’s definition of the occurrence which is intrinsically tricky for a number of reasons.
First those who control the definition may have a vested interest in the matter especially where the label can be powerful delegitimizing tool; Gibbs (2000) holds that states that label actions as terrorism promotes condemnation of the actors and may reflect their ideological bias. For instance the United States department argues that terrorism is committed only by clandestine agents, while on the other hand Tilly (2004) leaves out states as central characters of terror.
The states and interstates system also strive to protect the logic of sovereignty in the global sphere while covering their incapability to modify systemic circumstances that create violence by non-state agents, therefore this offered an authoritative disincentive for a state to define terrorism. Consequently, the definitions tend to be a paternalistic and dramatized explanation of the victim terrorist connection where readers identify with the victim (Elden, 2009).
Secondly is the issue of illegality, according to Tilly (2004) terrorism is obviously an illegal act. Thus, terrorism is ideally defined as an essentially unlawful act and when one deems the acceptance of a state’s monopoly on coercive force it becomes hard to divide from unlawful state violence and thus this situation would exclude states from terrorism.
References
Armstrong, J. (2010). Terrorism definition. Web.
Gibbs, Jack, P. (2000). Conceptualizations of Terrorism. American Sociological Review, 54(3):329-340.
Tilly, C. (2004). Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists. Sociological Theory, 22(1):5-13.