Terrorism

Terrorism as a Communicative Act

Terrorism is unlike any other violent act. Because the point of terrorism is to use public opinion to leverage political change when groups are too weak militarily to simply force a change of government, and too weak politically to win over the body politic, it requires an audience, witnesses, to succeed. It is not about simple destruction.

Because of this, the acts of violence perpetrated by terrorists are designed with communicative intent, and that intent can potentially be seen in every element of an attack: the target chosen, the date of the attack, the method used, and so forth. Timothy McVeigh, for example, was not interested in bombing downtown Oklahoma City per se. He specifically wanted to attack a federal building, and it was no accident, furthermore, that he chose to do so on the two-year anniversary of the federal government’s botched raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993. By the same token, Al Qaeda has a long history of going after targets that will yield both mass casualties and symbolic value. They made a point of attacking the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 on the anniversary of the day the very first U.S. troops arrived on Saudi soil in support of Operation Desert Shield in 1990, and the symbolic value of the targets chosen on September 11, 2001, hardly needs to be explicated.

Scholars interested in this facet of terrorism will research the terrorist act itself, but through a communicative lens. In other words, they examine the terrorist act asking, what was the message this act was most likely intended to send? To which parties was it most likely meant to communicate? Were the terrorists using the date, a particular aspect of the target (location, those in the location at the time), an aspect of the weapon used, to communicate? Doing this type of research well requires a relatively deep contextual background on the terrorist group in question. What is the history of the group, their doctrine, their membership, what are the issues they care about? What are the types of attacks they have historically undertaken, and is there a pattern to the way they plan and carry out attacks?

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