Although wars, classic insurrections and genocides have claimed far more lives, terrorism has become the very face of modern conflict and turbulence, particularly since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

But terrorism has a much longer history: in fact, recognisably ‘modern' terrorism has existed for more than two centuries. This chapter surveys terrorism from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries and analyses its emergence as a peculiarly modern form of violence in the context of the clash between the growth of state power and the emphasis on individual rights and entitlements.

The word ‘terrorist' was first used in English by Edmund Burke in 1795 in a passing comment denouncing the French Revolution's Reign of Terror.^[925] The terms ‘terrorism' and ‘terrorist' were rarely invoked in the following decades but entered wide if idiosyncratic circulation in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Those who used or advocated insurrectionary or sym­bolic political violence frequently embraced the word ‘terrorism' to describe their own behaviour, even as it began to enter broader usage as a convenient epithet to use against those whose motives or means of waging a struggle were deemed illegitimate by political elites or dominant populations. When scholars, legal authorities and international agencies began to turn their attention to ‘terrorism' in earnest in the middle of the twentieth century, the phenomenon was understood to overlap broadly with insurgency, that is, asymmetric warfare waged against a state by a group or a population not legally recognised as a sovereign entity. Only in the wake of the ascendance of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the emergence of ‘international terrorism' in the late 1960s did observers analytically distinguish terrorism from other forms of violence. Policy-oriented academics - usually from the social sciences - began to emphasise several core features: first, that it was violence against civilians outside of the normal bounds of war; second, that its intent was to achieve political change by intimidating state authorities or the broader population; and third, that it was, by definition, carried out against states by sub-state groups.

In the 1980s, a minority within academia began to focus on the symbolic nature of terrorism and to characterise it as a communicative act, which untethered the study of terrorism from the increasingly lengthy list of criteria that was used to define it. Such an approach made clear that terrorism could be used by both states and non-states, against soldier and civilian alike, and within and beyond the confines of war. Those who advocated this approach identified terrorism as a strategy that sought to change the behaviour of the many by violently targeting the few and argued that those who use terrorism pick symbolically charged targets and take advantage of the subsequent media attention to communicate their grie­vances, recruit new followers, terrorise and provoke their enemies, and - they hope - achieve political change.

But just as the study of terrorism has evolved, so has terrorism itself. Terrorism can be treated as a dynamic, evolving strategy in many different ways. Sometimes this is done via the broader effort to link the emergence of ‘modern' terrorism to one or more ‘modern' phenomena - such as mass media or certain weapon technologies - or the development of ‘modern' self-consciousness or subjectivity.^[926]

This chapter locates the emergence of modern terrorism in the parallel growth of the rhetoric and the reality of, on the one hand, state power and nationalism and, on the other, of individualism, individual entitlements and individual rights. To put it more polemically, modern terrorism is democratic violence for a democratic era. This has multiple meanings. First, much terroristic violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was carried out in pursuit of liberating ‘the people' from coercive state authority and asserting their rights, both individual and collective. Second, modern terror­ism is individualised and small scale, not only in terms of the perpetrator and the victim, but also in the narratives that are created in which members of society are encouraged to see themselves as the personal victim of the violence. Third, modern terrorists assert the power of the individual who strikes back heroically against an all-powerful state but often on behalf of causes that have a deeply social, even ‘mass' element.