The Development of Terrorism essays

The Development of Terrorism essays The development of terrorism in Herfried Mnklers The New Wars The book The New Wars by Herfried Mnkler deals with the main differences between the, so called, old wars and new wars, and its origins. Compared with the old wars a char-acteristic of the new wars is that because of the proceeding globalization constitutional states do not have an explicit monopoly on the use of military force any more , i.e. that theoretically everybody who has any political, ethnical, or social demand could buy weapons and, thus, be a source of danger. Consequently, the new wars consist of two or more war parties not having the same military, monetary and constitutional conditions. As a result, there are war parties which do not respect the traditional conventions like the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Furthermore, economic interests are mixed with political goals. Mnkler embeds the term terrorism in the wider context of the new wars. Generally spoken, terror-ism can be defined as a form of violence used in order to push through a political w ill with the help of the indirect effects of violence. Originally, terrorism was a part of the war strategy of partisanship supporting the smouldering so called low intensity wars and later became an independent war strategy itself. Terrorism in the nineteenth century, with respect to the Russian revolutionaries who fought for social interests, and in the twentieth century, with regard to the rebellions against the colonial power in the respective colonies, was characteristic of one decisive quality: the limitation of terrorist violence. Terrorists in the nineteenth and twentieth century mostly fought in the name of a certain social or ethnic minority. On the one hand this created a justi-fication for their terrorist acts and the possibility of obtaining human or material supplies from this minori...