The Progenitors of Terrorism

Russian Revolutionaries or Extreme Irish Republicans

Bibliographic Data

ID4086387
AuthorsLindsay Clutterbuck (corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume16
Issue1
Pages154-181
Publication date2004-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueTerrorism and Political Violence (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0954-6553 • E-ISSN: 1556-1836
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09546550490457917
OpenAlexW2037903496
LanguageEN
Citations received14

The literature on the origins of modern terrorism generally acknowledges that terrorism as a recognisable phenomenon had its roots during the latter decades of the nineteenth century and that the first exponents to embrace violence in a systematic way as a strategy to achieve their political ends were the extremist groups of the social revolutionary movement in Russia, particularly Narodnya Volya. Their campaign of terrorist attacks culminated in March 1881 with the assassination of Tsar Alexander the Second and thus both the conceptual and methodological seeds had been sown that led in the following century to the political violence in the characteristic form that we now refer to as terrorism. It is argued here that this unilinear model is flawed as it ignores the seminal contribution to the development of terrorism in the twentieth century made by the extreme Irish nationalist movement. During the years from January 1881 to January 1885 they mounted a series of bomb attacks in cities on the British mainland with the objective of forcing the government to relinquish its rule of the island of Ireland. Their strategy, operational methodology, tactics and targeting were innovative in both concept and execution and in turn they provided a blueprint for the conduct of terrorism that has not changed fundamentally for well over a hundred years. Terrorism, as it manifested itself in the 20th century, owes at least as much to the strategy, tactics and techniques developed and applied in the 19th century by the “physical force” proponents of the Irish republican movement as it does to the more readily acknowledged activities of the Russian revolutionaries

Criminology · Irish · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Political violence · Politics · Sociology · Terrorism · Law · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence

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