Classifying Terrorism

Classifying Terrorism in Criminal Justice

Our work aims to classify terrorism in criminal justice . The research will be performed to define what terrorism is and to report about terrorism and violent extremism in the United States . The subject of the research is of great importance . After September 11 we found ourselves in permanent state of emergency , a `war against terror , whose ramifications are as inscrutable as terrorism itself . Terrorism is never easy to understand , and least of all in the aftermath of a terrorist attack . Before September 11 at least , most on terrorism recognized that the physical threat posed by terrorism was dwarfed by other more quotidian dangers . But even then , ordinary people , or their political representatives , were less inclined to minimize the threat or put it in perspective . Often urged on by a mass media that magnified the public danger , politicians tried to answer the implicit or explicit call for protective action . That action was , however , usually inconsistent and episodic . September 11 called for more than this . Terrorism shot to the top of the political agenda , and from then on it would be hard to contend that the damage it could cause was comparatively trivial and that its psychological effect was out of proportion to its physical effect

Both political and academic efforts to get to grips with terrorism have repeatedly been hung up on the issue of definition , of distinguishing terrorism from criminal violence or military action . Book of Jonathan R White opens with a whole chapter on the issue another managed to amass over a hundred definitions before concluding that the search for an `adequate ' definition was still on . According to White (2005 , Nobody has been able to produce an exact definition of the subject . As a result , terrorism means different things to different people (p . 1 In a word , it is labelling , because `terrorist ' is a that has almost never been voluntarily adopted by any...