irected against symbolic targets. The matter is complicated further by official government definitions of terrorism, which are not uniform. Some agencies emphasize terrorism's illegality, some its violence, some its destructive effects. Thus White prefers a more simple definition.
To get around the conceptual difficulties with defining terrorism once and for all--and keeping in mind that the definition is likely to change with changing contexts--White suggests a typology, or classification system. Acknowledging that typologies are as numerous as definitions and that the classification may substitute for political analysis, White nevertheless notes that the typology can be useful in getting at the issue fronts that surface around terrorism and that as a classification system it can capture a variety of contexts and anticipate certain shifts in the unstable definition of the word. Accordingly, White proposes a "tactical typology" that begins with the assumption that human social experience is dominated by conflict and that terrorism is one form of conflict
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