s the way people actually use of the word, but it is commonly applied to a variety of actions that may be difficult to formally identify and distinguish from other actions not usually described as terrorism. The term is also politically loaded; one side's "terrorist" may be another side's "freedom fighters."
Some writers have attempted to avoid this problem by not offering a definition. One, borrowing from a US Supreme Court justice's famous remark on pornography, said simply that he might not be able to define it but he knows it when he sees it (Kinsley, 2001). This sort of avoidance of a definition, however, can itself be politically loaded. Another writer, after a similar refusal to attempt a formal definition, goes on to ask, rhetorically, "Was George Washington a terrorist? Is Yassir Arafat a freedom fighter?" (Kushner, 1998, p. vii). This particular non-definition thus has an obvious political agenda, and suggests that the refusal to offer a definition is merely a convenient way to avoid difficult questions.
The conceptual and political difficulties in defining terrorism turn out to be closely intermingled. We might initially attempt to define terrorism as politically motivated violence aimed primarily at civilians. This definition, however, immediately runs into difficulties.
On the one hand, bombing raids during World War II surely fall within this definition. Even if the planners of these raids had drawn circles around particular military targets they desired to hit, bombing in that era was so inaccurate that most of the bombs were certain to fall on surrounding civilian populations. In fact, Allied planners made little pretense of concentrating only on military targets.
The problem with a definition of terrorism that includes wartime bombing is partly political -- Americans and Britons do not wish to classify their actions in World War II as terrorism, and certainly to not want to make the slig...