What is the Meaning & Definition of terrorism
It is a form of political violence that, in one of its variants, called State terrorism, in which governmental entities are those that carry out unlawful acts against members of their own population. This horrific reality has lived in many Nations that, paradoxically, sought the combat against terrorist groups to eventually threaten their own civilian population. Dictatorships involved in "ethnic cleansing", as it has happened in the Balkans or the former Soviet republics are also included in this category.
Some of the most common terrorist practices are the abductions, torture and attacks on small or large scale and more or less systematically in order to intimidate or threaten a State concerned. At the same time, terrorist groups use various weapons from home making, as the molotov bombs, to biological or chemical weapons of mass destruction.
Terrorist activities are so complex and multiple that is nowadays difficult for international agencies to classify terrorism from specific characteristics that are present in all cases. More or less definite form, recognizes that, currently, many terrorist groups pursue, in addition to political or religious goals a financial nature weekend. Thus, we have identified links between various illegal activities (drug trafficking, arms trade, money laundering, trafficking in human beings) and various terrorist groups.
Nowadays, there are various terrorist groups in the world that respond to different causes and different leaders. Among the best known, they can be counted ANGER in Ireland, ETA in Spain, FARC in Colombia or Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Also, remind various organizations who acted during the decades of 1960 and 1970 in various nations of Latin America; some of these institutions have disappeared and others have abandoned arms to join the political activity in different ways.
In recent years there have been several attacks in the world that many theorists of international relations attributed to the effects of globalization. Among them, attacks on the World Trade Center in the United States on 11 September 2001, which resulted in not only thousands of victims, but also the home in response the Government United States of the wars in Afghanistan (2001) and subsequently in Iraq (2003). In this area are also limited the devastating attacks in Atocha (Spain) and London, despite intense security measures installed on most of the great cities of the first world.
In this sense, you can not forget that the new media have given rise to a new form of terrorism, which was unexpected in the last decades. It's computer terrorism (cyberterrorism), which is responsible for collecting personal or bank account details, as well as "shoot down" the portals of public or private bodies that are incompatible with its objectives. Although they have met certain empathy among the general population, the performers of cyberterrorism are able to cause true global catastrophes, by which the fight against this new form of international terrorism has become priority for some Governments, although it admits that some Nations seem to encourage this activity for their own purposes.
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.