Terrorism here, terrorism there, terrorism nowhere

If you ask anyone, terrorism is of course a very real issue and represents a great threat to the civilized world, being the act of mentally deranged people that are impossible to understand ; as we can see in http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/maps-and-graphics/Mapped-Terror-threat-around-the-world/. Well, according to L. Stampnitzky in Disciplining terror : how experts invented “terrorism” this terrorism in a complete invention ! Indeed, terrorism is a mental and social construction, so its definition has changed throughout history, ours has only been created in the 1970s.

To make that definition you need experts, but you also need new events, the starting point was the terrorist attack on the Olympics Games at Munich in 1972. Not only did it bring public and expert attention to terrorism, it brought new characteristics on terrorism too. Now, terrorism was considered as the activity of sub state actors, so excluding the possibility that states could use terrorist violence. Moreover, morality became an element of analysis, terrorists being considered as evil and irrational. It was a rupture compared to previous definition which described terrorists as rational and even sometimes honourable actors.

Another step occurred in the 1990s, with terrorists being described as willing to commit extreme act of violence, due to the new religious characteristic. This time the turning event was the apparition of Islamic terrorism with the bombing the World Trade Center in 1993. Terrorism soon became a replacement of the dying Soviet Union as the civilizational threat. The fear of the use of weapons of mass destruction was another step in the perception as terrorists as more dangerous than before, a threat that appeared too real with the gas sarin attack in Tokyo subway in 1995. We can still see the effect of such ideas on line http://texashelp.tamu.edu/006-violence-terrorism/.

So even before the 9/11, terrorism was the main threat, being the action of irrational, fundamentally evil and especially dangerous people.