How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns

by Audrey Kurth Cronin

These changes are casting new light on old ideas that drew their meaning from structures of the state. Most notably: what is a civilian? In a world where borders are increasingly permeable, where the organization of state armed forces is becoming more diffuse, and where the use of armed contractors is increasingly taking the place of traditional military members, this concept (always difficult) becomes still more tricky. Historical, cross-cultural norms derived from secular and religious traditions insist that civilians are by definition illegitimate targets, to be avoided through the discriminate use of force. States may have described them as “collateral damage,” unavoidable victims sacrificed in the cause of ending a war (self-conscious excuses that are revealing in themselves). But rightly or wrongly, the international community had accorded nation-states the authority under certain circumstances to use force, and those states gained or lost legitimacy on the basis of their efforts to do so discriminately. Indeed, this norm is at the heart of what makes terrorism wrong: its deliberate targeting of civilians.79 But how do we isolate civilians from attack when we are no longer clear exactly where the boundaries of “ civilian” lie? To our discomfort, even the reliable reference to “innocent women and children” fails in a world where child soldiers are coerced into becoming combatants and women are suicide bombers.80 For good or ill, we are moving backward, into the prenat...