ETHICS AND TERRORISM
Ethics has a critical, if often unacknowledged, role in the majority, if not all, concerns relating to terrorism and political violence. These are frequently most visible in counterterrorism debates but are frequently lacking from conversations concerning academic research practice. At the very least, ethical questions of terrorism have rarely been publicly addressed directly or thoroughly.
Meaning of terrorism:
Terrorism is defined as the unlawful use of force or violence against people or property in order to frighten or coerce a government or its populace into pursuing specific political or social goals. Domestic and international terrorism are usually recognized by law enforcement.
Thus, the use of violence, intimidation, or the threat of violence against a person or a (large) group in order to achieve political, ideological, social, or religious goals by putting pressure on or intimidating another group of people or another individual to carry out actions they would otherwise oppose is a common element of several definitions of terrorism.
Main causes of Terrorism:
Outsiders may not believe it, yet the behaviour of 'terrorists' is often self-consistent and rational. As a result, it is helpful to evaluate the elements that increase the risk of terrorist activities being committed. The following are some theories about the reasons or causes of terrorism.
- Sociological explanations focused on the criminals' societal standing.
- Psychological explanations for why certain people join terrorist organizations.
- Explanations of conflict theories are based on an assessment of the interaction between perpetrators and those in authority.
- Ideological explanations are based on a variety of purposes and/or ideologies.
- Explanations based on media theory, with terrorism viewed as a kind of communication
- Poverty and economic disparity inside the country.
- Transformation and insecurity in the socio-economic and/or political spheres.
- Identity and/or cultural clashes.
Factors affecting terrorism:
The key factors that have been demonstrated to be significantly connected with terrorism can be classified as below:
- Animosity among various ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups, including a lack of intergroup cohesion, social hostility, group grievances, religious tensions, sectarian, communal, or mob violence, and religious tensions.
- State-sanctioned violence, including extrajudicial killings, political terror, conflict-related deaths, a lack of physical integrity rights, and protracted conflict.
- Other forms of violence, such as guerilla warfare, the use of force or coercion by organized groups, and violent crime
Other contextual elements that may contribute to terrorism, but for which more proof is needed, include:
- Failure or a slow or ineffective reaction to other measures, as well as desperation owing to the (perceived) importance of the issue.
- Marginality, discrimination, and social exclusion, including exclusion from decision-making structures and access to decision-makers
- The dehumanization or even demonization of particular groups, which consequently justifies any sort of maltreatment, or their instrumentalization, puts their interests and rights secondary to those of other social groups.
- External or internal vested interests that aggressively resist peaceful change that would lessen their power and influence and may provide resources and financing to terrorist organizations.
Individual and Collective accountability:
In general, definitions of terrorism characterize innocence as a lack of engagement with the topic at hand. There are, however, concerns of individual and collective accountability. Terrorists may hold factions within a state or even all citizens collectively liable for injustices in some situations, however, punishment is rarely the goal for terrorism. However, defending against a repressive state may include attacks on some of its members, even though they bear no culpability for the tyranny perpetrated by the state. There is also a distinction between distributive and non-distributive collective responsibility. Individual accountability for the consequences of decisions emerges from distributive responsibility, whereas non-distributive responsibility does not. Members of a government or a town council, for example, share distributive responsibility for the consequences of decisions they make, whereas people of the country or town have a non-distributive duty. It is also occasionally asserted that citizens bear responsibility for things they do not do, such as neglecting to resist injustices or attempting to correct them.
Counter-Terrorism and Ethics
Counter-terrorism operations may include assassination/killing, fatal drone strikes, torture, data filtering, high-tech surveillance, and the imposition of legislation that restricts civil freedoms and human rights, frequently on a discriminatory basis. There is substantial debate about whether the right to life is completely inviolable and inalienable or whether it might be lost in certain circumstances. A position of total inalienability of the right to life would prohibit physical aggression that could result in death, except possibly in cases of self-defence where the attacker(s) and victim(s)' rights to life conflict. The concept that the right to life might be superseded by claims of criminal justice or proper legal procedure is problematic for several reasons. A person who has been held, in particular, is no longer a threat to the rights of others to life. It is also exceedingly rare to compel officials of state governments who have been responsible for extrajudicial executions, disappearances, and other breaches of human rights to participate in a proper legal procedure.
However, despite the ethical and legal ambiguity of pre-emptive assassination of potential terrorist murderers, it is still a lesser evil than either invasion of countries suspected of harbouring terrorist organizations or use of the rumoured presence of terrorist organizations as a pretext for invasion. While dramatic action may be deemed necessary to avert a prospective and significant terrorist threat, the principle of intervening action does not demand the execution of one person in order to save others, because it is the intervening action of another person that causes these deaths. A lack of moral demand, on the other hand, is not the same as an ethical prohibition and an ethical evaluation of the difficulties.
https://www.routledge.com/Ethics-and-Terrorism/Taylor-Horgan/p/book/9781032120652
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21582041.2019.1660399
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