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Prof. dr Alex Schmid is an emeritus professor and distinguished INIS member
Online Team event on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence
QUESTIONS
Question 1: When you first began working in the field of terrorism and political violence, what were the main issues that researchers were concerned with?
Schmid: I started my academic career as a historian and wrote my doctoral dissertation in the early 1970s on Intervention and Counter-Revolution in the Russian Civil War, 1918-1920. There was plenty of Red Terror by the Bolsheviks and White Terror by their opponents. I completed my doctoral dissertation in 1972 when the terrorist attack on the Olympic Games in Munich occurred. The Olympic venue and the occasion produced a television audience of some 800 million people to the Black September terrorists. That is typical for non-state terrorism at its most effective: 1 percent violence and 99 percent publicity to magnify it. That attack by a splinter group of Fatah was an inspiration to other terrorists. It was also a wake-up call that started research into non-state terrorism. In the same year, the U.S. Department of State organized the first conference on international terrorism. In the 1970s the terms ‘international terrorism’ and ‘transnational terrorism’ were used side by side until the term ‘international terrorism’ won – probably because it sounded very much like ‘international communism’ and implied the Soviet Union as a state sponsor.
I myself began investigating non-state terrorism first in 1976, after moving from Switzerland to the Netherlands. Funded by the Dutch government I was doing a case study on South Moluccan activists who were the descendants of Christian soldiers who fought on the side of the Dutch colonial troops against the national liberation forces in Indonesia who had been armed by the Japanese occupiers at the end of World War II. These South Moluccans, the sons of colonial soldiers, wanted to force the Netherlands to act against the Indonesian government and help them liberate the homeland of their fathers in the South Moluccan islands. At that time, terrorism research was not an independent field of study.
The way terrorism studies grew into a field was in three steps: first came conferences, then came special journals focusing on terrorism and finally institutes dedicated to the study of terrorism emerged.
Since 1972 and 9/11 there have, according to one count, been some 150 terrorism conferences on terrorism. A Jewish-American scholar by the name of Yonah Alexander published many conference proceedings dealing specifically with terrorist acts directed against Israel and the United States. He also published the first journal titled Terrorism: An International Journal which late merged with Studies in Conflict and Terrorism of which Bruce Hoffman is now the Editor-in-Chief.
Research centers focusing on the study of terrorism emerged only in the 1990s. In Europe the first one, the Centre for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism (CSTPV) was founded in 1994 at the University of St. Andrews , by Bruce Hoffman and Paul Wilkinson. Two years later, the International Center for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) in Herzliya, Israel was founded by Boaz Ganor who is now rector of the Reichman University. He once told me that he decided to go into terrorism research after he read my first Handbook on Political Terrorism in the 1980s.
Major concerns in the 1970s were first hijackings, especially those connected with Cuba. There was also a spade of embassy occupations, especially in Latin America. However, the most consequential embassy occupation and the longest-lasting one
(lasting 444 days) – which cost Jimmy Carter his re-election to a second term of the US presidency – was the occupation of the US embassy in Tehran in the late 1970.The 52 American hostages were finally released minutes after Jimmy Carter left office. Hostage-takings and kidnappings and negotiations with non-state terrorists were typical issues studied at that time. Almost nobody studied state terrorism at that time anymore.
Question 2: How have research themes changed over the years?
Schmid: Research followed the type of events introduced by terrorists, driven often by government grants for that type of research. Before 9/11, it was difficult to get funding for research. I myself did other research at two Dutch universities at that time focusing on peace research and human rights. Terrorism was but one field of my interest. Since I was not a tenured professor for most of my life, I was dependent on contract work and so I worked for the Red Cross, for Amnesty International and for various ministries in the Netherlands on topics they were interested in, like, for instance, cultural diplomacy.
One thing that changed research themes already before 9/11 was the emergence of databases on terrorism, like the RAND database which was continued by Bruce’s wife Donna in St. Andrews. I myself developed a database while I was Officer-in-Charge of the Terrorism Prevention Branch of the United Nations in Vienna in 1999 and reported my findings every week to the secretariat of the Security Council. Later I passed on some of my data and methodology to the Global Terrorism Database project of Gary Lafree at the University of Maryland. Unfortunately, government funding for that data project also came to an end under President Trump. That has been the fate of more than one data collection effort. However, there are now major databases outside the United States. In Germany, for instance, the MOTRA project [Monitoringsystem and Transferplatform Radicalisation ] coordinated by the BKA, the Federal Crime Office has for the last five years been a shining example of excellent monitoring. At this moment its continued financing is, however, still in the balance as the German government must practice a policy of retrenchment.
The existence of databases with multiple variables allows exploring terrorism from many angles. One theme that received considerable attention after 9/11 was the possibility of non-state terrorists going nuclear or using radiological, chemical and biological weapons. After the biological anthrax letter attacks in America in 1999 and the chemical sarin attacks in Japan in the mid01990s, there was some justification for that fear. The administration of President George Bush invested tens of billions of dollars for research in the field of biology to counter potential biological attacks. Such attacks did not occur but that research investment into germs later paid off when the COVID pandemic occurred – an unexpected spin-off of terrorism research.
Another theme on which considerable sums of research money have been spent is the funding of terrorism. However, much of terrorism does not require much funding. The 9/11 attacks cost only half a million dollars but created damage a thousand times bigger. Today we see multiple knife attacks in Europe that cost almost nothing in terms of weapon acquisition and preparation but nevertheless cause anxiety if not major terror. Massive research into the funding of terrorism has, in my view, not brought decisive results. Ideology, hate and frustration rather than money are major drivers behind terrorism – unlike organized crime where the study of money flows shows better results.
Question 3: What have been some of the most significant positive developments in the field?
Schmid: For a field to flourish, you need researchers who can devote for a considerable amount of time their whole attention to one particular subject – in this case – terrorism. There were few researchers who could do so before 9/11. Exceptions were Martha Crenshaw and David Rapoport and some researchers associated with the RAND corporation like Brian Jenkins or Peter Chalk.
After 9/11 a critical mass of researchers who stayed with the topic of terrorism emerged and that was a significant positive development. There were also new journals emerging like Terrorism and Political Violence of which I was C-editor until 2009 and Perspectives on Terrorism which I edited between 2009 and 2023.
Another positive development is that academic researcher increasingly began to study counter-terrorism. In the early 1990s, I published, together with the Canadian researcher Ron Crelinsten, a volume on Western Responses to Terrorism. It took, more than 20 years before a former St. Andrews colleague of mine, Michael Boyle – now at Rutgers University – published a parallel volume on Non-Western Responses to Terrorism. It turned out that non-Western responses were not so different from Western ones.
Question 4: How would you characterize the current state of the research field?
Schmid: Ten years ago, Marc Sageman, an influential author in the field of terrorism studies, complained about ‘The stagnation of terrorism’ research. Today no one could credibly be able to make such a claim. The field has grown so much that it is difficult to oversee it all. When you ask researchers – as I did in 2021 and 2023 through questionnaires – what the current state of the research field is you get very different answers because most individual researchers can no longer oversee the field as a whole since so many articles, dissertations, grey literature reports, monographs and edited volumes are published in so many languages that one loss track. Next to academic publishing, there is also journalistic publishing. However, next to the open literature, there is a whole field of not-so-public research by Think Tanks and research done inside intelligence agencies and security services which is based on all sources rather than only on open sources or fieldwork. Very few academics have a good idea of what is going on in in-house research of security agencies. A few lucky ones are at home in both worlds.
Question 5: What do you think the major research topics will be over the next 5 to 10 years?
Schmid: As I said before, government funding drives much of terrorism research and that in turn is driven by the emergence of new terrorist strategies. Someone called terrorists ‘bombers without an airforce’. With the introduction of drones, this has changed and we are likely to see more terrorist attacks using drones. However, prediction is difficult. After 9/11 there were a number of experts who said that it was not a question of “if” but only a question of “when” nuclear terrorism would emerge. It has not happened in more than twenty years. There is a lot of talk about ‘cyber-terrorism’. I have seen cybercrime and cyber warfare and cyber sabotage but I have not seen cyber terrorism – but it all depends on your definition of terrorism. Terrorism remains a contested concept. I am in favor of a narrow definition.
I sometimes compare terrorism studies to a game of tennis where the researcher looks only at the game the terrorists play and does not report on the game the government plays. However, many moves of the terrorists can only be understood when one looks at both sides of the tennis court. After 9/11 much of the focus has been on what Al Qaéda, ISIS and other terrorist groups do and not enough on the reactions of governments.
In my Handbook of Terrorism Prevention and Preparedness, one of the ‘Lessons Learned’ from research is that
1. Non-state Terrorism is often a strategy of provocation. Many terrorists want to produce an over-reaction with their atrocities, expecting that the government will target and repress the terrorists’ professed constituency as a whole, which is likely to drive new recruits into the arms of the terrorist organization. Governments should avoid falling into the trap of doing what the terrorists expect.
2. Another lesson form terrorism research is that acts of terrorism are often motivated by a desire to exact revenge for perceived or real injustice that has not been adequately addressed by the existing political system. Revenge has been a greatly underestimated cause of terrorism. If government actions are within the rule of law, respecting human rights and supported by the majority of citizens, fewer people will be motivated to engage in terrorist acts by feelings of revenge. In other words, many acts of retaliatory terrorism by non-state actors can be prevented by trying to avoiding offering reasons for acts of revenge.
3. A third way to prevent terrorism is to limit the possibilities for terrorists to obtain free publicity with their public outrages. If half or more of the terrorism struggle is in the media (as one Al Qaeda leader confessed), prevention should shift more strongly to targeting the communication channels and the access to mass and social media terrorists seek to instrumentalize to reach their intended audiences. Without publicity for their cause, non-state terrorists cannot get very far. However, to reduce the amount of publicity for acts of terrorism, governments have to work closely with editors of mass media and operators of social media and mobilize public support for applying selective news blackouts. This too will prevent some acts of terrorism.
As I tried to explain in my first book on terrorism which had the title ‘Violence as Communication’ – Insurgent Terrorism and the Western News Media (1982), terrorism is a combination of violence and propaganda, whereby the first helps to increase the effect of the second. If that is true- which I believe it is – counter-terrorism must focus much more on countering the propaganda, the narratives and the conspiracy theories of terrorists if they want to succeed. The primarily kinetic ‘war on terror’ has not brought the results hoped for after 9/11.
Share
Prof. dr Alex Schmid is an emeritus professor and distinguished INIS member
Online Team event on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence
QUESTIONS
Question 1: When you first began working in the field of terrorism and political violence, what were the main issues that researchers were concerned with?
Schmid: I started my academic career as a historian and wrote my doctoral dissertation in the early 1970s on Intervention and Counter-Revolution in the Russian Civil War, 1918-1920. There was plenty of Red Terror by the Bolsheviks and White Terror by their opponents. I completed my doctoral dissertation in 1972 when the terrorist attack on the Olympic Games in Munich occurred. The Olympic venue and the occasion produced a television audience of some 800 million people to the Black September terrorists. That is typical for non-state terrorism at its most effective: 1 percent violence and 99 percent publicity to magnify it. That attack by a splinter group of Fatah was an inspiration to other terrorists. It was also a wake-up call that started research into non-state terrorism. In the same year, the U.S. Department of State organized the first conference on international terrorism. In the 1970s the terms ‘international terrorism’ and ‘transnational terrorism’ were used side by side until the term ‘international terrorism’ won – probably because it sounded very much like ‘international communism’ and implied the Soviet Union as a state sponsor.
I myself began investigating non-state terrorism first in 1976, after moving from Switzerland to the Netherlands. Funded by the Dutch government I was doing a case study on South Moluccan activists who were the descendants of Christian soldiers who fought on the side of the Dutch colonial troops against the national liberation forces in Indonesia who had been armed by the Japanese occupiers at the end of World War II. These South Moluccans, the sons of colonial soldiers, wanted to force the Netherlands to act against the Indonesian government and help them liberate the homeland of their fathers in the South Moluccan islands. At that time, terrorism research was not an independent field of study.
The way terrorism studies grew into a field was in three steps: first came conferences, then came special journals focusing on terrorism and finally institutes dedicated to the study of terrorism emerged.
Since 1972 and 9/11 there have, according to one count, been some 150 terrorism conferences on terrorism. A Jewish-American scholar by the name of Yonah Alexander published many conference proceedings dealing specifically with terrorist acts directed against Israel and the United States. He also published the first journal titled Terrorism: An International Journal which late merged with Studies in Conflict and Terrorism of which Bruce Hoffman is now the Editor-in-Chief.
Research centers focusing on the study of terrorism emerged only in the 1990s. In Europe the first one, the Centre for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism (CSTPV) was founded in 1994 at the University of St. Andrews , by Bruce Hoffman and Paul Wilkinson. Two years later, the International Center for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) in Herzliya, Israel was founded by Boaz Ganor who is now rector of the Reichman University. He once told me that he decided to go into terrorism research after he read my first Handbook on Political Terrorism in the 1980s.
Major concerns in the 1970s were first hijackings, especially those connected with Cuba. There was also a spade of embassy occupations, especially in Latin America. However, the most consequential embassy occupation and the longest-lasting one
(lasting 444 days) – which cost Jimmy Carter his re-election to a second term of the US presidency – was the occupation of the US embassy in Tehran in the late 1970.The 52 American hostages were finally released minutes after Jimmy Carter left office. Hostage-takings and kidnappings and negotiations with non-state terrorists were typical issues studied at that time. Almost nobody studied state terrorism at that time anymore.
Question 2: How have research themes changed over the years?
Schmid: Research followed the type of events introduced by terrorists, driven often by government grants for that type of research. Before 9/11, it was difficult to get funding for research. I myself did other research at two Dutch universities at that time focusing on peace research and human rights. Terrorism was but one field of my interest. Since I was not a tenured professor for most of my life, I was dependent on contract work and so I worked for the Red Cross, for Amnesty International and for various ministries in the Netherlands on topics they were interested in, like, for instance, cultural diplomacy.
One thing that changed research themes already before 9/11 was the emergence of databases on terrorism, like the RAND database which was continued by Bruce’s wife Donna in St. Andrews. I myself developed a database while I was Officer-in-Charge of the Terrorism Prevention Branch of the United Nations in Vienna in 1999 and reported my findings every week to the secretariat of the Security Council. Later I passed on some of my data and methodology to the Global Terrorism Database project of Gary Lafree at the University of Maryland. Unfortunately, government funding for that data project also came to an end under President Trump. That has been the fate of more than one data collection effort. However, there are now major databases outside the United States. In Germany, for instance, the MOTRA project [Monitoringsystem and Transferplatform Radicalisation ] coordinated by the BKA, the Federal Crime Office has for the last five years been a shining example of excellent monitoring. At this moment its continued financing is, however, still in the balance as the German government must practice a policy of retrenchment.
The existence of databases with multiple variables allows exploring terrorism from many angles. One theme that received considerable attention after 9/11 was the possibility of non-state terrorists going nuclear or using radiological, chemical and biological weapons. After the biological anthrax letter attacks in America in 1999 and the chemical sarin attacks in Japan in the mid01990s, there was some justification for that fear. The administration of President George Bush invested tens of billions of dollars for research in the field of biology to counter potential biological attacks. Such attacks did not occur but that research investment into germs later paid off when the COVID pandemic occurred – an unexpected spin-off of terrorism research.
Another theme on which considerable sums of research money have been spent is the funding of terrorism. However, much of terrorism does not require much funding. The 9/11 attacks cost only half a million dollars but created damage a thousand times bigger. Today we see multiple knife attacks in Europe that cost almost nothing in terms of weapon acquisition and preparation but nevertheless cause anxiety if not major terror. Massive research into the funding of terrorism has, in my view, not brought decisive results. Ideology, hate and frustration rather than money are major drivers behind terrorism – unlike organized crime where the study of money flows shows better results.
Question 3: What have been some of the most significant positive developments in the field?
Schmid: For a field to flourish, you need researchers who can devote for a considerable amount of time their whole attention to one particular subject – in this case – terrorism. There were few researchers who could do so before 9/11. Exceptions were Martha Crenshaw and David Rapoport and some researchers associated with the RAND corporation like Brian Jenkins or Peter Chalk.
After 9/11 a critical mass of researchers who stayed with the topic of terrorism emerged and that was a significant positive development. There were also new journals emerging like Terrorism and Political Violence of which I was C-editor until 2009 and Perspectives on Terrorism which I edited between 2009 and 2023.
Another positive development is that academic researcher increasingly began to study counter-terrorism. In the early 1990s, I published, together with the Canadian researcher Ron Crelinsten, a volume on Western Responses to Terrorism. It took, more than 20 years before a former St. Andrews colleague of mine, Michael Boyle – now at Rutgers University – published a parallel volume on Non-Western Responses to Terrorism. It turned out that non-Western responses were not so different from Western ones.
Question 4: How would you characterize the current state of the research field?
Schmid: Ten years ago, Marc Sageman, an influential author in the field of terrorism studies, complained about ‘The stagnation of terrorism’ research. Today no one could credibly be able to make such a claim. The field has grown so much that it is difficult to oversee it all. When you ask researchers – as I did in 2021 and 2023 through questionnaires – what the current state of the research field is you get very different answers because most individual researchers can no longer oversee the field as a whole since so many articles, dissertations, grey literature reports, monographs and edited volumes are published in so many languages that one loss track. Next to academic publishing, there is also journalistic publishing. However, next to the open literature, there is a whole field of not-so-public research by Think Tanks and research done inside intelligence agencies and security services which is based on all sources rather than only on open sources or fieldwork. Very few academics have a good idea of what is going on in in-house research of security agencies. A few lucky ones are at home in both worlds.
Question 5: What do you think the major research topics will be over the next 5 to 10 years?
Schmid: As I said before, government funding drives much of terrorism research and that in turn is driven by the emergence of new terrorist strategies. Someone called terrorists ‘bombers without an airforce’. With the introduction of drones, this has changed and we are likely to see more terrorist attacks using drones. However, prediction is difficult. After 9/11 there were a number of experts who said that it was not a question of “if” but only a question of “when” nuclear terrorism would emerge. It has not happened in more than twenty years. There is a lot of talk about ‘cyber-terrorism’. I have seen cybercrime and cyber warfare and cyber sabotage but I have not seen cyber terrorism – but it all depends on your definition of terrorism. Terrorism remains a contested concept. I am in favor of a narrow definition.
I sometimes compare terrorism studies to a game of tennis where the researcher looks only at the game the terrorists play and does not report on the game the government plays. However, many moves of the terrorists can only be understood when one looks at both sides of the tennis court. After 9/11 much of the focus has been on what Al Qaéda, ISIS and other terrorist groups do and not enough on the reactions of governments.
In my Handbook of Terrorism Prevention and Preparedness, one of the ‘Lessons Learned’ from research is that
1. Non-state Terrorism is often a strategy of provocation. Many terrorists want to produce an over-reaction with their atrocities, expecting that the government will target and repress the terrorists’ professed constituency as a whole, which is likely to drive new recruits into the arms of the terrorist organization. Governments should avoid falling into the trap of doing what the terrorists expect.
2. Another lesson form terrorism research is that acts of terrorism are often motivated by a desire to exact revenge for perceived or real injustice that has not been adequately addressed by the existing political system. Revenge has been a greatly underestimated cause of terrorism. If government actions are within the rule of law, respecting human rights and supported by the majority of citizens, fewer people will be motivated to engage in terrorist acts by feelings of revenge. In other words, many acts of retaliatory terrorism by non-state actors can be prevented by trying to avoiding offering reasons for acts of revenge.
3. A third way to prevent terrorism is to limit the possibilities for terrorists to obtain free publicity with their public outrages. If half or more of the terrorism struggle is in the media (as one Al Qaeda leader confessed), prevention should shift more strongly to targeting the communication channels and the access to mass and social media terrorists seek to instrumentalize to reach their intended audiences. Without publicity for their cause, non-state terrorists cannot get very far. However, to reduce the amount of publicity for acts of terrorism, governments have to work closely with editors of mass media and operators of social media and mobilize public support for applying selective news blackouts. This too will prevent some acts of terrorism.
As I tried to explain in my first book on terrorism which had the title ‘Violence as Communication’ – Insurgent Terrorism and the Western News Media (1982), terrorism is a combination of violence and propaganda, whereby the first helps to increase the effect of the second. If that is true- which I believe it is – counter-terrorism must focus much more on countering the propaganda, the narratives and the conspiracy theories of terrorists if they want to succeed. The primarily kinetic ‘war on terror’ has not brought the results hoped for after 9/11.
