Is Terrorism Ever Justified - Essay Example

Following Singh: "There is almost an infinite variety of violence of anti-social nature-homicide, acts of vandalism, arson, destructive rage, or other expressions of an essentially irrational urge to strike at someone or something" (Singh 377). Beyond this, a political economy of terrorism must place statist behavior in a world system context. However, terror is not confined to purely instrumental linkages between specific nation-states and the misdeveloping world. The modern state may be quite "rational" in its projection of national power on a world scale through military force, covert intelligence operations, and economic sanctions (Edwards n.d.).

State power may be used quite "systematically" to maintain an order of inequality with both global and domestic dimensions. And all of this may be done in the name of national sovereignty and international law. Indeed, it may be a function of lawyers working for the state to find "lawful" reasons for policies of international and national intimidation (Egendorf 2004). Terrorism cannot be justified because it involves the systematic use of torture and the rise of military and police forces engaged in an internal war against a subject population.

This form of terrorism may also be waged through shadow organizations, death squads, and the like that have no official power but that is clearly linked with the national elite (Egendorf 2004). However, focusing on regime terror is often deceptive. To cast the issue of terrorism as the abuse of state power by political deviants may be to ignore the more endemic, taken-for-granted, higher forms of sanctioned violence that avoid the terrorist label. It may also ignore state structural imperatives (expressed in policy and action, including the threat or use of force) designed to preserve a transnational market system.

At the international level, higher terrorism takes different forms. It is ironic that in the political lexicon of terrorism, the war between states is routinely omitted. Indeed, the architects of the state may subscribe to humanitarian codes.