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The central question addressed in this collection is: in what circumstances did terrorism act as a "driver of history," exerting a major impact on international and national events, and why was it able to do so? To answer this question, this article focuses on three levels of analysis: first, using the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 as a case study, it explores terrorism’s monumental power to change the course of history. The second, which takes as its reference point the case of the Fenian dynamiters’ campaign in Britain during the 1880s, examines terrorism as a tactical weapon that achieves profound changes in governmental organization and policy to counter this menace. Finally, it discusses terrorism as a strategic force, re-calibrating international politics and affairs, and catapulting to prominence (and to an extent, power) hitherto unknown or inconsequential movements, such as the Palestinian fedayeen after the 1967 Six Day War. Each of these offers an important lesson from the past for our understanding of terrorism today, namely, how what may appear to be completely new and novel in the present often has a significantly relevant historical precedent. Indeed, all three cases presaged some later, important development in terrorist tactics or strategy: in the first case, the emergence of state-sponsored terrorism; in the second, attacks on subways (in London) and other mass transit, that also led to the formation of new security forces in response to the threat; and third, the "cult of the insurgent" that has enormous resonance in Iraq, with bin Laden, and in America’s war on terrorism today.

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While the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 helped to set in train a series of reactions by various governments that led to the outbreak of the First World War, the story neither begins nor ends there. From an historian’s perspective, this simple ‘cause and effect’ formula does not do justice to what is a far more complex story. This article assesses that event’s place in history by situating it within a wider context. It explores how the assassination interacted, first with the Byzantine geopolitics of the Balkans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and then with the weltanschaung of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, to become a catalyst for war.

If the events of 1914 tell us anything about the nature of terrorism they first illustrate ‘the law of unintended consequences.’ Terrorists are not always able to control the outcome of their actions, which depends on how others react. The Archduke’s assassins did not intend to start a global war by killing him. Unwittingly, they provided the Kaiser with the pretext for a war that he had sought for two years. Second, and flowing from that, it is clear that the significance of terrorist campaigns and actions cannot be understood in isolation from the political contexts in which they occur. Finally, in their desire to strike a blow against a ‘foreign’ authority, one can see that the motives and actions of the Archduke’s attackers were analogous to those of other insurgents before and since. In short, the Archduke’s assassination was a signal event in, if not the start of, a continuum in the history of modern terrorism.

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Many terrorist groups, it would seem, cause great turmoil but no lasting impact. This might include radical student groups of the 1960s and terrorist organizations of the 1970s. Yet, we know that in some instances political violence, or revolution, does lead to great social change. Consider Cuba as an example. This might suggest that terrorists and revolutionaries face a zero-sum game: total failure or total victory. There is a middle ground, however. The PLO, as an example, has not achieved an independent Palestine, but who in the 1970s would have imagined a Palestinian Authority led by Yasir Arafat. This case study of the Irish Republican Army and its political wing, Sinn Fein, examines this middle ground in Ireland in the 1916-1948 time period.

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The First World War damaged the European psyche, and physically and mentally maimed a whole generation of European men fortunate enough to survive the maelstrom. Nowhere was this more apparent than in post-war and Weimar Germany. For some young German veterans, the war never ended; they simply brought it home to continue the fight in the chaotic streets of the new republic. They revelled in the experience of violence, which they directed against their enemies, real and imagined. Between 1919 and 1923, dozens of loosely organized groups embarked on a campaign of revolutionary terrorism designed to spark a civil war and unite the disparate elements of the German Right behind the goal of creating an authoritarian state. After the failure of the Hitler Putsch in November 1923, the extreme Right altered its tactics and developed sophisticated political organizations capable of competing for influence in the government it once worked to destroy. While the Weimar Republic weathered multiple attempts to bring it down through violence, it was overcome by a combination of internal events and the misguided attempt by the mainstream conservatives to co-opt the Nazis. Assassinations and other terrorist acts alone did not destroy the Weimar Republic, but those responsible for such acts conducted a protracted, multi-faceted effort to undermine its legitimacy. The extreme Right’s early campaign of violence destabilized the Weimar government and both intimidated and enthralled the German people. The Nazis deployed revolutionary terrorism in their political struggle and delivered the death blow to the Weimar Republic.

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As early as 1933, the French rightist movement, the Croix de Feu, was proclaiming its willingness to threaten the use of force in order to achieve its political goals. However, this strategy proved risky for the French right, which was fragmented. Moreover, compared to its Italian and German counterparts, the French Third Republic dealt with the far right in a more robust manner; the police were reliable and the left-wing Popular Front government banned the Croix de Feu. But the group’s leader, Lieutenant-Colonel François deLa Rocque, responded by creating a new right-wing group: the Parti Social Français (PSF). The PSF not only resumed many of the Croix de Feu‟s paramilitary activities, but also blamed rising political violence on the French left, an argument recently used by its predecessor. While continuing to act belligerently, the PSF claimed that the Popular Front sought to repress it and democratic liberties in general, a strategy which helped to demoralize the left and undermine the Popular Front. The Croix de Feu and the PSF did much to exacerbate the crisis of democracy that afflicted France in the late 1930s. Their tactics illustrate how the politics of the street, coupled with exploitation of the rhetoric of democracy, can weaken even long-established parliamentary systems.

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This article begins with a question: can the contemporary Middle East conflict itself, in which terrorism plays a prominent role, be traced to a successful terrorist campaign? I argue that Jewish terrorism in 1940s Palestine was both tactically and strategically significant. At the tactical level, Jewish terrorists were able to erode the ability of British security forces to control Palestine. Strategically, that persuaded Britain to withdraw from Palestine, which, in turn, created the conditions that facilitated both the founding of Israel and the creation of an Arab-Palestinian diaspora. The consequent Arab-Israeli conflict has shaped and dominated Middle East politics and diplomacy for much of the last 60 years. Thus, Jewish terrorism left the region with a dual legacy of tactical effectiveness and strategic influence. This article explores and assesses this dual legacy.

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This article argues that the Algerian FLN (Front de libération nationale) played a major role in shaping the character of post-Second World War Europe. A sub-state terrorist organization dedicated to ending colonial domination of Algeria in the 1950s, the FLN effectively dashed France’s dreams of resuming its position as a global power, which in turn promoted greater commitment on the part of France to the nascent European Community. The FLN may also be said to have inadvertently contributed to the first large-scale immigration of Muslims into Europe during the modern era, while also severely complicating the relationship between France and its Muslims for decades. While the FLN’s use of political terror shaped national liberation movements across the developing world, the primary focus of this article will instead be on the ways in which the FLN’s victory in Algeria served to promote French participation in the European experiment and how the exodus of France’s Arab and Berber allies at the conclusion of the conflict added to the extant piedmont of Muslim Europeans reshaping the ethnography of Western Europe.

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This article reappraises the strategic impact of Armenian terrorism in the twentieth century. From 1973 to 1985, Armenian terrorists earned a deadly and infamous international reputation by murdering Turkish diplomats or members of their families, along with many other non-involved third parties killed in the crossfire, during 188 terrorist operations worldwide. By the mid-1980s, however, Armenian terrorists had fallen into mindless but deadly internal fighting that resulted in the deaths of several of their leading members. Yet even with the benefit of 20 years of hindsight, it remains difficult to assess definitively the strategic influence exerted by Armenian terrorism. It was an excellent example of how one person’s terrorist can be viewed by some as another’s freedom fighter. In seeking revenge for past perceived wrongs and in pursuit of the goal of an independent state, Armenian terrorism also shared common characteristics with such other ethnic-based terrorist movements as the Irish and Palestinians. Although by practically all conventional standards of measurement its ultimate strategic impact was virtually nil, some might still argue that Armenian terrorism did help preserve the memory of what many call the twentieth-century’s first or forgotten genocide.

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The Revolutionary Organization 17 November (17N) conducted terrorist attacks in Greece for 27 years (1975-2002), making it the most durable of the militant Leftist revolutionary groups that emerged from the European radical milieu of the 1970s. 17N went to great lengths in its communiqués – and eventually in trial testimony – to position itself as the only authentic, progressive political force in post-Junta Greece. In spite of the absence of any demonstrable mass political constituency, 17N’s leaders convinced themselves that they represented the vanguard of political change in the country. But 17N was never an authentic revolutionary group. Instead, it was a clandestine band of disillusioned armed militants with a flair for revolutionary rhetoric and symbolism for whom terrorism had become a way of life: a career. Its members lived in a closed, self-referential world where terrorism became a way of life from which it was impossible to walk away or to confront reality. Feeling themselves to be a genuine instrument of history, 17N leaders believed that it did not matter that there could never be a military victory as long as 17N, ‘intervened’ and ‘resisted.’ For their operational leader, Dimitris Koufodinas, and many of his comrades what was important was the act of ‘resistance’ itself and the notion that blood and death, even one’s own, would carry the mission forward, ultimately securing 17N a place in history.

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This article employs three "success criteria" – Dimensionality, Temporality, and Locus of Success – to assess the achievements of Palestinian terrorism during the al-Aqsa Intifada. Dimensionality refers to recognizable manifestations of recognition (political-social success), organization, and military achievement. Temporality gauges the achievements of terrorist campaigns or sets of events on a time continuum: the long haul, the medium term, and the short run. Locus of success addresses the basic question: success for whom? In the period prior to the First Intifada, Palestinian terrorism achieved recognition but little else apart from strengthening the Palestinian-Arab terrorist organizations politically and financially, in part at the expense of broader-based Palestinian-Arab „insider‟ interests. The First Intifada presents a somewhat different picture than the earlier period. In the case of dimensionality, recognition of the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle was enhanced and there was rapid expansion of organizational structures but the military success criterion remained underdeveloped. The single, most significant achievement of the First Intifada at the organizational level may have been the development of internal infrastructure in the Occupied Territories with an enormous capacity to keep a general movement thriving in an effective and sustained way. The al-Aqsa Intifada presents a different picture. First, by showing that they were willing to kill and be killed for the sake of the movement, it illuminated the depth of the Palestinians‟ commitment. Second, the Palestinians‟ resort to terrorist attacks on Israeli settlements and into Israel proper during the second Intifada, and especially the increasing use of „suicide bombers,‟ represented a profound and lasting change in strategy from the „limited force‟ approach that characterized the first uprising. These attacks generated and sustained fear among Israelis which, in turn, increased pressure on the political elite for political change. Perhaps the single, most significant success in this respect was the removal of Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005. However, the al-Aqsa Intifada does not seem to have achieved any other macro-political goals, such as serious reconsideration on the part of the Israeli elite of the status of the West Bank, including Jerusalem. Nor has it solved the familiar set of Palestinian-Arab internal problems that include corruption and the development of aspects of „civil society.‟ A key question is what to do with Hamas, the group which is now the de facto „government‟ of Gaza but is simply not committed to the notion of a „two state solution.‟ Finally, the al-Aaqsa Intifada highlights the transition of the national liberation struggle from a condition of successes and failures to the point where the emerging reality is a nation-state-in-the-making that comes complete with a system of „representative democracy,‟ including independent institutions that thrive in effective and sustained ways.

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The after-effects of the 9/11 attacks continue to reverberate around the world. It is much too soon to draw any definitive conclusions about its long-term impact, let alone its place in history. But five years is long enough to ask some preliminary questions and suggest some tentative answers. This article addresses only two of the many possible questions. First, did 9/11 represent a "Revolution in Terrorism Affairs"? That is, did it amount to such a profound break with the past practice of terrorism that the world now confronts an unprecedented threat? Second, did it "alter the course of history"? Did it initiate any significant events or have consequences which otherwise would not have occurred?

The development of terrorism over the last three decades calls into question the notion that al-Qaeda and 9/11 marked a ‘revolutionary’ change in the nature of terrorism. In many respects, they seem to constitute a ‘paradigm shift’ rather than a ‘quantum leap’ – more evolutionary than revolutionary.

There are plenty of factors that suggest 9/11 was a ‘world-changing event’: the launching of a "Global War on Terrorism"; the consequent invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan; the rise of major insurgencies in both countries; radicalization of expatriate Muslim communities; the fracturing of the trans-Atlantic alliance; the adoption of harsh anti-terrorism measures by liberal democratic states; and finally, the American adoption of the strategy of ‘preventive war.’ While it is tempting to suggest that none of this would have happened without 9/11, the truth of the matter is less clear-cut than one might think. Granted that five years is still much too close to place an event in its proper historical context, the evidence thus far suggests first, that 9/11 may have been less earth-shaking in its strategic consequences than first imagined, and second, that reactions to it contain some ‘genetic markers’ of longer-term trends that pre-date that event. Its strategic significance will probably be determined by three factors: the outcome of the war in Iraq; the extent to which ‘pre-emptive war’ becomes an accepted model of international crisis management; and the ability of democracies to balance security and civil liberties in the face of a prolonged war. At this juncture, perhaps all that we can say with any certainty is that history is a continuum and that 9/11 represents neither a beginning nor an end.