Overture: One World, Many Terrorisms

Abstract

The standard histories of terrorism, in their presentist bias, tend to suppress the multiplicity of meaning of the term that has existed ever since the word ‘terrorism’ made its discursive entrée in the late eighteenth century (if we are to believe authorities such as the Oxford English Dictionary or Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française). This chapter demonstrates the complexity of the fabric from which the meaning of terrorism in the discourse among states in the 1930s was carved out, and thus it points to the accidentality and contingency of this process. In other words, it suggests that the terrorism spoken about in the 1930s was simply not there; nor was it historically inevitable that, in their discourse, it would take the form it finally did. In the period covered by the content analysis of the three chosen newspapers (the New York Times, the Times of London and Le Figaro), the concept indeed became increasingly used. There were few rules, however, governing the ways in which it could be used and to whom it could be attributed.