International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 67

International Journal on Criminology
and non-violent. These included the consolidation of various organizations, original
forms of propaganda (including theater and slogans painted on walls), and
both rural and urban guerrilla actions. Most interestingly for our purposes, it also
used terrorism, in moments and places that it is our task to study. Furthermore,
the experience that the Peruvian state and society accumulated in fighting the insurgency—particularly
involving rural self-defense strategies (the rondas campesinas)—should
be integrated into any geostrategic study attempting to understand
such events in all their complexity.
When approaching these events and the associated literature, it is essential
to begin with a focused field of study. Here, we are specifically interested in terrorism—that
is, a technique of political violence that groups (or even individuals) use
in moments and places that it is our task to understand based on situational data
and given operational constraints. To do so, we must therefore first propose a definition
of terrorism—to be added to the hundreds already in circulation (Schmid
2013: 39–157). Formulating such a definition is essential if we are to clarify our
topic as precisely as possible. We claim here that terrorism consists in the realization
(and/or threat) of acts of war, intended to transmit an emotionally impactful
message to an audience beyond the immediate victims of the violent action (Dory
2017b).
While there is no need here for a detailed commentary on this definition
and its theoretical implications, we note that, beyond its communicational dimension
(which also applies to psychological warfare), our focus here is on the identity
of the victims. This may be personal, such as when a king, president, or other
individual is specifically targeted. In such cases, they are typically the victim of a
political assassination. Functional identity (related to functions in the state apparatus,
subversive organizations, the police, the army, etc.) involves victims who are
undifferentiated but who belong to particular categories of the population—typically
the armed forces in the case of rural or urban guerrilla warfare. Finally, vector
identity refers to the ability of particular categories of a population (based on
criteria such as ethnicity, age, and so on) to best convey, through the spectacle of
their victimization, the message that the attackers wish to send to particular audiences
(for example, the victims of the Bataclan attacks in Paris in 2015, or those of
the attack on Tarata Street on July 16, 1992, when the Shining Path set off two car
bombs in an upper-class residential area of Lima). Such actions best characterize
terrorism in what we may call its “purest” form, as a technique of political violence.
A scientific definition like this is of course different from the polemical and
political designation of “terrorism” and “terrorists” as vile, cowardly, barbaric, and
bloodthirsty—as our absolute enemies, whoever they are and (increasingly) whatever
they do. It also differs from legal approaches, which aim to define such acts in
terms of how they might be prosecuted, and which differ considerably from one
country to another.
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