Newsweek, December 2024
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg recently claimed that the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO earlier this month “was a killing that was intended to evoke terror.” And now prosecutors have charged the shooter, Luigi Mangione, with terrorism. This cold-blooded execution on a New York City street in broad daylight was a shocking act of violence. But does it meet the threshold of terrorism?
Political scientists have debated to death the definition of terrorism. And still there is no consensus. The terrorism scholar Alex Schmid spent decades researching the elusive definition of terrorism and concluded that the “search for an adequate definition is still on.” He and other scholars such as Walter Laqueur have identified hundreds of terrorist definitions. This lack of consensus is understandable because the term terrorism is not value-neutral. Governments around the world apply the word terrorism instrumentally to isolate and discredit their enemies at home and abroad. In authoritarian countries such as China, Egypt, and Turkey, even peaceful political dissidents risk being treated as terrorists. Democracies, too, are sometimes guilty as well, such as when the mob of Donald Trump supporters were called terrorists for unsuccessfully trying on Jan. 6, 2021, to influence the presidential election outcome at the Capitol.
