Birmingham-Southern College history professor Randall Law (BSC photo)
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- The use of terrorism for political ends -- particularly as this bloody practice has developed since the 19th century -- has one recurring element, according to Randall Law, an associate professor of history at Birmingham-Southern College.
"The key element is symbolism," Law said in a recent telephone interview. "The goal is change the behavior of a very large number of people by using violence against a relatively small number of people, but violence that's used with an audience in mind. The violence used against a small number of people can be symbolically read so that ... the larger population understands its role in it."
Terrorists play on human psychology, including fear. The violence they use "creates a narrative that people far and wide can write themselves into," Law said. "'I was in the World Trade Center. I have been on a plane before. I've ridden a bus. I can imagine myself being a victim of that kind of attack.'"
The course -- which is free and open to anyone in the world with an Internet connection -- is Birmingham-Southern's first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). It began May 12, but people can still sign up, according to Law.
Terrorism a "sign of weakness"
Those who use terror tactics usually try to achieve their ends "indirectly," according to Law. "This is generally different from war, in that those who use terrorism don't hope to achieve their results by seizing territory or physically eliminating the enemy," he said.
If such terrorist groups as Al Queda had conventional armies, they would use them, according to Law. Similarly, if they could take power through the ballot box, they probably would. But, for whatever reasons, "those avenues have been blocked," Law said.
This leaves terror tactics as their "last, worst option" and, contrary to what many people may think, the use of terrorism is usually "a sign of weakness," Law said.
"With something like 9/11, people tend to be awed by the display of power and imagine that this is a demonstration of Al Queda's great strength," he said. "It is actually a sign of their real weakness that they had no other options left to them."
Of course, this perspective "doesn't soothe the trauma or diminish the tragedy of the loss from 9/11," Law said.
How the course started
Law has taught this "History of Terrorism" class, or some version of it, each year since about 2003.
In 2009, he published a textbook, "Terrorism: A History" (Polity, 2009), which covers the period from ancient Assyria to the post-9/11 War on Terror and has been praised by both academic and military publications. For example, the Naval War College Review called Law's book "the quintessential work on the subject."
He is currently editing the "Routledge History of Terrorism," due in 2015 from Routledge Books, a prestigious academic publisher in the U.S. and the U.K.
Law is trained as a Russian historian and also studies European history from the late 19th through the mid-20th centuries. His interest in terrorism began, to some extent, while he was still a student. "I did a little work with terrorism in graduate school and got introduced to Russia's role in the birth of terrorism in the 19th century," Law said.
Modern terrorism emerged in Russia in the late 1800s when radicals assassinated public figures in the hopes of sparking a popular revolt against the Czars, according to Law.
Law's desire to understand the phenomenon was increased by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001. "After 9/11, I had some of the same questions as other people," he said. "Who are 'they'? Why do they hate us? Why did they attack us like this?"
He began writing and researching in earnest. "I have built up a way to think about terrorism, not just over the centuries, but from an international or global perspective," he said.
Most of the earliest examples of what we would recognize as modern terror tactics began in the late 18th century, according to Law. This would include the use or terror associated with the French Revolution. However, Law finds "antecedents" of modern terror tactics farther back in history.
"You see some similar tactics, such as assassination, but in a very different context," he said. "The continuities (with modern terrorism) are the justifications. Often in ancient and medieval history, it's the role of religion, the idea that God plays a role in commanding people to use violence against his enemies."
And it's not just one group that helped create modern terror, according to Law. "Many people think that the only terrorism is the kind carried out by wild-eyed Muslim fundamentalists," he said. "One of the many points of the course is to show that terrorism has been around for a long time and has been used in pursuit of nearly every objective and every ideology embraced by human beings in the last two centuries."
Attacks against the innocent a "signature strategy"
Sadly, one common feature of terrorism in recent decades has been attacks on civilians, something that Law calls "one of the signature terrorist strategies."
This was developed during the independence movement in Algeria in the 1950s when the National Liberation Front, called the FLN, used the tactic in their struggle with French colonialists. "You can trace it back to the 19th century, but it emerged very clearly here," Law said.
"The FLN hoped to use violence against civilians that would provoke the French to crack down so brutally, so violently, that they would radicalize the majority of the Algerian population who, up to that point, had mostly sat on the sidelines," Law said.
The tactic worked, the French were forced out and other groups in other countries took notice, according to Law. "Other terrorist groups patterned their violence after it," he said. Among the later copy cats was Al Qaeda in Iraq, who used the strategy against the United States with the beginning of the insurgency in 2004.
Terrorists take advantage of "flawed" risk assessment
Those who use terrorism take advantage of a quirk of human psychology to magnify the actual threat they pose to most people, according to Law. They "take advantage of the very flawed way in which humans assess risk and assess threat," he said.
Law points out that most people think that driving a car is a safer way to get from Point A to Point B than flying, even though -- if you look at the fatalities per 100,000 miles traveled -- "cars are death traps, and air travel is much, much safer."
"People think about terrorism in the same way," Law said. "They are much, much more fearful of being targeted randomly by terrorists in some sort of public venue than they are about dangers that ... happen much more often -- being struck by lightning or choking to death on your lunch or things like that."
"Those who use terrorism feed on that, and of course the media feeds that, as well," he said. "There is a symbiotic relationship between those use terrorism and those who disseminate news. There is so much conscious and unconscious fear mongering associated with terrorism, and there are ways of making sense of that which, again, do not deny that real people die in terrorist attacks or that real blood is shed and real lives broken, but that the scale of it is really such that it needs to be brought into a perspective that we usually fail to provide."
The effects of the War on Terror
The flawed way in which humans often assess risk may have had a deleterious effect on our country over the last decade or so, according to Law. "A good example of the cost of not thinking about genuine, appropriate risk assessment is what we've done in the name of the War of Terror," he said.
We have created new federal agencies, he said. We have spent lots of money.
"We have even entertained and, in some ways, actually engaged in violations of our own values that we didn't when fighting WWII or in the Cold War," he said. "You look at the debates over torture today, enhanced interrogation. We never had a public debate in which significant numbers of the people of America supported torture as a means to help defeat the Soviets or the Japanese, for that matter, but we do that now against a threat that is really is much less.
"The point is not to trivialize terrorist violence or those who use it but ... the hope is that I can help to educate people to be more conscious about how they assess these risks and threats and what we should do to in the name of trying to make ourselves safer," Law said.
The course is still open
It's not too late to take part in the class, according to Law. "People can enroll in the course right up until the very end and get access to all materials (including the lecture videos, quizzes, readings, essay assignments, bibliographies and discussion forums)," he said in an email.
And those who sign up by Sunday, June 1, according to Law, can still earn a certificate of completion for the course by paying a small fee -- which can be paid at the end of the term -- and getting caught up on the assignments and taking part in some discussion forums online.
To learn more, go to www.bsc.edu/mooc. To enroll, go to www.coursesites.com.
For more news from Birmingham, go to www.al.com/birmingham.
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