Terrorism, Insurgency and the Politics of Crime

Criminology has never settled on one definition of terrorism, and the disagreement is not a failure of scholarship so much as a reflection of the term's political stakes. Alex Schmid and Albert Jongman catalogued more than a hundred distinct scholarly and official definitions of terrorism in their 1988 survey Political Terrorism, and the count has only grown since.

Governments, international bodies and academics each define the term to fit their own purposes, and no single treaty definition has ever been adopted at the United Nations, despite decades of negotiation over a Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism.

The disagreement is captured in the well-worn phrase that one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. A government facing an armed independence movement has every incentive to call its opponents terrorists, because the label strips the violence of any claim to legitimate political grievance and licenses harsher legal tools against it. The movement, in turn, may describe the same acts as a legitimate war of national liberation.

Criminology cannot resolve this dispute, but it can describe the features that most working definitions share, which keeps the concept usable for research even where the label remains contested for policy.

Most definitions converge on four elements: the actor is typically non-state or acts clandestinely even where state-linked; the act is calculated rather than spontaneous; the primary target is a non-combatant, or the threat of harm to non-combatants, rather than an opposing armed force; and the intended effect reaches beyond the immediate victims to intimidate or coerce a wider audience, whether a government, a population or an international community.

This last element, the communicative function of the violence, is what separates terrorism from ordinary criminal violence that happens to be shocking. A bank robbery that kills a guard is not terrorism because it is not aimed at an audience beyond the immediate crime; a bombing timed to disrupt an election is, because the intended audience is the electorate and the government it is meant to pressure.

Legal definitions narrow this further for practical reasons, because a criminal statute needs to specify an offence with enough precision to survive constitutional challenge. National statutes differ on details such as whether damage to property alone can qualify, or whether a purely domestic motive counts alongside an international one, and these differences matter in practice: a group treated as terrorist under one country's law can fall outside another's definition entirely, which complicates extradition and cross-border evidence sharing.

That narrowing is where most of the contested cases sit, and it is the reason the next section separates terrorism from the related but distinct category of insurgency.

Insurgency describes an organised armed movement that tries to seize, hold or contest control of territory and population from an existing government, rather than merely to attack it. India's Naxalite-Maoist movement in the central and eastern states, and Colombia's FARC before its 2016 peace agreement, are both insurgencies in this sense: each ran parallel systems of taxation, justice and administration in the areas it controlled, alongside its armed activity.

Three features separate the two labels in practice. The first is target selection: an insurgency's primary targets are typically security forces and symbols of state authority, because the movement is contesting control rather than trying to terrorise a population into submission, while a terrorist campaign deliberately targets civilians to generate fear.

The second is territorial ambition: insurgents want to hold ground, however briefly, and terrorist campaigns generally do not, because a clandestine cell that must remain hidden cannot also administer a fixed territory. The third is scale and organisation: insurgencies field standing forces with a command structure, while terrorist cells can be small and loosely networked.

These are tendencies, not fixed rules, and the same group routinely crosses the line in both directions. An insurgent group can carry out a terrorist bombing in a city far from the territory it controls, and a group that begins as a small terrorist cell can grow into an insurgency if it succeeds in holding ground, as happened with groups that expanded from clandestine attacks into territorial control in parts of Iraq and Syria in the 2010s.

Criminologists therefore increasingly treat terrorism and insurgency as overlapping tactics available to a political violence group, rather than as two mutually exclusive categories of organisation.

The practical stakes of the distinction are highest in the law of armed conflict, because an insurgency that meets the threshold of an internal armed conflict can trigger international humanitarian law protections that do not apply to isolated terrorist acts.

A government fighting a recognised insurgency is expected to observe the laws of war toward captured fighters, while a state responding to a terrorist attack faces no such reciprocal framework because the attacker is treated as a criminal rather than a party to an armed conflict. Domestic criminal law generally ignores this distinction and instead defines terrorism by statute, which is the subject of the comparative law section below.

Organised crime and political violence groups are formally distinguished by motive: organised crime pursues profit, while politically motivated violence pursues an ideological or political end. In practice the two increasingly share methods.

The criminologist Tamara Makarenko set out the clearest framework for this overlap in a 2004 article in the journal Global Crime, describing a crime-terror continuum along which organised crime groups and terrorist or insurgent groups can converge, borrow each other's tactics, and in some cases transform into one another over time.

The clearest illustration is financing. An insurgent or terrorist group needs money for weapons, salaries and logistics, and the same channels used by organised, white-collar, corporate and cybercrime networks, including drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping for ransom, counterfeit goods and money laundering through shell companies and informal transfer systems such as hawala, are available to political violence groups too.

FARC's decades-long involvement in Colombia's cocaine trade, often described as narco-terrorism or narco-insurgency, is the most studied case: the group taxed and later directly managed segments of the drug trade to fund its insurgency, blurring the line between cartel and armed political movement. Taxing that trade puts the group inside the systemic pathway of the drugs-crime nexus, where violence follows from an illegal market's inability to settle disputes through courts rather than from intoxication or dependence.

Groups also learn tactics from each other where their operating environments overlap. Smuggling routes built for narcotics or arms serve equally well for moving people or cash for a political violence group, and bomb-making or urban tradecraft learned in one context transfers readily to another.

This has pushed international policy toward treating terrorist financing and money laundering as a single regulatory problem: the Financial Action Task Force, the intergovernmental body that sets global anti-money-laundering standards, has extended its recommendations to cover terrorist financing specifically, requiring banks and other regulated businesses to screen for both.

Newer fundraising channels, including online crowdfunding campaigns and cryptocurrency transfers, have added a further layer to this problem, because they let a political violence group solicit small donations from a dispersed, sympathetic online audience without relying on a traditional financial intermediary that a regulator can easily monitor.

The nexus is a matter of degree, not equivalence. Most organised crime has no political goal and most politically motivated violence is not run for profit, so the overlap in method should not be mistaken for a claim that the two categories are the same thing. What the nexus explains is why counter-terrorism law increasingly relies on financial investigation and asset freezing alongside the criminal offences discussed in the sections below.

Criminology's attention to political violence is not limited to non-state actors. State crime describes harm that is caused, ordered or knowingly tolerated by government officials acting in their official capacity, and it sits alongside terrorism and insurgency as a third category of politically driven offending.

The criminologists Penny Green and Tony Ward set out an influential framework for the field in their 2004 book on state crime, defining it as organisational deviance that violates human rights norms, carried out under the protection of state power, and deliberately using human rights rather than domestic law as the yardstick because a state can write its own abuses into legality.

Extrajudicial killing is the clearest example: security forces killing a suspect outside any judicial process, sometimes described euphemistically as an encounter killing, is a criminal act even though the perpetrator wears a uniform and claims official authority. Torture in custody, enforced disappearance, and the use of paramilitary or irregular forces to carry out violence the state wishes to deny responsibility for all fall into the same category.

Electoral crime, including vote rigging, intimidation of opposition candidates and misuse of state machinery for a ruling party's benefit, is a further form of state crime that has no non-state equivalent, because only an incumbent government controls the electoral apparatus being abused.

Political crime is the broader category that state crime sits inside. It covers any offence committed for a political motive, by a state or non-state actor, and includes acts far short of violence: civil disobedience that deliberately breaks a law to protest it, and offences built around the state's own sense of self-preservation, such as sedition-type laws that criminalise speech seen as undermining government authority.

Critical and radical criminology has long argued that the terrorism label is applied asymmetrically: a state's own lethal force against civilians is routinely reframed as counter-terrorism, national security or a security operation, while equivalent violence by a non-state group is unambiguously named terrorism, even where the harm to civilians is comparable.

This asymmetry matters for policy, not only theory. A counter-terrorism law that grants police extended detention powers and eases the evidentiary bar for prosecution is easiest to justify against a clearly labelled external threat, and harder to defend once it is turned against domestic dissent, which is exactly the due-process tension examined in the comparative law section that follows.

Disputed elections offer a further illustration: where state machinery, including the police and the bureaucracy that runs polling stations, is used to intimidate voters or exclude opposition candidates, the resulting harm is a state crime even though no single official may face individual criminal liability for it.

India's principal counter-terrorism statute is the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, commonly known as UAPA, which was substantially strengthened after the repeal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act in 2004 and again by a 2019 amendment. The 2019 amendment extended the government's power to designate individuals as terrorists, in addition to organisations, a change its critics argued removed a meaningful check because an individual designation can be made without a criminal conviction.

UAPA sits outside India's general criminal code: the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, replaced the Indian Penal Code, 1860, as the country's general criminal code from 1 July 2024, but UAPA remains a separate special statute, untouched by that codification, with its own stringent bail provisions and extended periods of pre-charge detention.

The United Kingdom's framework runs on similar lines but through a different mechanism. The Terrorism Act 2000 supplies a statutory definition of terrorism in its opening section, covering the use or threat of action designed to influence government or intimidate the public for a political, religious, racial or ideological cause, and it created the standing proscription power under which the Home Secretary can add an organisation to a banned list, making membership, support and fundraising for it separate criminal offences.

Proscription orders are reviewable, and an organisation or a person affected by a decision can appeal to the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission, a safeguard India's individual-designation power under UAPA does not mirror in the same form.

Both regimes draw the same category of criticism from civil liberties bodies, even though their legal architecture differs. Reversing the ordinary presumption in favour of bail, extending the period a suspect can be held before charges are filed, and in some cases relying on evidence a defendant cannot fully see, are recurring due-process complaints against terrorism-specific law in both jurisdictions.

Supporters of these provisions argue that the investigative difficulty of proving a terrorism case, where evidence is often intelligence-derived and witnesses are at risk, justifies departing from ordinary criminal procedure; critics argue that the departures persist well beyond what the underlying investigative difficulty can justify, and that they are applied unevenly against politically disfavoured groups.

Proscription itself has consequences that extend beyond the listed organisation's members. Because membership and material support become independent criminal offences once a group is proscribed, a listing decision can criminalise humanitarian aid workers, journalists and even family members who have contact with a listed group for reasons unconnected to its violence, which is why most proscription regimes build in a review or delisting process, however imperfect it is in practice.

Radicalisation at the group and movement level is a distinct question from why any single person joins a violent group; the individual psychological pathways into political violence are covered in threat assessment for mass violence.

At the movement level, radicalisation is better understood as a process of framing and recruitment: leadership constructs a grievance narrative that identifies an enemy and a justification for violence, and that narrative is then spread through social networks, community institutions or online platforms to recruit and retain members. The process rarely turns on ideology alone; social bonds, a sense of belonging and practical incentives such as income or protection are consistently found to matter as much as belief.

Measuring political violence is harder than it looks, and the difficulty differs by category. Large open-source terrorism databases, compiled mainly from media reporting, systematically undercount incidents in remote conflict zones where journalists cannot safely operate, and they apply inclusion criteria that can exclude events an insurgency-focused dataset would count. The same reporting patterns discussed in media, crime and emerging challenges shape which conflicts receive sustained coverage and which are effectively invisible to a database built from news sources.

State violence is undercounted for a different reason: a government is rarely the source that reports its own extrajudicial killings or use of force against civilians, so datasets that rely on official records will structurally miss this category unless they are supplemented by independent human rights monitoring.

Programmes that try to move people out of violent groups distinguish two related but separate goals. Disengagement targets behaviour: it aims to get a person to stop using violence and leave the group, whether or not their underlying beliefs change. Deradicalisation aims at the beliefs themselves, trying to shift a person away from the ideology that justified the violence in the first place.

Evidence on effectiveness is mixed and difficult to gather cleanly, because former members have an incentive to tell evaluators what they expect to hear, but the programmes with the more consistent results, such as Singapore's Religious Rehabilitation Group, tend to combine ideological engagement with concrete social reintegration, including family support, employment assistance and monitored community reintegration, rather than relying on ideological counselling in isolation.

Deradicalisation and disengagement programmes also raise the same due-process questions as the laws discussed above, because many operate as an alternative to prosecution or as a condition of early release, which means a participant's continued liberty can depend on a state's subjective judgement of whether the programme has worked.