In his 1975 novel, Harry’s Game, about the hunt for an IRA assassin, Gerald Seymour wrote: ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’. This expression helps to explain why there is no single, accepted definition of terrorism. This article uses the 1994 UN General Assembly definition of terrorist acts to assess terrorism’s effectiveness: ‘criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes’.
At face value, terrorism since 1969 has not been successful since the primary political purposes of many terrorist groups have not been achieved. However, when one considers that Nelson Mandela, as a leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), was a terrorist by most definitions and that Martin McGuiness, a former IRA leader, was made deputy first minister of Northern Ireland in May 2007, it is clear that terrorism has not been wholly unsuccessful.
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