While the exact boundaries are subject to considerable debate, it is generally agreed that terrorism is different from war-like manifestations of political violence, where organized armed groups engage in direct hostilities aiming at the outright destruction or attrition of the enemy’s capability to fight. While the logic of violence is relatively straightforward in these cases – defeat the opponent outright or persuade him that the degradation of his forces will eventually lead to his demise –, the logic of terrorism and political violence which cannot actually threaten the material capabilities of the state is less clear. A number of mechanisms by which violence should “work” have been proposed, but are often not consistent or even contradictory; some also argue that violence is not instrumentally rational at all but a side effect of organizational or psychological dynamics. A number of recent empirical studies in fact conclude that there is no demonstrable link between the violent means and the political success of terrorist groups.
In this paper, we review the state of the field concerned with theoretical approaches towards non-warring forms of political violence by non-state armed actors. We argue that it is essential to consider the contexts in which violence is carried out. Systematizing the disparate variety of explanations and approaches, we aim at developing a unifying conceptual framework able to guide future research on the topic.
