The Foundations of Modern Terrorism: State, Society and the Dynamics of Political Violence by Martin A. Miller (review)

The literature of terrorism is overwhelmingly slanted toward contemporary events as scholars respond to immediate policy problems. Only a few have delved into the history of the phenomenon, such as David Rapoport and Walter Laqueur. To this small group we may now add Martin A. Miller, whose book has a chronological and a conceptual sweep.

The Foundations of Modern Terrorism takes the reader from Greco-Roman antiquity to the Cold War, with some brief additional reflections on the post-Cold War era. But striking as the command of historical sources is, the real originality of Miller’s work lies elsewhere, for this book is not a history of terrorism in the traditional sense. By that I mean that it does not simply recount the exploits of violent nonstate actors. Miller has wider concerns, no less than the essence of intrastate political violence in the West.

As a consequence, his book is as much—perhaps more than—a history of state terror as it is of nonstate terror. It necessarily involves the relationship between the two, for in many instances one begat the other. Sometimes state terror produced terrorist insurgencies; sometimes terrorist campaigns resulted in governmental terror as the state cracked down. Few scholars have dealt so well or with such penetration on this interaction. Miller has not concentrated on events to the exclusion of writers who periodically dealt with or sought to justify political violence, from Aristotle to Georges Sorel and Frantz Fanon. His simultaneous exploration of both state and nonstate terror necessarily involves him in questions of political history and theory, notably those connected with the legitimacy of the state from the standpoint of both its defenders and its opponents, for the state has been both the preeminent target of terrorists who reject its legitimacy and often the most effective practitioner of terror in an effort to quell attacks on its legitimacy. It is difficult—although not impossible—to imagine terror without the state.

One of the great joys of this elegantly argued book—in addition to its insightful history of terrorism—is Miller’s splendid bibliography into which one can figuratively sink, seeking that serendipitous find. It is interdisciplinary and multilingual, filled with not only the standard works one would expect but also the esoteric studies that only a specialist might know. What is remarkable is that there are so many of them in a volume covering two millennia.

As with any work, there are limitations. One is self-imposed by the author, and that is geographical-cultural. This is a book about political violence in the West. This criterion works most of the time, but it does begin to break down when struggles in colonial territories appear, as well as later with the rise of militant Islam. Of course, including the rest of the world would have meant a very different and much larger book. As it stands, The Foundations of Modern Terrorism retains its cohesion. But as the narrative moves forward, the emphasis on the West narrows the field of vision.

The other limitation has to do with what the author chooses to include under the rubric of “political violence.” This can be as squishy a category as “terror.” He excludes conventional criminal activity, of course, but he also generally excludes “mass violence that is political, such as civil and transnational wars, ethnic cleansing and cases of genocide.” His rationale for doing so is that they exist not for purposes of terror but as the result of ongoing armed conflict. This is a tough call. Many times it is true that expulsions and massacres occur as the byproducts of war, but it is also true that atrocities are often perpetrated to terrify particular populations. This was certainly true, for example, in the Bosnian War.

These, however, are nonetheless minor disagreements, whereas this is...