Deconstructing Terrorism: Current Trends, Theories, and Methods

Deconstructing Terrorism
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Deconstructing Terrorism
The world has been faced with Terrorism for a long time now. Terrorism can generally be defined as the act of using criminal violence to force a given government to change its policies. They target powerful governments and influence the world's economy, for example, the United States of America. When infiltrated, the powerful governments can access any service and initiate their ideologies at any given time, for they will have acquired absolute power to express their strengths. For their needs to be fulfilled or their voices to be heard, they develop various ways to threaten the government to bend the policies to their favor. They always target the governments' innocent citizens, and because the government must take of their people, some attention is directed to them. When a terror attack occurs, the results are catastrophic as many lives are lost and economic properties are destroyed. Giving in to terrorist needs renders a government weak and vulnerable to attacks whenever they need something done. Terrorism takes two forms. There is international Terrorism, which entails violent criminal acts committed by individuals or groups associated or sponsored by designated foreign terrorist organizations or state-sponsored.[Schuurman, Bart. "Research on terrorism, 2007–2016: A review of data, methods, and authorship." Terrorism and Political Violence 32, no. 5 (2020): 1011-1026. /doi/abs/10.1080/09546553.2018.1439023] [Ibid 1]
Current trends and the manifestation of Terrorism
Terrorism in the United States has taken a new form as the world transforms. Communities and individuals have adopted new forms of expressing themselves and thus the new arrangements. In the past, Terrorism known was mainly brought as merely international, and any attack was seen to have been sponsored by the designated terrorist groups or nations. The other form of Terrorism that has taken shape in the United States, unlike in the past, is domestic Terrorism. Domestic Terrorism entails the brutal criminal activities carried out by individuals or groups to further their opinionated goals influenced by politics, religion, social relationships, race, and environmental nature. In the US, from 1994 to last year, the number of terror attacks and plots that have been experienced, according to research done by the center for strategic and international studies (CSIS), is approximately eight hundred and ninety-three. Some of these attacks are domestically initiated by groups of people trying to pass an ideology in the US.[Jones, Seth G., Catrina Doxsee, and Nicholas Harrington. "The escalating terrorism problem in the United States." (2020). https://apo.org.au/node/306395]
Consequent challenges
One of the most commonly known groups that planned to stage an attack was the "boogaloo" movement which, on June 3, 2020, planned to cause a civil war in Las Vegas by conspiring to cause chaos and violence that would help them act on their mission. The other group known for organizing and carrying out terror attacks is the Ku Klux Klan group. The US has had many attacks but has never developed a well-established and sophisticated system and policies to counter and bar terrorists from taking on the country. After the September 11 attack on American soil, the nation was shaken to its core due to the gravity of the loss of its citizens and properties. The attack ensured that the United States had to develop policies that would ensure Terrorism and terrorists were actively neutralized. However, as the most powerful nation, attacks on the US will keep on coming, and thus preparedness to counter-terrorism is the number one step the US took. It founded the department of homeland security to help analyze and carry out surveillance and act upon terror acts. Since its formation, plots to take attacks on the US soil have significantly been identified as early as possible, thus preventing their occurrence.[Ghatak, Sambuddha, Aaron Gold, and Brandon C. Prins. "Domestic terrorism in democratic states: Understanding and addressing minority grievances." Journal of conflict resolution 63, no. 2 (2019): 439-467. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022002717734285] [Silke, Andrew. "The study of terrorism and counterterrorism." In Routledge Handbook of Terrorism and counterterrorism, pp. 1-10. Routledge, 2018. ...