Clandestine Political Violence

摘要

In recent years, label-mongers in both politics and academia have lavishly exploited the label 'terrorism'. An old user, Donatella della Porta stands out for giving it up. Employing it in the past in studies on such groups as the Red Brigades in Italy and the Red Army Fraction in West Germany, she has abandoned it for her most recent comparative study, Clandestine Political Violence. In her view, the term terrorism has suffered from so much conceptual stretching that academic discourse around it has become unproductive. That the term functions to stigmatize an adversary, she adds, further limits the discourse.