Why Starmer is right about terrorism The lines have been blurred for decades

When Keir Starmer warned that Britain faces a “new threat” and that “terrorism has changed” since the Southport massacre, he was taken to task by several prominent counter-terrorism experts. The threat posed by Axel Rudakubana wasn’t new, they insisted, pointing to other murderous loners fixated on violence and driven by hatred. They also criticised him for fudging the distinction between terrorism and other forms of violence that, while causing plenty of terror, advance no political cause.

Jonathan Hall’s post-Southport review, published yesterday, essentially concurs with these experts, advising that it would be unhelpful to expand the legal definition of terrorism to include non-ideological rampages like Southport.

But Starmer wasn’t wrong to say that terrorism has changed — and those very changes have vastly complicated the business of demarcating between different forms of extreme violence.

To better understand how terrorism has changed and how best to classify opaque and liminal figures such as Rudakubana, I recently spoke to Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown professor and one of the world’s leading scholars on terrorism. “Like any phenomenon, terrorism is always changing and reflects the broader tensions and turbulence of society,” Hoffman told me.

Currently working on the 4th edition of his seminal book Inside Terrorism (1998), Hoffman has been tracing the changing face of terrorism for 27 years. “When I wrote the first edition, I argued that terrorism had to be an organisational phenomenon with an identifiable command and control structure,” he said. In that book he also made a firm distinction between a terrorist and a criminal, insisting that whereas the criminal is “acting primarily for selfish, personal motivations,” the terrorist’s goal is “ineluctably political (to change or fundamentally alter a political system through his violent act)”. Hoffman furthermore noted that the political nature of the terrorist’s motives is what distinguishes him from the “lunatic assassin”, whose “goal is more often intrinsically idiosyncratic, completely egocentric and deeply personal”.

His first order of business, when he started revising the 2nd edition published in 2006, was to soften the emphasis on the organisational structure of terrorism. This was because of the rise of al Qaeda: a group that encouraged lone individuals, with whom it had no direct connection, to undertake terrorist attacks. By the time ISIS came to prominence a decade later in 2016, the era of the “lone wolf” was in full swing. “And that’s when the lines began to blur,” Hoffman said.

From the late Seventies until the blurring began in 2014, there was a broad consensus in terrorism studies , which was based on three assumptions. First, terrorism was rational: the calculated and discriminate use of violence to achieve a desired political end. Second, and connectedly, terrorists used violence not for its own sake but as a tool for drawing attention to their grievances and believed that excessive civilian casualties would generate the wrong kind of publicity and harm their cause in the long run. Third, terrorists, for the most part, were psychologically normal: they were bad, certainly, but not mad.

But when over 50,000 people from 80 different countries started leaving their homes to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq, that consensus began to fracture. “Right there you’re dealing with an enormous pool and you’re going to have a cross-section of society, including those who may have mental health issues,” Hoffman said. “Terrorism has become so much more egalitarian now,” he further explained, chiefly because “you don’t have to belong to a terrorist organisation anymore — you can just show some sympathy or affinity to that organisation”. Indeed, with no real bar to entry, other than a willingness to kill or die for a cause, anyone can claim to be a terrorist and have that claim validated both by the terrorist group whose name they invoke and the mass media which thrives on covering terrorism-related stories. Hoffman said that the conventional wisdom that terrorists are normal was “always an exaggeration”, but that in the age of self-ID terrorism it no longer holds.

In addition to becoming more egalitarian, terrorism has become less onerous as a “project of the self”: whereas at one time recruits to terrorist groups had to demonstrate loyalty, discipline and proficiency with weapons, now lone actor terrorists need show only the most superficial commitment to the causes they latch onto. By way of example, Hoffman cited Omar Mateen, who “at the last minute declared his allegiance to ISIS, probably with the assumption that if you can hitch your fortunes to a terrorist organisation you’ll get much more attention”. In 2016, Mateen murdered 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida; less than half an hour into his attack he made a 9/11 call in which he pledged allegiance to ISIS. “How political is it if you’re leveraging on ISIS because you’ll know you’ll get a lot more attention by doing so?” Hoffman added.

The other major shift Hoffman observes is a new logic of barbarism, where terrorist violence has become more excessive and untethered from any civilisational restraint. Indeed, for many terrorist groups and actors, violence is an end in itself, where the overwhelming purpose isn’t to effect political change, but simply to terrorise and maximally harm a reviled enemy. Expanding on this, Hoffman said that he had just read Emmanuel Carrère’s new book V13: Chronicle of a Trial, which records the horrors of the November 2015 Paris attacks, where ISIS commandos murdered 130 people. Carrère quotes an investigator who, in response to an “odd question” about how he “felt about the killings”, said: “How I felt? I don’t know. I can only tell you that there were 30 holes in one victim, 22 in another, 14 in a third…” He also quotes one of the survivors who says that the terrorists “turned on all the lights and were shooting people, I’d say with a certain relish”. “I’d always argued that terrorism is altruistic, in the sense that it serves some collective goal the terrorist believes in,” Hoffman said, “but that’s now harder to maintain in the face of terrorism’s turn to ultra-violence.”

So, do these shifts suggest that Starmer’s characterisation of Axel Rudakubana was correct? Is the Southport killer a new kind of terrorist? “He may not have stated his allegiance to a terrorist group or done anything that situated his act of violence in a political context, but he was clearly animated by terrorism in the sense that he downloaded the al Qaeda manual and watched beheading videos,” Hoffman said. “This underscores the power of these organisations”, he went on, intimating at a distinction between the substance and style of atrocities. While Rudakubana may not have acted in fidelity to ISIS’s ideology, he certainly enacted the group’s ethos of sadistic and excessive violence; among the many harrowing details that surfaced after Rudakubana’s trial was the vast number of “sharp force injuries” he inflicted on the girls and how he had tried to decapitate one of them. “I’m glad to see those kids are dead, it makes me happy,” Rudakubana was heard to have said shortly after his arrest on the day of the massacre.

Hoffman acknowledged that Rudakubana’s extremist interests and extreme violence are not sufficient to make him a terrorist, but he suggested, convincingly in my view, that their toxic amalgamation foreshadows a newly emergent hinterland in which the sadistic mass killer and terrorist meet. This has been facilitated by what he called the “ubiquity” of terrorism as a mass-mediated global spectacle, subculture and aesthetics — and a seemingly limitless supply of anomic loners who develop a cathartic identification with it.

To further complicate the picture, Hoffman said that not only has it become more difficult to define terrorism, but that it has become increasingly challenging to determine what its motives are, “because they’re not as clear as they once were”. This is also emphasised in a leaked Department of Homeland Security assessment from last year. Hoffman attributes this to the proliferation of lone actor terrorism and the ideological promiscuity that post-organisational violence permits. Referring to Nicholas Cruz, who murdered 17 at a Florida high school in 2018, Hoffman asked, “Was he an incel or was he a neo-Nazi or neither?” For Hoffman, although Cruz outwardly evidenced an interest in both ideologies, it wasn’t clear that either one directly motivated his attack, although they couldn’t be discounted as an influence on him.

As our interview drew to a close, Hoffman confided that, despite studying terrorism for nearly five decades, he still wrestles with the conceptual challenges it continually throws up and that revising Inside Terrorism hasn’t exactly been plain sailing. This will be of scant comfort to the British authorities who must not only summon the clarity of thought to meet these challenges but also work out how to best contain extremist-fixated-non-extremists like Axel Rudakubana. More immediately, they will need to decide on whether Prevent, a counter-radicalisation programme which was originally envisaged to deal with al Qaeda and then expanded to focus on the far-Right and incels, is the best vehicle for leading this effort.

When I asked Hoffman what he thought of Prevent, to which Rudakubana had been referred three times and which has come under intense fire for failing to thwart his path to violence, he was philosophical. “I’ll be Quranic or Talmudic and say that if it prevents just one act of terrorism then it’s a useful tool and as good as saving the whole world”. But he was also starkly realistic. “We’ve over-exaggerated the power of these programmes,” he said. Referring to Shamima Begum and the more than 800 British citizens who joined ISIS, he asked, “where was Prevent?” The core problem, in Hoffman’s view, is that Prevent and other similar programmes are based on the assumption that there are pathways to terrorism that can be readily identified. But this is a fiction: “The most serious terrorists aren’t going to evidence the warning signs that a mental health provider, teacher or police officer might pick up on.”

The other problem for Prevent is that there is no real consensus on what these warning signs are nor, in the aftermath of Southport and other recent atrocities, is there much public confidence in Prevent’s capacity to thwart those who are determined to commit mass violence, whatever the driving motivation.

Is there a difference between the rampage violence of a sadistic mass killer and that of the lone wolf terrorist? At the extremes, there assuredly is, but there is also an expanding grey line that makes it difficult to distinguish between the two and for which the authorities and their favoured experts lack even the most basic map for navigating. Whether the 4th edition of Inside Terrorism will supply one is unclear, but the next time Starmer feels inclined to make any categorical statements about terrorism he could do worse than find his way to a copy once it’s published.