Understanding Terrorism

Now more than ever in Nigeria, the terrorism scourge commands national attention, and with it, so much trepidation. Until the last decade when an insurgency group, the Boko Haram, announced its arrival in the country ferociously killing helpless people in its avowed cause to stop Western education, Nigerians’ experiences of terrorism developments were restricted to […]

Now more than ever in Nigeria, the terrorism scourge commands national attention, and with it, so much trepidation. Until the last decade when an insurgency group, the Boko Haram, announced its arrival in the country ferociously killing helpless people in its avowed cause to stop Western education, Nigerians’ experiences of terrorism developments were restricted to media reports, in prints and pictures, on terrorists’ activities abroad.
In Nigeria, terrorism is no longer “News From Abroad”; it is very much with us here in practically horrendous terms. The Boko Haram sect has driven home the terrorism scare through extensive bloodletting. Within the last six years, the sect has killed no less than 2000 Nigerians through shootings and bombings.
Despite the daily occurrences of Boko Haram attacks, little, however, remains known intellectually of what the Terrorism scourge is all about. Because it is a relatively new confrontation here, many high schools are yet to embrace terrorism as a body of knowledge in their curricula. Even books that deal mainly on the subject are a rarity.
It is this lacuna that Abayomi Nurain Mumuni, a criminologist with “extensive training, vast knowledge and first-hand experiences” seeks to address in his book, “GLOBAL TERRORISM and its EFFECTS on HUMANITY”, a seven-chapter, 176-page overview of the topic.
As the author prefaces in the book, his interest in writing the book was motivated by his “training and research on the subject-matter, translating invariably into an attempt at the unveiling and understanding of the concept of global terrorism in all its ramifications.” Mumuni strives, with this work, to bring to the “consciousness of the ordinary man the presence of terrorism everywhere man lives”.
Mumuni opens his overview with the first chapter dedicated to the many definitions of terrorism. It is noteworthy that the terror concept was originally applied by government itself to suppress the opposition. The word ”terrorisme” specifically applied to state terrorism as practised by the French government during its Reign of Terror from September 5, 1793 to July 28, 1794. The word was then later recorded, for the first time, in the English dictionary as “a systematic use of terror as a policy”.
Over time, governments seemed to have, however, succeeded in shifting the onus of the terrorism guilt on individuals and groups other than leaders, with contemporary definition reading something like this, “The deliberate killing of innocent people at random in order to spread fear through a whole population and force the hands of its leaders.”
It remains contentious, however, who is innocent in terrorism conflicts and what determines innocence.  Studies have identified more than 100 definitions of terrorism, with controversial meanings. Various legal systems and government agencies compound the confusion with their self-serving definitions.
Chapter Two educates readers on the different types of Terrorism that exist. Unlike the thinking by many that terrorism applies to only anti-establishment fighters and groups, Mumuni argues that States themselves can be, actually have been and continue to be, terrorists. He gives the instances of when the United States of America labelled Iran “as the most prolific sponsor of terrorism because Iran arms groups such as the Hezbollah”, while the Americans themselves were called terrorists for their covert sponsorship of the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s against the Nicaraguan government. The latter is strictly State-sponsored terrorism, though, rather than State Terrorism.
So the first type is State Terrorism, which is the systemic use of terror by a government in order to control its population. This is the norm in most dictatorships and pseudo-democracies as exist in Africa. State terrorism is entirely organized by the serving government, deploying all manners of instruments of coercion, and even killing in the process, mostly to hang on to power.
There are also, inter alia, Bio-terrorism, Narco-terrorism, Political/Ideological terrorism, Religious-terrorism, Nationalist terrorism, Cyber Terrorism and Pathological terrorism. It would do the reader well to have the book to gather an informed understanding of these types of terrorism.
While Chapter Three discusses whether indiscriminate terrorism can ever be justified, Chapter Four profiles the psychological, political, physiological and political constitution of terrorists.  
The two following chapters focus on global terrorism and its effects on humanity.  Globally, the author writes, “national, regional and global security has steadily declined in many countries over the past 40 years owing to the new and potent types of terrorism which have emerged since the 1960s.”
One of the effects Mumuni lists sounds more frightening, “Terrorism is basically done with the objective of causing serious physical violence, but what its repercussions and effects left on mental health is immeasurable…” As we are realising in Nigeria, this should be an understatement.
GLOBAL TERRORISM doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive literature on terrorism discourse; as the author admits, it is merely an overview. It doesn’t even attempt protective solutions for helpless individuals against terrorist attacks. The book, however, provides rich addenda of notes and bibliography that will aid readers into further reading and understanding the gamut of global and local terrorism, an understanding that will serve both academic and practical purposes.
And as the author says, whatever would be the ultimate conclusions to be drawn from reading this book, one point cannot be missed: “Terrorism has become a 21st century global reality. Its varied and extensive effects on us all can no longer be ignored or taken for granted, not now with the terrorists now knocking on doors to recruit before the very eyes of unsuspecting parents.”