MILITARY AND TERRORISM: AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE OF THE JUSTIFICATION OF THE USE OF ARMED FORCES AGAINST TERRORISM

Dragan Stanar

Abstract

This paper examines the justification of the use of armed forces against terrorism by comparing terrorism to forms of political violence which allow and justify the use of military, such are guerrilla, uprisings, and war. This paper aims to investigate the compatibility of army’s mission and nature with terrorism as a form of political violence, and concludes that they are incompatible, and that a new paradigm of terrorism should exclude the combat use of armed forces. Peacetime use of military must be restricted to non-combat assistance to peacetime security forces and public institutions. By analyzing terrorism’s definition, but also the problems of defining this phenomenon presented by numerous esteemed writers, author aims to demonstrate that this form of political violence is possible exclusively in peace, which is a necessary attribute of terrorist violence. The crucial difference between the very nature of war and peace classifies the same form of violence differently, depending on the state in which it is manifested – war or peace. Therefore, combat use of armed forces must be restricted to the state of war, while in peace it can only be use in accordance with its function of deterrence. By erasing, or even by blurring, the thin line and border between war and peace, which is one of the results of the modern proclaimed “war on terror”, we are enabling the process of pollicization of armed forces and its unlimited use against terrorism in peace. This introduction of armed forces in the criminal arena against criminals is highly problematic in various ways, especially for members of armed forces. Simultaneously, the world is led into an extremely perilous state of quasi-war, in which all those who are labeled as terrorists lose both criminal rights in peace and combatant rights in war at the same time. The current perspective of the use of armed forces against terrorisms has proven not only to be completely ineffective, but also very counterproductive, as it causes more terrorism and more terrorists all across the globe than ever before.

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