"The purpose of terrorism is to cause generalized fear, sometimes to achieve political ends, sometimes out of fierce hatred. Killing people in acts of terrorism is not the goal of terrorists - it is collateral damage. Nor is it their goal to blow up airplanes, trains, markets or buses - these are just methods of achieving their goal. The real target of terrorists is everyone else, the billions of people not killed in terrorist acts but who are terrified by the killings. The real target is not the act itself, but our reaction to it."

Bruce Schneier

Terrorism in all its forms and manifestations and in its scale and intensity, its inhumanity and cruelty has now become one of the most acute and pressing problems of global significance. The manifestation of terrorism entails mass human casualties, the destruction of spiritual, material and cultural values that cannot be recreated for centuries. It generates hatred and distrust between social and national groups. Terrorist acts have led to the need to create an international system to combat it. For many people, groups, organizations, terrorism has become a way to solve problems: political, religious, national. Terrorism refers to those types of criminal violence, the victims of which can become innocent people, everyone who has nothing to do with the conflict. The essence of terrorism is violence with the purpose of intimidation. The subject of terrorist violence is individuals or non-governmental organizations. The object of violence - the authorities represented by individual government officials or society represented by individual citizens. In addition - private and public property, infrastructures, life support systems. The purpose of violence is to achieve the development of events desirable for terrorists - a revolution, destabilization of society, launching a war with a foreign state, gaining independence for a certain territory, a fall in the prestige of the authorities, political concessions from the authorities, etc.

error is a way of governing society through preventive intimidation. This method of political action can be used both by the state and by organizations (or forces) with political goals. For many years, the tactics of preventive intimidation, regardless of the nature of the subject of terrorist action, was denoted by the general concept of terror. In the 1970s and 1980s, a terminological distinction was made between terror and terrorism. "Terrorism" is the practice of illegitimate violence carried out by forces and organizations opposed to the state. Terror relies on violence and achieves its goals through the demonstrative physical suppression of any active opponents in order to intimidate and remove the will to resist from all potential opponents of the authorities. It is important to emphasize that terror is a policy of preventive violence and this distinguishes it from the harshest repression of lawbreakers. Terror is resorted to by the authorities seeking to radically change the existing order of things.

In cases such as a foreign conquest, or a social revolution, or the establishment of authoritarianism in a society with democratic traditions - that is, whenever the political reality changes radically, and these changes inevitably cause resistance from a significant part of society - the arsenal of political strategies of the new power includes a policy of terror. A prerequisite for terrorism is the resonance of a terrorist action in society. Widespread dissemination of information about a terrorist attack, turning it into the most discussed event is a key element of terrorist tactics. A terrorist act that goes unnoticed or is classified loses all meaning. The public response to a terrorist act is necessary for terrorists to change public sentiment. Terrorist attacks affect mass psychology. Terrorist organizations demonstrate their strength and willingness to go to the end, sacrificing both their own lives and the lives of their victims.

Terrorism is the most dangerous way of political destabilization of society. Such methods of destabilization as military intervention, rebellion, unleashing civil war, mass riots, general strike, etc. require significant resources and imply broad mass support of those forces that are interested in destabilization. Support for the terrorist cause by a relatively narrow stratum of society, a small group of extreme radicals who agree to everything, and modest organizational and technical resources are sufficient to launch a campaign of terrorist acts. Terrorism undermines power and destroys the political system of a state.

Department of propaedeutics of children’s diseases

translated Ismoilov R.