“The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism” defines a wave as a cycle that takes place over a 40-year time period. Each cycle is dynamic in that it expands and contracts. Groups within a particular wave adapt to the exigencies of their time, are aware of the actions of other contemporary terrorist groups in other countries and are driven by a relentless energy that propels them into violent action. They share a common technological facility, including communications, weaponry, and logistics. Most important, they share a vision that perceives in the ills and abuses of the world the seeds of a revolutionary future.
Wave theory corresponds strongly with Arthur Schlesinger’s theory of political generations. Schlesinger posited 40-year generational cycles, which he found to be decisive in American presidential elections. His generational theory identified successive waves of social activism that are invariably followed by a period of retrenchment in which a political generation, frustrated by the seeming impossibility of bringing about meaningful change, falls back into a generation-long focus on material acquisition and economic well-being, centred on self and family. Schlesinger’s work demonstrates the gulf between the fields of history and political science, which wave theory would come to bridge.
We have four terrorist waves. Each has a precipitating event, signature tactics and weapons, and an inevitable gradual decline that culminates in the birth of another wave. The death of one wave and the birth of the next overlap, although a few dinosaurs of the previous wave find ways to adapt and survive in the wave that follows. The four waves are successively the Anarchist wave (1878–1919), the Anti-Colonial wave (1920s–early 1960s), the New Left wave (mid 1960s–1990s), and the religious wave (1979–?). All save the fourth wave are posited to last a single Schlesingerian political generation, although some movements manage to survive their compatriots.
The Anarchist Wave
The opening salvo that touched off the first wave of modern terrorism took place on January 24, 1878, when Vera Zasulich, a little known anarchist figure, shot and wounded a police commander in St. Petersburg, Russia. The offending officer had been accused of flogging political prisoners. Zasulich was tried but not convicted. During the trial she uttered the memorable line: “I am a terrorist, not a killer.” Zasulich’s relative obscurity, compared to such anarchist superstars as Kropotkin or Nachaev, testifies to the power of the propaganda of the deed in catalyzing a terrorist wave.
The anarchist wave emerged in Russia and quickly spread throughout the world. Western Europe, the United States, and even Japan and China, where anarchist involvement in the May 4th Movement is remembered today, were soon alive with anarchist groups. The early phase of the anarchist wave (from the 1880s to the 1890s) came to be known as the “Golden Age of Assassination,” as government leaders, senior politicians, including President William McKinley, and military officers died at the hands of committed anarchists.It does not specifically note a signature weapon characteristic of the Anarchist wave, although bullets and bombs certainly predominated. It did however note a factor that distinguished the Anarchist wave from ancient terrorism: international communications technology. This made it possible for Russian anarchists to disseminate their doctrine of revolution throughout the world. Unique too was the willingness and ability of Russian anarchists to train other revolutionary groups even if they did not share anarchist beliefs. Clearly it is the international character of terrorist violence that most distinguished modern terrorism from its ancient precursors. A global terrorist milieu marked each subsequent terrorist wave.
The Anti-Colonial Wave
The Anarchist wave died away with the onset of World War I. WWI was the first instance of a conflict that involved the entire population of each contending nation. In such a conflict, anarchism soon faded from the public stage. With the conclusion of hostilities, European colonies, as well as a number of European ethnicities, particularly in the Balkans,19 felt that political independence was within reach. Their hopes were further strengthened by American President Woodrow Wilson’s stated support. In the end, these hopes were dashed by the Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty transformed Europe into national states by breaking up the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while the Mandates that followed were created on the assumption that, in time, self-determination would occur. They were not meant to become permanent territories, although they had the effect of maintaining colonial control. The Treaty triggered the second wave.
The Irish Republican Army (IRA) was one of the first national liberation terrorist movements, but their lack of success forced them to outlive most other second wave groups. The IRA aside, there was a nearly quarter century lag between the Treaty of Versailles and the onset of the full force of the second wave. This delay is attributed to two primary factors: the impact of World War II, which dissolved the mandates once and for all, and the primacy of the United States whose stated opposition to colonialism could no longer be resisted. Self-determination was now possible for African, Asian, and the Middle Eastern peoples.
The terrorist/freedom fighter analogy came to prominence in the second wave. Put simply, those who engage in terrorist tactics are terrorists, regardless of how laudable their goals. A case in point is Menachem Begin, whose Irgun remains a model of successful terrorism. The Irgun were responsible for considerable carnage in their efforts to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Their bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946 was particularly egregious. Begin and Anwar Sadat were awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace in 1978. The Irgun described themselves as freedom fighters who were locked in a struggle to the death against “government terror.” Begin and the Irgun demonstrated that terrorism must be analyzed in a detached manner and that under given circumstances terrorism can succeed, albeit seldom through terrorism alone.
The terrorist/freedom fighter analogy is itself a product of the second wave. Where Vera Zasulitch proudly proclaimed herself to be a terrorist, the term “terrorist” by the 1940s had come to take on too many negative connotations to be of utility in gathering public support. Once again Jewish terrorism took the lead in recognizing and diagnosing the problem. The freedom fighter tag stuck and would be of considerable benefit to the succeeding New Left wave, whose fighters were often described in fawning newspaper articles as freedom fighters regardless of their bloody deeds.
We note several important innovations that took place in the second wave. For the first time Diaspora support became vital to terrorist success. Similarly, foreign governments began to offer support. Police became primary targets, and guerrilla tactics gained increasing importance. Where anarchist violence had been primarily urban, the increasing primacy of Maoist thought gave greater emphasis to peasants and the countryside. Perhaps most striking is that, while honoring the revolutionary zeal of the first wave, the second wave idealized national histories and cultures as the second wave turned increasingly inward, focusing on local struggles against colonial control.
By the mid-1960s, the second wave had all but faded away. National liberation had largely been achieved, making second wave terrorism superfluous. In those few areas where statehood or political change had not been achieved, such as Northern Ireland or the Basque region of Spain, groups like the IRA and ETA soldiered on, adapting to the exigencies of the third or New Left waves, often quite well. Elements of both the IRA and ETA engaged in fusion terrorism—fusing their political goals with criminality to survive and thrive.
The second wave focused primarily on political aspirations; the elimination of colonial control and the formation of new nation-states. In 2015, The U.S. State Department lists 196 independent states, most of them recognized since 1920. The persistence of ethnonational terrorism in regions such as South America and Africa, as well as in the Balkans and the Former Soviet Union (FSU) suggests that perhaps the emergence of nation-states did not effectively bring the anticolonial wave to a neat ending in the 1960s. This question will be more closely examined later in concert with other criticisms of wave theory.
The New Left wave
The New Left wave emerged in the mid-1960s in response the Vietnam War. Powered by the revolution in communications technology, opposition to the War, and the much-maligned country that pursued it, opposition to the United States and popular anti-Americanism became a global phenomenon. In the context of the Cold War, Soviet active measures seemed to succeed for a time in painting the United States as rampant war mongers and associating the communist world with the word “peace,” in this way drawing a clear distinction between the two, which would allow the Soviets to funnel aid, resources, and intelligence to terrorist groups in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Thus, in the context of the Cold War, state sponsorship of terrorism was inevitable. Moreover, the rapid developments in communications technology made the third wave more internationalist in scope than earlier waves. Globalization as we understand it today would have to wait the end of the Cold War, but the elements were there as the grievances and exploits of the third wave of modern terrorism was as accessible as a movie, a rock album, an underground journal, or the ubiquitous image of Ché Guevara affixed to a lamppost.
If a terrorist wave has a nostalgia factor, it would be the third wave. A generation of Europeans and Americans who were in college in the 1960s recall the time in remarkably romantic terms. Anyone in possession of a Che Guevera or a Leila Khaled poster would attest to this. Carlos the Jackal and Leila Khalid, with her signature kafiya and Kalashnikov look, were youth heartthrobs. In the third wave, terrorist acts were multimedia productions rather than mass casualty events. For third wave terrorists, good television was of prime importance. The simultaneous landing of seven hijacked aircraft in Jordan without causing harm to any of the passengers or the kidnapping of a heretofore anonymous newspaper heiress who would go on to join her ragtag band of captors were ideal operations. More violent groups, like the German Red Army Faction in Germany, could find shelter from the government storm on university campuses, while the strange Maoist cult of personality built around the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) leader Abimael Guzmán were protected by peasants in the mountains of Peru.33
Airplane hijackings became the signature operation of the third wave, although it was of declining utility when tighter security regulations were put into effect at Western airports. Kidnappings however continued apace, with Italy, Spain, and Latin America at the top of the table in a list that contains no less than seventy-three countries. Assassination too was revived from the anarchist wave.
We note the importance of borrowed tropes from previous waves, particularly the second wave’s emphasis on nationalism. This may strike many as odd given the anti-Vietnam nature of the early years of the wave. The Vietnam War ended officially in 1975, with the North Vietnamese conquest of the South, but as a catalyst for terrorism the War officially expired with the American withdrawal of 1973 an action that set the bar for the United States’ run of failed foreign conflicts, which continues to this day with its withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan. This allowed the Palestine liberation Organization, a nationalist movement par excellance to come to the fore as the face of third wave terrorism.
The PLO is a case in point about the limits of the utility of wave theory in that in the real world not all cases fit neatly into any theoretical basket. The PLO is a third wave actor chronologically, but its nationalist aspirations would fit as comfortably into the second wave. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the 1949 Armistice Agreements resulted in the Palestinian diaspora, but the PLO National Charter was not created until 1964 and completed with all constituent resolutions until July 1968. However, in contrast to the national struggles of the second wave, the PLO was composed of a number of fully or partially autonomous groups and was fully international in scope, serving as training ground for European terrorists and playing an important role in Soviet policy in the Middle East. Thus, while nationalist in aspiration, it was international in practice and an important part of the third or New Left wave. It was secular in orientation and socialist in aspiration, yet it would ironically emerge as the Western-oriented counter to Hamas in the post 9/11 world. Terrorism, like politics, makes strange bedfellows indeed.
The third wave invariably receded, much as Schlesinger predicted, within a generation. A closer look at this social milieu however is instructive. An unanticipated result of the Vietnam War was the opening of the gates of immigration to Asians,39 who came in droves and brought with them the gurus and teachers who would found a generation of new religious movements whose roots sank deep into the United States and later in Europe and even the Soviet Union itself. The American counter-culture however ended badly. Experimentation with sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll burned out as the costs of indulgence over industry came due. Out of the morass came such phenomena as the American Jesus Movement and the Reagan Presidency.
If social change could not produce happiness and inner peace, certainly religion could, and the newly religious appeared throughout the world. The Moral Majority led by Pastor Jerry Falwell brought fundamentalism into the American body politic for the first time since their Pyrrhic victory in the 1928 Scopes trial.41 Similarly, in the Middle East, the failure of Arab Nationalism in both the Nasserite and Ba’athist varieties, coupled with the disaster of the Six Day War in 1967, brought the Muslim masses back to the madrassas and the mosques, where a headier brew of political Islam had been quietly percolating. The first fruits of the Islamic revival would shock the world and usher in the fourth wave of modern terrorism.
The Religious wave
Three seminal revolutions, and three dominant personalities, shaped the history of the 20th century: Lenin and the Russian Revolution, Mao and the Chinese Revolution, and Imam Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution, which touched off the fourth wave of modern terrorism. In retrospect, the remarkable time lag between the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the recognition of the event’s importance by scholars and governments alike seems remarkable. It was not lost on the Shi’ite Iranians however, nor was it ignored by the overwhelmingly Sunni Arab masses. For a brief moment, as the American embassy in Islamabad was torched by Iranian inspired Sunnis in 1979, and 300 marines and the U.S. embassy were lost to the Shi’ite Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1982, Tehran took on the mantle of the fourth wave “Terror Central” that a generation ago many had seen in Moscow.
The discussion of the religious wave is brilliant, but in some ways problematic. His vital early scholarship virtually invented the study of religious terrorism as a sui generis category of terrorism rather than as the manipulative confidence game perpetrated by politically astute leaders, which was the analysis of most terrorism scholars. Yet he is in the end a political scientist, understanding well the impact of religion but somewhat at a loss to explain the nature of modern radical Islam with the facility that he demonstrates with ancient Judaism. The blood and sinews of the topic was in fairness even less clear to the handful of established terrorism scholars at the time, making comprehension of the global impact of the Iranian Revolution and the mysterious figure of Ayatollah Khomeini chimeric for the better part of a decade after the event.
While recognizing the emergence of religious violence in other parts of the world, Islam is at the heart of the wave. Yet some of the most deadly terrorist strikes, as the wave was still rising in the 1980s and early 1990s, involved Aum Shinrikyo’s use of nerve gas in the Tokyo subway, the killing of Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and the Hebron Mosque massacre by Baruch Goldman in Israel, the Tamil Tiger violence in Sri Lanka, and the bloody actions of such African groups as the Lord’s resistance Army and Boko Haram. On a far less deadly scale, attacks by the American radical right which, in contrast to their European counterparts is almost entirely driven by religion, and the deadly violence in India that involved the Sikhs or the 1984 destruction of the Ayodhya Mosque by Hindu militants.
With the global nature of the fourth wave firmly established, the victory of the Iranian Revolution was surely the catalyzing event whose ripples soon engulfed the Middle East. One of the least noticed of these ripples in the West, but of seismic import to the Islamic Ummah (community), was the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by a self-styled messianic savior named al-Juhaima. It took a special fatwa to allow French Special Forces to enter the Holy City to finally root them out.49 The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1997 hardly went unnoticed, and its defeat and humiliating withdrawal both put the final nail in the Soviet Union’s coffin and unleashed a jihadist force that would, in 1993, give birth to Mullah Omar’s Taliban. It emboldened many, including Osama Bin Laden, to believe that just as lightly armed simple believers could defeat one superpower, surely al-Shaitan al-Kabir (the Great Satan aka the United States) would be just as vulnerable; a perception that would ultimately lead to the 9/11 strikes and the interminable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 1998, Bin Laden stated this belief clearly to John Miller.
Bin Laden believes that the United States, which was so heavily involved in supporting the Afghan rebels, misses the profound point of that exercise: Through sheer will, even superpowers can be defeated.
“There is a lesson to learn from this for he who wishes to learn,” Bin Laden said. “The Soviet Union entered Afghanistan in the last week of 1979, and with Allah’s help their flag was folded a few years later and thrown in the trash, and there was nothing left to call the Soviet Union.”
The war changed Bin Laden. “It cleared from Muslim minds the myth of superpowers,” he said.
The Taliban soon took power in Afghanistan and gestated an eponymous movement that threatens Pakistan. Osama Bin Laden offered his baya (oath of allegiance) to Mullah Omar, and Ayman Al Zawahiri renewed the pledge to his successor in 2015. Then there was the Al Qaeda attack on New York and the Pentagon, which continues to shape American policy, and thus the world, fifteen years later.
The fourth wave, which began in 1979, will transcend the generation which gave it birth. Indeed, by 2015, the religious wave of modern terrorism shows no signs of cresting, much less receding, which throws into question the forty year generational cycle. Moreover, with the foundation of the Islamic State, the fourth wave has entered a new phase in which, rather than trying to gain control of established states a la Al Qaeda and its numerous offshoots, seeks to establish a millennial state in the heart of the Islamic world.
Criticisms of Wave Theory
Wave theory has come to be widely accepted in the field as a useful historical model. The insights it provides into both the international character of terrorism and its transnational commonalities and modalities are undeniable. That said, every theory must be a constant work in progress if it is to have continuing utility in a rapidly evolving field. Some of the difficulties with wave theory we have already pointed out. Problems of classification, as with the PLO, are not of great import. The generational nature of wave theory is a major strength, although the religious wave seems to defy the single generation life span allotted to each wave. Therefore, it would be useful to conclude with a look at some of the difficulties and objections that have been expressed about wave theory.
We will begin with a reexamination of the second wave and a consideration of what might be termed ethnonationalist violence. This will be followed with a consideration of the literature of the four waves. Two books have appeared in recent years with specific reference to the four waves; Terrorism, Identity and Legitimacy: The Four Waves Theory and Political Violence, an anthology edited by Jean Rosenfeld and Jeffrey Kaplan’s Terrorist Groups and the New Tribalism: Terrorism’s Fifth Wave, which appeared in 2010. The former is a festschrift and the latter a monograph. Both are well disposed to wave theory. No academic theory is able to capture the full scope of any issue in the social sciences. There remain cases where a terrorist group defies easy classification, where groups outlive their wave and are able to adapt to the changed circumstances of the world around them. These, however, are the exceptions, and they serve to prove the rule. Wave theory’s ability to grow and adapt demonstrates the organic nature of the idea, as well as its academic appeal. It will be a cornerstone in the academic study of terrorism for some time to come.
