Walter Lacquer Postmodern Terrorism

This paper will be looking at the term ‘Postmodern Terrorism’ as it is explored by Walter Lacquer in his paper with the same title. We will also seek to determine whether or not terrorism has changed fundamentally over the recent centuries, especially around the time of the 9/11 attacks as well as all of the new technologies and techniques that seem to of had been implemented over the years by various terrorist groups and governments to counter each other in their efforts.
Over the recent years terrorist groups have been relying on different techniques to showcase themselves such as using social media more, news coverage as well as other means of communication in order to show their strength against larger groups in order to influence others.
By using the definition provided by Lacquer, as it is stated in his paper, titled 'Postmodern Terrorism', we can see that he defined it as: "the substate application of violence or threatened violence intended to sow panic in a society, to weaken or even overthrow the incumbents, and to bring about political change"(Lacquer, 1997). It can be argued that over recent years that terrorism has changed, especially when we look at terrorism before and after the 9/11 attacks. Before there were different weapons and techniques being implemented by political forces, that would assist these terrorist organizations in order to bring clear messages to other large groups. This can be seen with the Russian and Irish revolutionary movements, but in the future it may be that these groups may consist of like-minded people that will work in small groups, such as the 9/11 attacks (Lacquer,
The main goal of the attack was to bring panic and fear and to intimidate the USA and to send a message. Terrorist groups that existed beforehand are now gone and it seems that “most international and domestic terrorism these days, however, is neither left nor right, but ethnic-separatist in inspiration. Ethnic terrorists have more staying power than ideologically motivated ones, since they draw on a larger reservoir of public support.” (Lacquer, 1997). This is quite different from previous terrorist groups as now they are becoming more right, compared to their initial initiatives where the extreme left-wing terrorist groups were much more noticeable closer to the 1970’s.
With the evolution of these new terrorist groups, their overall functionality and operations have changed as well. Terrorist groups are starting to divide more in terms of their operations, where each different ‘branch’ has a unique role compared to the other. This can be seen with the political arm and the military wing. As stated by Lacquers, “the political arm provides social services and education, runs businesses, and contests elections, while the "military wing" engages in ambushes and assassinations” (Lacquer,