State Terrorism

Author: Carolyn Nordstrom

Terror warfare's goal is to defeat political opposition by controlling populations through the fear of brutality. Mozambique's 1976-92 war stands as a prime example of this military strategy: over one million people, the vast majority of whom were civilians, were killed. Half of these casualties were children. Fully one-half of the population was directly affected by the war, and one-quarter had to flee their homes. As devastating as terror warfare is, it is destined to fail. People ultimately resist, and they do so in complex and creative ways. Rebuilding war-destroyed worlds, healing the wounds of violence, and crafting concepts of self-identity based on resistance to aggression become powerful conflict-resolution strategies among the average citizenry. The creative resources that Mozambicans developed to survive and end a very brutal war are among the most sophisticated I have seen anywhere in the world. Their war was against violence itself.

Author: Tony Ward

A central task for a criminology of state crime is to explain why the cruelty and destructiveness of regimes of terror so often seem to exceed anything required by the rational pursuit of organizational goals. This article explores competing explanations of terror through a case study of the Congo Free State (1885-1908) and argues that ‘excesses’ are committed in circumstances where it is rational for organizations and individual actors to minimize the moral costs of cruelty.