In a rather eloquent presentation for the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, Tim Wilson (2012) spoke about terrorism’s ‘ability to stop the clocks’ and to claim the attention of those who would not normally pay attention to political events. Indeed, the power of terrorism is its ability to grab the world's interest because it is often seen as a spectacular event, a spectacular deviation from the status quo and from the moral norms of protecting innocent life that is held dear. Yet, I would add, that clock only stops for some acts of terrorism, not all.

For instance, in a discussion of ‘patriarchal’ or ‘everyday’ terrorism (as will be discussed in Chapter 5), some of my students were resistant to calling this form of domestic abuse terrorism precisely because it was so minimal. To them, terrorism is a deed like 9/11 or the 2017 Manchester Arena suicide-bombing at the end of an Ariana Grande concert. It is spectacular and unswerving in its desire to harm innocents. However, not all terrorism is spectacular, nor does it aim to harm those that are unequivocally innocent. Those who are labelled terrorists target military installations, like the West German Red Army Faction or the Irish Republican Army. When we think of the violence in Kashmir or in Israel-Palestine, this is not always a spectacular violence because it is accompanied by endemic, everyday violence that grinds people and society down. Not all terrorism is perpetrated by those that we easily accept as terrorists, like political violence conducted by our own governments, such as the torture at Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay (see Melanie Richter-Montpetit's [2014 and 2007] excellent work on how these are linked with race structures and how this enables a ‘blind eye’ to them in US society) or in the destabilising of other places, like Operation Condor in the Southern Cone.

While we would recognise that all or most violence treads a fine knife edge when it comes to illegitimacy and immorality, and all of the violence mentioned in the paragraph above has fallen off that knife-edge completely, there are times where charges of immorality are rarely levelled at the violence states perpetrate, where it is almost always levelled at terrorist violence.