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MODERN TERRORISM. CONCEPT, ORIGIN, SOCIAL, POLITICAL, ECONOMIC AND SPIRITUAL FOUNDATIONS

E.V. Martynenko, N.P. Parkhitko

Abstract

In the last decades the word "terrorism" became for modern society almost an everyday one. In scientific and practical understanding it means any kind of demonstration of violence carrying either mass, or special-purpose destructive character by this concept. Murders of people in places of their mass gatherings, destruction of housing stock by explosion of buildings or objects of inhabited infrastructure, causing damage to civilian infrastructure (water and food poisoning, causing irreplaceable damage to the farmland, poisoning or elimination of medicines, destruction of power substations and boiler rooms, etc.) traditionally belong to such phenomena. Separately it's necessary to emphasize the political vector of terrorism which is (not always, but often) expressed in public murder of the politician, especially during election campaign or in case of his/her involvement into work of governmental or special structures. At last, nearly as the main motivator of modern terrorism acts the religious factor. However, the motivational range in this case is so wide that its review can pretty serve as a subject for a separate research. Anyway, in our days we have to admit that terrorism has already become an inevitable factor of international relations being one of the most destructive challenges to the mankind. Identification of concept of terrorism as social, political and, to some extent, spiritual phenomenon is seriously complicated by its multifactorialness. For example, modern mass media in attempts to quietly exhaustive characteristic to terrorism, tend to equate such concepts, as "violence" and "terror". It definitely facilitates them a problem of identification of the phenomenon in the context of methodological approach. But from our point of view, such approach has also a serious drawback: simplification of an essence of the phenomenon not always leads to its revealing, and, on the contrary, often leads to its distorted understanding. Therefore from the very beginning it is necessary to understand whether the unification of such concepts, different in their objectives and psychological contents, as "terror" (having, in most cases, political or military-political backgrounds) and "violence" (a much broader concept which methodological basis should be looked for in psychology of the personality or even society in general) is justified in principle.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/SGEMSOCIAL2017/HB11/S12.118

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