4 Terrorism

Terrorism — violence, typically against non-combatants, by non-state (occasionally state- sponsored) actors, designed to coerce or intimidate for political ends — resists a single legal definition ("one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" being the problem in a sentence). Forms: nationalist-separatist, religious-extremist, left/right-wing, single-issue; the globalized network form exemplified by Al-Qaeda (9/11, 2001) and ISIS's "caliphate" experiment (2014–17). Responses: the post-9/11 "War on Terror" (Afghanistan 2001–2021, Iraq 2003), international cooperation (the UN's counter-terrorism machinery; the FATF standards; SAARC's Regional Convention on Suppression of Terrorism, 1987 — Kathmandu's signature achievement in this field), and the permanent tension between security and human rights (torture memos, drone strikes, detention regimes — the law's hardest cases). Analysis for answers: terrorism is a strategy of the weak (theater of violence for audiences); counter-terrorism succeeds by intelligence, policing, financing interdiction and legitimacy, less by pure force; the balance of civil liberties is the democratic test. Nepal: a fatality of the "terrorist vs. insurgent" labelling war (the 2001–2006 designation and delisting of the Maoist insurgents — and the peace process that dissolved the dichotomy: a lesson in how political settlement, not criminalization alone, ended an armed conflict), plus exposure through open borders to regional networks and the FATF-era compliance agenda (Nepal's anti-money-laundering reforms).