State terrorism
While the most common modern usage of the word terrorism refers to civilian-victimising political violence by insurgents or conspirators, several scholars make a broader interpretation of the nature of terrorism that encompasses the concepts of state terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism. Michael Stohl argues, "The use of terror tactics is common in international relations and the state has been and remains a more likely employer of terrorism within the international system than insurgents. Stohl clarifies, however, that "[n]ot all acts of state violence are terrorism. It is important to understand that in terrorism the violence threatened or perpetrated, has purposes broader than simple physical harm to a victim. The audience of the act or threat of violence is more important than the immediate victim."
Critical terrorism studies
There has been a huge amount of academic discussion about the ontological and epistemological foundations of critical terrorism studies. Within CTS, there is a broad agreement on the need to examine terrorism and terrorists from a historical, contextualized perspective asking 'how' questions of causation and constitution, rather than the more orthodox problem solving questions of a single isolated event. For instance, CTS questions why a terrorist action happens, asking whether the terrorists simply hate western notions of freedom, or whether they have deeper underlying political motivations? CTS adopts the ontological position that "terrorism" is fundamentally a social fact rather than brute fact.