Terrorism
The Task Force defines terrorism as "a tactic or technique by means of which a violent act or the threat thereof is used for the prime purpose of creating overwhelming fear for coercive purposes". It classified disorders and terrorism into six categories:
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.