Terrorist Constituencies in Terrorist-State Conflicts: The debate on the use of violence among Irish nationalists and West Germany’s Radical Left in the Mid 1970s

Abstract

Most terrorist research is focused on the actual terrorists or on counter-terrorist policies. Still, terrorists need a ‘societal surround’ of sympathisers and immediate supporters to function successfully. These form the first audience in the struggle between state and terrorists in which they both try to convince the rest of society of the validity of their contrasting concepts of democracy. This chapter focuses on the debates in what is here termed the terrorist constituency to provide an understanding of the dilemmas that arise in societies faced with fundamental opposition. It does so by analysing the reactions within this constituency in Ireland and Germany to a number of trials and subsequent hunger strikes of IRA and RAF prisoners in the 1970s.