Dr Alex Bellamy

Terrorism hasn’t always taken the forms that are manifesting in today’s society.

UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award winner Dr Alex Bellamy has won his $75,000 grant to write a book about the ethics of terrorism for Oxford University Press.

Dr Bellamy, a Senior Lecturer at UQ’s Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, will explore the motivations and justifications behind terrorism, a term first used during the French Revolution.

Dr Bellamy said during the Cold War, terrorism was often the weapon of choice for those seeking to right what they regarded as political wrongs, to liberate a country or to free people seen as being oppressed.

He said there was now less terrorism than ever before because of the increased revulsion towards the killing of civilians.
"Until very recently, the most deadly terrorists were states," Dr Bellamy said.

"Since 1789 we count the number of victims of state terror in the millions.

"Terrorism came to be seen as illegal and illegitimate after the Geneva Conventions, although the great powers retained the right and ability to resort to it in emergencies in the form of nuclear deterrence."

Dr Bellamy said an example of state-driven terrorism to suppress internal dissent were the massacres of Greeks by Turkey, while the Holocaust was an example of terrorism to eliminate ethnic or religious groups.

He said Stalin’s Russia was an example of terrorism to impose an ideology and British rule in Kenya an example of terrorism used to maintain order in a colony.

• Dr Alex Bellamy www.uq.edu.au/uqresearchers/researcher/bellamyaj.html

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