Is deterrence a strategy that can work in contemporary times against terrorists or terror groups? Currently I'm summarizing a piece about this for my International Relations class, and I find it quite interesting. It takes the position that you can, in fact, deter terrorism, but I was wondering on what the views of you all were.

You can deter non-terrorists that support terrorism, but as most modern terrorists have little fear of death, they're not likely to be vulnerable to deterrence.

So yes, but generally only indirectly (i.e. if the Iranian government was certain that the US would nuke them for supporting terror, a lot of their assistance would probably dry up).

In any case, deterrence is most certainly not the best strategy for battling terrorism; doing that requires education, investment, and sheer determination.

i have to say i totally agree with you. If you had no fear of death then are you going to stop just because you/your country is threatened?......i dont think so

The more important question to ask is: can we deter state terrorism?

Because when you get down to it, that's what's really causing the biggest problems. Al-Qaeda killed three thousand civilians, one of the worst nonstate terrorist actions in history...but the US government was able to kill hundreds of thousands and destroy a country during the current US-led war in Iraq. This was under the myth of course that it was fighting a viable "enemy" state when it was actually engaging Iraq as a whole in what's essentially total warfare and a vicious counter-insurgency, also known as state terrorism. Same can be said for Israel's recent war in Lebanon.

The numbers are off the charts, there's absolutely no comparison. It's undeniable that state terrorism and the consequences of the state's violence are on an infinitely larger scale than any mercenary or nonstate terrorist group and therefore warrant our more direct attention.

...

But just to indulge the OP, I will say that I think nonstate terrorism can be "deterred." It's a question of people feeling safe: when people feel like they have control over their own lives, self-determination to be exact, no semblance of mass or large nonstate terrorist actions should really occur. That said, people can be swayed by ideology which might explain why the Saudi Arabian hijackers were actually pretty well-off. The important question to then ask is how is that ideology produced, and under what circumstances more specifically of imperial and (neo)imperial domination. Sayyid Qutb couldn't exist without the construction of a monolithic "Orient" and "Islam," the same constructions that now fuel "clash-of-civilizations" theorists and most US pundits. In that sense, defeating nonstate terrorism requires addressing global power relations and the "insecurity" that might even be produced in a well-off middle-class family. This leads then to a more basic question of global hierarchies.