What is state terrorism? How would it be possible to differ it from authoritarian policies of states to enforce law and order?

The term « state terrorism » is of topical interest since the 1970's. Originally, it was used by the USSR during the Cold War to describe the Operation Condor in Southern America. This strategy of massive repression of left-winged insurrectionary movements, lead by most of the authoritarian regimes of the region, consisted in a wide-spread use of intelligence services, assassinations and torture. But its origins in fact go back to centuries ago. The French Revolution and the period of Terreur that followed (june 1793 - july 1794), initially with Robespierre, gave birth to the word « terrorism ». Although quite marked by its context, his definition of the revolutionary process gives many clues concerning any terrorist's intellectual path : « If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible. » (February 1794). That is terror not only makes a revolution possible, it also makes a revolutionary state viable and capable of achieving its sacred goal, democracy here. Still, the concept of terror must not limit itself to young and ebullient states, focused both on their political and philosophical survival, and can also apply to solid states with solid institutions. Forty years before the French Revolution, on 1 March 1757, Damiens the regicide was condemned to public execution in the Place de Grève in Paris. His torture, described in Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, is thought to have played a decisive role in the redefinition of justice and the way to administer it. For the first time indeed, torment was not seen as deterrent but simply as repugnant. Before the switch from public punishment to guillotine, Michel Foucault noted that « if fault and punishment merged into atrocity, it was not the consequence of an obscurely admitted lex talionis. It was the result of a certain mechanics of power : a power that not only makes no bones about acting directly on bodies, but that exalts and reinforces itself over its physical manifestations; a power that asserts itself as armed, and whose order functions are not entirely separated from its war functions. » The idea of a constant war between a state and its own citizens is here a striking embodiment of terror as a way to govern. In this case, the whole process of justice is centered on the act of chastisement. It is meant to display power in its purest sense: the aim is not to correct but just to show.