Addressing the political context in which a particular act of terror has taken place is an essential part of fighting terror, Achin Vanaik, Left ideologue and former professor, Department of International Relations and Global Politics, University of Delhi, has said.
He was delivering a lecture by the Kerala Council for Historical Research (KCHR) on ‘The US informal empire project and the global war on terror’ to mark the 80th birthday of historian K.N. Panikkar.
“We must be universally impartial morally and politically to all kinds of terror by State or non-state actors. We should be able to say ‘Never again to any people’ and not just ‘Never again to my people’, a statement which would give the State the justification to target outside the country,” he said.
Terming the United States of America as an ‘empire in denial’, he said that it had killed more civilians outside its own borders after the Second World War than the rest of the world put together.
He said there was no single universally accepted definition of terrorism. It was a reference to a method or a tactic, not a category of persons.
