A Post Structural Approach to Terrorism Crisis of Meaning

The present article attempts to answer 2 questions: Is there a unanimous definition of terrorism on contemporary International Relations (IR)? In order to answer the question the author supposed that there has been no agreement for defining terrorism on contemporary international Relations and its content. The result of studying various definitions stated in documents, treaties, resolutions and scientific meetings show that there is no silver lining to this agreement. Secondly, what is the theoretical perspective for the lack of agreement about defining terrorism unanimously? The logical answer is that the content of social phenomenon is not consistent, but they depend on the disputes and disagreement on rival discussions in the society. Terrorism is a phenomenon that has no consistent meaning and it interprets based on the different rival discussions. The governments, institutions and agent use this concept to distinguish domestic vs. foreign and friendly vs. alien and provide a stable identity for them. So, the meaning of terrorism is optional, contrived and political. In order to answer the above questions, the present article is divided in to three parts; 1 _ the lexical definition of terrorism and international terrorism and its categorization is presented. 2 _ the researches done on international law about terrorism are reviewed. 3 _ Theoretical framework based on post-structuralists’ views as Derrida and his deconstruction method is studied to reach an analysis about disagreements on the definition of terrorism.