llenges that may have contributed to the lack of a generally accepted definition. Regarding the BM, the authors highlighted the difficulties in distinguishing terrorism from other forms of political violence, such as insurgencies, guerrilla warfare, and civil wars. Terrorism also encounters literal and analytical STs. While literal STs are a product of the author’s geographical or psychological distance from the terrorist act, which ultimately determines what event is tagged a terrorist act, or an uprising; analytical STPs occur as a result of over generalisation of the concept. Collier and Mahon described it as follows:

When scholars take a category developed for one set of cases and extend it to additional cases, the new cases may be sufficiently different that the category is no longer appropriate in its original form. If this problem arises, they may adapt the category by climbing the ladder of generality, thereby obeying the law of inverse variation. As they increase the extension, they reduce the intension to the degree necessary to fit the new contexts (Collier & Mahon, 1993, p. 846).

Thus, on the one hand, terrorism could stretch to the point of abstraction or require the invention of a new word that would represent a broader set of actions (Weinberg, Pedahzur and Hirsch-Hoefler (2004, p. 779).

Irrespective of these challenges and in recognition of the vast range of benefits which a consensual definition of terrorism would yield, scholars have continued to explore different approaches towards combating the definition menace. Although, no consensus has been reached, the efforts by the authors have yielded some degree of success. On the one hand are authors who emphasise the psychological element of terrorism, on the other are those, who recognise the empirical deficiency of such a route and have adopted, safer, observable components in crafting their definitions. An examination of two separate studies will serve to elucidate these differences, as well as highlight the merits and demerits of each stance. The researcher’s expression of terrorism as a politically motivated tactic involving the use or threat of violence, with the primary purpose of generating a psychological impact beyond the immediate victims or object of attack in which the pursuit of publicity plays a significant role, is a product of the merits of the definitions proposed by the authors in these studies.

Towards resolving the 30-year terrorism definition conflict, Weinberg, Pedahzur and Hirsch-Hoefler (2004) compared Schmid’s definition, (see excerpt below), a product of a survey in which 22 definitional elements were identified in the 109 definitions of terrorism retrieved from 200 participants; to the application of the concept in three terrorism-based academic journals: Terrorism, Studies in Conflict and Terroris