John brown, american revolutionary war guerillas in the south, the treblinka revolt and the coding of terrorist organizations

Victor Asal lays out four ways to think about coding a group as a terrorist organization, personal preference, convenience, power differentials or ethics. One of the ways people have coded, labeled, or defined terrorism is by ascribing the actions or nature of terrorism either to the losers or more commonly to the actors they do not like. According to Asal, for reliability purposes, terrorists and nonterrorists need to be divided in a way that that is not simply the product of a whim or the interests of one party or another. Another way to code terrorism, and probably the dominant way done by most scholars, is simply to use existing databases and accept their definitions and coding schema. Coding terrorism based on targeting civilians actually allows us to investigate the structural and cultural conditions that make it more or less likely that an organization will be a terrorist organization without assuming key issues related to their resources.