Alex P. Schmid

Alex Schmid at CSTPV, University of St. Andrews in September 2014 Alex Peter Schmid (born 1943) is a scholar in terrorism studies, who from 1999 to 2005 was Officer-in-Charge of the Terrorism Prevention Branch of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna. He is particularly known for his work on the definition of terrorism.

Schmid has lived and worked mostly in the Netherlands, and , he is research fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) in The Hague, and among his many other roles, is a director of the Terrorism Research Initiative and editor-in-chief of its journal, Perspectives on Terrorism.

Early life and education Alex Peter Schmid was born in Chur, Switzerland, in 1943. He studied history at the University of Zürich and was awarded a PhD from that institution.

Schmid was an Einstein Fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University (as part of a program funded via the Albert Einstein Institution

In 1992 Schmid was associate professor of International Relations at Leiden University, and a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Conflicts, and research director at the PIOOM Foundation (Interdisciplinary Research Programme on Root Causes of Human Rights Violations, 1988–2001 ).

Schmid is a member of the World Society of Victimology and a Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) since 2003 or 2004. He is also one of three directors of the Terrorism Research Initiative, a non-profit organisation based in North Carolina.

Journals Schmid was previously co-editor of the Taylor & Francis journal Terrorism and Political Violence, and remains on the editorial board.

In 2009 he began editing the journal Perspectives on Terrorism, a publication of the Terrorism Research Initiative,

"Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons, whereby – in contrast to assassination – the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperilled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought".

He proposed a definition to the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ) in 1992, based on the already internationally accepted definition of war crimes, with the crucial words "peacetime equivalents of war crimes", but his proposal was not accepted.

The 1988 definition was updated in 2011 after "three rounds of consultations among academics and other professionals" and published in The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research. The revised definition is longer than most, after suggesting that the previous attempts, in its quest for consensus, had reduced the level of complexity in the definition, and ended up with "a high level of abstraction". The 2011 revised definition includes 12 points, the first of which is:

Recognition

The first edition of Political Terrorism (1984) won a national award for the best book in political science.

Schmid has been described as "a leading orthodox terrorism scholar".

Selected works Schmid has authored and edited over 200 publications, (Editor, co-edited by Ronald D. Crelinsten) (Co-authored with Sanam B. Anderlini) The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research (2011), edited by Schmid and including his revised consensus definition of terrorism, is a much-cited resource. Handbook of Terrorism Prevention and Preparedness, an open-access publication edited by Schmid, has been issued since November 2020 on the ICCT website, with a chapter published each week.