PERSPECTIVE: Terrorist designationWhat Does a "Terrorist" Designation Mean?
From both the right and the left, there have been calls to designate various domestic organizations – the KKK, antifa, white supremacists – as “terrorists.” Anna Meier writes there is no legal mechanism in the United States for labeling purely domestic organizations as terrorist groups, but while there is no purely domestic terrorism statute in the United States, nor is there a domestic terrorism proscription mechanism, the “terrorist” label, even when not a formal legal mechanism, signals what kinds of political behavior cross the line from nonideal to unacceptable. “Trump’s threatened antifa designation, then, may not carry any legal weight, but it does signal to the public—and to law enforcement—an unacceptable form of contention in the eyes of the administration,” she writes.
Following incidents of far-right violence, it has become routine for politicians and pundits alike to call for designating white supremacist organizations as “terrorists” under the law. Anna Meier writes in Lawfare that currently, Change.org hosts 20 petitions calling for the Ku Klux Klan to be labeled a terrorist organization. Collectively these petitions have more than 3.5 million signatures. The impulse toward designation appears on the other side of the aisle as well: On 32 May, President Trump announced on Twitter that he would designate antifa, a broad movement of anti-racist and anti-fascist activists, as a terrorist organization.
Meier writes:
There is no legal mechanism in the United States for labeling purely domestic organizations as terrorist groups, but mechanisms for designating foreign actors are plentiful. The State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list made headlines last year when the Trump administration listed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the first use of the list against a foreign military entity. Meanwhile, the U.S. recently listed the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) under Executive Order 13224, a designation tool that applies financial sanctions—the first instance of the U.S. government officially labeling a white supremacist organization as “terrorist.”
Given this focus on designation, it is worth asking what terrorist designations are designed to do, how well they do it, and what effects they have aside from curtailing organizational capacity. Designation may combat political violence in some circumstances, but its largest effects lie elsewhere. In particular, designation signals what kinds of political contention are unacceptable to the U.S. government—and preserves this categorization as much as possible as public sentiment shifts.
Meier writers that while there is no purely domestic terrorism statute in the United States, nor is there a domestic terrorism proscription mechanism, the “terrorist” label, even when not a formal legal mechanism, signals what kinds of political behavior cross the line from nonideal to unacceptable—often along racial and ethnic lines. The existence of mechanisms for designating terrorists may thus matter less than officials’ willingness to go after organizations viewed as “terrorist.”
Meier adds: “Trump’s threatened antifa designation, then, may not carry any legal weight, but it does signal to the public—and to law enforcement—an unacceptable form of contention in the eyes of the administration.”
