United States and state terrorism

Several scholars have accused the United States of involvement in state terrorism. They have written about the US and other liberal democracies' use of state terrorism, particularly in relation to the Cold War. According to them, state terrorism is used to protect the interest of capitalist elites, and the U.S. organized a neo-colonial system of client states, co-operating with regional elites to rule through terror.

Such works include Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman's The Political Economy of Human Rights (1979), Herman's The Real Terror Network (1985), Alexander L. George's Western State Terrorism (1991), Frederick Gareau's State Terrorism and the United States (2004), and Doug Stokes' America's Other War (2005). Of these, Ruth J. Blakeley considers Chomsky and Herman as being the foremost writers on the United States and state terrorism.^[1]

This work has proved controversial with mainstream scholars of terrorism, who concentrate on non-state terrorism and the state terrorism of dictatorships.^[1]