when you said, "Here's a definition: when you plant bombs to blow up a train killing 200 innocent civilians."

Incomplete thoughts are difficult to follow and require a lot of interpretation.

One of the barriers that must be expanded concerns identifying just what terrorism actually is. Your sentence fragment isn't much help in this case. To accept a limiting definition that excludes the actions of nation-states blocks our potential understanding and excuses human rights abuses that probably should be considered under the label of terrorism.

Understanding terrorism must include the state's use of potential terror to create a climate of coercion.

Social facts are intelligible facts. There is always an inside story or meaning in human events that differentiate them from datum or scientific fact. Social terms have a why contingent, beyond the how, when what and where.

To take an act of violence and think that is a definitive act of terrorism serves only to shut down language and give being to a single brand of terrorism that neatly exempts state terrorism.

Publius