Anders Behring Breivik

Lore & Background

Breivik was born in Oslo to Jens Breivik, a diplomat, and Wenche Elisabeth Behring, a nursing assistant. His parents divorced when he was one. At age four, reports from the National Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry expressed concern about his mental health and his mother's treatment of him, including sexualization, hitting, and telling him she wished he were dead. The report recommended foster care, but this was not carried out. At 16, he was arrested for graffiti vandalism. He later joined the anti-immigration Progress Party, chaired its Vest Oslo youth branch in 2002, and left in 2006. He joined a gun club in 2005. A company he founded went bankrupt, and he reported no income in 2009. He financed the attacks with about €130,000 using credit cards.

Reader's Guide

Breivik's significance lies in his 2011 attacks, which were the deadliest in Norway since World War II, and his articulation of far-right ideology in a compendium titled '2083: A European Declaration of Independence.' He opposed Islam, blamed feminism for European 'cultural suicide,' and called for the deportation of Muslims. Two forensic psychiatric evaluations disagreed: one diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, the other found narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders and concluded he was not psychotic. He was found competent to stand trial, convicted, and sentenced to 21 years' preventive detention, extendable indefinitely. His legal challenges under the European Convention on Human Rights regarding confinement conditions have been largely unsuccessful, including a 2024 case on prison isolation. His case continues to influence debates on terrorism, mental health, and far-right extremism.

Did You Know?

• Breivik changed his legal name to Fjotolf Hansen in 2017.
• He distributed a compendium titled '2083: A European Declaration of Independence' on the day of the attacks.
• A 1983 psychiatric report recommended he be forcibly removed from his mother due to her emotional and psychological abuse, but this was not carried out.

The Contested Definition of Terrorism

The question of what constitutes terrorism has never settled into a single, universally accepted answer. Scholars across disciplines acknowledge that no consensus definition exists, and the difficulty is compounded by the term's deeply political and emotional weight. The word carries inherently negative associations and is typically directed at adversaries rather than applied neutrally. In practice, very few individuals or groups who carry out violent acts describe themselves as terrorists; instead, the label is most often attached by opponents in a conflict. This asymmetry means that the same act of political violence might be called a liberation struggle by one side and an act of terrorism by the other. The absence of a fixed definition has allowed the concept to stretch across centuries and ideologies, encompassing everything from ancient assassination plots to modern state-sponsored intimidation, making it one of the most slippery and contested terms in political discourse.

The French Revolution and the Birth of the Term

The English word "terrorism" traces its first recorded use to the Reign of Terror, an eleven-month period between September 1793 and July 1794 during the French Revolution. The ruling Jacobins, figures like Robespierre among them, deployed extreme violence—including mass executions carried out by guillotine—to force obedience and frighten those they considered enemies of the state. Strikingly, some of these Jacobins referred to themselves as "terrorists," a self-identification that complicates the modern tendency to use the word only as a slur. Yet contemporary historians such as Sophie Wahnich push back against equating that revolutionary violence with what we now call terrorism, arguing that drawing a moral line between France's Year II and events like September 11 is historically and philosophically incoherent. The Revolution nonetheless shaped later thinking: conservative European rulers, alarmed by the prospect of similar upheavals, began to view radical secret societies with suspicion, laying groundwork for the 19th-century association of terrorism with non-state actors.

Ancient and Medieval Precedents

Scholars debate the true origins of political violence that we might now call terrorism, with candidates ranging from the 1st-century Sicarii Zealots to the 11th-century Hashshashin. The Sicarii, a radical offshoot of the Jewish Zealot movement in Roman Judaea, were formed around 6 AD by Judas of Galilee. They targeted Jewish collaborators—temple priests, Sadducees, and wealthy elites—by concealing short daggers beneath their cloaks, blending into festival crowds, striking their victims, and vanishing into the resulting panic. Their most notable kill was the High Priest Jonathan. In the Islamic world, the Kharijites were the first group whose members were explicitly called terrorists; they pioneered the doctrine of takfir, declaring that heretics could be lawfully killed. Centuries later, the Hashshashin, an Isma'ili Shia faction led by Hassan-i Sabbah, seized fortress strongholds like Alamut across Persia. Outnumbered by their enemies, they relied on targeted assassinations of governors and commanders to forge alliances with more powerful neighbors.

Ideological Expansion and State Violence

By the mid-19th century, the association of terrorism shifted decisively away from state actors and toward non-governmental movements. Anarchism, frequently intertwined with rising nationalism and anti-monarchist sentiment, became the ideology most closely linked to political violence of that era. Toward the century's close, anarchist actors or groups carried out the assassinations of both a Russian Tsar and a U.S. president, cementing the image of the lone or small-group political killer. The 20th century broadened the landscape further: anarchist, socialist, fascist, and nationalist organizations all engaged in what various observers termed terrorism, many in the context of independence struggles in what was then called the Third World. Meanwhile, a subset of scholars extended the label to systematic internal violence and intimidation perpetrated by states themselves, pointing to the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as examples of governmental terror that paralleled non-state tactics. This dual application—against both states and sub-state groups—continues to animate debates about where the boundaries of the term truly lie.

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