Why Terror Lists Don’t Explain Violence — They Explain Power

 Scroll through social media long enough and you’ll run into the same argument, polished and calm. Most groups on global terror lists identify as Islamist. This wasn’t true in the 1960s or 70s, when violence wore Marxist or nationalist labels. Therefore, the problem must be political Islam.

It sounds neat. Too neat.

Lists feel authoritative. Columns of names. Official seals. The quiet confidence of “data.” But terror lists don’t simply describe violence. They classify it. And classification is power.

Who gets labeled a terrorist and who becomes a militia, an ally, a security partner, or a “necessary evil” depends less on methods and more on alignment. Violence committed by actors close to power is explained away. Violence by those outside the system is branded and archived.

That’s not a conspiracy. That’s how states work.

The historical comparison with 1968 also cheats by omission. Between the age of leftist militancy and today sits a long, violent corridor that rarely makes it into these posts. Cold War proxy wars. Afghanistan in the 1980s. The flooding of weapons into fragile societies. Sanctions regimes that hollowed out economies. Authoritarian states that crushed secular and leftist opposition with Western backing.

When politics is destroyed, people don’t stop resisting. They change the language. Religion didn’t ignite the fire. It survived the ruins.

This matters because ideology becomes a convenient culprit precisely when structure is uncomfortable to discuss. Occupation is messy. Proxy wars implicate superpowers. Arms sales have invoices. Ideology lets everyone step back and point.

Normalization deals are often held up as proof that ideology fades when peace arrives. But what usually fades first is dissent. Many “stable” states are stable because they police speech, crush opposition, and manage anger before it spills into the open. That isn’t reconciliation. It’s containment.

And then there’s the question that gets asked with an air of finality. Where is the Muslim reform movement?

It exists. It always has.

Reformers are imprisoned in Iran. Exiled from Egypt. Silenced in the Gulf. Assassinated in Bangladesh. Reform doesn’t fail because Muslims don’t want it. It fails because reformers threaten power more than extremists do.

None of this denies the reality of religious extremism. It kills indiscriminately, and Muslims are its primary victims. But reducing global violence to a single ideology while ignoring the machinery that produces chaos is not analysis. It’s narrative convenience.

Terror lists don’t explain why violence happens. They explain who gets blamed once it does.

If we are serious about reducing bloodshed, we need fewer moral shortcuts and more uncomfortable honesty. About history. About power. About who benefits when complexity is flattened into a single, reassuring villain.