The article distinguishes between the conventional meaning of politics, with its largely territorial connotations, and the functional definition of political power as a process of giving and receiving support in reference to the important outcomes in a social process. A discussion of terrorism is seen as involving the use of causal (indeterminative) propositions, historical trends, and predictions about the probable future of terror. In addition, social goals and their relation to terrorism should be clarified as well as the explorations of the sanctioning objectives and strategies related to basic policy purposes. Such objectives include deterrence, withdrawal, rehabilitation, correction, prevention, and reconstruction. Terrorist strategies are viewed as arousing acute insecurities by evoking the symbolic enhancement of instruments or procedures of destruction. Five conditions are enumerated for a terrorist regime to consolidate: shared ideological justification for violence, a view of victims as expendable, isolation of the terrorists and the victims from ordinary life, balancing terror by working incentives, and survival of cooperative relationships in society. The article concludes that recurring seizures of a sense of weakness may precipitate periodic revivals of terrorism as a strategy of territorial or pluralistic elements in the world social process.