Japan's Aum Shinrikyo, the changing nature of terrorism, and the post‐cold war security agenda∗

The author would like to thank Masatoshi Kimura and the anonymous referees for their valuable criticism and comments on this article.

Events such as the Aum Shinrikyo's sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in March 1994 have placed terrorism at the top of the post‐Cold War security agenda and have caused policy makers to sense qualitative change and new dangers in the terrorist threat to industrialised societies. By examining the case of the Aum Shinrikyo and comparing it in detail with Japanese terrorism during the Cold War period, this article demonstrates that terrorism has indeed undergone qualitative change in the 1990s due to terrorism's enhanced non‐specificity, expansion in destructive potential, greater erosion of the barriers between internal and external security, and ability to corrode the legitimacy of existing security institutions. The article then goes on to argue that Aum's characteristics as a terrorist phenomenon reflect the nature of the post‐Cold War security agenda as a whole, and that the policy lesson of the Tokyo subway attack is that, in the 1990s, in order for security institutions to detect new security challenges early enough and to deal with them they need to discard Cold War mindsets and to sustain the process of internal reform.

Notes

The author would like to thank Masatoshi Kimura and the anonymous referees for their valuable criticism and comments on this article.