JanineStHubbins
That reference is to a marcher at a republican commemoration wearing paramilitary garb in 2014, not to IRA members handily wearing uniforms during sniper battles in Belfast in 1971 or while planting bombs in 1974.
To quote LurkingHusband: You had the IRA, and the provisional IRA. There was a difference.
The skirmishes in the '70s were with a group distinct in composition and behaviour to the original IRA. The Provos were a terrorists, the IRA (debatably) guerrillas.
the juntas in South America, or imperialist expansion in the 19th century, or the Stalinist or Maoist regimes.
The crimes by the Juntas in South America, as well as the actions of Stalinist and Maoist regimes, were not undertaken to bring about political change in other countries. As such, while they may be acts designed to terrorise, they are not the same as a terrorist act.
You would need to be more specific regarding the acts of 19th Century imperial powers.
I wouldn't agree that most scholars accept the existence of state terror, though I will acknowledge a significant number do. Personally, I think the confusion around the definition are created by apologists for American or Zionist positions on South American and Middle Eastern insurgencies, but that might be unfair on my part. It's also true that I graduated a little under a decade ago and I have no doubt the field has continued evolving.
LurkingHusband I think you already have inferred what a non-state actor is, as you managed to correctly identify the errors made by state actors. But to be clear, is simply an organisation or individual acting without the overt support of a state and theoretically unaccountable to any legally responsible body. In practice, non-state actors can be used as a deliberate tool of covert military action by a state - right wing south-american paramilitaries with the CIA, Red Army Faction with KGB or the relationship between the Taliban and Al'qaeda - but the state-actors will always insist that the actions of the non-state actors are entirely independent.
The references are not circular, but a result of the ongoing development of international law based on both historical precedent and, it must be admitted, the political exigencies of the present. So the definition might well have been clouded by recent events - after all, are ISIS a terrorist group who happen to hold territory, or a state actor in themselves? Who will decide? So much of what was once clearly defined is now in flux.
If it didn't result in such appalling human tragedy, I'd say it was a fascinating time to be alive.