Sluka: "In political science, there has been a convention of distinguishing between state violence and antistate violence, referring to the former as 'terror' and the latter as 'terrorism,' but while there is now a massive literature on antistate terrorism, state terror has been neglected by academics, the media, and governments. The reasons for this have been more political and ideological than empirical, and the only compelling reasons to distinguish between terror and terrorism are because the function of one is to maintain the status quo while that of the other is to achieve political change, and because there is a huge difference in scale between them."
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman distinguish between "wholesale terror" (practiced by states) and "retail terror" (practiced by antistate individuals and insurgent groups) [see their The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (The Political Economy ofHuman Rights, vol. 1)]
"[I]f terrorism means political intimidation by violence or its threat, and if we allow the definition to include violence by states and agents of states, then we find that the major form of terrorism in the world today is that practiced by states and their agents and allies, and that, quantitatively, antistate terrorism pales into relative insignificance compared to it."