Discussions of terrorism assume actual or threatened violence, but the term is regularly used to delegitimize rivals' nonviolent actions. Yet do ordinary citizens accept descriptions of nonviolence as terrorism? Using a preregistered survey-experiment in Israel, a salient conflictual context with diverse repertoires of contention, we find that audiences rate adversary nonviolence close to terrorism, consider it illegitimate, and justify its forceful repression. These perceptions vary by the action's threatened harm, its salience, and respondents' ideology. Explicitly labeling nonviolence as terrorism, moreover, particularly sways middle-of-the-road centrists. These relationships replicate in a lower-salience conflict, albeit with milder absolute judgments, indicating generalizability. Hence, popular perceptions of terrorism are more fluid and manipulable than assumed, potentially undermining the positive effects associated with nonviolent campaigns.

Historical and legal accounts of domestic military and militarized use abound, but there is no systematic normative treatment of the issue. This article argues that an important normative principle that governs domestic military use is that citizens ought not to be treated as enemies. Using examples drawn from the United States, it shows that apart from any instrumental considerations such as fears of military coups and excessive violence, domestic military use is prohibited in principle when it relates to citizens as enemies. To treat citizens as enemies undermines their standing as members of the state’s political community, and so violates governments’ duty to not commit expressive harms against them. This principle has implications for current dilemmas regarding domestic military use, as well as militarized domestic law enforcement. The latter gain the normative commitments of militaries as they militarize, and in so doing lose permissions to operate domestically.