According to various terrorism experts, the most common tools for terrorism include: assassination, kidnapping; enslavement, subjugation, imprisonment, banishment, and genocide; arson, guns, bombs, hijacking, and weapons of mass destruction.

Imprisonment and punishment involve imprisoning and punishing people perceived to be enemy of the state, like Nelson Mandela in South Africa. While genocide involves acts committed such as killings, mutilation of body parts to destroy an ethnic, racial, political or religious group; such as the Rwandan genocide, Bosnian genocide, Armenian genocide, Nazi-Jewish genocide, and so forth.

Bombs and weapons of mass destruction are designed to bring maximum devastation. During the Roman Empire the Roman military contaminated their enemy's drinking water with the carcasses of animals. Likewise, it was also thought that an early form of biological warfare was engineered by the early European settlers of the Americas, who used smallpox-contaminated blankets in their efforts remove the native people (the Indian-Americans).

Assassinations, kidnappings, car bomb explosions, IEDs, and suicide bombings all fall under the umbrella of conventional terrorism. Airplane hijackings were common during the 1970s and 1980s, where passengers were held hostage or one-by-one killed until the terrorists' demands were met. The international community's refusal to negotiate with hijackers made airplane hijacking a less popular method of terror. Kidnapping and hostage taking remain common terrorist crimes, and in some countries are very real dangers for tourists.