The notion of "terrorism" is analyzed in the article, as one of the key concepts in modern political discourse. Terrorism is discussed as a complex of inter-agential relations, which forms in the absence of possibility of negotiations between agents with mutually opposed interests; the relations within the said complex are completely dependent on such societal and cognitive institutions as the language of intercourse, mass-media, electoral practices, freedom of speech. Proceeding from the thesis that disclosure of the concept's semantic structure in combination with cognitive methods of reconstructing the agents' consciousness opens the way to comprehending both the terror phenomenon itself and the possibility of manipulations with it, the author constructs the cognitive scheme of terrorism and illustrates the heuristic potential of the scheme, with the Kosovo conflict as example.