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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > Terrorism, freedom fighters, armed struggle > General
Terrorism remains one of the major threats facing the world community. While literature on the subject is dominated by discussion of the factors leading individuals and groups to join violent extremist, terrorist groups, the question of what can lead them to disengage from such groups is an equally important one. This book is the first study to provide a detailed analysis of both counter-radicalization and deradicalization programmes in eight Muslim-majority states, representing hitherto one of the largest, detailed, and most systematic inventory of such programmes in the world. Drawing on detailed case-studies from a number of countries, the book:
The detailed comparative analyses allow the reader to identify conditions, both internal and external, which are conducive to both success and failure of counter-radicalization and deradicalization programmes, and the authors identify best practice and provide policy implications for states facing threats from violent extremism, as well as for international institutions and organizations working in the field of counter-terrorism.
Terrorism remains one of the major threats facing the world community. While literature on the subject is dominated by discussion of the factors leading individuals and groups to join violent extremist, terrorist groups, the question of what can lead them to disengage from such groups is an equally important one. This book is the first study to provide a detailed analysis of both counter-radicalization and deradicalization programmes in eight Muslim-majority states, representing hitherto one of the largest, detailed, and most systematic inventory of such programmes in the world. Drawing on detailed case-studies from a number of countries, the book:
The detailed comparative analyses allow the reader to identify conditions, both internal and external, which are conducive to both success and failure of counter-radicalization and deradicalization programmes, and the authors identify best practice and provide policy implications for states facing threats from violent extremism, as well as for international institutions and organizations working in the field of counter-terrorism.
Blending concepts from 'dramatism' such as 'victimage ritual' with Foucault's approach to modern power and knowledge regimes, this book presents a novel and illuminating perspective on political power and domination resulting from the global war on terrorism. With attention to media sources and political discourse within the context of the global war on terror, the author draws attention to the manner in which power elites construct scapegoats by way of a victimage ritual, thus providing themselves with a political pretext for extending their power and authority over new territories and populations, as well as legitimating an intensification of domestic surveillance and social control. A compelling analysis of ritual rhetoric and political violence, Power, Discourse and Victimage Ritual in the War on Terror will be of interest to sociologists, political theorists and scholars of media and communication concerned with questions of surveillance and social control, political communication, hegemony, foreign policy and the war on terror.
Despite a plethora of studies devoted to it, the current understanding of al-Qaeda and the threat it poses remains vague and ambiguous. Is al-Qaeda a rigidly structured organisation, a global network of semi-independent cells, a franchise, or simply an ideology? What role did Osama bin Laden play within the group and its terrorist campaign? What does it mean to talk about the "global Salafi-jihad" threat allegedly confronting the West? In addressing such questions many writers have sought to offer definitive answers, yet overall the truth about al-Qaeda remains elusive. This book moves beyond this traditional approach in order to investigate and critically assess how such answers reflect the particular epistemological frameworks within which they are produced. Its chapters explore the varied contexts within which the obscure entity labelled al-Qaeda is constituted as a comprehensible object of political, strategic, cultural, and scientific knowledge, and within which 'terrorism' is rendered an experience of quotidian life. This volume offers a much-needed critical reflection on Western ways of talking and of thinking about the frightening experience of global terrorism. In trying to know how we know al-Qaeda, it offers us an opportunity to try to know ourselves and our often hidden assumptions about legitimacy, violence, and political purpose.
Haynes looks at religious transnational actors in the context of international relations, with a focus on both security and order. With renewed scholarly interest in the involvement of religion in international relations, many observers and scholars have found this move unexpected because it challenges conventional wisdom about the nature and long-term historical impact of secularisation. The 'return' of religion to international relations necessarily involves deprivatisation. Recent challenges to international security and order emanate from various entities, notably 'extremists', people often said to be 'excluded' from the benefits of globalisation for reasons of culture, history and geography. This study looks at the dynamics of this new religious pluralism as it influences the global political landscape. Several specific transnational religious actors are examined in the chapters including: American Evangelical Protestants, Roman Catholics, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, Sunni extremist groups (al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba), and Shia transnational networks. While varying widely in what they seek to achieve, they also share an important characteristic: each seeks to use religious soft power to advance their interests. In sum, these religious transnational actors all wish to see the spread and development of certain values and norms, which impact on international security and order.
The movement of humans across borders is increasing exponentially-some for benign reasons, others nefarious, including terrorism, human trafficking, and people smuggling. Consequently, the policing of human movement within and across borders has been and remains a significant concern to nations. Policing Global Movement: Tourism, Migration, Human Trafficking, and Terrorism explores the nature of these challenges for police, governments, and citizens at large. Drawn from keynote and paper presentations at a recent International Police Executive Symposium meeting in Malta, the book presents the work of scholars and practitioners who analyze a variety of topics on the cutting edge of global policing, including:
Examining areas of increasing concern to governments and citizens around the world, this timely volume presents critical international perspectives on these ongoing global challenges that threaten the safety of humans worldwide.
How did the North European states react to the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001? Michael Karlsson argues that 9/11 led to a considerable pressure to strengthen rules and practices for counterterrorism and security, but that this pressure was mediated by several other conditions. The reforms were also affected by, among other things, how the threat of global terrorism was perceived, pressure from international institutions such as the UN, EU, and NATO, the domestic political context, and pre-existing rules and practices. His analysis uses the new institutionalism framework, tested through case studies of Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The book offers a unique lens on the study of counterterrorism from a new theoretical and regional perspective.
As potential targets, such as military facilities, symbols of democracy, government buildings, and infrastructure are "hardened" against possible terrorist attack, terrorists will shift to softer targets: churches, schools, malls, mass entertainment centers, high-rise apartments, transportation centers, and energy facilities. Their goal will be to disrupt or destroy our economy, impose fear and uncertainty, break our national will, and deflect our attention and support from the Middle East. We could wait for it to happen, or we can prepare now. This new book empowers Americans by providing them with the knowledge and skills needed to understand terrorist strategies, which, in turn, allow each of us to contribute to disrupting the terrorists' intended goals through observing and reporting suspicious activity, reducing target vulnerabilities, and minimizing casualties through education and preparation. The authors define terrorism and its origins and describe present-day organizations: where they operate, what their philosophies entail, and what their motivation and objectives are. They review different terrorist tactics and their desired effects, providing readers with guidelines and checklists for surviving them. Knowing how to prepare for, and how to survive, an attack is a step toward marginalizing intended casualty rates, psychological impacts, and propaganda values. At the same time, the lifesaving skills presented in this book may also be used in naturally occurring catastrophic events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or earthquakes.
Fire Alarm: The Investigation of the U.S. House Select Committee on Benghazi is a study of legislative-executive friction, partisanship, and Congress's attempt to recount events surrounding the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Beghazi, Libya that killed four Americans. Using publicly available sources, Bradley F. Podliska details the history of congressional investigations, arguing that both Republicans and Democrats use taxpayer-funded investigations as an arena to mount political attacks for electoral advantage regardless of the consequences. He traces the events of September 11, 2012, and applies a new partisan model to frame the role of Speakers of the House John Boehner and Paul Ryan in investigating the Obama administration's attack response and post-attack narrative. Employing qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the divisive investigation, Podliska finds Speaker Boehner's selection of party loyalists for the committee, placement of vetted staff in crucial investigative assignments to ensure execution of party strategy, and over emphasis on former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, minimized the examination of White House, Department of Defense, and Intelligence Community responses. As a result, the investigation failed to determine responsibility for U.S. policy in Libya, an accurate post-attack narrative, and why the military did not perform a timely rescue.
First published in 1990, this book will be of great interest to anyone concerned about conflict and stability in the 1990s, especially governments, police, and buisnesses involved in anti-terrorist technology. It will also be of value to students of politics who want to understand terrorism, and to people who want to take account of future technology in handling poltical and social problems.
Ten years on, what have been the principal impacts of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on the external policies and international outlooks of the world's major powers, the range and scope of the international security agenda and on the capacity for states and international organisations to work together to combat the dangers of international terrorism? This book investigates a range of international responses to the events of 9/11, to evaluate their consistency over time; to analyse their long-term significance and impact and to consider both their implications for the international security agenda and the prospects for international cooperation in addressing the challenges posed. In particular, the book considers the perspectives of some of the world's major powers and international organisations on the question of international terrorism, and on its perpetrators, comparing their interpretations and responses and examining how these have changed over the course of a decade of conflict. This book is primarily directed at an academic market, and especially towards undergraduate and taught postgraduate students on courses in international politics, international relations, security studies, terrorism studies, and contemporary international history.
Foreign policy success or failure is often attributed to the role of leadership. This volume explores the relationship between President George W. Bush's leadership, the administration's stated belief in the power of ideas (and the ideas of power) and its approach to the war on terror. Drawing on the international expertise of ten American foreign policy and security specialists, this incisive and timely book combines theoretical perspectives on political leadership with rigorous empirical analysis of selected aspects of the Bush administration's post 9/11 foreign policy. As a result, this book sheds considerable light not just on the limited impact of President Bush's war on terror strategy, but also, more importantly, on why key ideas underpinning the strategy, such as US global primacy and pre-emptive war, largely failed to gel in a globalizing world.
This book explores the ideas of key thinkers and media practitioners who have examined images and icons of war and terror. Icons of War and Terror explores theories of iconic images of war and terror, not as received pieties but as challenging uncertainties; in doing so, it engages with both critical discourse and conventional image-making. The authors draw on these theories to re-investigate the media/global context of some of the most iconic representations of war and terror in the international 'risk society'. Among these photojournalistic images are: Nick Ut's Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of a naked girl, Kim Phuc, running burned from a napalm attack in Vietnam in June 1972; a quintessential 'ethnic cleansing' image of massacred Kosovar Albanian villagers at Racak on January 15, 1999, which finally propelled a hesitant Western alliance into the first of the 'new humanitarian wars'; Luis Simco's photograph of marine James Blake Miller, 'the Marlboro Man', at Fallujah, Iraq, 2004; the iconic toppling of the World Trade Centre towers in New York by planes on September 11, 2001; and the 'Falling Man' icon - one of the most controversial images of 9/11; the image of one of the authors of this book, as close-up victim of the 7/7 terrorist attack on London, which the media quickly labelled iconic. This book will be of great interest to students of media and war, sociology, communications studies, cultural studies, terrorism studies and security studies in general.
This book explores the ideas of key thinkers and media practitioners who have examined images and icons of war and terror. Icons of War and Terror explores theories of iconic images of war and terror, not as received pieties but as challenging uncertainties; in doing so, it engages with both critical discourse and conventional image-making. The authors draw on these theories to re-investigate the media/global context of some of the most iconic representations of war and terror in the international 'risk society'. Among these photojournalistic images are: Nick Ut's Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of a naked girl, Kim Phuc, running burned from a napalm attack in Vietnam in June 1972; a quintessential 'ethnic cleansing' image of massacred Kosovar Albanian villagers at Racak on January 15, 1999, which finally propelled a hesitant Western alliance into the first of the 'new humanitarian wars'; Luis Simco's photograph of marine James Blake Miller, 'the Marlboro Man', at Fallujah, Iraq, 2004; the iconic toppling of the World Trade Centre towers in New York by planes on September 11, 2001; and the 'Falling Man' icon - one of the most controversial images of 9/11; the image of one of the authors of this book, as close-up victim of the 7/7 terrorist attack on London, which the media quickly labelled iconic. This book will be of great interest to students of media and war, sociology, communications studies, cultural studies, terrorism studies and security studies in general.
High performance during catastrophic terrorist events require the ability to assess and adapt capacity rapidly, restore or enhance disrupted or inadequate communications, utilize flexible decision making swiftly, and expand coordination and trust between multiple emergency and crisis response agencies. These requirements are superimposed on conventional administrative systems that rely on relatively rigid plans, decision protocols, and formal relationships that assume smooth sailing and uninterrupted communications and coordination. Network Governance in Response to Acts of Terrorism focuses on the inter-organizational performance and coordinated response to recent terrorist incidents across different national, legal, and cultural contexts in New York, Bali, Istanbul, Madrid, London, and Mumbai. Effortlessly combining each case study with content analyses of news reports from local and national newspapers, situation reports from government emergency/crisis management agencies, and, interviews with public managers, community leaders, and nonprofit executives involved in response operations, Naim Kapucu presents an overview of how different countries tackle emergencies by employing various collaborative decision-making processes, thus, offering a global perspective with different approaches. These features make this book an important read for both scholars and practitioners eager to reconcile existing decision-making theories with practice.
Without money, terrorists cannot function as organizations and cannot conduct attacks. Yet the questions remain, how vulnerable are terrorists to financial disruptions? Can governments put pressure on their finances in meaningful ways or are they too resilient and adaptive to be affected by state actions? These and other questions about terrorism financing are vigorously debated by scholars and policymakers, particularly since the attacks of September 11th 2001 . While there is a growing literature on policy issues, strategies, and countermeasures, states must first understand their enemies before developing strategies to defeat them. So, instead of focusing on the state response, this book asks a more foundational question: How do different terrorist groups actually raise money? What are their budgets? What do their portfolios look like? How have they changed over time? What are the advantages and disadvantages of different sources of financing? The book includes case studies of 11 different terrorist groups or sets of groups within a country. It is clear that each group has a different portfolio tailored to their needs and their environment and this makes countering terrorist financing more challenging for the state. This topical book will be required reading for all students and scholars interested in terrorism financing as well as those working in government agencies tasked with combating terrorist groups and their financial resources.
This edited volume aims to deepen our understanding of state power through a series of case studies of political violence arising from state counter-terrorism' strategies. The book examines how state counter-terrorism strategies are invariably underpinned by terror, in the form of state political violence. It seeks to answer several key questions: To what extent can counter-terror strategies be read as a form of state terror? What are the features of counter-terrorism that render it so easily reducible to state terror? If state terror is a necessary product of state counter-terrorism, what does this mean for how we resist the war on terror'? How fundamental is state terror to the maintenance of a neo-liberal social order? The chapters analyse this process in a range of contexts including: Spain; the UK and Northern Ireland; the US and Colombia; the US and Puerto Rico; Israel and Gaza; the US and European powers in the Sahara; Indonesia and Timor-Leste and West Papua; Sri Lanka and Tamil Eelam; the UK and immigrants (especially from suspect communities'), political dissidents and asylum seekers. Contributors use the case studies to understand what it means to say that the war on terror' is terror, and explore this in a psychological warfare sense (the creation of widespread fears of state violence in order to achieve political, social or military aims), or in a hegemonic sense (to develop a state of fear of sub-state terrorists' in order to escalate state political violence). This book will be of great interest to students of critical terrorism studies, political violence, war and conflict studies, sociology, international security and IR.
First published in 1990, Richard Clutterbuck's fascinating analysis of European security confronts the problems of internal European community frontiers and technological aids in combating terrorism and international crime. He looks at what the EC countries have done in the past, describes the technology now becoming available, and makes radical proposals for airport security, fighting drugs, and overcoming the intimidation of witnesses and juries. Above all, he foresees he exciting prospect of the USSR, the USA, and a united Europe co-operating for the first time to overcome the common enemies of terrorism and international crime.
This unique book analyzes the discourse of militant organizations affiliated with al-Qaeda. It interrogates the discourse of these extremist organizations, which publish their own newspapers. These publications, widely distributed to the local population, play a critical role in securing and maintaining public support for the militant organizations. The book examines how these organizations discursively construct the socio-political reality of their world, in the process defining the Self and the Other. The Self becomes umma, or the global Muslim community, while the Other becomes the West, including the United States, Israel, and India. This book presents an analysis of three historical moments-the assassination of al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden, the controversial YouTube video Innocence of the Muslims, and the shooting of the Pakistani child activist and Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai. This analysis reveals the discursive strategies used by the militant organizations to create what Foucault calls regimes of truth and articulate identities of the Self and the Other. The first of its kind, this book provides an insight into the mind-set of extremists. It presents a picture of the world that extremists construct through their own discourse and explains how extremists try to win the hearts and minds of mainstream Muslims in order to expand their support base, seek donations, and find new recruits. Understanding extremist narratives and the ways they feed the broader militant discourse may yield more meaningful and effective strategies for the West to communicate with mainstream Muslims.
Terrorism suffers the fate of many issues receiving wide media coverage: it is much discussed but little understood. First published in 1990, this book develops a clear conceptual framework which will enable the reader to come to a better assessment of the exact extent and nature of the threat posed by terrorism and of the measures appropriate to combating it. With numerous case studies including the British in Northern Ireland and the Americans in the Middle East, the author gives a comparative survey of counter-terrorism in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
This book investigates terrorism and anti-terrorism as related and interacting phenomena, undertaking a simultaneous reading of terrorist and statist ideologists in order to reconstruct the 'deadly dialogue' between them. This work investigates an extensive array of violent phenomena and actors, trying to broaden the scope and ambition of the history of terrorism studies. It combines an extensive reading of state and terrorist discourse from various sources with theorizing of modernity's political, institutional and ideological development, forms of violence, and its guiding images of self and other, order and disorder. Chapters explore groups of actors (terrorists, pirates, partisans, anarchists, Islamists, neo-Nazis, revolutionaries, soldiers, politicians, scholars) as well as a broad empirical source material, and combine them into a narrative of how our ideas and concepts of state, terrorism, order, disorder, territory, violence and others came about and influence the struggle between the modern state and its challengers. The main focus is on how the state and its challengers have conceptualized and legitimated themselves, defended their existence and, most importantly, their violence. In doing so, the book situates terrorism and anti-terrorism within modernity's grander history of state, war, ideology and violence. This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies, political violence, sociology, philosophy, and Security Studies/IR in genera Mikkel Thorup is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and the History of Ideas, University of Aarhus, Denmark.
This edited volume brings together both western and non-western approaches to counter-terrorism in the post-9/11 era. This multi-cultural study of counter-terrorism strategies identifies common lessons from failed and successful attempts to counter the terrorist threat and provides guidelines for an effective counter-terrorism strategy. The book explores the changing dynamics of terrorism from a range of perspectives - from the global threat posed by home-grown terrorism in North Africa and the larger security dimensions in the Middle East, to the various strategies employed by western and non-western societies in their efforts to develop effective counter-terrorism strategies. Core themes in the book include the divergent dynamics of the phenomena categorised under the 'terrorism' label, and the domestic, national and regional variants of international terrorism. As such, the book offers in-depth analysis of the relationship between the local and the global, both in the root causes of, and responses to, terrorism since 9/11. This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism and political violence, security studies and IR. Asaf Siniver is Lecturer in International Security in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham.
This book examines how governments can weaken the regenerative capabilities of terrorist and insurgent groups. The exploration of this question takes the form of a two-tier examination of three insurgent actors whose capacity to regenerate weakened in the past: the Front de liberation du Quebec (FLQ) of Canada, the Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional - Tupamaros (MLN-T) of Uruguay and the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) of Northern Ireland during the mid-1970s. At the first level of its examination, the book investigates the extent to which the regenerative capacities of the FLQ, MLN-T, and PIRA weakened because of an increase in attrition and a decrease in recruitment. The primary objectives of this analysis are to uncover whether a declining intake of recruits played a lesser, equal, or greater role than a burgeoning loss of personnel in weakening the capacities to regenerate of the three insurgent actors; and, in turn, to shed greater light on the broader validity of the prevailing view in conflict studies that a decrease in recruitment is more important than an increase in attrition in effecting the corrosion of an insurgent actor's capacity to regenerate. At the second level of its exploration, the book assesses the effectiveness of five of the most prominent policy prescriptions in the literature and insurgent recruitment and attrition: ameliorating grievances, selective repression, discrediting insurgent ideology, improving intelligence collection, and restricting civil liberties This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism and counter-terrorism, conflict studies, strategic studies and security studies in general. Cameron Crouch is currently an Analyst at Allen Consulting Group, an Australian economics and public policy consulting firm. He has a PhD from the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at The Australian National University.
In recent years, senior policy officials have highlighted increased signs of convergence between terrorism and unconventional (CBRN) weapons. Terrorism now involves technologies available to anyone, anywhere, anytime, deployed through innovative solutions. This indicates a new and more complex global security environment with increasing risks of terrorists trying to acquire and deploy a CBRN (Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear) attack. This book addresses the critical importance of understanding innovation and decision-making between terrorist groups and unconventional weapons, and the difficulty in pinpointing what factors may drive violence escalation. It also underscores the necessity to understand the complex interaction between terrorist group dynamics and decision-making behaviour in relation to old and new technologies. Unconventional Weapons and International Terrorism seeks to identify a set of early warnings and critical indicators for possible future terrorist efforts to acquire and utilize unconventional CBRN weapons as a means to pursue their goals. It also discusses the challenge for intelligence analysis in handling threat convergence in the context of globalisation. The book will be of great interest to students of terrorism studies, counter-terrorism, nuclear proliferation, security studies and IR in general. |
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