From Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author Ron Suskind comes an astonishing investigation of how America lost its way and the nation's daily struggle to reclaim the moral authority upon which its survival depends. Tracking down historic revelations and improbable hope from the Beltway to the farthest corners of the globe, Suskind delivers a stirring and strikingly original portrait of the post-9/11 world.

How does the Taliban wage war? How has its war changed over time? Firstly, the movement's extraordinary military operation relies on financial backing. This volume analyses such funding. The Taliban's external sources of support include foreign governments and non-state groups, both of which have affected the Taliban's military campaigns and internal politics. Secondly, this is the first full-length study of the Taliban to acknowledge and discuss in detail the movement's polycentric character. Here not only the Quetta Shura, but also the Haqqani Network and the Taliban's other centres of power, are afforded the attention they deserve. The Taliban at War is based on extensive field research, including hundreds of interviews with Taliban members at all levels of the organisation, community elders in Taliban-controlled areas, and other sources. It covers the Taliban insurgency from its first manifestations in 2002 up to the end of 2015. The five-month Battle of Kunduz epitomised the ongoing transition of the Taliban from an insurgent group to a more conventional military force, intent on fighting a protracted civil war. In this latest book, renowned Afghanistan expert Antonio Giustozzi rounds off his twenty years of studying the Taliban with an authoritative study detailing the evolution of its formidable military machine.

There are one hundred and forty-three other passengers onboard. What you don't know is that thirty minutes before the flight your pilot's family was kidnapped. For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die. The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane. Enjoy the flight.

Security in the European Union (EU) is an increasingly complex problem, with the spectre of disintegration looming over the Eurozone, and the threat of terrorism, insecurity and the long-term sustainability of food supply and fresh water reaching levels of crisis. This interdisciplinary book provides a unique insight into the multiple security threats that the EU is facing, and gives readers invaluable information about the challenges these pose to the Union. With contributions from scholars of economics, law and political science, The European Union: Facing the Challenge of Multiple Security Threats provides a comprehensive analysis of contemporary security problems for the EU. Focussing on the latter end of the 2010s, this book examines in great detail the impact that developments in the rest of the world has had on the Union?s vulnerable state. Among the key contemporary issues examined are the migration crisis exacerbated by the conflicts in Syria and Libya, the increasingly strained relationship between the EU and Russia as well as the changing circumstances in the EU-US relationship brought on by Donald Trump?s presidency. Tapping into the internal and external causes and impacts of security problems in the EU, this book offers important policy ideas for the future of the Union. It constitutes a vital read for policy makers and advisors in the EU, as well as for scholars of European political science, economics, and law. Contributors include: A. Bakardjieva Engelbrekt, N. Bremberg, M. Eriksson, J. Gullstrand, C. Joergensen, C. Magnusson Sjoeberg, A. Michalski, N. Nilsson, G. Noll,I. OEsterdahl, L. Oxelheim, C. Parker, T. Persson, R. Svensson, C. Wagnsson, S. Widmalm

FALLING: the blockbuster thriller and most explosive global bestseller of 2021 in hardback, now in paperback. You just boarded a flight to New York. There are one hundred and forty-three other passengers onboard. What you don't know is that thirty minutes before the flight your pilot's family was kidnapped. For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die. The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane. Enjoy the flight. 'Amazing . . . Intense suspense, shocks and scares plus chilling insider authenticity make this one very special' LEE CHILD 'FALLING is the best kind of thriller (for me as a reader anyway). Characters you care deeply about. Nonstop, totally authentic suspense' JAMES PATTERSON 'Attention, please: T. J. Newman has written the perfect thriller! GILLIAN FLYNN, #1 bestselling author of Gone Girl 'Think Speed on a passenger jet - with the cockpit dials turned up to supersonic' IAN RANKIN 'Stunning and relentless. This is Jaws at 35,000 feet' DON WINSLOW 'The best thriller I've read in years. Buckle up' ADRIAN MCKINTY 'A jet-propelled thriller that will have you in its grip from first page to last. A truly astonishing debut and an incredible work of pure suspense' STEVE CAVANAGH 'With characters you'll root for and a plot that dips and bounces like a plane hitting turbulence, this thrill ride is impossible to put down' Daily Mail 'A scorching thriller' Evening Standard 'Newman's [flight attendant] background means Falling brings a freshness and depth to the genre' The Guardian 'Gripping from the first sentence, this thriller is like no other' OK! Magazine 'A remarkable debut' The Sunday Times

The future of American leadership in the Asia-Pacific under the Trump administration appears uncertain. In this timely book, Michael Heazle and Andrew O?Neil have brought together contributors from across the globe to explore the commitment of Australia and Japan to US leadership in this region, and how this commitment may impact on often tense relations between China and the US. China's Rise and Australia?-Japan?-US Relations discusses the strategic post-war presence of American leadership in Asia, and examines the influence on the region?s geopolitics. This book allows readers to understand how and why China is challenging this external engagement, and conversely why Australia and Japan want to maintain a commitment to US input; their perceptions of American leadership are critical indicators of the prospects for change in the region. This is a vital book for security and international relations scholars, researchers and experts, as it provides detailed analyses of current relations between countries in the Asia Pacific and the US, as well as giving a thorough look into what the future is likely to hold in terms of US commitment in the region. Contributors include: Z. Cooper, I. Hall, R. Hanada, M. Heazle, V. Jackson, R. Kersten, S. Lee, S. Mori, A. O'Neil, M. Rapp-Hooper, R. Sahashi

The shift in the U.S. global role precipitated by the events of September 11, 2001although the events were unexpectedwas a long time in the making. In this challenging work, Gilbert Achcar analyzes how this shift came about and examines its fateful consequences.

Achcar'sClash of Barbarismstraces the rise of militant and anti-Western Islamic fundamentalism to its roots in U.S. policies aimed at control of the oil reserves of the Middle East, and above all, Saudi Arabiathe "Muslim Texas." Achcar examines the political premises of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda and show how these led to the massive miscalculation of the September 11 attacks, with results both politically counterproductive and morally reprehensible.

The major result of this miscalculation has been to complete a shift from the vision of a world order based on international law and respecting the rights of strong and weak nations alike, announced by George Bush, Sr., in 1991, to the world order being created by the administration of George W. Bush today, in which the United States asserts its own power and pursues its interests without regard for law or rights. In this context, we are living through a "clash of barbarisms" indeed.

This important and timely work is already scheduled for publication in French, English, German, Turkish, and Korean. It draws on first-hand knowledge of the Middle East, but looks beyond immediate events to clarify their geopolitical bases.

This book investigates abductions, hostage taking, beheadings, and global jihad influences in four theatres in the Middle East over the last 25 years (1980-2005): Israel (as a part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq. It includes discussion of the William Buckley, William Higgins and "Iran gate" abductions. The "Nahshon Waxman" affair -- the Israeli soldier abducted and murdered by HAMAS in 1994 -- is presented as a case study in understanding the four major phases of an abduction -- preparation and planning; carrying out the abduction; negotiations; and the rescue attempt. Terrorist organisations use abduction as a tool for promotion of their and their patrons' interests. Examination of Middle East abductions, and the relations/correlations between Islamic terrorist organisations and Iran, demonstrates Iran's role as a terror supporting state, and the promotion of Iranian interests by its terrorist surrogates. The research examines the challenge posed by terrorist organisations for countries whose citizens have been abducted and the answers to that challenge, and provides theoretical classifications of the terror phenomenon in general and abductions/beheadings in particular.

The authoritative collection includes a number of seminal papers relating to the field of terrorism and human rights. Professor Scheinin has selected readings covering a variety of topics, including detention and extraordinary rendition, targeted killings, freedom of expression, privacy and terrorist listings. Along with an original introduction by the editor, this important and topical volume will be an invaluable source of reference for researchers, students, academics and practitioners interested in the field of terrorism and human rights.

In February 2014, al-Qaida issued a statement that shocked the entire Jihadi movement. For the first time in its history, the group declared that a local affiliate, the Islamic State in Iraq, was no longer part of al-Qaida. The renegade Iraqi group, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had expanded its operations to Syria, taking over the regional branch Jabhat al-Nusra; but in the process, the group had defied orders from al-Qaida's amir, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Islamic State's actions, and increasingly aggressive posture towards fellow Jihadis, eventually ignited a Jihadi civil war--a period defined by internal tensions that ultimately turned global. With devastating impact, this fitna left the Jihadi movement more polarised and fragmented than ever, seriously threatening its internal cohesion. 'Jihadi Politics' presents the first exhaustive account of infighting within the global Jihadi movement. Based on years of digital anthropology, hundreds of primary documents, and interviews with Jihadis, it offers an unprecedented glimpse into historic and current conflicts between and within Jihadi groups. This thorough examination of the years 2014-2019 offers a more nuanced understanding of the current state of Jihadism, with important insights into its future evolution--including Islamic State's role in Afghanistan.

An eye-opening account of the British terror attacks you've never heard of-because the perpetrators were caught in time. Since 2017, the UK has seen fifteen terrible terrorist attacks. But the atrocities on our evening news are the tip of a vast iceberg. Security services are striving to contain a staggering 3,000 jihadists, far-right extremists and other potential threats. We are in a new age of terror, with self-radicalising, hard-to-categorise individuals planning violence-but each one caught by the British state tells us something about British society. For every successful plot in the five years since Westminster Bridge, more than twice as many have been foiled. Some were thwarted by nerve-wracking undercover operations; others were narrowly averted by heroic citizens, or ruined by the absurd mistakes of would-be attackers. Invariably, the all-too-human stories of these failed terrorists reveal the true picture of UK extremism. Through interviews with senior counter-terror figures and astonishing court testimony, Plotters unpacks how and why British terror attacks happen-and don't. From dating websites and prison cells to Telegram networks and Tesco knives, Lizzie Dearden's deep dive offers one disturbing certainty: the plotters will keep coming. To confront them, we need to understand them.

The summer of 2014--when the Islamic State seized Mosul, Iraq's second city; captured vast swathes of eastern Syria; and declared itself a latter-day Caliphate--marked a turning point in the history of photography, one that pushed its already contested relationship with reality to its very limits. Uniquely obsessed with narrative, image management and branding, the Islamic State used cameras as weapons in its formative years as a Caliphate. The tens of thousands of propaganda photographs captured during this time were used to denote policy, to navigate through defeat and, perhaps most importantly, to construct an impossible reality: a totalising image-world of Salafi-Jihadist symbols and myths. Based on a deep examination of the 20,000 photographs Charlie Winter collected from the Islamic State's covert networks online in 2017, this book explores the process by which the Caliphate shook the foundations of modern war photography. Focusing on the period in which it was at its strongest, Winter identifies the implicit value systems that underpinned the Caliphate's ideological appeal, and evaluates its uniquely malign contribution to the history of the photographic image. The Terrorist Image travels to the heart of what made the Islamic State tick during its prime, providing unique insights into its global appeal and mobilisation successes.

This edited translation of Katutugu Yoshida's Jiyuno Nigaiaji analyses the gradual process of reform in Taiwan over the past 100 years. It pays particular attention to the dilemmas, compromises and pitfalls that have faced reformists as they have strived to bring democratic change under a series of brutal dictatorships. The author discusses the historical background to Taiwan's current constitutional issues and its difficult relationship with the People's Republic of China. It explores in detail the way in which local political activism has transformed national politics, providing original analysis of democratic political thought in East Asia and a rich explanation of the social, historical and political context of democratization in Taiwan. The book makes a significant theoretical contribution to the literature on political reform by using the Taiwanese context to explore debates between reformists and revolutionaries and to consider the development of the concept of the right to self-determination. This challenging and stimulating book will strongly appeal to scholars and students with an interest in Asian studies, politics, public policy and public choice.

Since September 11, 2001, the pressure on Al Qaeda has increased. Training sanctuaries and havens have been eliminated, and numerous fighters of the organization have been killed, captured or are in hiding. Today, Al Qaeda can be understood - according to many analysts - much more as an ideological platform than an operative terror organization: Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri cannot provide tactical leadership. But they pose a new, more virtual threat insofar as recruitment, training and indoctrination, as well as propaganda, have moved to small cell operations in virtually every country, under the Al Qaeda ideological banner. ... The stark fact is that the execution of the global war on terrorism has not decreased international terrorism directed against the West. In view of this apparent failure of present strategies, the editors have sought the opinions of eight distinguished scholars and experts in the field to reflect on the following questions: What additional actions are required in counterterrorism policy to reverse the increase in terror-directed activities? What are the main shortcomings of current policy initiatives? And, what policy recommendations can they make as a result of recent developments in counterterrorism theory and new data on terror perpetrators and incidents? Their answers set out in this volume provide important contributions - academic, scientific, and practical - to the debate on how to effectively counter terrorism, which methods to pursue, and which means to apply. ... The volume is structured in three parts: Possible anticipatory actions in the context of counterterrorism and prevention; the question of reasonable reaction to a perceived or real threat; and discussion on the effects of an attack and how to deal with them.

War in the post-9/11 world is far different from what we expected it be. Counterinsurgency and protracted guerrilla warfare, not shock and awe, are the order of the day. David Kilcullen is the world's foremost expert on this way of war, and in The Accidental Guerrilla, the Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq surveys war as it is actually fought in the contemporary world. Colouring his account with gripping battlefield experiences that range from the jungles and highlands of South and Southeast Asia to the mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to the dusty towns of the Middle East and the horn of Africa, The Accidental Guerrilla will, quite simply, change the way we think about war. While conventional warfare has obvious limits, Kilcullen also stresses that neither counterterrorism nor traditional counterinsurgency is the appropriate framework to fight the enemy we now face. Certainly, traditional counterinsurgency is more effective than counterterrorism when it comes to entities like Al Qaeda, but as Kilcullen contends, our current focus is far too narrow, for it tends to emphasize one geographical region and one state. The current war presents a much different situation: stateless insurgents and terrorists operating across large number of countries and only loosely affiliated with each other.

This book investigates abductions, hostage taking, beheadings, and global jihad influences in four theatres in the Middle East over the last 25 years (1980-2005): Israel (as a part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq. It includes discussion of the William Buckley, William Higgins and "Iran gate" abductions. The "Nahshon Waxman" affair -- the Israeli soldier abducted and murdered by HAMAS in 1994 -- is presented as a case study in understanding the four major phases of an abduction -- preparation and planning; carrying out the abduction; negotiations; and the rescue attempt. Terrorist organisations use abduction as a tool for promotion of their and their patrons' interests. Examination of Middle East abductions, and the relations/correlations between Islamic terrorist organisations and Iran, demonstrates Iran's role as a terror supporting state, and the promotion of Iranian interests by its terrorist surrogates. The research examines the challenge posed by terrorist organisations for countries whose citizens have been abducted and the answers to that challenge, and provides theoretical classifications of the terror phenomenon in general and abductions/beheadings in particular.

The Management of Savagery of tells the story of the parallel rise of international jihadism and Western ultra-nationalism. Since Washington's secret funding of the Mujahideen following the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970s, America has supported extremists with money and hardware, including enemies such as Bin Laden. The Pentagon's willingness to make alliances abroad have seen the war coming home with inevitable consequences: by funding, training, and arming jihadist elements in Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya since the Cold War and waging wars of regime change and interventions that gave birth to the Islamic State. Meanwhile, Trump's dealings In the Middle East are likely only to exacerbate the situation further. Blumenthal excavates the real story behind America's dealing with the world and shows how the extremist forces that now threaten peace across the globe are the inevitable flowering of America's imperial designs of a national security state. And shows how this has ended with the rise of the Trump presidency.

A history of Reading's iconic gaol: architectural landmark, cultural emblem and symbol for a community determined to cherish the town's heritage. Layers of history and art are carefully peeled back as Peter Stoneley reveals its past as architectural showcase for Sir George Gilbert Scott's decorative (and expensive!) style, location for experiments in prison reform, training ground for the leaders of the Irish Independence movement and, of course, the inspiration for Oscar Wilde's famous Ballad of Reading Gaol. Bringing the narrative right up to the present day with the discussions over its future use, the impact of the ArtAngel exhibition and Banksy's graffiti, this book is a timely platform for the building to tell us its story.

The evolving field of the economics of terrorism has been and continues to be the subject of much research. Professor Enders, in this authoritative research review, charts the development of this topic over the past century. The areas discussed include incentive regulation, competition in generation, market power, transmission and system operation as well as retail competition and future developments.

By day, Julia Ebner works at a counter-extremism think tank, monitoring radical groups from the outside. But two years ago, she began to feel she was only seeing half the picture; she needed to get inside the groups to truly understand them. She decided to go undercover in her spare hours - late nights, holidays, weekends - adopting five different identities, and joining a dozen extremist groups from across the ideological spectrum.

Her journey would take her from a Generation Identity global strategy meeting in a pub in Mayfair, to a Neo-Nazi Music Festival on the border of Germany and Poland. She would get relationship advice from 'Trad Wives' and Jihadi Brides and hacking lessons from ISIS. She was in the channels when the alt-right began planning the lethal Charlottesville rally, and spent time in the networks that would radicalise the Christchurch terrorist.

In Going Dark, Ebner takes the reader on a deeply compulsive journey into the darkest recesses of extremist thinking, exposing how closely we are surrounded by their fanatical ideology every day, the changing nature and practice of these groups, and what is being done to counter them.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'The farewell calls from the planes... the mounting terror of air traffic control... the mothers who knew they were witnessing their loved ones perish... From an author who's spent 5 years reconstructing its horror, never has the story been told with such devastating, human force' Daily Mail This is a 9/11 book like no other. Masterfully weaving together multiple strands of the events in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Fall and Rise is a mesmerising, minute-by-minute account of that terrible day. In the days and months after 9/11, Mitchell Zuckoff, then a reporter for the Boston Globe, wrote about the attacks, the victims, and their families. After further years of meticulous reporting, Zuckoff has filled Fall and Rise with voices of the lost and the saved. The result is an utterly gripping book, filled with intimate stories of people most affected by the events of that sunny Tuesday in September: an out-of-work actor stuck in an elevator in the North Tower of the World Trade Center; the heroes aboard Flight 93 deciding to take action; a veteran trapped in the inferno in the Pentagon; the fire chief among the first on the scene in sleepy Shanksville; a team of firefighters racing to save an injured woman and themselves; and the men, women, and children flying across country to see loved ones or for work who suddenly faced terrorists bent on murder. Fall and Rise will open new avenues of understanding for everyone who thinks they know the story of 9/11, bringing to life - and in some cases, bringing back to life - the extraordinary ordinary people who experienced the worst day in modern American history. Destined to be a classic, Fall and Rise will move, shock, inspire, and fill hearts with love and admiration for the human spirit as it triumphs in the face of horrifying events.