Rather than mark the end of conflict, the end of World War II began a half century of ideological, political, military, economic struggles, and many with century-old antecedents. This work brings together in encyclopedic format most of the major events of the last half century that can be classified as conflict. While war is the ultimate conflict, the volume includes assassinations, coups, insurgency, terrorism, massacres, and genocide. It provides detailed information on the people, places and events that have produced conflict and its resolution since 1945. Many entries trace the antecedents of events back through history to illustrate continuity and change. The troubled Middle East and Africa, for instance, are seen today as the result of tensions that have developed over decades, of colonialism, exploitation, and ethno-religious antagonism. The reader will be able to understand the backgrounds of the individual players and gain a better understanding of why conflicts occur and how they can be resolved.

Taking a global and interdisciplinary approach, the Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories provides a comprehensive overview of conspiracy theories as an important social, cultural and political phenomenon in contemporary life. This handbook provides the most complete analysis of the phenomenon to date. It analyses conspiracy theories from a variety of perspectives, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. It maps out the key debates, and includes chapters on the historical origins of conspiracy theories, as well as their political significance in a broad range of countries and regions. Other chapters consider the psychology and the sociology of conspiracy beliefs, in addition to their changing cultural forms, functions and modes of transmission. This handbook examines where conspiracy theories come from, who believes in them and what their consequences are. This book presents an important resource for students and scholars from a range of disciplines interested in the societal and political impact of conspiracy theories, including Area Studies, Anthropology, History, Media and Cultural Studies, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology.

'For those of us who have to live with terrorism, when we leave home in the morning there is no guarantee that we will come back.' Thus Lakshman Kadirgamar, Sri Lanka's Foreign Minister, foreshadowed his own assassination in 2005. He was an astute and brave thinker and practitioner on many key issues in international politics. Long before 9/11 he warned Western democracies that they were too passive about the activities on their soil of foreign terrorist movements and their front organizations. He was a strong advocate of democracy and human rights, conducting the first-ever Amnesty investigation into the problems of a particular country - Vietnam. He was uniquely effective in countering the propaganda campaigns of the separatist Tamil Tigers in his native Sri Lanka - the movement which ultimately took his life. This definitive work explores the continuing relevance of his ideas for the modern world. Democracy, Sovereignty and Terror presents Kadirgamar's distinctive voice in his major speeches. It also offers a convincing picture, by those who knew him, of a scholar-statesman who was both a realist and an idealist. He showed that these approaches can be combined in both thought and action.

Saudi Arabia influences American policy through both conventional and unconventional methods, ranging from lobbying and endowments to think tanks, policy centers, universities, and workshops for schoolteachers, all due to the petro-dollars that have been generated from America's addiction to foreign oil. With chapters written by long-time experts in the fields of national security, foreign policy, education, and law, this book uses first-hand accounts to explore the Saudis' vast grip. It addresses how Saudi influence has eased the rise of domestic terrorism as well as a promulgation of pernicious ideas regarding American foreign policy. All this has produced a philosophy of moral equivalency, mitigating against a sense of American exceptionalism or a moral clarity of America's unique mission in the world.

Proscribing peace offers a systematic examination of the impact of proscription on peace negotiations. By introducing the concept of 'linguistic ceasefire', Haspeslagh adds to our understanding of the timing and sequencing of peace processes in the context of proscription. With relevance for more than half of the conflicts around the world in which an armed group is listed as a terrorist organisation, 'linguistic ceasefire' helps to explain why certain conflicts remain stuck in the 'terrorist' framing, while others emerge from it. International proscription regimes criminalise both the actor and the act of terrorism. Proscribing peace calls for an end to the amalgamation between acts and actors. By focussing on the acts instead, Haspeslagh argues, international policy would be better able to consider the violent actions both of armed groups and those of the state. By separating the act and the actor, change - and thus peace - become possible. -- .

The global pandemic has offered extraordinary opportunities for extremists and terrorists to mobilize themselves and revive as more powerful actors in the security landscape. But could these threat groups actually capitalize on the coronavirus crisis and advance their malevolent agendas? Utilizing the largest COVID-19-related terrorism database, the book presents an analysis built upon a quantitative and qualitative comparison between the nature of both the radical Islamist and the far-right-related threat in 2018 and 2020. It provides, for the first time, a true picture of novel trends since the pandemic outbreak.

This book provides the first sustained critical engagement with the legacy of the 9/11 attacks twenty years on. Featuring a wide range of established and emerging voices in critical terrorism studies, the book explores the deeply political character of remembering and forgetting, and the racialised, gendered and other contexts within which this takes place. A lively and provocative conversation between feminist, postcolonial, post-structural, literary and critical perspectives, 9/11 Twenty Years On asks what ‘the day that changed the world’ means for critical terrorism studies today, and how we might choose to mark those events in the future. It will be essential reading for upper-level students, researchers and academics in the fields of International Relations, Security Studies and Political Science in general, as well as anyone interested in critical approaches to terrorism, political violence, and memory. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies on Terrorism.

Terrorist organizations and international criminal networks pose an increasingly severe danger to US security. Who are these rivals who threaten us? What do they want to achieve? This book looks at diverse groups such as Al Qaeda, its jihadist fellow travelers as well as Hezbollah and its terrorist sponsor, Iran. Other chapters examine Hamas, Jemaah Islamiyah, the FARC, the Mexican drug cartels, and the criminal gang, Mara Salvatrucha 13. Pakistan, where jihadists pose an extreme security threat, is another focus as is a chapter on terrorist WMD threats. This look at sub-state rivals is recommended to all serious students of international security.

As international terrorism has grown over the past decades, airlines and airports have become increasingly popular targets for violent attacks and hijackings. In this volume, Peter St. John provides a survey of international air piracy and airline terrorism, and of the ways airline professionals and governments are coping, or attempting to cope, with the crisis. St. John not only deals with the history, politics, psychology, and sociology of air piracy, but also provides an assessment of the threat to commercial aircraft and ways to counter the danger. The principal theme he develops is that security for airports and aircraft can be achieved, and the fear of terrorists overcome, if Western countries cooperate in installing effective security policies and plans. St. John begins his work with a two-chapter history of the evolution of hijacking, tracing the five-to-seven-year cycles that seem to have emerged and the growth of the politically motivated hijacking that has become the most persistent and dangerous form. He next analyzes the eight types of individuals who have hijacked aircraft in the past, their different motives, and how they can be identified by airport security and flight crews. A major chapter discusses the politics of Western governments toward highjacking in Europe and North America, and identifies the best and worst airports around the globe. A seven-stage system of security that will probably be a necessity for the 1990s is also proposed. Ensuing chapters address the problem of the hijacked plane, offering advice for passengers and crew members who are victims of hijacking, and for government behavior, which often does more to encourage air terrorism than to preventit. Finally, St. John looks to the future of airport security and describes the need for a concentrated attempt at all levels of national and international government to develop effective defenses against air piracy. A group of appendices is also included, documenting the principal hijacks of the past forty years as well as sabotage attempts on commercial aircraft. This work will be an important reference tool for professionals in security services and the airline and airport management field, and for students in political science and international relations courses. It will also be a valuable addition to college, university, and public libraries.

In seeking to evaluate the efficacy of post-9/11 homeland security expenses--which have risen by more than a trillion dollars, not including war costs--the common query has been, "Are we safer?" This, however, is the wrong question. Of course we are "safer"--the posting of a single security guard at one building's entrance enhances safety. The correct question is, "Are any gains in security worth the funds expended?"
In this engaging, readable book, John Mueller and Mark Stewart apply risk and cost-benefit evaluation techniques to answer this very question. This analytical approach has been used throughout the world for decades by regulators, academics, and businesses--but, as a recent National Academy of Science study suggests, it has never been capably applied by the people administering homeland security funds. Given the limited risk terrorism presents, expenses meant to lower it have for the most part simply not been worth it. For example, to be considered cost-effective, increased American homeland security expenditures would have had each year to have foiled up to 1,667 attacks roughly like the one intended on Times Square in 2010--more than four a day. Cataloging the mistakes that the US has made--and continues to make--in managing homeland security programs, Terror, Security, andMoney has the potential to redirect our efforts toward a more productive and far more cost-effective course.

This book examines the intersecting forces of nationalism, terrorism, and patriotism that normalize an acceptance of the global war on terror as essential to maintaining freedom and democracy as defined by white nation-states. Readers are introduced to speculative ethnography: an experimental methodology that bends time and space through the practice of avant-garde poetics. This study conceptualizes terrorism as a place of colonial encounters between soldiers, insurgents, civilians, and leaders of nation-states. The tactics of suicide bombings employed by the Tamil nationalist movement, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, are juxtaposed with drone strikes in asymmetric warfare where violence becomes a means of dialogue. Each chapter weaves seemingly disparate narratives from multiple experiences and sites of war, inviting readers to witness the condition of getting lost in that willful attachment to killing and being killed in service of patriotic pride and national belonging.

Lone-actor terrorism has unfortunately been on the rise in recent decades, causing major adverse societal effects in the United States and abroad. While lone-actor terrorists can be driven by a range of identifiable factors such as extremist views or availability of weapons, the process of becoming and identifying these individuals is deeply complicated. Lone-Actor Terrorism: An Integrated Framework outlines the societal causes and impacts of lone-actor terrorism from a multi-disciplinary, international perspective. Drawing together seasoned insights across clinical and forensic mental health, sociology, criminology, law, military and intelligence, and security, this volume explores patterns common to lone-actor terrorists across four major sections: historical and case examples, clinical aspects, non-clinical professional and allied perspectives, and assessment and potential approaches to reducing the risk of lone-actor terrorism. Contributors describe both individual clinical factors affecting lone-actors, including developmental aspects, mental health variables, psychoactive drugs, psychometrics and linguists, along with broader social factors such as propaganda and rhetoric, social media, and geographical considerations. This volume concludes with a review of the available threat and risk assessment tools applicable to lone-actor terrorism cases and provides guidance for professionals seeking to reduce risk. While there is no uniform approach to the concept of lone-actor terrorism, this edited volume provides a diverse yet authoritative overview for those interested in better understanding the threats of lone-actor terrorism and its professional response.

The global trend of increasing violence against the press has spurred research interest into the questions of where, why, and how communicators are repressed. As a result, scholarship has demonstrating that hybrid regimes - which mix undemocratic and democratic elements - constitute a specifically dangerous and lethal context for these actors.  Decentralized countries, in which some subnational political elites have retained authoritarian features, have been identified as the most perilous context for communicators. However, despite the burgeoning interest in illiberal practices and repression on the subnational level, it is still relatively unexplored how and why subnational political elites repress communicators within their multi-level setting. The author argues that communicators in subnational undemocratic regimes who can spread the scope of compromising information beyond subnational boundaries can cause uncertainties for subnational undemocratic regimes. The book explores how the political elites of these regimes repress these communicators in response.

This book is a guide to international human rights law as it applies to situations of armed conflict, to counter-terrorism measures and to any other situation of actual or potential violence requiring security measures. These situations can lead to some of the most fundamental human rights being put in danger of being violated. These include the right to life, the prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, enforced disappearance, all the rights relating to detention and due process of law, and the freedoms most commonly affected by armed conflict and counter-terrorism. The book begins with a presentation on the application of human rights to such situations and an explanation of the regime of limitations and derogations. After an overall description of the relationship between human rights law, on the one hand, and international humanitarian law and international counter-terrorism measures, on the other, the book concentrates on the rights themselves. Each chapter presents the relevant treaty provisions and explains the interpretation of the rights by reference to the case law and general comments of these treaty bodies. The book concludes with a section on how international human rights law protects certain vulnerable and disadvantaged populations in such situations.

This book examines why Turkey has become infamous as a repressor of news media freedom. For the past decade or so it has stood alongside China as a notorious jailer of journalists - at the same time as being a candidate state of the EU. The author argues that the reasons for this conundrum are complex and whilst the AKP is responsible for the most recent illiberality, its actions should be taken in the wider context of Turkish politics - and the three way battle for power which has been raging between Kemalists, Kurds and Islamists since the republic was founded in 1923. The AKP are the current winners of this tripartite power struggle and the securitisation of journalists as terrorists is part of that quest. Moreover, whilst securitisation is not new, it has intensified recently as the number of the AKP's political opponents has proliferated. Securitisation is also a means of delegitimising journalism - and neutralizing any threat to the AKP's electoral prospects - whilst maintaining a democratic facade on the world stage. Lastly, the book argues that whilst the AKP's securitisation of news began as a means of quashing the reporting of illiberality against wider political targets, since 2016 it has become a target in its own right. In the battle for power in Turkey, journalism is now one of the many losers.

Islamophobia has been on the rise since September 11, as seen in countless cases of discrimination, racism, hate speeches, physical attacks, and anti-Muslim campaigns. The 2006 Danish cartoon crisis and the controversy surrounding Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg speech have underscored the urgency of such issues as image-making, multiculturalism, freedom of expression, respect for religious symbols, and interfaith relations.
The 1997 Runnymede Report defines Islamophobia as "dread, hatred, and hostility towards Islam and Muslims perpetuated by a series of closed views that imply and attribute negative and derogatory stereotypes and beliefs to Muslims." Violating the basic principles of human rights civil liberties, and religious freedom, Islamophobic acts take many different forms. In some cases, mosques, Islamic centers, and Muslim properties are attacked and desecrated. In the workplace, schools, and housing, it takes the form of suspicion, staring, hazing, mockery, rejection, stigmatizing and outright discrimination. In public places, it occurs as indirect discrimination, hate speech, and denial of access to goods and services.
This collection of essays takes a multidisciplinary approach to Islamophobia, bringing together the expertise and experience of Muslim, American, and European scholars. Analysis is combined with policy recommendations. Contributors discuss and evaluate good practices already in place and offer new methods for dealing with discrimination, hatred, and racism.

The objective of this work is to provide an analysis of the legislative approaches to counter-terrorism and human rights in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The text is aimed at lawyers and practitioners within and outside common law nations. Although the text analyses the subject within the four jurisdictions named, many parts of the book will be of interest and relevance to those from outside those jurisdictions. Considerable weight is placed on inter- tional obligations and directions, with a unique and hopefully useful feature of the text being the inclusion and consideration of a handbook written by me on human rights compliance when countering terrorism (set out in Appendix 4 and considered in Chap. 13). A signi?cant part of the research undertaken for this work was as a result of my being awarded the International Research Fellowship, Te Karahipi Rangahau a Taiao, an annual fellowship generously funded by the New Zealand Law Foun- tion. The New Zealand Law Foundation is an independent trust and registered charitable entity under the Charities Act 2005 (NZ). This project would not have been possible without the Law Foundation's award, which allowed me to undertake research and associated work over reasonably lengthy periods of time in Australia, Canada, Israel, England, Austria, Switzerland and Finland. It is not just the g- graphical location of this work that was made possible, however.

The rules of state responsibility have an important but under-utilized role to play in the terrorism context. They determine both whether a breach of primary obligations has occurred, through the rules of attribution, and the consequences which flow from that breach, including the possible adoption of responsive measures by injured states. This book explores the substantive international legal obligations and rules of state responsibility applicable to international terrorism and examines the problems and prospects for effectively holding states responsible for internationally wrongful acts related to terrorism. In particular, it analyses the way in which the implementation of state responsibility for international terrorism may be affected by the self-determination debate and any applicable lex specialis (including the jus in bello), including any sub-systems of international law (such as the WTO), as well as by the interaction between determinations of individual criminal responsibility and the implementation of state responsibility.
The international community has responded to the threat of international terrorism through both a security/jus ad bellum paradigm and by creating an international criminal law framework to address the conduct of non-state terrorist actors. The secondary rules of state responsibility analyzed in this book cut across both approaches as they apply regardless of states breaching their primary obligations relating to terrorism through participation in or a failure to prevent or punish terrorism. While this book identifies a number of problems in implementing state responsibility for international terrorism, it also highlights the prospects for the rules of state responsibility to make a crucial contribution to maintaining respect for obligations which lie at the very foundations of the contemporary international legal order, and to restoring the relationships between states if those obligations are breached.

This book challenges the rhetoric linking 'war on terror' with 'war on human trafficking' by juxtaposing lived experiences of survivors of trafficking, refugees, and labor migrants with macro-level security concerns. Drawing on research in the United States and in Europe, Gozdziak shows how human trafficking has replaced migration in public narratives, policy responses, and practice with migrants and analyzes lived experiences of (in)security of trafficked victims, irregular migrants, and asylum seekers. .

This book brings together research that covers perspectives and case studies on terrorism, radicalisation and countering violent extremism (CVE). Written by experts involved in these issues at the grassroots, the book bridges the academic-practitioner gap in the field. The proliferation of academic studies and conferences devoted to these subjects has meant that policymakers and practitioners in the same fields sometimes struggle to digest the sheer volume of academic output. The same critical questions keep coming up, but it is debatable the level to which there have been tangible improvements to our real state of knowledge: knowledge in especially in terms of what "best practices" exist in the field (and what can be translated, versus what approaches remain context and location specific). Written in an accessible manner for the general interested reader, practitioners, and policymakers in the field, this volume comprises edited versions of papers presented at CVE workshops run by the Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS) at the S.Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2016 and 2017.

Targets of Terror: Contemporary Assassination, aims to address the repercussions of assassination as a tactic of terrorism and delineate post-assassination political and societal outcomes across target type. Assassination of heads of state, such as John F. Kennedy and Yitzhak Rabin, are rare events but the political murders of police personnel, local government officials, politicians, and journalists occur frequently. These 'softer' targets (low-level and mid-level government officials, for instance) are often targeted during broader campaigns of terrorist violence and the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) records a significant number of these assassination events-16,246 to be exact-between 1977 and 2017. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are utilized in this project-using survival analysis to examine the span of time from a terrorist assassination to potential shifts in state political institutions. Changes in political institutions in authoritarian, mixed or tumultuous regimes are compared against democratic regimes (utilizing Polity score changes from the Polity IV Index as the indicator of institutional change and detailed further below). Repressive and non-repressive regimes are delineated and changes in political institutions are examined in order to determine the extent to which the type of assassination target may or may not be linked to political institutional change. The assassinations and target data is derived from the GTD and repression levels are measured using the Political Terror Scale (PTS). Establishing differences in post-assassination political outcomes across regimes and target types provides a baseline study upon which to build future examinations of the types and severity of risks to governmental institutions as well as to the broader society.

Conventional wisdom holds that weak and failing states are the source of the world's most pressing security threats. After all, the 9/11 attacks originated in an impoverished, war-ravaged country, and transnational crime appears to flourish in weakly governed states. However, our assumptions about the threats posed by failing states are based on anecdotal arguments, not on a systematic analysis of the connections between state failure and transnational security threats. Analyzing terrorism, transnational crime, WMDs, pandemic diseases, and energy insecurity, Stewart Patrick shows that while some global threats do emerge in fragile states, most of their weaknesses create misery only for their own citizenry. Moreover, many threats originate farther up the chain, in wealthier and more stable countries like Russia and Venezuela. Weak Links will force policymakers to rethink what they assume about state failure and transnational insecurity.