This book constitutes a journey into the obscure field of sectarian-guided discourses of radical Islamist groups. It provides new insights into the ideological mechanisms utilized by such organizations to incite sectarian conflicts and recruit local and foreign guardians to their alleged cause. This book examines diverse aspects and dimensions of the discourses of Sunni-based ISIS and Shia-based al-Hashd al-Shaabi and explores manipulative and ideological discursive strategies utilized by media outlets associated with these groups. It delves into linguistic and contextual activities, implicit and explicit messages within the discourses of various media outlets operating in the heart of the Middle East. It also scrutinizes and explains aspects of politicization, religionization and sectarianization within the media discourse of terrorist groups in the digital era.

This volume provides insights on how recruitment patterns develop for two related types of criminal networks: organized crime and terrorism. It specifically explores the social, situational, psychological, and economic drivers of recruitment. Although organized crime networks and terrorism networks can differ in underlying goals and motivations, this volume demonstrates common drivers in their recruitment, which will provide insights for crime prevention and intervention. The goal of the book is to explore the current knowledge about these common drivers, as well as highlight emerging research, to identify and prioritize a research agenda for scholars, as well as policymakers. The research presented in this work aims to fill existing gaps in the knowledge of recruitment to both organized crime and terrorism. For each area, it provides a systematic review of the existing research on social, psychological, and economic drivers of recruitment. It then presents findings from independent original research aimed to explore new ground not covered in these previous studies. The contributions to this volume were the result of a research project funded by a European Union Horizon 2020 grant, and present a diverse, international mix of expertise and cases. It will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, as well as related fields such as sociology, psychology, and international relations. Chapter 13 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Following up on Donna Starr-Deelen's previous book Presidential Policies on Terrorism: From Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama (Palgrave, 2014), this book compares and contrasts the approach of the Obama administration with the Trump administration regarding national security and counter-terrorism. It provides an overview of counter-terrorism in the Obama era and then moves to the rise of ISIS and the Syrian civil war, ending with an analysis of the new Trump administration's national security policies.

External Dimension of the European Union's Critical Infrastructure Protection Programme: From Neighboring Frameworks to Transatlantic Cooperation provides the basis, methodological framework, and first comprehensive analysis of the current state of the external dimension European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection. The challenges at the EU level are multidimension insofar as identifying, designating and protecting critical infrastructures with the ultimate goal of harmonizing different national policies of the Member States and creating the identity of the European Union in this arena. Modern society has become so reliant on various sectors of critical infrastructure-energy, telecommunications, transport, finance, ICT, and public services-that any disruption may lead to serious failures that impact individuals, society, and the economy. The importance of critical infrastructures grows with the industrial development of global and national communities; their interdependence and resiliency is increasingly important given security threats including terrorism, natural disaster, climate change and pandemic outbreak In the area of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Resilience, the European Union is constantly committed to setting the objectives for the Member States. At the same time, the European Commission promotes the importance of a common approach to Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP), and ensure cooperation beyond the borders of the Union, while also cooperating with neighboring countries, including those soon willing to join the European Union. This book has been structured and written to contribute to current critical infrastructures, resilience policy development and discussions about regional and international cooperation. It serves as a reference for those countries willing to initiate cooperation and that therefore demand deeper knowledge on the security cultures and frameworks of their potential partners. Features: Provides an unprecedented analysis of the national frameworks of 14 neighboring countries of the EU, plus the United States and Canada Overcomes the language barriers to provide an overall picture of the state of play of the countries considered Outlines the shaping of national critical infrastructure protection frameworks to understanding the importance of service stability and continuity Presents guidelines to building a comprehensive and flexible normative framework Addresses the strategic and operational importance of international co-operation on critical infrastructure including efforts in CIP education and training Provides insight to institutions and decision-makers on existing policies and ways to improve the European security agenda The book explains and advocates for establishing stronger, more resilient systems to preserve functionalities at the local, national, and international levels. Security, industry, and policy experts-both practitioners and policy decision-makers-looking for answers will find the solutions they seek within this book.

This book offers a transnational and transdisciplinary investigation of the causes and consequences of violence, ranging from bullying and hate crimes to revolutions, genocide, and acts of terrorism. Editors James Hawdon, John Ryan, and Mark Lucht bring together empirical investigations of these specific types of violence as well as theoretical discussions of the underlying similarities and differences among these forms of violence to further a comprehensive understanding of the topic. The collection addresses hate crimes committed by one or two individuals, riots, revolutions, and terroristic acts committed by well-organized groups. It also focuses on the perpetrators as well as the targets of violence. While each chapter stands alone as a cutting-edge piece of scholarship, taken together the collection provide a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary approach to group violence. Addressing a phenomenon affecting every area of the modern world, From Bullies to Terrorists: The Causes and Consequences of Group Violence is a valuable resource for sociologists, criminologists, political scientists, behavioral scientists, peace studies scholars, and psychologists."

Fills a conspicuous gap in the literature by providing an authoritative dissection of one of the more prominent features of contemporary terrorism: so-called jihadi snuff videos. Explains how ISIS harnessed social media to manipulate global opinion and communicate a carefully constructed image of the group. Written in a lively and accessible style, it interrogates why some people find terrorist atrocity films both repulsive and irresistible.

Fills a conspicuous gap in the literature by providing an authoritative dissection of one of the more prominent features of contemporary terrorism: so-called jihadi snuff videos. Explains how ISIS harnessed social media to manipulate global opinion and communicate a carefully constructed image of the group. Written in a lively and accessible style, it interrogates why some people find terrorist atrocity films both repulsive and irresistible.

This book explores the online strategies and presence of Salafi-Jihadi actors in the Nordic as well as the international context. Global Salafi-jihadism has been at the epicentre of international focus during the past decade. This book explores how the Swedish and other Nordic Salafi-jihadist sympathisers have used social digital media to radicalise, recruit, and propagate followers in relation to foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs) and online communities. The chapters in this volume unpack different perspectives of Salafi-jihadi communications strategies, as well as how the international Salafi-jihadi community has constantly reconfigured and adapted to changing security conditions. The case studies of the Nordics constitute a microcosm of wider Salafi-jihadi narratives in relation to the rise and fall of the Islamic State's so-called 'digital caliphate'. This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism studies, counter-extremism and counter-terrorism, social media and security studies.

What are hybrid media events? Who creates them and what kind of purpose do they serve in contemporary societies? This book addresses these questions by re-thinking media events in the contemporary digital media environment saturated by intensified circulation of radical violence. The empirical analyses draw on the investigation of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, in 2015 and the global responses those attacks stirred in the media audience. This book provides a new way of thinking about the idea of the hybrid in global media events. The authors give special emphasis to the hybrid dynamics between the different actors, platforms and messages in such events, explaining how global news media, terrorists and political elites interact with ordinary media users in social media. It demonstrates how tweets such as "Je suis Charlie" circulate from one digital media platform to another and what kind of belongings are created in those circulations during the times of distraction. In addition, the book examines how emotions, speed of communication and fight for attention become hybridized in the digital media. All these aspects, the authors argue, shape the ways in which we make sense of global media events in the present digital age. The authors invite readers to critically reflect the technological, economical, political and socio-cultural challenges connected with today's global media events and the ethical encounters they may entail.

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.

An award-winning journalist's extraordinary account of being kidnapped and tortured in Syria by al Qaeda for two years--a revelatory memoir about war, human nature, and endurance that's "the best of the genre, profound, poetic, and sorrowful" (The Atlantic). In 2012, American journalist Theo Padnos, fluent in Arabic, Russian, German, and French, traveled to a Turkish border town to write and report on the Syrian civil war. One afternoon in October, while walking through an olive grove, he met three young Syrians--who turned out to be al Qaeda operatives--and they captured him and kept him prisoner for nearly two years. On his first day, in the first of many prisons, Padnos was given a blindfold--a grime-stained scrap of fabric--that was his only possession throughout his horrific ordeal. Now, Padnos recounts his time in captivity in Syria, where he was frequently tortured at the hands of the al Qaeda affiliate, Jebhat al Nusra. We learn not only about Padnos's harrowing experience, but we also get a firsthand account of life in a Syrian village, the nature of Islamic prisons, how captors interrogate someone suspected of being CIA, the ways that Islamic fighters shift identities and drift back and forth through the veil of Western civilization, and much more. No other journalist has lived among terrorists for as long as Theo has--and survived. As a resident of thirteen separate prisons in every part of rebel-occupied Syria, Theo witnessed a society adrift amid a steady stream of bombings, executions, torture, prayer, fasting, and exhibitions, all staged by the terrorists. Living within this tide of violence changed not only his personal identity but also profoundly altered his understanding of how to live. Offering fascinating, unprecedented insight into the state of Syria today, Blindfold is "a triumph of the human spirit" (The New York Times Book Review)--combining the emotional power of a captive's memoir with a journalist's account of a culture and a nation in conflict that is as urgent and important as ever.

Civic entrepreneurship lies at the heart of the Arab Spring. From the iconic image of an occupied Tahrir Square to scenes of dancing protesters in Syria and politically conscious hip hop in Tunisia, people across the Middle East and North Africa continue to collaborate and experiment their way out of years of dictatorship and political stagnation. "The Future of the Arab Spring" examines the spirit of civic entrepreneurship that brought once untouchable dictators to their knees and continues to shape the region's political, artistic, and technology sectors. Through interviews with some of the region's leading civic entrepreneurs, including political activists, artists, and technologists, Maryam Jamshidi broadens popular understandings of recent events in this misunderstood region of the world.

Features first-hand interviews with some of the most important political, cultural, and economic players on the ground in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, and other Arab Spring countriesOffers a window into a region often misunderstood in the United StatesIlluminates the potential for positive, grassroots change in the social, political, and economic systems of Arab countries"

This collection of essays demonstrates how the security of Americans is potentially threatened by individuals and governments who are engaged in the illicit trade in arms, drugs, and human beings in distant parts of the globe. More than just a threat to Americans, the essays underscore that these activities are often detrimental to the United States interests around the world due to the destabilizing impact that each activity can have on a nation or region. More revealing is how terrorists benefit from this illegal trade, generating critical sources of funding used for everything from recruiting to procurement of weapons and explosives of all types to extend and expand the scope of their struggle. The scope of this work is truly global. Fourteen essays touch on prevailing problems from the Balkans to Southeast Asia and the Pacific; from Africa to the Caribbean, and more. In each essay, the authors explore a problem that not only has direct regional repercussions, but larger international ones as well. The essays present problems that result from these illegal activities as a global epidemic, not simply regionalized problems.

This volume brings together interviews with leading scholars to discuss some of the most important issues associated with radicalization, violent extremism and terrorism. The overall aim of these interviews is to move beyond the 'conventional wisdom' over radicalization and violent extremism best represented by many of its well-known slogans, metaphors, aphorisms alongside various other thought-terminating cliches. A vast range of topics are tackled in these conversations, including issues as diverse as the genealogy of radicalization and violent extremism, the rhetoric of emergency politics ('the language of fear'), the ethics of securitization, mutual radicalization, the challenges arising out of the relationship between cognitive and behavioural radicalization, Islamism bias in research on radicalization, the ethics of espionage (as an integral element of the 'war on terror'), the epistemic dimension of radicalization, the application of the just war conceptual framework to terrorism, and the ethics of exceptional means when addressing security-related issues, to name a few. The unifying assumption of the interviews in the volume is the complex nature of radicalization, violent extremism and conflicting diversity, as well as their interwoven relationship. While radicalization has become one of the 'great buzzwords' of the intelligence and security 'industry', pleas for its very abandonment as a useful analytical category have also started to emerge. This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism studies, radicalisation, violent extremism, security studies and International Relations, in general.

This book examines the development of imperial intelligence and policing directed against revolutionaries in the Indian province of Bengal from the first decade of the twentieth century through the beginning of the Second World War. Colonial anxieties about the 'Bengali terrorist' led to the growth of an extensive intelligence apparatus within Bengal. This intelligence expertise was in turn applied globally both to the policing of Bengali revolutionaries outside India and to other anticolonial movements which threatened the empire. The analytic framework of this study thus encompasses local events in one province of British India and the global experiences of both revolutionaries and intelligence agents. The focus is not only on the British intelligence officers who orchestrated the campaign against the revolutionaries, but also on their interactions with the Indian officers and informants who played a vital role in colonial intelligence work, as well as the perspectives of revolutionaries and their allies, ranging from elite anticolonial activists to subaltern maritime workers.

A number of recent terrorist attacks were committed by young men and women who had radicalized, went to train with IS in the Middle East, then returned to their home country to commit acts of violence. In this text, Phil Gurski examines why some people decide to abandon their homeland to join terrorist groups, and whether they pose a significant threat to their societies if they survive and return. The focus is on Canadians and other Westerners who see violent Jihad as divine obligation, with the intention to challenge the view that foreign fighters are all brainwashed. The book first looks at state motivation for resorting to conflict and the nature of war, including Jihad. It then discusses why Westerners volunteered to join the military in past wars to offer points of comparison before focusing on why some are now going to Iraq and Syria to fight along groups such as Islamic State. This includes a thorough discussion of the increasing participation of women and the debates among extremists on whether they can engage in warfare. Lastly, the threat posed by radicalized fighters when they return home after either training or waging war abroad is examined in detail along with what is done to prevent and counter it. Written in an accessible manner by a reputed expert on terrorism and radicalization, the text will appeal to anyone seeking to understand why people join terrorist groups and the threats they represent to their homeland.

Offers approaches and strategies for combating radicalisation and extremism. The first book to explore cultural identity, acculturation and perceived discrimination of Muslim youth across Western countries in relation to social work. An interdisciplinary resource for those researching and working in social work, psychology, public health, psychiatry, sociology, political science and community development.

This book explains how and why the transatlantic relationship has remained resilient despite persistent differences in the preferences, approaches, and policies of key member states. It covers topics ranging from the history of transatlantic relations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and security issues, trade, human rights, and the cultural sinews of the relationship, to the impacts of COVID-19, climate change, think tanks, the rise of populism, public opinion, and the triangular relationship between the United States (US), Europe, and China. The book also conceptualizes resilience as a quality arising from myriad forms of interdependence. This interdependence helps shed light on the Atlantic partnership's capacity to withstand serious disagreements, such as those that occurred during the Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump presidencies. With a principal focus on the US and Europe, the contributors to the volume also employ Canadian case studies to provide a unique and useful corrective. This book will interest all intermediate and senior undergraduate as well as graduate courses on relations between the US and Europe, American foreign policy, and European Union foreign policy. A specialist readership that includes academic and think tank researchers, policy practitioners, and opinion leaders will also benefit from this timely volume.

This book explains how and why the transatlantic relationship has remained resilient despite persistent differences in the preferences, approaches, and policies of key member states. It covers topics ranging from the history of transatlantic relations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and security issues, trade, human rights, and the cultural sinews of the relationship, to the impacts of COVID-19, climate change, think tanks, the rise of populism, public opinion, and the triangular relationship between the United States (US), Europe, and China. The book also conceptualizes resilience as a quality arising from myriad forms of interdependence. This interdependence helps shed light on the Atlantic partnership's capacity to withstand serious disagreements, such as those that occurred during the Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump presidencies. With a principal focus on the US and Europe, the contributors to the volume also employ Canadian case studies to provide a unique and useful corrective. This book will interest all intermediate and senior undergraduate as well as graduate courses on relations between the US and Europe, American foreign policy, and European Union foreign policy. A specialist readership that includes academic and think tank researchers, policy practitioners, and opinion leaders will also benefit from this timely volume.

Offers new insights into the history of right-wing extremism and violence in Europe, East and West, from 1900 until the present day. Examines various forms of organizational and ideological interconnectedness and what inspires right-wing terrorism. In addition to several empirical chapters on prewar extreme-right political violence, the book features extensive coverage of postwar right-wing terrorism including the recent resurgence in attacks.

This book explores the legal dimension of the Islamic State, an aspect which has hitherto been neglected in the literature. ISIS' dystopian experience, intended as a short-lived territorial and political governance, has been analyzed from multiple points of view, including the geopolitical, social and religious ones. However, its legal dimension has never been properly dealt with in a comprehensive way, assuming as a point of reference both the Islamic and the Western legal tradition. This book analyzes ISIS as the expression of a potential though never fully realized legal order. The book does not describe ISIS' possible classifications according to the standards and the criteria of international law, such as its possible statehood or proto-statehood, issues that are however touched upon. Rather, it analyzes ISIS' own legal awareness, based on the group's literary materials, which show a considerable amount of juridical work. Such material, mainly propagandistic in its nature, is essential in understanding which kind of legal order ISIS aimed at establishing. The book will be of interest to students and academics in the fields of Law, International Relations, Political Sciences, Terrorism Studies, Religion and Middle Eastern Studies.

This book reveals how the idea of human security, combined with other human-centric norms, has been embraced, criticized, modified and diffused in East Asia (ASEAN Plus Three). Once we zoom in to the regional space of East Asia, we can see a kaleidoscopic diversity of human security stakeholders and their values. Asian stakeholders are willing to engage in the cultural interpretation and contextualization of human security, underlining the importance of human dignity in addition to freedom from fear and from want. This dignity element, together with national ownership, may be the most important values added in the Asian version of human security.

This book explores the success and failures of the Prevent strategy, which was developed by the UK Government to help stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. It provides a holistic overview of the policy's formation, delivery and impact on Muslim communities.

This book sheds new light on the emergence and fluctuation of Iran's connections with non-state entities in the Middle East. Iran's involvement with political-militant non-states has been at the heart of international and regional security policy for more than three decades. The author analyzes Iran's non-state foreign policy by focusing on specific geopolitical and geocultural threats and opportunities that pushed Tehran to build strategic ties with the Iraqi Kurds and the Lebanese Shia. This project will appeal to multiple audiences interested in geopolitics of the Middle East, Iran's foreign policy, and international relations.