Assassination as a political act has a long history, predating
the murder of Julius Caesar and continuing into our own time. The
murder of the mighty has long fascinated artists and rebels but
only rarely has it been studied in a scholarly manner. In Assassin,
J. Bowyer Bell combines existing historical evidence with years of
personal interviews with terrorists in Africa, the Middle East, and
Europe. The result is an incisive study of that enigmatic figure,
the revolutionary killer.
As Bell makes clear, the motives of the actors, and
effectiveness of assassination, vary widely across time and place.
Assassination in many parts of the world has not only been a normal
political act, rational, explicable, but also often effective, in
some cases taking fewer lives in the transfer of power than an
election. Likewise, there have been all kinds of
assassins--personal, psychopathic, professional, ranging from
lonely failures trying to make their mark to authorized agents of
the state.
Using the assassination of Henry IV of France as a historical
backdrop, Bell writes about contemporary political murder from the
perspective of one who has studied the subject of political
violence for decades. Bell has met with or known well the
perpetrators, conspirators, and intended victims of assassination
who have escaped. His interviewees include a radical Irish
revolutionary leader, an American Arabist diplomat, a spokesman for
the PLO, and the president of a Mozambique liberation movement. The
itinerary of his investigative journeys covers most of the
flashpoints of contemporary political violence.
The people and places studied here at firsthand are engaged in
a deadly game. The attrition rate is often high, the power
fleeting, and the consequences often unforeseen. If past is
prologue, assassination is to be with us for years to come. The
volume will be essential reading for those engaged in the
prevention of political violence and terror as well as historians
and political scientists.
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