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Does Terrorism Work? A History.
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I’m a history professor at Western Washington University. I first got interested in understanding social movements, power, and political violence in the late 1990s and early ‘00s as a young anarchist. Later, while studying history in graduate school, I realized that much of what I thought I knew about the FBI, violence, and radical movements of the 1960s and ‘70s was inaccurate. I don’t have any magic solutions to the problems facing humanity, but I believe that studying history—including the history of political violence—can help us better understand our present moment and how we might build a more just and peaceful world.
Anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani wrote Good Muslim, Bad Muslimshortly after the 9/11 attacks. The book is a rebuttal of the U.S. government’s justifications for the War on Terror and military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which relied heavily on the inaccurate notion that terrorism is a product of anti-modern passions embedded in Islamic culture. Mamdani uses history as a corrective, illustrating how such “culture talk” has deep roots in European imperialism, and how a violent strand of political Islam emerged from modern anticolonial movements in the Middle East and gained global influence amid U.S. covert military operations in the second half of the Cold War, particularly in Afghanistan. I learn something new every time I reread this fantastic book for my U.S. and International Terrorism history course.
In this brilliant look at the rise of political Islam, the distinguished political scientist and anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani brings his expertise and insight to bear on a question many Americans have been asking since 9/11: how did this happen?
Mamdani dispels the idea of “good” (secular, westernized) and “bad” (premodern, fanatical) Muslims, pointing out that these judgments refer to political rather than cultural or religious identities. The presumption that there are “good” Muslims readily available to be split off from “bad” Muslims masks a failure to make a political analysis of our times. This book argues that political Islam emerged…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I’m a history professor at Western Washington University. I first got interested in understanding social movements, power, and political violence in the late 1990s and early ‘00s as a young anarchist. Later, while studying history in graduate school, I realized that much of what I thought I knew about the FBI, violence, and radical movements of the 1960s and ‘70s was inaccurate. I don’t have any magic solutions to the problems facing humanity, but I believe that studying history—including the history of political violence—can help us better understand our present moment and how we might build a more just and peaceful world.
This book turned the field of Terrorism Studies on its head. Historical sociologist Lisa Stampnitzky demonstrates that the legion of terrorism experts who rose to prominence in North America, Western Europe, and Israel in the 1970s were not neutral analysts of political violence. Rather, through their intellectual work, much of it funded with government grants, terrorism scholars helped construct the contemporary meaning of terrorism as a threat to society fundamentally different from other forms of violence, crime, and political activity. This book made it clear that we can’t understand the history of “terrorism” without analyzing the history of the term itself, and how the use of this term in law, academia, politics, international relations, and popular culture has shaped political power and violent conflicts between states and insurgents.
Since 9/11 we have been told that terrorists are pathological evildoers, beyond our comprehension. Before the 1970s, however, hijackings, assassinations, and other acts we now call 'terrorism' were considered the work of rational strategic actors. Disciplining Terror examines how political violence became 'terrorism', and how this transformation ultimately led to the current 'war on terror'. Drawing upon archival research and interviews with terrorism experts, Lisa Stampnitzky traces the political and academic struggles through which experts made terrorism, and terrorism made experts. She argues that the expert discourse on terrorism operates at the boundary - itself increasingly contested - between science…
I’m a history professor at Western Washington University. I first got interested in understanding social movements, power, and political violence in the late 1990s and early ‘00s as a young anarchist. Later, while studying history in graduate school, I realized that much of what I thought I knew about the FBI, violence, and radical movements of the 1960s and ‘70s was inaccurate. I don’t have any magic solutions to the problems facing humanity, but I believe that studying history—including the history of political violence—can help us better understand our present moment and how we might build a more just and peaceful world.
Prior to this book, most works on the long history of terrorism applied contemporary definitions of the term to various incidents throughout world history. Wilson turned the page on this framework.Killing Strangersanalyzes the gamut of political violence in Western Europe and North America since the late eighteenth century to explain how we’ve arrived at a contemporary reality characterized, in part, by recurring fear of impersonal atrocities carried out in public gathering spaces. Wilson shows how, on one hand, the rise of the modern bureaucratic state’s “monopoly” on legitimate force pushed most violent challengers to the fringes of society. On the other hand, various technological innovations—from dynamite and automobiles to commercial airlines and satellite television—offered new possibilities for those intent on violent havoc.
A bewildering feature of so much contemporary political violence is its stunning impersonality. Every major city centre becomes a potential shooting gallery; and every metro system a potential bomb alley. Victims just happen, as the saying goes, to 'be in the wrong place at the wrong time'.
We accept this contemporary reality - at least to some degree. But we rarely ask: where has it come from historically? Killing Strangers tackles this question head on. It examines how such violence became 'unchained' from inter-personal relationships. It traces the rise of such impersonal violence by examining violence in conjunction with changing…
The Guardian of the Palace is the first novel in a modern fantasy series set in a New York City where magic is real—but hidden, suppressed, and dangerous when exposed.
When an ancient magic begins to leak into the world, a small group of unlikely allies is forced to act…
I’m a history professor at Western Washington University. I first got interested in understanding social movements, power, and political violence in the late 1990s and early ‘00s as a young anarchist. Later, while studying history in graduate school, I realized that much of what I thought I knew about the FBI, violence, and radical movements of the 1960s and ‘70s was inaccurate. I don’t have any magic solutions to the problems facing humanity, but I believe that studying history—including the history of political violence—can help us better understand our present moment and how we might build a more just and peaceful world.
The 1970s was a pivotal decade in the history of terrorism and counterterrorism. Airplane hijacking became widespread and widely televised during this period, as did other forms of politically motivated hostage-taking, bombings, and assassinations. Drawing from archival research in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, Zoller explains how states of the Global North responded with efforts at international cooperation, particularly as Palestinian nationalist militants and their allies traversed borders to enact ostensibly anticolonial violence far beyond contested territories in the Global South. International antiterrorism accords met limited success, however, as they frequently conflicted with various states’ geopolitical interests. Zoller demonstrates that by the early 1980s, multilateralism had given way to a militarized form of counterterrorism led by the United States that established a precedent for the post-9/11 War on Terrorism.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, governments in North America and Western Europe faced a new transnational threat: militants who crossed borders with impunity to commit attacks. These violent actors cooperated in hijacking planes, taking hostages, and organizing assassinations, often in the name of national liberation movements from the decolonizing world. How did this form of political violence become what we know today as "international terrorism"-lacking in legitimacy and categorized first and foremost as a crime?
To Deter and Punish examines why and how the United States and its Western European allies came to treat nonstate "terrorists" as a…
I’ve been fascinated by fairytales since I was a little girl, watching Disney movies with my grandparents. As I grew older, I read fairy tales almost insatiably and was also drawn to mythology and folklore of every variety. When I discovered the fantasy genre, in my early teens, it was like coming home…a genre that combined all of the elements I’d grown up devouring: fairytales, mythology, and folklore. My love of fantasy developed my love of portal fantasy—the idea that other realms, other worlds, other dimensions exist, and we can travel between or to them. I wrote my first portal fantasy novel at eighteen and have continued writing fantasy and portal fantasy novels ever since.
Christian/Inspirational fantasy and thriller with a solid portal fantasy plot. I read several Ted Dekker books and series when I was a teen, but this one stood out to me because of the notion of two realms and how a protagonist could be a normal human being in one realm, Earth, and a savior, a leader, a “chosen one” in the other.
Ted Dekker’s bestselling and most beloved series—together in one volume. It’s an epic tale of evil and rescue, betrayal and love, and a terrorist threat unlike anything the human race has ever known.
Thomas Hunter is an unlikely hero who finds himself pulled between two worlds. In our reality, he works in a coffeehouse. In the other, he becomes a battle-scarred general leading a band of warriors known as the Circle.
Every time he falls asleep in one reality, he wakes in the other—and both worlds are facing catastrophic disaster. In one world, Thomas must race to outwit sadistic terrorists…
Like many people, I am deeply troubled by the death and destruction from violent conflict. When I began my graduate work in economics at Cornell University, I was allowed to apply my economics learning to the problem of war. When I began teaching at Holy Cross College, my colleagues encouraged me to offer courses on the economics of war and peace. After many years of teaching, I compiled Principles of Conflict Economics (with John Carter) to serve as a textbook on economic aspects of conflict. I hope the book might encourage other economics professors and students to learn more about war and how to resolve conflicts nonviolently.
I learned a great deal from this book’s insightful and wide-ranging coverage of the motives of terrorists; economic, political, and social causes and effects of terrorism; and government and private-sector counterterrorism efforts.
I especially like the book’s accessible coverage of leading research results in the field including risk factors for terrorism and conundrums associated with policy efforts to stymie terrorism. I loved how the book offered a fruitful blend of theoretical models, data trends, empirical results, and policy perspectives.
The authors are economists, so the book is strongly economic in approach, yet multidisciplinary perspectives are richly woven into the chapters, giving rise to a true “political economy” of terrorism.
The Political Economy of Terrorism presents a widely accessible political economy approach to the study of terrorism. It applies economic methodology - theoretical and empirical - combined with political analysis and realities to the study of domestic and transnational terrorism. In so doing, the book provides both a qualitative and quantitative investigation of terrorism in a balanced up-to-date presentation that informs students, policy makers, researchers and the general reader of the current state of knowledge. Included are historical aspects, a discussion of watershed events, the rise of modern-day terrorism, examination of current trends, the dilemma of liberal democracies, evaluation of…
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
I am an emeritus professor of Russian and modern European history with twenty-five years of teaching and research experience, and I’ve been teaching the history of terrorism for almost that long. I am drawn to the field because it gives me a prism through which to explore nearly every topic in modern history that I’m passionate about: violence, extremism, the growth of the state, the proliferation of modern ideologies, and so on. In fact, I could teach most of my courses, including the survey of European history, almost entirely through the lens of terrorism, which is a sobering thought!
I have taught the history of terrorism for over twenty years, and I think this is the single best introduction to terrorism available. When people ask me for one book to read on the subject, this is my obvious choice.
Hoffman is one of the most respected scholars of terrorism. In this book he includes a brief survey of the history of terrorism as a springboard to examining how it manifests in the world today. The writing is accessible, and the takeaways are clear.
Bruce Hoffman's Inside Terrorism has remained the seminal work for understanding the historical evolution of terrorism and the terrorist mind-set. In this revised third edition of his classic text, Hoffman analyzes the latest developments in global terrorism, offering insight into new adversaries, motivations, strategies, and tactics. He focuses on the rise of ISIS and the resilience of al-Qaeda; terrorist exploitation of the Internet and embrace of social media; radicalization of foreign fighters; and potential future trends, including the repercussions of a post-caliphate ISIS. Hoffman examines the demographics of contemporary terrorist leaders and recruits; the continued use of suicide bombers; and…
A Chicago writer, I've always been drawn to quirky books. My first novel, The Prospect of My Arrival, was a finalist in Amazon's novel contest and centers on a human embryo that is allowed to preview the world. My current work-in-progress is nonfiction. The Invention of Fireflies is a memoir of the magical and monstrous moments of my life. Varied day jobs have included being a professional cuddler, web designer, and caregiver. Affirmative Entertainment represents me for possible movie/TV projects. My work was selected for inclusion in the HBO New Writers Project, The Norton Introduction to Literature, many textbooks, and anthologies.
If ever there was a book that cast a spell over me, it was Incendiary. The novel is written as a letter to Osama Bin Laden; the letter writer is a woman whose husband and son were killed in a terrorist attack. How male author Chris Cleave manages to speak in the voice of a heartbreakingly traumatized, possibly drunk woman is a true act of ventriloquism. I could imagine the whole thing performed on a black box stage as a monologue and it would be riveting. The heroine's rage is understandable throughout the course of the story. What is surprising is her grace, her sense of humor, even her tenderness toward the man who destroyed her family. At one point she urges him to "stop making boy-shaped holes in the world."
You aren't stupid. You know there's no such thing as a perfect mother. Plenty of other books will tell you there is, but this one won't lie to you.
I was weak and I cheated and I was punished, but my god I loved my child through all of it. Love means you never break, and it means you're stronger than the things they do to you. I know this is true because I have been through fire, and I am the proof that love survives.
I am not a perfect mother but I will tell you the perfect truth,…
I am an emeritus professor of Russian and modern European history with twenty-five years of teaching and research experience, and I’ve been teaching the history of terrorism for almost that long. I am drawn to the field because it gives me a prism through which to explore nearly every topic in modern history that I’m passionate about: violence, extremism, the growth of the state, the proliferation of modern ideologies, and so on. In fact, I could teach most of my courses, including the survey of European history, almost entirely through the lens of terrorism, which is a sobering thought!
I return over and over to Zulaika and Douglass’ book as the most important and valuable text in the field that has come to be called critical terrorism studies. They ask a simple question: How can terrorism, something that kills relatively so few Americans–less in a typical year than are killed by lightning or choke to death on dinner–come to be seen as a fundamental threat to the very foundation of our life?
They weave an answer out of history, media studies, and sociology that is jargon-free enough to be accessible to an educated reader but sophisticated enough to get you rethinking everything you thought you knew about terrorism. That’s what it did for me.
Terror and Taboo is about the mythology of terrorism; it is an exploration of the ways we talk about terrorism. It offers incontestable evidence to support the idea that we give power to terrorism by the way we write and talk about it. According to Zulaika and Douglass, we make terrorism worse by the way we represent it in the media and in everyday conversation. Through their examination of terrorism, they propose to remove the taboos surrounding terrorism. Terror and Taboo is full of examples to ground the authors premise, ranging from specific examples, such as tendency to talk more…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I'm a scholar with a deep interest in the critical study of propaganda and its role in shaping public perceptions of terrorism, particularly in Spain. My passion for this topic stems from the recognition that propaganda is pervasive in today’s world and that accusations of terrorism are often deployed strategically to delegitimize a society’s political opponents.
By examining how groups are framed as “terrorists” and unlearning the biased narratives that surround them, we can begin to understand their true nature beyond superficial prejudice. This perspective drives my commitment to exploring media, political discourse, and historical context critically, making me well-positioned to recommend works that illuminate the complex interplay between propaganda, terrorism, and societal perception.
It offers a fresh, bold alternative to mainstream terrorism studies, challenging the dominant state-centric frameworks.
I appreciate how it gives voice to marginalized perspectives, particularly those critical of Western policies. Its interdisciplinary approach helped me link terrorism with issues like identity, language, and empire.
It’s not just a handbook—it’s a manifesto for rethinking security.
This new handbook is a comprehensive collection of cutting-edge essays that investigate the contribution of Critical Terrorism Studies to our understanding of contemporary terrorism and counterterrorism.
Terrorism remains one of the most important security and political issues of our time. After 9/11, Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) emerged as an alternative approach to the mainstream study of terrorism and counterterrorism, one which combined innovative methods with a searching critique of the abuses of the war on terror. This volume explores the unique contribution of CTS to our understanding of contemporary non-state violence and the state's response to it. It draws together…
