Different Disciplinary Perspectives on Understanding and Countering Crucial Aspects of Terrorism: The Quest for an Integrated Approach Remains an Ideal

Abstract

Radical, Religious and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism. By Eli Berman. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009. 280 pp., $34.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-262-02640-6). How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns. By Audrey Kurth Cronin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. 330 pp., $29.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-691-13948-7). Targeting Terrorist Financing: International Cooperation and New Regimes. By Arabinda Acharya. New York: Routledge, 2009. 256 pp., $120.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-49807-4). The study of terrorism as a systematic academic field of inquiry is a relatively new field of inquiry. The events of the late 1960s, and particularly the Munich Massacre of 1972, initiated pioneering studies into a form of violence that had a long historical record. But it was not until the events of 9/11 that terrorism studies moved beyond the backburner in a number of disciplines. But even with today's contemporary interest in the topic, the subject of terrorism still is not within the mainstream of the social and behavioral sciences. In large part, this is because the very nature of the topic requires an interdisciplinary approach, and therefore research on terrorism does not have an intellectual home. It still to a large degree lacks unifying theories and approaches that a new generation of scholars, specialists, and policymakers must grapple with. While there have been impressive advances in our substantive knowledge of terrorism and especially advances in methodological approaches to research it, despite all the events of the last decades, a deep and coherent understanding of the nature, dynamics and outcomes of terrorist threats, acts, campaigns and outcomes is still in a formative stage. The following books are representative of the challenges inherent in seeking to understand the multidimensional aspects of a subject that has been both emotionally and intellectually demanding in recent and contemporary times. Each in their own right utilizes different approaches with varying degrees of success to advance our knowledge of terrorism. They also come from a particular culturally oriented approach to the various social and behavioral sciences, whose constructs are ideally universal but must take into account the different cultural milieus that seek to observe, research, and analyze. Moreover, the application of theory in different environments may be questionable when viewed through the prism of an …