Reality Of Terrorism Research Articles

What Should This Fight Be Called? Metaphors of Counterterrorism and Their Implications.

This monograph examines from a psychological perspective the use of metaphors in framing counterterrorism. Four major counterterrorism metaphors are considered, namely those of war, law enforcement, containment of a social epidemic, and a process of prejudice reduction. The war metaphor is as follows: Wars are fought by states; the enemy is thus an identifiable entity whose interests fundamentally oppose your own. The conflict is zero-sum-the outcome will be victory for one side or the other-and there is no compromise. The war metaphor is totalistic and extreme. Arguably, it was adopted in light of the immensity of damage and national hurt produced by the 9/11 attack. It has insinuated itself into the public discourse about counterterrorism, and it has guided policy, but it has also met challenges because of lack of fit and the availability of counteranalogies with different lessons of history. Some of the drawbacks of the war metaphor are addressable in the law enforcement metaphor of counterterrorism. Unlike war's special status and circumscribed duration, law enforcement is an ongoing concern that must compete for resources with other societal needs. A major advantage of law enforcement over warfare is its focused nature-targeting the actual terrorists, with less likelihood of injuring innocent parties. Yet despite its advantages, the law enforcement metaphor exhibits a partial mismatch with the realities of terrorism. Its complete and uncritical adoption may temporarily hamper terrorists' ability to launch attacks without substantially altering their motivation to do so. The public health epidemiological model was usefully applied to the epidemic of terror that followed the 9/11 attacks. It utilizes a partition between (a) an external agent, (b) a susceptible host, (c) an environment that brings them together, and (d) the vector that enables transmission of the disease. In the specific application to jihadist terrorism, the agent refers to the militant Islamist ideology, the susceptible host refers to radicalizable Muslim populations, the environment refers to conditions that promote the readiness to embrace such ideology, and the vectors are conduits whereby the ideology is propagated. The epidemiological metaphor has its own advantages over the war and law enforcement metaphors, but also limitations. Whereas the latter metaphors neglect the long-range process of ideological conversion and radicalization that creates terrorists, the epidemiological metaphor neglects the "here and now" of counterterrorism and the value of resolute strikes and intelligence-gathering activities needed to counter terrorists' concrete schemes and capabilities. Framing counterterrorism as the process of prejudice reduction addresses the interaction between two communities whose conflict may breed terrorism. This framing shifts the focus from a unilateral to a bilateral concern and acknowledges the contribution to intergroup tensions that the party targeted by terrorists may make. A major tool of prejudice reduction is the creation of positive contact between members of the conflicted groups. Efforts at prejudice reduction via positive contact need to take place in the context of a larger set of policies, such as those concerning immigration laws, educational programs, and foreign policy initiatives designed to augment the good-will-generating efforts of optimal-contact programs. For all its benefits, the prejudice-reduction framework is also not without its drawbacks. Specifically, the positive-contact notion highlights the benefits of mere human interaction; it disregards differences in ideological beliefs between the interacting parties, thereby neglecting an element that appears essential to producing their estrangement and reciprocal animosity. Too, like the epidemiological metaphor, the prejudice-reduction framing takes the long view, thereby neglecting the "here and now" of terrorism and the need to counter specific terrorist threats. Thus, each of the foregoing frameworks captures some aspects of counterterrorism's effects while neglecting others. Accordingly, an integrated approach to counterterrorism is called for, one that exploits the insights of each metaphor and avoids its pitfalls. Such an approach would maximize the likelihood of enlightened decision making concerning contemplated counterterrorist moves given the complex tradeoffs that each such move typically entails.

Connectivity among Terrorist Groups: A Two Models Business Maturity Approach

The reality of terrorism has become ubiquitous. Terrorist groups continue to garner front-page exposure, which contributes to their agenda, while stories of hostage dilemmas, suicide bombings, assassinations, and a variety of nefarious criminal activities lead the unsuspecting to wonder, “What's next?” In order to begin to understand terrorism researchers should first understand how these terrorist groups operate and, far more importantly, what motivates others to co-operate with terrorists. No terrorist group operates in isolation. It is assured a priori that terrorist groups have to collaborate with other entities in order to further their agenda. In the conventional sense, terrorists have limited resources, limited capabilities, and limited reach. Without co-operation and support in support of criminal enterprises, they would function in isolation; their impact would be isolated. This article outlines two models that demonstrate how cooperation between terrorists and recognized, albeit criminal, institutions contribute to terrorist successes. The first, a resource model, outlines some of the resources that bind two or more terrorist groups. The second, an alliance model, layers different levels of collaborative engagements between terrorist groups and these institutions. Both models are descriptive in nature and contribute to an understanding of how terrorist groups must engage in the fundamentals of established economic practices in order to succeed.

M. Deflem, (ED) 2004. * Terrorism and counter-terrorism: criminological perspectives

This beautifully written collection of essays examines terrorism and counter-terrorism from several perspectives: theoretical; methodological; counter-terrorism and security; and the construction and reality of terrorism. Beginning to address the questions of what terrorism is, and how it can be addressed—or not—the book provides a useful and highly readable overview for practitioners and theoreticians alike. The first essay by Donald Black contains a thoroughly conclusive definition of what terrorism is and how it can be recognized in practice: ‘Pure terrorism is unilateral self-help by organized civilians who covertly inflict mass violence on other civilians’ (p.10). This definition comprises characteristics such as self-help, subversive social control, recurrent mass violence, applying a standard of collective liability (indiscriminately attacking civilians rather than military targets), one-sided conflict, organization, and secrecy, which he considers to be fundamentally technology-enabled and thus a feature of modern civilized society. Black considers terrorism to be a form of interminable quasi-warfare...

Designing real terrorism futures

In July 2003, the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) was described as terrorism futures, and immediately cancelled. While PAM was not in fact designed to be terrorism futures, I here consider five design issues with implementing and using real terrorism futures: combinatorics, manipulation, moral hazard, hiding prices, and decision selection bias. As neither these nor other problems seem insurmountable, terrorism futures appears to be a technically realistic possibility.

Social, Psychological, and Psychiatric Interventions Following Terrorist Attacks: Recommendations for Practice and Research

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the constant threat of imminent terrorist activity have brought into the forefront the urgent need to prepare for the consequences of such attacks. Such preparation entails utilization of existing knowledge, identification of crucial gaps in our scientific knowledge, and taking steps to acquire this knowledge. At present, there is little empirical knowledge about interventions following terrorism and absolutely no available empirical knowledge about interventions following bioterrorism. Therefore, this paper reviews knowledge about (1) reactions following the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City and other places, (2) the practical experiences accumulated in recent years in countries (eg, Israel) that have had to cope with the threat of bioterrorism and the reality of terrorism, and (3) interventions for acute and chronic stress reactions following other types of traumatic events (eg, rape, war, accidents). Our review found several treatments efficacious in treating individuals for acute and chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) related to other traumatic events that will likely be efficacious in treating PTSD related to terrorist attacks. However, there were significant gaps in our knowledge about how to prepare populations and individuals for the possibility of a terrorist attack and what interventions to apply in the immediate aftermath of such an attack. Accordingly, we conclude the paper with several questions designed to guide future research.

Security, Democracy, and the Rhetoric of Counter-Terrorism

The “war on terrorism” is both a series of institutional practices and an accompanying set of political narratives. Employing the methodology of critical discourse analysis, the study suggests that the language of the “war on terrorism” is not simply a neutral or objective reflection of policy debates and the realities of terrorism and counter-terrorism; rather, it is a very carefully and deliberately constructed public discourse that is specifically designed to make the war seem reasonable, responsible, and inherently “good.” More importantly, as it is currently constructed, the language and practice of the “war on terrorism” poses severe challenges to the democratic state, including destabilizing the moral community, weakening democratic values and civic culture, undermining the legitimacy of democratic institutions, and preventing the articulation of potentially more effective counter-terrorism approaches.

The September 11 Tragedy and the Muslim World: Living with Memory and Myth

The September 11 attacks on the United States have resurrected old fears, created new myths, and constructed enduring images and memories. These terrorist attacks also demonstrate that September 11 trauma was not simply a transient story, but rather it was rooted in deep and widespread resentment toward U.S. foreign policy. With the intensifying Palestinian crisis, new myths and memories have domi nated the Muslim world. While the September 11 tragedy brought to mind horrifying images and realities of terrorism, the messy and wan tonly cruel Israeli policies in the occupied territories represent another chapter in the contested narrative about the struggle between two peo ples. The images of the tragic events of September 11 and recurrent suicide bombings in Palestine shape the minds of many in the United States and Israel. Similarly, the memories of the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Leba non' and the 2002 Jenin killings live on in the minds of many Palestinians.

The First (1996) edition of the Senatus consultum

The First (1996) Edition of the Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre: A Review Edward Champlin Werner Eck, Antonio Caballos, and Fernando Fernández, eds. Das Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1996. xiv 1 329 pp. 20 pls. Cloth, DM 142. (Vestigia 48) Can a committee write a report? Yes and no. The question of authorship is relevant as much to the book under review as to the extraordinary text which it presents. The document is a very long Latin inscription (176 lines) recording a decree of the Senate passed late in a.d. 20 after the trial, suicide, and posthumous condemnation of Cn. Calpurnius Piso, the former legate of Syria. Copies began to turn up, all within the boundaries of Roman Baetica, in the late 1980s, one virtually complete, one partial, and fragments of some four or five other versions. Appropriately, their first publication has appeared in two versions, the one under review here in German, the other in Spanish. Most of the material is shared by both volumes, but the German edition adds a concluding chapter on the political importance of the document, while the Spanish version has considerably more on the physical properties of the bronze tablets and on the Spanish historical context—and on it the authors’ names are offered in alphabetical order. The German text scrupulously presents itself throughout as having three authors, and no hint is given as to who was responsible for which section. Let us speculate. The first three chapters, on the origins of the texts, on their physical condition, along with diplomatic transcriptions of each copy, and on the reconstruction and translation of the original text as received in Baetica, may represent the work of a team, but the subsequent chapters (4, prosopographical information; 5, the date of the trial; 6, commentary; 7, the transmission of the text to and within Baetica; and 8, the senatus consultum as political document) all bear the clear imprint of Werner Eck. That is, the prose is lapidary (Eck seems incapable of ambiguity or ellipsis); the erudition is [End Page 117] formidable; the argumentation is thorough, balanced, and imaginative; and the relative rapidity of publication is astonishing. Above all, Eck has made the book a work of truly international collaboration: between 1991 and 1996 he discussed the text at colloquia and at seminars in 38 universities (“among others”); some 60 scholars are thanked for help and criticism; and the notes are replete with specific acknowledgments to these and yet others for written and verbal comments and for reviews of unpublished work. The result is a formidable edition, clearly setting out the terms for future debates. Thus, appropriately for a decree of the Senate, the book is the work of one author, or of three, or of scores: for convenience we will call the author(s) E. As word of the SCPP’s discovery spread, scholarly excitement grew, for two reasons, one historiographical, one historical. Here is a contemporary version of a dramatic crisis familiar from the riveting account in Tacitus (Ann. 2.41–3.19): the bitter enmity between Tiberius’ legate Piso and Tiberius’ nephew and adopted son Germanicus Caesar, the suspicious death of Germanicus in 19, Piso’s trial and suicide, the passions of the plebs, the tensions within the domus Augusta and the Senate, and the brooding ambiguity of the princeps. Hence we can perhaps peer over the shoulder of Rome’s greatest historian in his study as he selects and shapes his material. At the same time, we are also offered a posed, but vivid and detailed, snapshot of power and ideology in the new principate at a time when the roles of the partners in government—that is, the princeps, his colleague (if any), and the Senate—are still being defined and the threat of civil war is still a real terror. And beyond these the document is a trove of information, constitutional, administrative, legal (both private and criminal), economic, linguistic, religious, prosopographical, topographical. To take but one instance, light is cast on several words in the evolving vocabulary of power, for here we find the earliest use of the word donativum in the sense of...

The real state terrorism

Politicians and journalists have described terrorism—acts of terror by those opposed to governments—as the cancer of the modern world. In the 1970s the term international terrorism was devised to describe acts of violence committed by political groups outside the nation in which they primarily operated. At the same time, state terrorism referred to a state that made its resources—financial, political, training, and intelligence—available for terrorists to create political and economic instability in another country. We seem to be living in the age of terrorism. But it's an age filled far less with the terrorism described above, and far more with the terror of war, famine, overpopulation, deadly diseases, and related violence. We should be more concerned with a very different kind of violence: government or state‐organized terrorism.

Terrorism and the State: A Critique of Domination Through Fear.

Preface The Ideology of Terrorism Terrorism and the State Mediaspeak: The Selling of International Terrorism The Real Nuclear Terrorism Racial Terrorism: Apartheid in South Africa "Terrornoia" and Zonal Revolution: The Case of Libya Settler Terrorism: Israel and the P.L.O. Holy Terror: Iran and Irangate Surrogate Terrorism: The United States and Nicaragua Bibliography Index

Conceptualizing the effects of mass‐mediated terrorism

Abstract In summer 1985, a TWA plane was hijacked by Shiite terrorists to Beirut creating what turned to be one of the most impressive spectacles of the mass‐mediated “theater of terror.” After the event the American media were blamed for fanning the crisis atmosphere, giving the terrorists the publicity they craved, abetting the terrorists by reporting U.S. military movements, holding a brutal competition among themselves to get exclusive footage or interviews, harassing the hostages’ families, negotiating directly with the terrorists, milking the hostages still held by the terrorists for political and ideological declarations, and propagandizing the terrorists’ anti‐U.S. and anti‐Israel messages. The resulting debate that followed these accusations, illustrates the lingering argument regarding media and terrorism. While some claim that “the media are the terrorists’ best friends. The terrorist act by itself is nothing. Publicity is all”,1 others argue that the media are avoiding the “real terror” for id...

Terrorism in Context: The Case of the West Bank

While terrorism is probably as old as human violence itself and has never been very rare, we now seem to approach it as if it were an anomaly of human belligerency-as violence that somehow goes beyond the norms of violence. We have hardly grown more moral as a species: certain types of terror, such as torture and genocide, are more common today than they were in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Labeling one's opponent a terrorist is one way to barbarize both his image and his cause. Many world leaders see terrorism as monolithic: that is, they trace all important terrorist actions-either directly or indirectlyto the same source. In the U.S. they are branded as degenerative acts of immoral enemies, often in a manner suggesting that support for such behavior comes from America's arch foe, the U.S. S. R., or one of its client states. The Soviets, in turn, apply the same theory to the U.S. The double standard necessary to maintain this attitude is submerged in the simplistic good vs. evil worldview persistently adhered to in both popular American and Soviet political attitudes. The terror of one's foes is real terror, premeditated and pathological, while that of one's friends is only a temporary aberration, a mistake, to be addressed, if at all, by quiet diplomacy. In this there is a striking resemblance in attitudes between the United States and its major Middle Eastern ally, Israel. Their ideologies differ, but

An Introduction

A garrison is a closely knit and beleaguered society. . . . In such a society the terror is not for the common enemy, even when the enemy is or seems victorious. . . . The real terror comes when the individual feels himself becoming an individual, pulling away from the group, losing the sense of driving power that the group gives him, aware of a conflict within himself. . . . — Northrop Frye, Conclusion to A Literary History of Canada.

The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda

Each of these volumes, in its own way, contributes to a better understanding of the media. Each will certainly find its defenders and detractors. Together they are a trilogy of poetry, polemics and pedantry.

A Source of Terrorism Revealed: The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda. . Edward S. Herman.

A Source of Terrorism Revealed: The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda. . Edward S. Herman.

A Source of Terrorism Revealed: The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda, Edward S. Herman

A Source of Terrorism Revealed: <i>The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda</i>, Edward S. Herman

The Real Terrorists

Review of The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda by Edward S. Herman.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda, by Edward S. Herman

The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda, <i>by Edward S. Herman</i>

Review Essay: The International Network of Terrorism

Claire Sterling's The Terror Network and Edward Herman's The Real Terror Network are reviewed and reactions to the authors' research and subject matter in the scholarly and popular press compared. It is ar gued that Sterling's work suffers from sloppy argument and questionable evidence and a lack of apprecia tion of the interaction between politics and history. Herman's work, an avowedly polemical piece, deserves far more attention that it has thus far received despite some shortcomings in the analysis which at times seem to confuse structural arguments with conspiracy. Both works point to the need to further explore the role of the state in the terror process.

The Secret Life of Federico Fellini

There is a sequence in La Strada that is crucial for our understanding of the films of Federico Fellini. It begins with a wedding celebration taking place in the open air. To one side of a long banquet table, really quite unnoticed by the wedding party, Zampano and Gelsomina are performing one of their tatty numbers, a kind of raggle-taggle conga. Zampano is seated and is playing the drum, his huge form made awkward by the crumpled position necessary for him to hold the drum between his knees, while Gelsomina is performing her stiff little dance. Bowler hat on her head and clown's make-up on her face, she hops about in time to the music, thrusting her arms forward on every fourth beat. All about them both is the litter that is always associated with any festivity in Fellini; and although she is ignored by the wedding party, scarcely noticed by the adult world, while Gelsomina dances, a number of children in the background dance in unison with her. They respond in sympathy to what she is doing and imitate her movements. One of the guests offers Gelsomina some wine which, after a hurried sip, she passes on to Zampano. Then the lady-of-the-house calls them to come and eat, and the sad little performance ends. On her way to the house, however, Gelsomina is led away by the children who have been so attentive to her dancing. There is apparently something that they want her to see. She is led up a narrow flight of stairs by the side of the house and along a network of corridors where she almost loses her way. At one moment we see a little boy dressed in a black cloak gliding along. We've never seen him before in this film and we'll never see him again; but the magical fascination of his sudden appearance holds us for that moment and gives us the sense of something festive about to take place as well as perhaps of something that we can't quite understand. Who is this boy? What is he doing here? What is going on? Gelsomina is then led into a large dark room, all the windows shuttered to keep out the sun, at the end of which crouches Osvaldo, a little boy in a big bed. There are two small mobiles suspended above him, little universes that rotate before his eyes. Indeed, his eyes stare out of his misshaped head, for he is apparently some kind of spastic, in the film regarded as a little idiot boy. The children ask Gelsomina to try and make him laugh, but her imitative bird flutterings only strike more terror into the boy's already terrified eyes. Finally, in a moment impossible to describe without limiting its implications, she draws close to him-he staring in confused terror at her, her own eyes opening wide to receive the full impact of this stare. Then abruptly, she and all the children are chased out of the room by a nun. What is the meaning of this moment in La Strada? What is it that she receives from those wild staring eyes? Is it that in this misformed child she recognizes some affinity with her own gentle strangeness? Un po strana, as her mother described her at the beginning of the film. Or is it that she senses in this blank unmovable face something beyond the powers of her simple goodness to affect in any way? And is it, then, a feeling of real terror that communicates itself to her, the result of a sudden recognition that at the end of long corridors hidden away in some sunless room there might lurk something terrible, something beyond our understanding, something deeply buried away and kept from conscious sight, but something terrifyingly real