Customer Reviews

How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns

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How Terrorism ends by Audrey Kurth Cronin in a well written and well researched book that lays out the intellectual framework and the crucial points leading to the demise of various terrorists organizations. Cronin's work is extremely relevant in the world today as it attempts to illustrate how terrorist organizations end and thus how nations may develop strategies and goals that leads to the demise of the terrorists' organization. One of the major findings that Cronin points out is that less than 5% of all terrorists' campaigns succeed. Killing civilians does not seem to be a promising means to achieve political aims.
Cronin points out six historical ways in which terrorist organizations end: the capture or killing the group's leader, entry of the group into a legitimate political process, achievement of the groups aims, implosion or loss of the groups public support, defeat and elimination by brute force and transition from terrorism to other forms of violence. A chapter of the book is dedicated to each of these findings and is thoroughly detailed through the use of empirical data, case studies, and various graphs to illustrate the author's points.
Some of the findings in the book are quite interesting for example: most terrorist organizations last less than 8 years; killing a terrorists leader may not damage the group as much as arresting him, especially if he is humiliated before the public and sentenced to prison; states negotiate with terrorists because they want the conflict to end, whereas the terrorist organization may not want the same; and finally, terrorists often fail because the violence they perpetrate on the civilian populace they are trying to win over ends up provoking popular revulsion versus popular support. The use of the case studies to point out the strengths and limitations of each of the six ways in which terrorist organizations end clearly and succinctly points out the veracity of the authors points.
The most interesting portion of the book is chapter 7, titled How Al-Qaeda Ends. Cronin points out up front that Al-Qaeda will end without achieving its strategic goals, but along the way she clearly points out how Al-Qaeda is different than most other terrorist organizations. The chapter clearly demonstrates the strengths of Al-Qaeda, it's resilience, methods of recruitment, means of support and communications. What is interesting though is Cronin then demonstrates how Al-Qaeda may end using the six historical ways described earlier in the book. Cronin does not conceive how Al-Qaeda could fully realize their strategic aims because ultimately Al-Qaeda's aims are not clearly articulated and are too broad in context to be achievable.
How Terrorism Ends is a very comprehensive, historical and academically rigorous look at terrorism. Terror campaigns may seem endless, but as Cronin has so accurately depicted, terror campaigns always end and usually not in the favor of the terrorists organization. I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in understanding terrorist's organizations and the political and military means to defeat terrorist's organizations.

If and when the publisher provides the table of contents and a sample chapter (easy to upload using the standard publishing tools offered by Amazon Advantage) or works with Amazon to achieve Inside the Book access, I will consider buying this book.

In the meantime, I will observer that this book has been highly recommended by Berto Jongman, the top European observer of terrorism and the creator of the World Conflict & Human Rights map, and is so featured at Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, where the Amazon reader can find an easy to access section on Jihad and Terrorism with all my reviews on this subject.

My one reservation about this book, lacking a sufficiency of Inside the Book information, is that it appears to assume that if one just does the "right things" such as kill leaders, terrorism will eventually die out. Robert Arkoff would turn in his grave over this thought. Terrorism is a tactic, a manifestation of discontent so grave as to indict the state as a failed state in relation to the needs of the segment adopting terrorism. Hence, this book may be more about doing the wrong things righter instead of doing the right things: assuring every group a prosperous world at peace.

Corruption, not terrorism, is in my view the primary curse of all governments and the global network of interests that seek to optimize wealth for the few at the expense of the many. Terrorism, in my view, is a logical in extremis response, a demand to be taken seriously that governments continue to treat at face value (violent crime) rather than as a root value being expressed (seriously angry people with brains and willpower).

See also:

Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty