Customer Reviews

The New Global Terrorism: Characteristics, Causes, Controls

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I rarely give five stars to anything, but this is quite possibly the best terrorism book ever, at least in terms of the sample of readings. Twenty-one chapters in all, the contributors all being well-known scholars in the political science field mainly. The textbook is very scholarly, divided into three parts, corresponding to the purposes of science: description, explanation, and prescription. Each part is excellent, and the book is well-balanced. Part I (description/characteristics)is a little heavy on the theoretical side, especially where there is some repetitive use of the phrase "post-modern" and exploration of historical side roads, but doesn't devolve into a bunch of navel-gazing over definitions and typologies like so many other books do. One could actually "use" the stuff in Part I, either for further theory development or other grounded purposes. Part II (explanation/causes) is probably what most readers would turn to first. It's nothing more than a collection of writings by all the luminaries in the field: Crenshaw, Wilkinson, Rubenstein, Laqueur, Howell, Juergensmeyer, Lewis, and Gurr. One couldn't ask for a better lineup, and although some of the articles have been previously published, a lot of them look like they were updated and revised for this book. Selection bias is always a possibility with books of this kind, and to be sure, the book is overall critical of mindless understanding approaches to counterterrorism, but not overly concessionistic. Military solutions are discussed, and lesser-known authors like Howell write about darwinistic solutions like letting failed states collapse on their own. However, Part III has counterweighting articles like Falk and Johnson's excellent discussions of why the war on terrorism is a moral war against "evil" (in the non-metaphysical sense). The third part of the book isn't about strategy or grand strategy, as one might expect, but is about tactics and counter-tactics, representing, in short, as good of a primer as any, on the political science approaches to counterterrorism option selection. I highly recommend this little book be read by anyone who wants to quickly become an erudite scholar of terrorism. It's highly educative.

I had to read this for a terrorism class, and this was one of the most boring books I've had to read yet. I'm sure there is some good information in it somewhere, but because it was so boring, I couldn't stay awake to read that good information.

I bought this book for a class in terrorism.It's a well made paperback.It was very informative.Many views on terrorism from different leaders in the field have been compiled.A great idea.But I feel the book is WAY too wordy.I literally had to read it with a dictionary in the other hand.Not bad for people who want to train for a spelling bee or learn new words to dazzle their friends but it really does add a lot of extra time to a reading assignment that you may not have.I would like to say I learned new words from the book but they are really obscure words I will never ever use in day to day conversation and will likely forget...actually I can't even remember them right now.