Our understanding of terrorism has greatly benefited from the insights of experts at work in universities across the country. A sampling of some of their books follows.
Neil J. Smelser‘s The Faces of Terrorism: Social and Psychological Dimensions (Princeton University Press, $29.95, 288 pages) is a well-reasoned and comprehensive discussion about terrorism and counterterrorism.
Mr. Smelser, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, is considered one of America’s foremost social scientists. This is evident in his discussion of the causes of terrorism, how terrorist behavior is influenced by ideology and the processes of recruitment into terrorism, which for modern-day groups, such as al Qaeda, is influenced by personal and kinship ties.
With regard to recruitment, the author is influenced by the work of psychiatrist and terrorism expert Marc Sageman, who first showed how social affiliations were central to luring operatives into al Qaeda and its cellular affiliates. Mr. Smelser also discusses the factors contributing to the decline of terrorist groups, the dependence by terrorist groups on constant publicity, measures that are effective in countering terrorism and the impact of terrorism on a targeted society.
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To understand how terrorist groups operate, it is crucial to know how they go about gaining recruits and how they maintain themselves as viable organizational networks and expand their activities.
Elena Mastors, a professor at the Naval War College, and Alyssa Deffenbaugh, a program analyst at ManTech International Corporation, provide such insight in The Lesser Jihad: Recruits and the Al-Qaida Network (Rowman & Littlefield, $24.95, 174 pages, paper). For the sake of full disclosure, I had been asked by the publisher to review the manuscript prior to its publication and was so impressed with the quality of the authors’ analysis that I wrote a complimentary blurb, which appears on the book’s back cover.
Focusing primarily on the al Qaeda network, the authors examine “why, how, and where individuals” become involved in that network, which they define as “financial backers and fund-raisers, operators, logisticians, recruiters, trainers, and leaders.” It is important to uncover such recruitment patterns in order to enable counterterrorism agencies to derive potential strategies for dealing with the “entry” points into their networks.
To understand how individuals are recruited into al Qaeda it is necessary to examine the diversity of “the individuals, their experiences, and their reasoning and justification for participation in the network.” Al Qaeda, as the authors explain, is not a monolithic organization but a series of diverse networks bound together by common extremist ideologies and motivations.
The authors’ findings are worth noting. Recruits into al Qaeda’s network come from different geographical places, ages, and occupational and religious backgrounds. As a result, while their personal, social, economic and political motivations for joining al Qaeda may differ, “religion is intricately involved in each one of these motivational categories.”
An individual’s motivation to join al Qaeda’s network is reinforced by various methods such as speeches, fatwas, religious opinions and instructions, Internet websites, chat rooms, magazines, cassettes and DVDs, and personal approaches. “These methods serve to ‘educate’ individuals about what behavior [al Qaeda] considers proper, political events, social policy, and religion, among other issues and subjects, including the network’s exploits.”
In the conclusion, the authors propose five alternative strategies for the U.S. government to “dissuade and counter” al Qaeda’s recruitment efforts: Encouraging the reform of Middle East regimes, changing U.S. Middle East policy, waging an “information” campaign against al Qaeda, targeting the group, and promoting greater interaction between Americans and Middle Easterners.
By focusing on the al Qaeda network’s recruitment processes, “The Lesser Jihad” is an important contribution to our understanding of the measures required to counter and defeat such a terrorist network.
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Another way to counter terrorism is by understanding the geographical environments that produce terrorist rebellions. Harm de Blij’s Why Geography Matters: Three Challenges Facing America, Climate Change, The Rise of China, and Global Terrorism (Oxford University Press, $30, 320 pages) helps us understand the role geography (distant regions and foreign cultures) plays in the emergence of different types of terrorist insurgencies. Mr. de Blij is a distinguished professor of geography at Michigan State University.
Although terrorism forms only one of three threats discussed in the book, the two chapters on terrorism and insurgency are worth reading for their insight on the role of what he calls the “geography of rage” in widening the circle of Islamic extremism from the Middle East to other regions where Muslim communities exist, such as Southeast Asia, Central Asia, West Africa, Western Europe and North America.
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Criminal smuggling and trafficking networks transcend geographical boundaries, so they make ideal partners for terrorist groups seeking arms, funds and logistical means to carry out their worldwide operations and attacks. The nexus between organized crime and terrorism is the subject of Transnational Threats: Smuggling and Trafficking in Arms, Drugs, and Human Life (Praeger Security International, $49.95, 256 pages), edited by Kimberley L. Thachuk.
Ms. Thachuk, a senior fellow at National Defense University, has assembled a group of experts to discuss how the functional issues of narcoterrorism, human trafficking, nuclear smuggling, crime and small arms trafficking apply to the geographical regions of the Balkans, Central Eurasia, China, Japan, South Asia, Africa, South America, the Caribbean and the United States.
The book begins with Ms. Thachuk’s incisive overview of transnational threats and concludes with a chapter by Rhea Siers on the implications of such threats for U.S. national security. This volume is an important contribution to our understanding of the convergence of transnational crime and terrorism.
Joshua Sinai is a program manager for counterterrorism studies at the Analysis Corporation, in McLean, Va.
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