A Review of: “Hillel Schenker and Ziad Abu-Zayyad. Islamophobia and Anti–Semitism,”

Although foreign fighting is hardly new, scholarly research on the phenomenon is only a decade old. Since 2005, there has also been a dramatic rise in the number of transnational insurgents fighting in the Middle East, and they appear to have become the face of the jihad movement. However, of the dozens of foreign fighter contingents around the world in recent decades, only about half have been Islamists. In this article, I contend that the difference between the other contemporary and historical foreign fighter groups and the jihadis is not one of mobilization or effectiveness, but of persistence. Most other foreign fighters demobilized at the end of their conflicts and reintegrated. I argue that the primary factor that accounts for the persistence of the jihadis was the policies of their home and host states that prevented reintegration and created cohorts of stateless, and now professionalized, actors who perpetuate in weakly-governed conflict zones. In presenting this argument, I first attempt to establish a common working definition of foreign fighter based on the first decade of discourse in this emerging field of study, and present a comparative examination of the largest recorded foreign fighter mobilizations.     

A Review of: “Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. Uwe Steinhoff. On the Ethics of War and Terrorism. Seth G. Jones. Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Ekaterina Stepanova. Terrorism in Asymmetrical Conflict: Ideological and Structural Aspects. Laura K. Donohue. The Cost of Counterterrorism: Power,Politics and Liberty.”

Approaches to terrorism and peacebuilding have a complex relationship with each other, which may be explained according to four categories outlined in this article. These range from blocking each others’ aims, nullifying terrorism, supporting a very limited, or a broader peace process. Each of these categories has implications for the inclusion and reconciliation of a wide range of actors and the hybrid nature of the emerging peace. This relates to the critical approach of using theory to create emancipatory forms of peace, which is used as a basis for the examination of the production of hybridity via the interaction of approaches to terrorism and peacebuilding in five cases in this article. These include Sri Lanka, Kashmir, the Middle East, Nepal, and Northern Ireland. We argue that “post-liberal” possibilities for a hybrid form of peace (which are inherent in such conflicts) offer a “post-terrorist” potential for peace processes.     

A Review of: “Thomas Hegghammer. Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism Since 1979.”

Charles King, Ending Civil Wars, Adelphi Paper 308. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. 94, notes. ISBN 0–19–829343–7, £14.99. ISSN 0567–932X.

Michael Howard, George J Andreopoulos and Mark R Shulman (eds.), The Laws of War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Pp. vii + 303, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 0–300–05899–3 (hb), £22.50; ISBN 0–300–07062–4 (pbk) £11.95.

Martha Crenshaw and John Pimlott (eds.), Encyclopedia of World Terrorism. Armonk: Sharpe Reference, 1997, 3 vols. Pp 768. illustrations, bibliography; general, names and geographical indexes. ISBN 56324–806–9 (hbk) £275.     

A Review of: “Rogelio Alonso. The IRA and Armed Struggle.”

ABSTRACT

In the conceptual literature on terrorism, there is no shortage of answers to the question: “What is terrorism?” Indeed, the terrorism literature has been heavily criticized for a deluge of definitions. And yet the booming quantitative terrorism literature generally examines a narrow set of “what is terrorism?”: how country-level factors explain variation in the number of terrorist attacks. This article demonstrates the variety of ways in which scholars currently operationalize terrorism and compares them to the ways it could be operationalized. I replicate studies using alternative operationalizations of terrorism to examine the consequences of the terrorism literature’s collective bet to focus on attack counts at the country level. Finally, I discuss the implications of the narrow set of operational choices with an eye towards how a greater variety of approaches would produce a more robust research agenda.