Terrorist Finance: Asking the Right Questions

An emerging critical literature from within and outside academia argues that existing understandings of the financing of terrorism are at best severely dysfunctional, and at worst malignantly so. This article argues that at the root of this dysfunction is a failure to ask the 'right' questions about terrorist financing. The right questions, the article finds, are only tangentially related to the supposed mystery of 'who finances and how they do it', and instead revolve around, first, specifying how financial activity influences terrorist behaviour and, second, assessing what such activity tells us about the place terrorists truly occupy in today's global system.