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The authors investigate the timing of insurgents’ use of terrorism within the context of wider-scale warfare. Unlike the great wars found in modern history, the dominant form of warfare in recent years has become internal. The main actors are non-state groups seeking to replace an existing political order through violent means. Terrorism, especially indiscriminate attacks on unarmed civilians, has been an important component of these groups’ tactical repertoires. The purpose of this study is to explore variations in the timing of insurgents’ use of terrorism within the context of war. The authors draw on the largely separate literatures on terrorism and warfare as well as complementary sources of data on terrorist events, insurgent groups, and various forms of armed conflict. The product of this analysis is a mapping of the frequencies of terrorist attacks over time and the identification of these attacks as occurring during the beginning, middle, or ending stages of wider-scale warfare. This is followed by in-depth discussions of the insurgent groups whose use of terrorism matches each of these patterns as well as the contexts within which these groups operate. Readers of this book will include students, scholars, policy-makers, members of the military, and the general public.
insurgency make analysing terrorism and CT in India immensely challenging, and the confusion between these two categories is plainly reflected in India's CT and counterinsurgency (COIN) responses, which are at times indistinguishable, much to the detriment of both. Thus, rather incomprehensibly, India's CT doctrine tends to be framed in the population-centric ‘hearts and minds’ rhetoric that traditionally underpins COIN rather than CT strategies. At the same time, despite this hearts and minds rhetoric, India's response to both pure terrorism and insurgencies that use
In the latter half of the twentieth century, the term ‘common heritage of mankind’ was coined as a promise to the international community, stipulating that all states would benefit equally from the areas that fell within its scope. The regime grew to encompass the deep seabed among other areas that lay beyond the sovereign jurisdiction of any one state. The deep seabed
United States. However, aside from other Latin American countries, the fall of communism did not mean the end of local left-wing guerrillas. On the contrary, local guerrillas, particularly FARC, enhanced their military power to fight against the government. Thus the term “narcoterrorism” was coined in the United States to catalogue the ambiguous situation in Colombia, and for that
‘Xinjiang mode’ of counterterrorism which combines the counter-insurgency (COIN) models adopted by the West (primarily the United States) in its ‘War on Terrorism’ with China's own ‘public security’ and ‘governance’ models to, in effect, create a counterterrorism strategy defined by militarization, surveillance, and ideological ‘remoulding’. The central objective of the ‘Xinjiang mode’ is to not only prevent ‘terrorism’ before it occurs but also to pre-empt its very possibility by identifying and ‘remoulding’ individuals who display ‘abnormal’ behaviours
the upkeep of civilisation, both the concept of civilisation and the notion of international politics it constructs should be carefully analysed. Civilisation and civil society Adam Ferguson coined the term ‘civil society’ in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (first published in 1767). In today’s idiom, Ferguson described how modern society, with its elaborate
fears to an extent that international observers coined the term ‘German angst’ as a characterisation of the German national character. On the occasion of the celebrations surrounding the German unification in 1990, the UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher met with six academic experts on German politics and history to discuss ‘the Germans themselves and their characteristics’; in the memorandum, the prime minister’s private secretary at the time, Charles Powell, wrote: Like other nations, [the Germans] had certain characteristics, which you could identify from
Anglo-French appeasement at Munich had a transformative effect on the United States. This is something of a paradox: the proceedings at Munich were far from American shores, American public opinion was at the high point of ‘isolationism’, there was no large immigrant constituency of Czech-Americans to rally other Americans to their cause and US foreign policy had previously had little interest in Czechoslovakia. Before autumn 1938, American interests in Europe were peripheral. Yet even though the Roosevelt administration was a bystander, Munich brought the United States deep into the heart of European affairs, and the reason had everything to do with fear. Appeasement may have averted war in the short term, but it raised the spectre of longer-term and perpetual war. Americans began to fear not so much for their physical safety and their territorial integrity – although those fears were certainly amplified – but for the fate of ‘Judeo-Christian civilisation’ and the ‘American way of life’, themselves new cultural constructions, because Hitler had taken international society outside civilised norms. Though they did not yet use the term, Americans acutely felt the pressures of globalisation, of a shrinking world that made possible new types of threats to their ‘national security’. These new fears resonated throughout American society, from elite politics to ordinary churches. The response to Munich eventually saw the repudiation of ‘isolationism’ and an enthusiastic embrace of a militarised, globalist role for the United States. Munich, in other words, inadvertently conceived the ‘American Century’ three years before Henry Luce coined the term.
distinguish brute and option luck; and to examine the relationship between the reward structure and responsibility. Luck and probabilities Imagine a simple Bournelli trial of coin tosses. In each trial we have a pattern of outcomes with probability p (success) and 1 − p (failure). What patterns do we describe as good/bad luck and what do we describe as ‘to be expected’? For each trial we know the probability of heads is 0.5 and 142 Luck for tails is 0.5. Let us concentrate upon the probability of getting heads as success. Each time the coin comes down heads, we see this
grounds: first, ‘the mere possibility of being able to change governments can avoid violence’ and, second, ‘being able to do it by voting has consequences of its own’. 5 With respect to the first point, Przeworski puts his argument thus: assume that governments are selected by a toss of a, not necessarily fair, coin . . . the very prospect that