Suchergebnisse

Suicide Terrorism, Ami Pedahzur, Cambridge: Polity, 2005, pp.
264.With the issue of terrorism continuing to dominate media reports,
there are renewed calls for a better understanding of the most deadly
weapon employed by these organizations: suicide bombing. Ami Pedahzur, in
his book Suicide Terrorism, successfully meets this challenge
head on. It has long been accepted by those who study this issue that
suicide terrorism has been a potent tool both for making grandiose public
statements and as a means of engaging militarily superior opponents or
difficult targets. Pedahzur outlines various methods, including historical
tracing and the analysis of case studies, to further the understanding of
this issue as well as the academic debate which surrounds it.

Since 9/11, Western democracies are increasingly targeted by whathas been termed Islamic-inspired Home-grown terrorism (IIHGT). This paperinvestigates what we really know about this more recent phenomenon andreveals several interesting, potentially troubling, findings. Canadian, Americanand Australian cases demonstrate that IIHGT actually takes many differentforms, depending on endgame, size, organization, and scale and sophistication.It also identifies that despite consistent changes and shifts in form, IIHGT doesnot follow a clearly identifiable or linear trajectory, making the identification oftrends moving forward very difficult. The paper concludes that while IIHGTgenerally seems to be devolving, this might be portrayed instead as an evolutionbecause the transformation, more likely inadvertent than intentional, willmake these types of plots more difficult to identify, monitor and prevent, thusimproving the likelihood they will become increasingly successful in the future.