ABSTRACT
Each chapter in this collection attempts to elucidate the puzzling phenomenon of political violence from its global to its local occurrences, from The International Jihad/al-Qaeda to the traditional acceptance of and government indifference to domestic violence against women in Malawi. The rigorous analyses of terrorism and political violence presented in this volume vary not only in their evidence-based findings, but the scholars who offer explanations differ markedly in their perspectives on the data. When a theory or a hypothesis attempts to push the knowledge envelope, a healthy discourse should develop about its ideas. The authors’ perspectives on terrorism and political identity and legitimacy reflect their diverse professions, from diplomacy to statistical analysis. Most contributors are political scientists, and many are trained in or have crossed into history, anthropology, psychiatry, sociology, religious studies, forensics, African studies, international relations, and conflict resolution. All have been influenced, to some degree, by the work of Professor emeritus David C. Rapoport, the first scholar in the United States to offer a course on non-state terrorism, whose theoretical understanding of political violence spans a generation of research, writing, and teaching. Questioning conventional wisdom – which is only the provisional consensus at any given time – is a distinctive hallmark of Rapoport’s scholarship. Thinking about terrorism, what it all means, whether it is wholly random or patterned in its occurrences over thousands of years and in the modern world, where its “energy” comes from, whether and for how long it persists in a particular incarnation, who perpetuates it, how it changes, its professed “morality,” and its “transcendent purposes” have been some of the preoccupations of Rapoport, whose comparative studies of ancient and medieval religious terrorists in hinduism, Judaism, and Islam alerted scholars to terrorism’s surprising persistence in human history. In short, terrorism is not new, but recurrent. It is no more deadly today than it was centuries ago, although technological advances in communication and transportation have given particular impetus to successive “waves” of terrorism in the past century and a quarter. Moreover, as weapons become more lethal and their means of delivery are refined by the innovative responses of terrorists to the defenses against them by nation-states, the ancient practice of extra-legal violence in pursuit of political objectives intensifies as a global threat.
