ABSTRACT
The impact of David Rapoport’s ‘Four Waves of Modern Terrorism’ theory cannot be overestimated. Rapoport, a political scientist, gathered together the vast amount of data which had been compiled about modern terrorism and, in the manner of a cultural historian, found a heretofore unrecognized pattern. The Four Waves theory is strongly reminiscent of Arthur Schlesinger’s theory of the cycles of American political history. Schlesinger’s generational theory holds that American history is a series of generation-long fluctuations between public and private interests. Both theories focus on broad cultural trends which are analyzed in terms of waves. In both cases waves end not with a bang but with a whimper, to borrow the too-oft-used phrase from T.S. Eliot. Within a political generation of roughly thirty-to-forty years, according to Schlesinger, people simply become tired of public activism or private acquisition, with one pattern invariably giving way to the other as disenchantment sets in.1 The four waves or cycles of modern terrorism refer to global rather than national or regional phenomena. The succession of terrorist waves share particular characteristics which provide wave theory with its conceptual unity. Rapoport’s posits four primary components common to the successive waves of modern terrorism:
1. TIME A wave has a cyclical form which includes beginning, high point, and end. The process lasts around forty years which I call a generation. Waves may overlap and they follow each other in succession.
