ABSTRACT
Addressing factors that cause a recurring problem is usually preferable to dealing with symptoms and consequences. If an area suffers from mosquitoes, draining the swamps where they breed is usually a more effective strategy than trying to kill all the individual insects.2 This principle applies to terrorism as well as to many other problem areas. The approach requires, however, that we can identify causes and mechanisms that are of such a nature that they are available for intervention and possible to change. For this approach to be effective, it requires that the causes identified for intervention should be specific and have a direct causal relationship to the problem. This is by no means easy to achieve with such a complex and multifarious phenomenon as terrorism. Nevertheless, it has been a main objective of this book to explore these possibilities.
