ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates the development of knowledge claims about insurgent terrorism and measures them against the standard of how well these claims have advanced the formulation of theories of terrorism that can be subjected to observational testing. There have been relatively few who have approached the study of terrorism as Michael Nicholson would have wanted us to do. The chapter argues that it is one's approach to knowledge about terrorism that is the underlying cause of the continuing inability to accumulate and test knowledge claims. Since 9/11 Mr Bush formulated his response in the form of the war on terror, a major contentious issue has been the nature of the network of terror that the war was intended to defeat. The chapter examines changes in the lethality of terrorism, the characterisations, boundaries and control structures of the network claims and differences amongst the old and new terrorists and concludes that claims of a new terrorism' are vastly misleading.
