Leesfragment: Does Terrorism Work? A History

Wij publiceren een fragment uit de inleiding van Does Terrorism Work?, het nieuwste boek van Richard English.

• The first ever sustained enquiry into one of the fundamental questions about terrorism: does it work? And if so, then how?
• Written by one of the world's foremost experts on terrorism, with over thirty years' experience analysing the field
• Focuses on four of the most significant terrorist organizations of the last fifty years: al-Qaida, the Provisional IRA, Hamas, and ETA
• Uses a wealth of interview material collected over the years, both with former terrorists and their enemies in the counter-intelligence, police, and security services
• Argues that we need a far more honest understanding of the degree to which terrorism works - and the precise ways in which it does so

N.B. Op English' boek, en een dertigtal andere uitgelezen titels van Oxford University Press krijgt u in de jubileummaand september 20% kassakorting - ook online (Kortingscode AB50OUP).

In the heart of Oslo, on the site where on 22 July 2011 Anders Behring Breivik exploded a van-bomb killing eight people at government buildings, the Norwegian state has established a dignified Centre commemorating the events of that terrible day. Breivik himself has been lengthily and deservedly imprisoned. And the 22 July Centre offers an elegiac window onto his atrocity. There are agonizingly silent photographs of most of the seventy-seven people he killed (after Oslo he murdered a further sixty-nine victims later the same day, at the Norwegian Labour Youth League's summer camp on beautiful Utoya island). And there is the actual wreckage of the van in which his Oslo bomb had been planted: a gruesome, mangled, sculpture-like relic of his blood-stained work.

It is hard not to be moved by the quiet gesture embodied in this 22 July Centre. But as I myself walked around it I was struck again - as I frequently had been while living for many years in violence-torn Belfast - that behind all such recollections of terrorism lies a question of very high importance, which we have none the less found it difficult to address adequately in relation to actions such as Breivik's famous operation. For all of its baneful effects, Does Terrorism Work?

This is an important, controversial, and difficult question. I think it's also one which requires an historically-grounded answer, and a carefully-crafted framework for assessment, if we are to address it as seriously as it deserves.

For the question is important both analytically and practically. Any full understanding of a phenomenon which - like terrorism - is focused on the pursuit of political change, will necessitate analysis of how far such change has actually been achieved. In the case of terrorism, this issue is even more analytically important given its implications for explaining some of the central dynamics of terrorist activity as a whole: its causation (why does it occur where and when it does?); its varying levels across place and time (why does it endure for the periods and at the specific, differing levels that it does?); the processes by which terrorist campaigns come to an end (why does it dry up in some settings at some moments, but not in and at others?); and the patterns of support involved in terrorism (why are some people more likely to endorse and practise it than others?).

Based on decades of experience studying the subject, and on much original material, this book therefore offers the first systematic treatment of the question: Does Terrorism Work?

© Richard English 2016