What is the role of founding leaders in shaping terrorist organizations? What follows the loss of this formative leader? These questions are especially important to religious terrorist groups, in which leaders are particularly revered. Tricia L. Bacon and Elizabeth Grimm provide a groundbreaking analysis of how religious terrorist groups manage and adapt to major shifts in leadership. They demonstrate that founders create the base from which their successors operate. Founders establish and explain the group’s mission, and they determine and justify how it seeks to achieve its objectives. Bacon and Grimm argue that how successors position themselves in terms of the founder shapes a terrorist group’s future course. They examine how and why different types of successors choose to pursue incremental or discontinuous change. Bacon and Grimm emphasize that the instability surrounding succession can place a group at its most vulnerable—the precise time to explore options to weaken or defeat it. Bacon and Grimm highlight similarities between Islamic terrorist groups abroad and Christian white nationalist groups such as the 1920s Ku Klux Klan in the United States. Drawing on extensive field research in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Pakistan, Terror in Transition features detailed analysis of groups such as al-Shabaab, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda in Iraq / the Islamic State in Iraq, as well as the KKK. Offering a rigorous theoretical perspective on terrorist leadership transition, this policy-relevant book provides actionable recommendations for counterterrorism practitioners.

"Taiwan's peaceful and democratic society is built upon on decades of authoritarian state violence that it is still coming to terms with. Following 50 years of Japanese colonization, Taiwan was occupied by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) at the close of World War II in 1945. The party massacred thousands of Taiwanese while it established a military dictatorship on the island with the tacit support of the United States. Although early episodes of state violence (such as the 228 Incident in 1947) and post-1980s democratization in Taiwan have received a significant amount of literary and scholarly attention, relatively less has been written or translated about the White Terror and martial law period, which began in 1949. The White Terror was aimed at alleged proponents of Taiwanese independence as well as supposed communist collaborators wiped out an entire generation of intellectuals. Both native-born Taiwanese as well as mainland Chinese exiles were subject to imprisonment, torture, and execution. During this time, the KMT institutionally favored mainland Chinese over native-born Taiwanese and reserved most military, educational, and police positions for the former. Taiwanese were forcibly "re-educated" as Chinese subjects. China-centric national history curricula, forced Mandarin-language pedagogy and media, and the re-naming of streets and public spaces after places in China further enforced a representational regime of Chineseness to legitimize the authority of the KMT, which did not lift martial law until 1987. Taiwan's contemporary commitment to transitional justice and democracy hinges on this history of violence, for which this volume provides a literary treatment as essential as it is varied. This is among the first collection of stories to comprehensively address the social, political, and economic aspects of White Terror, and to do so with deep attention to their transnational character. Featuring contributions from many of Taiwan's most celebrated authors, and written in genres that range between realism, satire, and allegory, it examines the modes and mechanisms of the White Terror and party-state exploitation in prisons, farming villages, slums, military bases, and professional communities. Transitions in Taiwan: Stories of the White Terror is an important book for Taiwan studies, Asian Studies, literature, and social justice collections. This book is part of the Literature from Taiwan Series, in collaboration with the National Museum of Taiwan Literature and National Taiwan Normal University"--

Richard Clarke has been one of America's foremost experts on counterterrorism measures for more than two decades. He has served under four presidents from both parties, beginning in Ronald Reagan's State Department becoming America's first Counter-terrorism Czar under Bill Clinton and remaining for the first two years of George W. Bush's administration. He has seen every piece of intelligence on Al-Qaeda from the beginning; he was in the Situation Room on September 11th and he knows exactly what has taken place under the United State's new Department of Homeland Security. Through gripping, thriller-like scenes, he tells the full story for the first time and explains what the Bush Administration are doing.

Annotation This work answers questions concerning the length of time that terrorist campaigns last and when targeting leadership finishes a group. It examines a wide range of historical examples to identify the ways in which almost all terrorist groups die out.

This book is the definitive guide to the topical issue of the relationship between political parties that embrace the democratic process and terrorist groups which eschew the legal and procedural strictures of democracy. The fully revised edition continues to provide the most detailed theoretical and empirical analysis of this controversial issue, highlighting the fluid nature of boundaries between terrorist organisation and legitimate political party. Drawing on a vast array of data, the authors examine a large number of international case studies from Italy, Spain, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Peru, Argentina, Japan and Northern Ireland. By incorporating substantial new material on ETA, Hizbollah and Hamas, this book retains its position at the forefront of the worldwide political discussion on terrorism, and continues to be essential reading for all students, academics and readers with an interest in security studies, terrorism and political violence

In the world of terrorism, knowledge is a critical asset. Recent studies have revealed that, among international terrorists, there is a global sharing of ideas, tactics, strategies, and lessons learned. Teaching Terror examines this sharing of information in the terrorist world, shaping our understanding of, and response to, the global threat of terrorism. Chapters cover various aspects of individual and organizational learning, some using a general level of analysis and others presenting case studies of individual terrorist groups. These groups teach each other through a variety of means, including training camps and the Internet. Terrorist networks are also learning organizations, drawing on situational awareness, adapting their behavior, and, to give one example, improving not just their use of improvised explosive devices, but also rendering technology such as unmanned aerial vehicles and satellite phones ineffective. This book provides a wealth of insights on the transfer of knowledge in the world of terrorism, and offers policy implications for counterterrorism professionals, scholars, and policymakers.