In a recent Politico op-ed urging Congress to consider the importance of United States foreign aid programs, Admiral Mike Mullen (Ret.) and General James Jones (Ret.) insisted that “[s]trategic development assistance is not charity, it is an essential, modern tool of U.S. national security.” The authors focus particularly on the…
Recent terrorist attacks carried out on behalf of ISIS on American and European soil by lone wolf attackers or sleeper cells remind us of the importance of understanding the dynamics of radicalization mediated by social media communication channels. In this paper, we shed light on the social media activity of…
Prominent scholars criticize terrorism research for lacking sufficient empirical testing of arguments. Interestingly, one of the most widely-cited estimates in terrorism studies has not been evaluated using the many data sources now available. Rapoport’s 1992 claim, that perhaps 90 percent of terrorist groups last less than one year, has been…
The mostly white men who gathered to defend the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, and white nationalism in general, came from many walks of life. And as they, one by one, began to be identified and their images circulated in the news media, their family members expressed everything…
The centuries-long struggle against racism and domestic terrorism in the United States reached another low point in Charlottesville, Virginia. On August 11, hundreds of torch-carrying protesters—exclusively white and nearly all-male—marched through the campus of the University of Virginia, deliberately invoking the imagery of America’s violently racist Jim Crow south in…
This chapter provides an overview of left-wing terrorism in the United States, with a focus on key groups, patterns over time, primary targets, and the main tactics utilized by the movement. This overview starts with the traditional groups of the 1960s, whom were based on anti-Imperialist and anti-Capitalist philosophies. It…
This paper endeavors to explore the ISIS prison system, the arrest or abduction, interrogation and confession and total detention processes, as well as the condition of detention facilities, and the physical and psychological torture taking place within the terrorist organization’s jails. Fifty-five ISIS cadres (defectors, returnees or prisoners) and 17…
El objetivo del presente artículo es poder mostrar en primer lugar el programa de intervención con internos islamistas que se está llevando a cabo en España por primera vez y por otro lado realizar una comparativa con algunos de los principales programas de intervención europeos que están en funcionamiento actualmente…
Social media increasingly plays a role in conflict and contentious politics. Politicians, leaders, insurgents, and protestors all have used it as a tool for communication. At the same time, scholars have turned to social media as a source of new data on conflict. I provide a framework for understanding social…
The fact that from 2013 until 2015 almost 1,000 people from the Western Balkans left to fight in Syria and Iraq is a matter of ongoing concern. Even though the number of foreign fighters began to decrease as of 2015, it is estimated that more than 300 have returned to…
El contacto con algún agente de radicalización yihadista y la existencia de vínculos sociales previos con individuos radicalizados explican por qué, dentro de España, hay musulmanes que se adhieren a una versión violenta del salafismo y se implican en actividades terroristas mientras otros no. También permiten comprender por qué existen…
In the first days of the “war on terror,” before the United States had launched air strikes against the Taliban or Special Forces raids on Osama bin Laden’s compounds, President George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13224. The presidential decree, which dates from September 23, 2001, targeted al Qaeda’s money…
