Understanding Terror Networks

click here for more details, find new or used items	Marc Sageman Our price £19.50 New from £9.55 Used from £9.54 Pages: 236 (Hardcover) ISBN: 0812238087 Pub: University of Pennsylvania Press Pub date: 2004-11 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 112797

Reader Reviews:

Prescient Academic Study (6/6 people found this helpful)

As a Foreign Service Officer Sageman spent time working with the Mujaheddin in Pakistan during the war with the Soviet Union, he's also a qualified clinical psychiatrist and has a PhD in Political Science and as result brings an interesting mix of skills to this analysis. The empirical basis of the study are the biographies of around 170 identified al-Qaeda related terrorists. Part of the book provides an overview of the ideological and organizational development of the global salafist movement focusing on the importance of Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization. However the key contribution is the way that Sageman uses to his empirical data to develop a picture of the type of people who became involved in al Qaeda, the group dynamic of radicalization and the emergence of links to the resources and expertise of the group around Osama Bin Laden. The process that he sees is essentially bottom up where relatively well educated but often unemployed and alienated men forge links with small groups of others of the same type. The competitive dynamic within these groups - what Canadian police surveillance of one such group labelled a "bunch of guys" - supports increasing radicalization within the group and isolation from non-members. These groups then seek to make the connection to the global jihad. Using network analysis Sageman explores the strengths and vulnerabilities of this type of network.

What is striking in the wake of the July 2005 bombings in London is the way in which what we know about that group fits with the type of process that Sageman identifies. Indeed he makes the point that the difficulty that global salafist mujaheddin faced in striking at the US after 2001 led to attacks in countries that they could access and this dynamic places the UK at increased risk.

This is a model for studies of terrorism that systematically seeks to make use of empirical data and to test alternative explanations. Highly recommended.

Similar Products

Inside Terrorist Organizations (Cass Series on Political Violence)

The Psychology of Terrorism (Cass Series on Political Violence)

The New Global Terrorism: Characteristics, Causes, Controls

Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance

Research on Terrorism: Trends, Achievements and Failures (Cass Series on Political Violence)

Categories

Amazon.co.uk places this book into the following categories: