Posts

Defeating Jihad: Lessons from Anarchism

  Mark Twain once said that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” To many of us in the modern West, the wave of Islamist terrorism that we’ve endured in the two decades following the 1998 bombing of the World Trade Centers seems like a brand new phenomenon. Violent terrorists causing seemingly mindless destruction and claiming the lives of thousands of innocent civilians on a massive scale is something that many Americans would never have dreamed of a few decades ago. This wave of violent jihad seems to have come out of the woodwork, blindsiding an unprepared West with a kind of terror we hadn’t seen before. In reality though, the multitude of terror attacks we’ve experienced in the last two decades is strikingly similar to a terror wave the world suffered through more than a century ago. Then, the threat was anarchism. Now, it’s Islamic jihad. The parallels in tactics and motives though are blindingly obvious. Anarchists throughout the 1880s and 1890s were responsi
Post a Comment
Read more

The Terrorist Threat of White Supremacy

Reports from across the United States suggest that in recent years, the size and strength of white supremacist organizations has been rising rapidly. In light of unprecedented spikes in immigration into the US, many disaffected young white men are turning to ideologies like white nationalism and white supremacism that promise to defend their status as the demographic majority and power center of the US. But what exactly should the rest of us expect of this growing strain of racism? What sort of threat do white supremacist organizations pose to America? The explosive growth of white supremacism can be best analyzed by breaking it down into its various segments. The majority of the adherents to this growing movement are simply young white men who feel they have been marginalized by American society. Eight years spent living in Obama’s America have forced ordinary Americans to cling to identity politics in ways that haven’t been seen on this scale since the mid-20 th Century. The p
Post a Comment
Read more

ISIS: What's Next?

On the battlefield, it seems that the so-called ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS) has been thoroughly defeated. The terror group has lost control of nearly the entirety of its once mighty swaths of territory. A long series of devastating defeats at the hands of adversaries such as the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Syrian Army, the Iraqi Army, and the international military coalitions led by the United States and Russia have dealt a devastating blow to ISIS’s prospects of establishing a lasting Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria. In light of its defeats on the battlefield, ISIS has attempted to refocus its efforts on international jihad (following closely in the footsteps of its predecessor al-Qaeda). Mass-casualty terror attacks in France, Belgium, the United States, and other Western countries have been either orchestrated by ISIS, inspired by the group, or dubiously claimed by ISIS after the fact. The question that the West faces going forward is: with ISIS nearly wiped from the map in the Middle
Post a Comment
Read more

Revised Terrorism Essay

Erika Dennery Professor Shirk Global Politics of Terrorism May 3rd, 2018 Revised Terrorism Essay At the start of this semester my definition of terrorism was that any goal to inflict terror or harm against civilians, regardless of motive, should be recognized as a form of terrorism. This definition challenges the idea that acts of terrorism are typically carried out for a political goal as well as the idea that terrorism can only be committed by state actors. After taking this class, my definition of terrorism remains unchanged. I believe that there are many ways that acts of terrorism can be committed but I think that the definition of terrorism that is so widely accepted, the definition that argues the need for a political motivation and a non-state actor committing the crime, should be broadened to include acts of terrorism committed by state actors as well as acts committed by civilians against civilians. This change is necessary because too many violent actors, especi
Post a Comment
Read more

Revisiting Terrorisms Definition

Patrick Dancoes POL-347 Prof. Shirk Defining Terrorism 2 nd 5/2/18 Defining Terrorism    At the begging of the course, I argued the definition of terrorism was; the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives. Now, after studying terrorism over the semester and reviewing our case studies, I believe terrorism is foundationally broken into five different types of terrorism; Criminal Terrorism, Political Terrorism, State-Sponsored Terrorism, Religious Terrorism, and a catchall, Dissent Terrorism. To bring together these five terrorist types into a single definition of terrorism, I also acknowledge the fact that this means that the terms ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ are mainly socially constructed, as the term has virtually morphed over the course when describing different terrorist groups.  I currently define terrorism
Post a Comment
Read more

Terror Essay Revisited

In my initial essay regarding the definition of terrorism, I argued that the definition should remain along the lines of the U.S. State Department’s definition of terrorism while making minor modifications regarding the inclusion of state actors in the definition, and an understanding that something is terror only when it is being used as a tactic for political gain. In addition, I argued against the idea that terrorism had to be a reaction to one’s current order. After taking this class, I am slightly changing my overall argument to include the fact that terrorism is a reaction to the current order and therefore not a tactic. However, I am still going to maintain that terrorism is violence committed against non combatants by either state or non-state actors.   I chose not to believe that terrorism is a socially constructed concept, as argued by Stampnitzky. Given the currently loose definition of terrorism, it is easy for the word to be misused for political gain. I believe that str
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Terror: Increasing Airstrikes

Erika Dennery Professor Shirk Global Politics of Terrorism April 22nd, 2018 The War on Terror: Increasing Airstrikes It is widely known that the United States has been fighting an international military campaign known as the War on Terror for over ten years now, and there is no indication that the fighting will stop anytime soon. This is in part due to the fact that the threat of terrorists overseas committing acts against the United States is unpredictable and it is hard to determine a way to prevent these acts from occurring other than simply attempting the fight the terrorists at the very source through the use of airstrikes. While these strikes seem logical and like an ingenious way to protect the citizens of the U.S., it turns out that air strikes are responsible for a large amount of civilian deaths and they may not be entirely useful in preventing the threats we perceive as real; therefore, if airstrikes are not doing any good, then what is their purpose and why is
Post a Comment
Read more