Causality of terrorism defined

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Indranil Banerjie

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Rs 850

The September 11, 2001, terrorist strike on the United States has generated a huge body of literature on terrorism and its various facets.

A book search on terrorism in Google Books returns over seven million hits, which, even after accounting for duplicate entries, journal articles and so on, is a humungous number. Clearly, for much of the past decade and more, terrorism has been a global obsession with security experts furiously publishing case studies, viewpoints, theories and non-fiction thrillers about terrorists and their dastardly deeds.
Sage alone has published over 40 books that deal with the subject, including an encyclopaedia of terrorism, its essentials and so on.
Now we have a book that seeks to reveal terrorism’s psychosocial causes and suggest counter strategies. Edited by two Indian defence research scientists — Updesh Kumar and Manas K. Mandal — the book is a formidable collection of essays on terrorism written by an impressive group of experts from India and abroad.
Easy to dismiss at first glance as yet another addition to the growing corpus of terrorism literature, the book is surprisingly original in its contents. It is not another rehash of past events or analyses of terrorist movements.
This voluminous book is, in fact, a serious study of the social, religious and psychological factors that cause terrorism, and various strategies best suited to combat the various manifestations of terrorism.
“The conceptual and theoretical issues elaborated in the first section of this volume along with the applied and practical issues relating to the counter-terrorism strategies in the second section are an effort to put the readers’ insight into comprehensive understanding of and preparedness against the problem of terrorism,” the authors aver in their preface.
The project is laudable and its execution difficult. For, terrorism despite its obvious manifestations is both difficult to define and isolate among the other forms of violence societies and individuals perpetrate. This difficulty is well analysed in the book’s first chapter, “Terrorism: A Conceptual Framework”, by a Pakistani professor, Ishtiaq Ahmad.
He considers various definitions of terrorism proposed by various experts and concludes that there can be no clear definition of terrorism as it “is a highly subjective and contested term. States and scholars may have failed to offer a universally agreed definition of terrorism, but they do agree to its four important elements: One,
terrorism is an act of violence. Two, it is deliberately undertaken. Three, its primary targets are unarmed civilians. Four, its immediate motive is to create fear”.
The rest of the book follows from the premise laid down by Ahmad and his fundamental question: “If terrorism is so diverse and intricate a phenomenon, how can strategies and policies to combat terrorism in all its forms and manifestations be so simple and easy?”
That indeed is the question and perhaps one reason why success in extinguishing terrorist movements has proved so elusive in recent times.
The next few chapters therefore seek to discover what might cause terrorist behaviour.
Abdolhossein Abdollahi, described as a rising star in the field of psychology, takes up the discussion by delving into the most basic behavioural motives and conditions in individuals, some of which could result in terrorist activities. Sadly, there are no clear pointers in behavioural sciences and the discussion must move on to wider issues such as the “Sociocultural Aspects of Terrorism”, which forms the subject of another chapter.
The deeper one delves into the causality of terrorism, the curiouser it gets. The analysis gets deeper into the understanding of psychosocial or one should say psychopathological behaviour and the nature of terrorist groups.
The discourse is varied and complex such as the one suggested by Dipak K. Gupta in his chapter titled “The Leadership Puzzle in Terrorism Study”, where he postulates that it is the “rare individual” who provides the leadership crucial for the rise and continuation of terrorist movements.
The book is divided into two sections, the second titled “Countering Terrorism: Psychosocial Avenues”. From here on things get pretty abstruse and much of the theories and strategies postulated are debatable. The merit of the many pieces by experts, who have clearly cogitated a lot on the subject, is that they are thought-provoking and provide many pointers for practitioners.
The book is not exactly easy reading and its editing leaves much to be desired. But it is not meant for the lay reader interested in getting a quick low-down on the subject.
This tome is meant for serious practitioners of counter-terrorism; people who are involved with the issue and need to get additional ideas and inputs on how to deal with it. For such individuals wading through the book’s often dense material would be worthwhile as there are many lessons that could refine counter-terrorism strategies and tactics. The book, despite its ponderosity, is important because ultimately all research into the study of counter-terrorism is not about producing polished prose but about saving lives.