Globalisation and the Future of Terrorism

Globalisation and the Future of Terrorism: Patterns and Predictions is devoted to understanding how international terrorism is shaped, how it evolves over time and what we are to expect in the future. The book offers a fresh contribution to the terrorism literature by drawing upon research and methods outside the traditional terrorism research genre, and by taking both a theoretical approach and a practical predictive perspective that is surprisingly unusual in the field. While predicting terrorism is a highly speculative business, there are ways of identifying certain long-term causes, driving forces and their linkages with societal conditions. Terrorists are never aliens from a distant planet, but usually integral players in local and sometimes global politics. Hence, when the local, regional and international contexts change, so does terrorism. This book offers a thorough review of the literature on the causes of terrorism and combines this research with predictive and futuristic literature on globalisation, supported by a range of case studies. The analysis spans the transformation of international relations, the globalisation of the market economy, demographic factors, ideological shifts and technological changes. The result is a set of propositions about future patterns of terrorism, which are not simply best guesses, but are backed up by research.