Flashpoints in the War on Terrorism

This volume offers a comprehensive overview of international political violence by bringing together foreign policy experts on several regions who examine conflicts in the Fertile Crescent, the Balkans, the Post-Soviet Region, the Himalayas, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. With cogent assessments of civil conflicts that threaten to be part of a ‘global jihad’, each chapter both dissects the historical roots and socio-economic causes that catalyze terrorism in those areas, as well as posits ways for the United States to meet the myriad of foreign policy challenges posed by the growing threat of contemporary international terrorism.

"Flashpoints in the War on Terrorism is essential reading for anyone wishing to begin a detailed examination of terrorism. . . . Reveron and Murer enlist a diverse group of scholars, each of whom is an expert in one or more facets of terrorism. Each, in turn, brings considerable depth and experience to the project, offering the reader a much greater understanding of both the depths and complexities of current terrorist hotspots. In each chapter, the contributors offer well-written, . . . compelling overviews of the nature of the conflict, followed by their identification and discussion of current flashpoints, pivot points, and hotspots. . . . [T]he greatest strength of the work [is] offering in a concise and readable format a more balanced and in-depth assessment of the multitude of factors feeding militancy. . . . Murer and Reveron's concluding essay note[s] correctly that to understand terrorism we must examine in depth the variety and nuances of the myriad causal factors of conflict, that it is important to understand the specific cultural and environmental context in which it occurs, and that it is not a unitary "thing" that can be generalized and reduced to the least common denominator, as most government counterterrorism programs and policies seek—perhaps by design—to do."--Defense Intelligence Journal

Jeffrey Stevenson Murer is an Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College where he teaches European Politics and Modern Political Theory. Derek S. Reveron is an Associate Professor at the Naval War College, where he specializes in democratization, strategy, and intelligence. His books include: Promoting Democracy in the Post-Soviet Region and America’s Viceroys: the Military and U.S. Foreign Policy.