Perspectives on Terrorism: Special Issue on the Islamic State
From the introduction to this issue:
We are pleased to announce the release of Volume IX, Issue 4 (August 2015) of Perspectives on Terrorism at www.terrorismanalysts.com. Our free online journal is a joint publication of the Terrorism Research Initiative (TRI), headquartered in Vienna (Austria), and the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies (CTSS), at the Lowell Campus of the University of Massachusetts (United States).
Now in its ninth year, Perspectives on Terrorism has over 5,200 regular subscribers and many more occasional readers and visitors worldwide. The Articles of its six annual issues are fully peer-reviewed by external referees while its Policy Briefs and other content are subject to internal editorial quality control.
This special double issue is devoted entirely to the so-called Islamic State (IS), presenting 14 research articles on various aspects of the organization, in addition to an extensive, specially compiled bibliography on IS. The articles are products of a conference on IS held in Oslo on 11-12 June 2015. The conference was organized by the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) and funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and it brought together leading specialists on IS, jihadism, and civil war along with senior policymakers and government analysts from several countries.
The motivation for the conference – and for this special issue – was that our understanding of IS is lagging behind the group’s battlefield advances. After a wave of studies on al-Qaida in Iraq in the mid-2000s, the academic community largely dropped the ball on the group’s later incarnations ISI and ISIS until it burst onto the global stage last summer with the capture of Mosul. The past year has seen a substantial intellectual catch-up effort, not unlike that mounted for al-Qaida in the early 2000s, but we still have a long way to go.
The articles cover a broad range of topics and questions pertaining to IS as an organization. All of the articles were completed in July 2015 and are therefore unusually up-to-date as far as academic publishing goes….
To give you a sense of the tone you will find here, Charles Lister writes in A Long Way from Success: Assessing the War on the Islamic State:
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The clear and present threat posed by IS justifies, and indeed demands a counter-reaction by international states and the local governments who directly face IS on the battlefield. After nine months of coalition operations, a series of tactical-level victories have been won against IS in parts of Iraq and northeastern Syria, but these do not yet appear to amount to anything close to strategic progress in genuinely degrading and destroying IS as an organization. In fact, some facets of the strategies adopted may even prove counterproductive in the long-term.
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I suppose the use of “terrorism” in the title of the journal is something of a give away on its agenda.
What be exceptionally useful for the Information Technology community would be a map of private and public funding for anti-terrorism programs. Along with a short summary of which groups were designated as terrorists by each funding source.
Queries along the lines of: Do you think Tibetan monks are terrorists? If you answer yes, you are directed to the Chinese government. That sort of thing.
Pointers?