Full Description
This book explores the paradoxical endurance of terrorism, which continues to exist despite often failing to achieve its central goals. Multifaceted and wide-ranging in scope, the analysis comprehensively surveys a range of global contexts from the last two centuries, where long-term terrorism has prevailed, and systematically identifies various terrorism-sustaining determinants.
Using South Asia as a case study, the chapters trace the etymology, origins, and study of terrorism within colonial India, during its partition and post-independence period. An in-depth study of pre-post-9/11 persistent terrorism in Pakistan - the second-most adversely impacted country globally by terrorism - links the phenomenon's broader historical patterns and contemporary causes to explain terrorism's contentious efficacy contextually and theoretically and to resolve the persistence-inefficacy paradox. This book makes two significant contributions: it fills a critical, empirical, methodological, and theoretical gap in understanding the paradoxical persistence of terrorism, while also underscoring the need for specific recognition of this violence genre as a distinct sub-phenomenon warranting dedicated study.
Offering a fresh perspective from a scholar based in the Global South, the book will be of interest to researchers, analysts, academics, and postgraduate students of South Asian politics, international security, and terrorism and political violence studies more broadly.
Contents
1.Placing Terrorism Persistence in Context: An Introduction. Part I-Global and South Asian Dynamics. 2.Chapter 1: Terrorism's Paradoxical Persistence: Global contexts, Explanations and voids. 3.Chapter 2 - Terrorism in South Asia and Pakistan: Conflict History and Terrorism Literature. Part II- Terrorism Longevity: Empirical and Theoretical Causes. 4.Chapter 3: The Ideational Factors and Discourses of Persistence -Part I. 5.Chapter 3: The Ideational Factors and Discourses of Persistence -Part II. 6.Chapter 4: The Structural-material Factors of Persistence. 7.Chapter 5: Interpreting and Theorising Persistent Terrorism: Pakistan and Beyond. Part III-The Tenability of Persistence-Efficacy Paradox. 8.Chapter 6: Empirical Reality versus Tenability of Central Paradox, Extant Literatures, and Theories. 9.Conclusions and Reflections.
