Terrorism: How to respond

Citation

English, R. (2009). Terrorism: How to Respond. Oxford University Press. (Paperback 2010.)

Chapter Summary

This is a short book: about 143 pages of analysis, followed by endnotes and a bibliography, in four chapters. Each chapter answers one question about terrorism, and together they move from definition, to causes, to history, to policy. The author, Richard English, is a historian who teaches politics at Queen's University Belfast and has written on Irish nationalism and the IRA, and that background shapes the book. The publisher's blurb presents the central argument as follows: the post-9/11 "war on terror" has failed, and responses to terrorist violence will fall short unless the phenomenon, its nature and its complex causes are treated more honestly, with the long history of terrorism taken into account.

Chapter 1: What is Terrorism?

Opens with the problem of definition. English sets out a series of difficulties: the many competing definitions, the difference between "terror" and "terrorism", the relationship between states and terrorism, whether to define terrorism by its perpetrators, its targets or its methods, the fact that many groups use other forms of violence as well, change over time, and the fact that the word is a pejorative rather than a neutral technical term. He asks whether the word should be dropped, concludes that it should be kept, and proposes his own definition: heterogeneous political violence, used or threatened, with an important psychological dimension that reaches a wider audience, involving the exercise of power and the attempt to redress power relations, and a sub-species of warfare.

Chapter 2: Why do People Resort to Terror?

A short survey of types of explanation: psychological, civilisational, religious, strategic and political, with nationalism within the political explanation. English weighs the strengths and weaknesses of each and prefers the explanation from politics.

Chapter 3: What can we Learn from Terrorism Past?

The longest chapter. It asks why significant terrorist campaigns begin, how they are sustained and why they end, first in the case of the Provisional IRA and then by considering what can be generalised to terrorism elsewhere, including comparison with contemporary jihadist terrorism.

Chapter 4: What is to be Done?

Turns the earlier analysis into practical advice. As summarised by a published review, the advice is to learn to live with terrorism; to address underlying causes where possible; to avoid over-militarised responses; to treat intelligence as the most important element of counter-terrorism; to keep to orthodox legal frameworks and the rule of law; to coordinate security, financial and technological preventive measures; and to maintain credibility in public argument.

Key Concepts

Chapter 1: What is Terrorism?

• Problem of definition: terrorism has many competing definitions and is a pejorative term, so any definition is contested.
• Terrorism as a sub-species of warfare: the book's proposal that terrorism be understood as a form of war within wider political campaigns.

Chapter 2: Why do People Resort to Terror?

• Types of explanation: psychological, civilisational, religious, strategic and political explanations.
• Explanation from politics: the author's preferred approach, in which nationalism is prominent.

Chapters 3–4: Lessons from the past; What is to be done?

• Beginning, sustaining and ending: the three questions used to analyse terrorist campaigns historically.
• Post-terrorism: the idea that terrorist leaderships can be persuaded that politics without terror will serve them better.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Short and structured. Four chapters, each built around a single question, make the book easy to follow and to use in a seminar.
• Grounded in a historian's knowledge. The author's grasp of Irish republicanism is used to analyse how campaigns begin, are sustained and end, and to argue for historically informed policy. Maura Conway, reviewing it in the Irish Literary Supplement, singled out the call to learn from the past as one of its most noteworthy aspects.
• Clear on definition. Chapter 1 organises the problems of definition in an orderly way and takes a position, so it is useful as an entry to the debate.
• Well received. Conor Gearty praised it in the Irish Times, and Conway judged it a good book that makes a case for contextualised analysis, and recommended it.

Limitations

• Limited originality, in one reviewer's view. Conway observed that it says little that has not been said before, though it collects and weighs a large literature clearly and briefly.
• Gaps noted by reviewers. The same review found the chapter on causes brief, with ethnicity and wider social explanations mentioned but not discussed, and noted that the IRA-based analysis may not transfer easily to loose networks with no identifiable leadership.
• Not a legal or criminological text. It is a political and historical analysis. It does not set out counter-terrorism law; legal frameworks appear as one strand of the final chapter's advice.
• Dated. It was published in 2009 and does not cover later developments in terrorism and counter-terrorism.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within this course list, Roberts's Criminal Justice: A Very Short Introduction, Newburn's Criminology, The Oxford Textbook on Criminology and The Oxford Handbook of Criminology introduce the field of crime, justice and criminology, and Easton and Piper's Sentencing and Punishment covers what follows conviction. English's book is the one on terrorism specifically, from the perspective of political history.

It makes a good companion to a general criminology course when the topic of political violence or state security comes up, and a short starting point for a dissertation or essay on counter-terrorism.

How to Use This Book

The book suits undergraduates and general readers; it requires no legal background and is brief enough to read in a few sittings.

Read Chapter 1 for definitions even if you read nothing else. Then read Chapters 2 and 3 for the explanatory framework and the historical argument. Chapter 4 is the policy payoff and can be read last, or first if you want to know where the argument ends up.

Use it to frame questions, not to settle them: compare its definition with those in legislation and in other authors, test its lessons against cases outside Ireland, and look for later work on counter-terrorism law and on jihadist networks.