Military, Social Sciences, Political Science, Terrorism 

Is Terrorism the work of crazies and misfits? Recent research has turned away from this idea and focuses instead on understanding how normal people-perhaps especially idealistic people- can become capable of terrorist acts. This book includes several contributions to the new look in terrorism research, including a history of terrorism that reaches back two thousand years, an examination of the life-cycle of terrorist groups that have come and gone since World War II, and a new theory of the stages by which political protest political violence and terrorism.
Is terrorism a research category or a political statement? Many in traditional academic disciplines believe that terrorism is a pejorative label that does not identify and coherent set of behaviors. From this point of view, terrorism research makes no more sense that the now discredited studies of Witchcraft. This book puts the critique into print for the first time, together with recent terrorism research that offers that offers at least the beginning of an answer to the critique.
How is terrorism research communicated to policy makers who have to deal with terrorist threats? Poorly and with considerable difficulty according to the contributions to the book, and the reasons for the failure of communication are addressed both by those who would have closer government at a distance. Conference and books about terrorism research have been numerous, but this book is unusual in giving explicit consideration to the problems of communicating and apply the results of such research.
 

First Published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. - from Amzon 

Table of Contents
Editor’s Introduction: Terrorism Research and Public Policy by Clark McCauley P. 1
Terrorism and Military Theory: An Historical Prospective by Everent I. Wheeler P. 6
Terror, Toten and Taboo: Reporting on a Report by Joseba Zulaika .................P 34
The Process of Delegitimization: Towards a Linkage Theory of Political Terrorism by Ehud Sprinzak .........................................................................................P. 50
How Terrorism Declines by Martha Crenshaw ...............................................P. 69
Academic Research and Government Policy on Terrorism by Ariel Merari .........P. 88
Terrorism, Research and Public Policy: An Experience, Some Thought by Gussavo Gorriti ..................................................................................................P. 103
Worlds in Collision, World in Collusion: The Gap between the Policy Community and the Academic Community by Raphael S. Ezekeil and Jerrold M. Post .............P. 117
Terrorism Research and Public Policy: An Overview by Clark McCauley ..........P. 126