Rethinking Transnational Terrorism: An Integrated Approach
The 2011 civil war in Syria attracted thousands of fighters from at least seventy countries to join the Islamic State. Al-Shabaab carried out large-scale attacks on civilian targets in Uganda and Kenya as retribution for the deployment of peacekeeping forces in Somalia. In this report, Martha Crenshaw considers the extent to which civil war and foreign military intervention function as a rationale for transnational terrorism, and how understanding the connections between terrorism, civil war, and weak governance can help the United States and its allies mount an appropriate response.
About the Report
Drawing on an extensive review of the recent literature, this report considers the extent to which civil war and military interventions by foreign powers function as drivers of and rationales for transnational terrorism. The research was supported by the Policy, Learning, and Strategy Center at the United States Institute of Peace.
About the Author(s)
Martha Crenshaw is senior fellow emerita at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, and professor emerita of government at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Explaining Terrorism, a collection of her essays on the causes, processes, and consequences of terrorism, was published in 2011. She is the author (with Gary LaFree) of Countering Terrorism (2017).