David C. Rapoport

Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions

As the first comparative study of religious terror groups, the article provides detailed analyses of the different doctrines and methods of the three best-known groups: the Thugs, Assassins, and Zealots-Sicarii. Despite a primitive technology, each developed much more durable and destructive organizations than has any modern secular group.The differences among the groups reflect the distinguishing characteristics of their respective originating religious communities: Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. The distinctive characteristics of religious terror are discussed, and relationships between religious and secular forms of terror are suggested.

The importance of space in violent ethno‐religious strife

The political and moral dimensions of space are rarely understood to be crucial political ingredients. This essay challenges that assumption by examining ethno‐religious conflicts since the 1880s. It argues that the massive spatial configurations occasioned by the collapse of great empires created a powerful impuetus for a steady expansion of the number of ethno‐religious conflicts. Space decisively shaped features of the struggles, namely length, intensity, and purpose. Finally, space influenced international responses to internal ethno‐religious struggles making proximity more important than power in decisions to intervene.

Elections and violence

No subject attracts political scientists more than elections do. Still, the intimate link with violence has scarcely been noticed. A sparse recent literature exists on how ballots may eliminate bullets in civil war settlements: questions concerning why ballots create occasions for bullets and the relationship between violence‐producing and violence‐reducing propensities of elections are ignored. This article aims to help fill the gap. It treats election as a mode of succession, noting that the succession moment is normally the most dangerous recurring one in all political systems. We compare election with heredity, its chief historical rival, to see how the different character of each shapes violence patterns. Hereditary systems require, but rarely achieve, clarity in establishing claim priorities. Election requirements are ‘fairness’ (competitors ‘bend’ rules) and ‘conciliation’ (divisions are created which must be reconciled). The final section offers a brief taxonomy of typical justifications for initiating and/or resisting election violence.

Before the Bombs There Were the Mobs: American Experiences with Terror 1

Terrorist studies rarely discuss activities before the invention of dynamite, which made modern terror possible. One important, interesting, and forgotten form is the mob terror campaign. Two significant successful American examples are examined and compared, “The Sons of Liberty” which ignited the American Revolution, and the Ku Klux Klan, which “won the peace” the South wanted after it lost the Civil War. The study concludes by briefly comparing modern with mob terror.

Foreword by David C. Rapoport Introduction by Jeffrey Kaplan

the coming of the second millennium of the Christian calendar, were offered by governments and pundits alike, little of note did take place at the New Year of the year 2000. Ominously in light of what was to come on 11 September 2001, the only serious plot to commit terrorist violence was reportedly undertaken by operatives of al-Qaeda, when a group led by Ahmad Rassam and including Mokhtar Haouari, Abdelmajid Dahoumane, and Abdel Ghani Meskini (who later exchanged his testimony against his comrades for leniency) were arrested when trying to enter the United States or were extradited to the USA subsequent to the initial arrests. Their putative target appears to have been Los Angeles International Airport, which would be crowded with holiday travelers. With the advantage of hindsight, it is significant that the threat of real terrorist violence came not from Western millenarians, but from an Islamist movement which emerges from a culture whose lunar calendar did not reflect the turn of the chronological millennium and whose attraction to taking action on the New Year seems to have been occasioned by the opportunity of expected crowds at airports and public events and, apparently, the widespread press speculation that millennial violence was imminent. The full import of these arrests was unknown at the time, and before 11 September set new paradigms for our understanding of terrorism, the threat of millennial violence was considered to be both real and serious by many governments, and by more than a few scholars. The context of the times is thus important, for 1

MILITARY AND CIVIL SOCIETIES: THE CONTEMPORARY SIGNIFICANCE OF A TRADITIONAL SUBJECT IN POLITICAL THEORY1

THE purpose of this essay is to call attention to some Renaissance and Reformation political thinkers whose way of perceiving civil-military relations has been neglected though it is still extremely valuable today. Machiavelli constructed the group’s frame or reference, and if the word did not have too many misleading connotations, the school could be called the Machiavellians. Preferably, however, they should be called the Neo-Classicists, linking them with the literary figures of the same period who already have that name, and who also looked back to Greece and Rome for inspiration. Following Machiavelli’s lead, the group studied classical military and political institutions, analysed classical philosophers and historians, and helped to ‘rediscover’ the classical military writers, Xenophon, Polybius, Aelian, Frontinus, Vegetius, etc. The school had many members. To name only a few-besides Machiavelli, there were Bacon, Montaigne, Lipsius, Campanella, Harrington, Moyle, de la Noue, and Sir Algernon Sidney. I shall single out only three-Machiavelli, Lipsius, and Harrington. They will not be discussed fully; only certain views will be stressed and these will be contrasted with subsequent and contemporary ways of approaching the same problems. Most of the Neo-Classicists lacked extensive personalmilitary experience. But reflection and classical books apparently enabled them to grasp the essentials of war and military organization for their learning was profitably used by the great seventeenth-century military reformers, Maurice of Nassau and Gustaphus Adolphus, who assembled the first disciplined Western armies. We know the Neo-Classicist period as one in which classical art and philosophy was revived, but the soldier understands it as one in which the classical method of waging war was understood again.2

It Is Waves, Not Strains

“The Four Horsemen of Terrorism: Its Not Waves, Its Strains” asks some useful questions, but its critique of the Wave Theory is wholly inadequate and the “Strain Theory” alternative has little ut...