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Terrorism
Political Science, Current Events, US Politics
277 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1977
6 people are currently reading
89 people want to read
About the author
Walter Laqueur
141 books46 followersWalter Ze'ev Laqueur was an American historian, journalist and political commentator. Laqueur was born in Breslau, Lower Silesia, Prussia (modern Wrocław, Poland), into a Jewish family. In 1938, he left Germany for the British Mandate of Palestine. His parents, who were unable to leave, became victims of the Holocaust.
Laqueur lived in Israel from 1938 to 1953. After one year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he joined a Kibbutz and worked as an agricultural laborer from 1939 to 1944. In 1944, he moved to Jerusalem, where he worked as a journalist until 1953, covering Palestine and other countries in the Middle East.
Since 1955 Laqueur has lived in London. He was founder and editor, with George Mosse, of the Journal of Contemporary History and of Survey from 1956 to 1964. He was also founding editor of The Washington Papers. He was Director of the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library in London from 1965 to 1994. From 1969 he was a member, and later Chairman (until 2000), of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington. He was Professor of the History of Ideas at Brandeis University from 1968 to 1972, and University Professor at Georgetown University from 1976 to 1988. He has also been a visiting professor of history and government at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Tel Aviv University and Johns Hopkins University.
Laqueur's main works deal with European history in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially Russian history and German history, as well as the history of the Middle East. The topics he has written about include the German Youth Movement, Zionism, Israeli history, the cultural history of the Weimar Republic and Russia, Communism, the Holocaust, fascism, and the diplomatic history of the Cold War. His books have been translated into many languages, and he was one of the founders of the study of political violence, guerrilla warfare and terrorism. His comments on international affairs have appeared in many American and European newspapers and periodicals.
(Wikipedia)
Laqueur lived in Israel from 1938 to 1953. After one year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he joined a Kibbutz and worked as an agricultural laborer from 1939 to 1944. In 1944, he moved to Jerusalem, where he worked as a journalist until 1953, covering Palestine and other countries in the Middle East.
Since 1955 Laqueur has lived in London. He was founder and editor, with George Mosse, of the Journal of Contemporary History and of Survey from 1956 to 1964. He was also founding editor of The Washington Papers. He was Director of the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library in London from 1965 to 1994. From 1969 he was a member, and later Chairman (until 2000), of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington. He was Professor of the History of Ideas at Brandeis University from 1968 to 1972, and University Professor at Georgetown University from 1976 to 1988. He has also been a visiting professor of history and government at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Tel Aviv University and Johns Hopkins University.
Laqueur's main works deal with European history in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially Russian history and German history, as well as the history of the Middle East. The topics he has written about include the German Youth Movement, Zionism, Israeli history, the cultural history of the Weimar Republic and Russia, Communism, the Holocaust, fascism, and the diplomatic history of the Cold War. His books have been translated into many languages, and he was one of the founders of the study of political violence, guerrilla warfare and terrorism. His comments on international affairs have appeared in many American and European newspapers and periodicals.
(Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 14, 2021
So I actually read the 1980s revised edition of this book, which I'll review here. While this book is valuable both as history and as a reflection of the field of terrorism studies in the 70s and 80s, it's a tedious and repetitive book that I do not recommend unless you have a very specific scholarly need to read it. A lot of the book is just descriptive, and the transition between editions did not come with a lot of editing, so sometimes it feels like you are reading the same sentence twice. Laqueur is obviously an important scholar, but I recommend reading his Foreign Affairs articles rather than his books.
Despite the tedious nature of this book, there are some important/interesting overall points. One is that the 1970s really did see a new wave of terrorism, more serious than anything since the pre WWI anarchist period. WL sees that period as somewhat nobler and more restrained: terrorism in the 70s and 80s was bigger, more ruthless, and genuinely non-democratic in its aims. He brilliantly flips Bakunin on his head to say that any group that seeks power through terrorism will probably continue to rule through terrorism once it takes power. However, this is highly unlikely: WL rigorously shows that terrorist groups almost never achieve their political goals. Nationalist-separatist groups sometimes do if they combine terrorism with a broader guerrilla strategy; in addition, their goals are more tangible. Leftist-revolutionary groups rarely do, however; they are too small, alienated to and alienated from the larger population, and romantically unrealistic about their goals. WL points out an important paradox in terrorism: if you attack small, you don't generate the attention needed to change things; if you attack big and kill tons of people, you probably generate a massive response in which you are crushed. IT would be interesting to apply this to al Qaeda, a group that attacked big, was crushed as a functional organization, but "won" in other senses: getting the U.S. to overreact and overextend itself, rallying parts of the Islamic world to their cause, creating AQ affiliates all over teh world.
WL is a good source of terr because he navigates pretty objectively through this divided, politicized field. He is a historian who is rightfully skeptical of the usefulness of political science-type generalizations and psychological categories. The history of terrorism points to variation and context-specific factors and personalities that make such generalizing tendentious. This is very much how I look at the problem, although I use poli sci research as a complement. WL verifies an interesting idea that terrorism only really works/is tried against democracies and weak autocracies; strong autocracies and totalitarian states don't rely on consent and aren't restrained by the rule of law, so they can crush terrorism and other forms of violent dissent relatively easily. Democracies, however, restrain themselves in a number of ways, and terrorism as a strategy seeks to shift popular opinion in ways that benefit the terrorist group. They also have free media who will actually report on terrorism. SO while many conservatives exaggerated the democracy v terrorism struggle in the 1980s, WL shows that there was a basis for this belief.
Despite the tedious nature of this book, there are some important/interesting overall points. One is that the 1970s really did see a new wave of terrorism, more serious than anything since the pre WWI anarchist period. WL sees that period as somewhat nobler and more restrained: terrorism in the 70s and 80s was bigger, more ruthless, and genuinely non-democratic in its aims. He brilliantly flips Bakunin on his head to say that any group that seeks power through terrorism will probably continue to rule through terrorism once it takes power. However, this is highly unlikely: WL rigorously shows that terrorist groups almost never achieve their political goals. Nationalist-separatist groups sometimes do if they combine terrorism with a broader guerrilla strategy; in addition, their goals are more tangible. Leftist-revolutionary groups rarely do, however; they are too small, alienated to and alienated from the larger population, and romantically unrealistic about their goals. WL points out an important paradox in terrorism: if you attack small, you don't generate the attention needed to change things; if you attack big and kill tons of people, you probably generate a massive response in which you are crushed. IT would be interesting to apply this to al Qaeda, a group that attacked big, was crushed as a functional organization, but "won" in other senses: getting the U.S. to overreact and overextend itself, rallying parts of the Islamic world to their cause, creating AQ affiliates all over teh world.
WL is a good source of terr because he navigates pretty objectively through this divided, politicized field. He is a historian who is rightfully skeptical of the usefulness of political science-type generalizations and psychological categories. The history of terrorism points to variation and context-specific factors and personalities that make such generalizing tendentious. This is very much how I look at the problem, although I use poli sci research as a complement. WL verifies an interesting idea that terrorism only really works/is tried against democracies and weak autocracies; strong autocracies and totalitarian states don't rely on consent and aren't restrained by the rule of law, so they can crush terrorism and other forms of violent dissent relatively easily. Democracies, however, restrain themselves in a number of ways, and terrorism as a strategy seeks to shift popular opinion in ways that benefit the terrorist group. They also have free media who will actually report on terrorism. SO while many conservatives exaggerated the democracy v terrorism struggle in the 1980s, WL shows that there was a basis for this belief.
January 6, 2025
Walter Laqueur's 'Terrorism' is as underwhelming as his title. Laqueur is said to be an expert and there are endless references made to his books by many of the other people that fashion themselves as 'terrorism experts'. To be fair, Laqueur has written seven other books on terrorism and maybe those are more worthy than this one. This book purportedly covers various aspects of terrorism including aspects like 'origins, philosophy, sociology', but the immediate problem is that the book provides almost no formal framework of analysis. On page five, Laqueur is talking about some of the difficulties and problem with categorizing terrorism. He proceeds to state, "According to widespread belief, the main features of contemporary terrorism are, very briefly..." and then lists six different things. He doesn't say if he agrees or disagrees with these six widely held beliefs, and he just kind of moves on. He traces the origins of the word and then meanders for the rest of the book through endless examples of different groups and what they did or believed. We are not given a framework nor a clear analysis of what will happen in the book. The reader is just suppose to surmise what he means by the term and who is and is not a terrorist. This means we can figure out what Laqueur's politics are by what he includes and doesn't include or what he paints as terror and what he doesn't seem to be bothered by. This is made abundantly clear when he talks about Algeria and their fight for independence.
On page nineteen, he is discussing the FLN and calls them urban terrorists. He mentions General Massu saying, "But the tough methods used by General Massu's Paras in combating systematic terror with systematic torture provoked a worldwide outcry." General Massu implemented "systematic torture", yet Laqueur doesn't seem to rate that as terror. I'm not sure how you can take someone seriously when they talk about terrorism, and cannot at least acknowledge the scale of terror the French carried out in Algeria as terror.
Another example of his lack of rigor is a more benign and funny example. While talking about anarchism and propaganda by deed, he starts talking about Kropotkin and contrasts him with Nechaev. Nechaev is a vicious monster and Kropotkin is "almost saintly'. However, don't be misled! Laqueur then says, "When [Kropotkin] took over the leadership of the Anarchist movement in the late 1870s he was one of the main protagonists of individual terror as a means to arouse the spirit of revolt among the masses." It is crazy that Laqueur waded through all those anarchist papers-with all the infighting and denouncing of any kind of leaders-and suggest that there was ever some kind of leadership to be taken over, much less that Kropotkin took up the mantel. Absurd and total misunderstanding of anarchism and misplacing of moral outrage-remember when the French were systematically torturing and he had no qualms?
Oh and a final note, I was casually looking up one of his citations, specifically footnote 122 in chapter two, and he just plagiarizes the original passages. Obviously he cites his source, but most of the sentence is directly lifted with no quotation marks. If he plagiarized this random citation, then what else did he lift from others?
On page nineteen, he is discussing the FLN and calls them urban terrorists. He mentions General Massu saying, "But the tough methods used by General Massu's Paras in combating systematic terror with systematic torture provoked a worldwide outcry." General Massu implemented "systematic torture", yet Laqueur doesn't seem to rate that as terror. I'm not sure how you can take someone seriously when they talk about terrorism, and cannot at least acknowledge the scale of terror the French carried out in Algeria as terror.
Another example of his lack of rigor is a more benign and funny example. While talking about anarchism and propaganda by deed, he starts talking about Kropotkin and contrasts him with Nechaev. Nechaev is a vicious monster and Kropotkin is "almost saintly'. However, don't be misled! Laqueur then says, "When [Kropotkin] took over the leadership of the Anarchist movement in the late 1870s he was one of the main protagonists of individual terror as a means to arouse the spirit of revolt among the masses." It is crazy that Laqueur waded through all those anarchist papers-with all the infighting and denouncing of any kind of leaders-and suggest that there was ever some kind of leadership to be taken over, much less that Kropotkin took up the mantel. Absurd and total misunderstanding of anarchism and misplacing of moral outrage-remember when the French were systematically torturing and he had no qualms?
Oh and a final note, I was casually looking up one of his citations, specifically footnote 122 in chapter two, and he just plagiarizes the original passages. Obviously he cites his source, but most of the sentence is directly lifted with no quotation marks. If he plagiarized this random citation, then what else did he lift from others?
June 28, 2008
I thought this rather pessimistic upon reading it back in '96, but then our Olympic Games presented by Coca-Cola were disturbed by Eric Rudolph's pipe bomb presented by Coca-Cola, and then 2001 came along and we witnessed the end of irony, if Zoe Williams's drivel in The Guardian is to be hearttaken. Oh well, confirmation of prediction does not a fine text make.
February 13, 2011
Interesting although now somewhat dated history of terrorism originally published in 1977 and here in a second edition from 1987. There are good chapters on the origins of terrorism, the "philosophy of the bomb" and the sociology of terrorism. The later chapters on "Terrorism Today" are a snapshot of the world events of the 1970s and 1980s.
June 8, 2013
Laquer discusses the dynamics of terrorism as well has how it works. There is some discussion on how a government can reduce the risks of terrorism.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews