Terrorist/Insurgent Threats
The issue of studying the problem of terrorism and insurgence has become urgent and vital due to numerous accidents throughout the world, where the United States of America is not the exception. Taking as an example the period between August, 1998 and September, 2001, which includes just thirty-seven months, there were three significant attacks of al-Qaeda on the United States of America. The first one occurred in Kenya and Tanzania in August, 1998 when the embassies of the USA were being bombed simultaneously, the second one – in October, 2000, when the USS Colein was bombed, and the third one – September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked.
There exists a variety of factors that cause and influence the emergence of the goal for terrorists to commit an act of violence. Back in 1987, Edward N. Muller and Mitchell Seligson suggested that one of the most frequent and widespread preconditions of perpetrating terroristic and insurgent acts was the land inequality in agrarian society. They have developed a special multivariate causal model, which explained the correlation between power, land, government and intensity of separatism. Another point of view belongs to William C. Banks, who claims that terrorism is the organized network of violent actions that are spread throughout the world. The threat of terrorism and insurgence is considered to be “self-generated from the bottom-up, self-organizing, a local initiative that has considerable flexibility”. As a rule, terrorists are often people from one country, who frequently live in another country and commit violence in the third country. Political violence occurs, resulting from attempts of people, groups of people or particular regions to obtain larger autonomy or secede from a country. During the period of 1970s the reason for political violence was resulted by the presence intensive separatist sentiment, for example the Muslims in Philippines, the Catholics in Northern Ireland, Baluchistan in Pakistan and in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
The goals of committing terroristic and insurgent actions are of various kinds, though one common feature is the idea of obtaining more power or property, such as land. Recent events in the modern world have shown that there is a great necessity of studying the problem and finding solutions to this urgent and vital problem of current times in order to reduce or demolish the percentage of violent actions.
Works Cited
Banks, William C. “Alternative Views of the Terrorist Threat.” International Studies Review 7, no. 4 (Dec. 2005): 669-684.
Bipartisan Policy Center. Jihadist Terrorism: A Threat Assessment. Washington, DC, 2013.
Muller Edward N. and Seligson Mitchell A. “Inequality and Insurgency.” The American Political Science Review 81, no. 2 (June 1987): …
