Assessing the War on Terror ─ Western and Middle Eastern Perspectives

This volume is a collection of articles that critically examine the efficacy, ethics, and impact of the war on terror as it has evolved over the past decade and a half since 9/11.

The articles, both new and previously published, have been selected because they effectively address specific aspects of the war—from Western, Russian, and Middle-Eastern perspectives on terrorism-- that are missing or underrepresented in political discourse since 9/11. One of the strengths of this collection is that it includes articles written at different times since 9/11 and the present, thus reflecting the immediacy of the times when they were written and providing a necessary socio-historical context for understanding these complex events and historical processes. There would be no way to do justice to such a broad area of topics and events taking place over the past fifteen years without sampling political discourse at discrete points in time and without including different, and sometimes conflicting, voices and narratives.

During the nearly fifteen years of "the war on terrorism," numerous books have been published that consider the political, psychosocial, and economic impacts of terrorism. However, there has been little systematic effort to examine the "effectiveness" of the GWOT in achieving its goals in making the world in general and the United States, the United Kingdom and the rest of the West in particular more secure by reducing the number and lethality of officially-designated terrorist attacks. Further, here is virtually nothing that presents comparative analyses of the GWOT by the people most directly affected by it—citizens and refugees from conflict zones in the Middle East. As a result, there is great need for a book about contemporary terrorism and counter-terrorism that includes in-depth analysis of the strategies, tactics, and outcomes of the Global War on Terror and which also presents facts and ideas that are missing or underrepresented in the dominant narratives found in public discourse.

The book includes a mix of article types and the volume editors provide an overview of the collection, commentary for each section, and original contributions. The book will be of much interest to students of terrorism and counter-terrorism, foreign policy, Middle Eastern politics, security studies and IR.

Mark Tomass is?an economist and instructor at Harvard University, USA, and author of The Religious Origin of the Syrian Conflict: The Remaking of the Fertile Crescent (2015).