Barak Mendelsohn’s very impressive work examines the question of how and why Al-Qaeda franchised terrorist affiliates throughout the Middle East, and the consequences of this decision. The growth of Al-Qaeda’s regional affiliates were seen as a response to the group’s loss of their base in Afghanistan. These new Al-Qaeda movements were also often interpreted as signs that the group was powerful, global, and had substantial ideological appeal in the Islamic world. They were also read as signs that the U.S.-led war on terror was failing and only producing greater numbers of terrorist groups, and deadlier levels of violence. Mendelsohn’s work alters these interpretations of the spread of Al-Qaeda.

Instead of viewing the growth of Al-Qaeda as a product of poor counterterrorism, anti-Americanism, and growing support for the group, Mendelsohn argues that the franchising of Al-Qaeda can instead be interpreted as the desperate efforts of a group that recognized its limitations and declining fortunes. Mendelsohn claims that the 9/11 attacks increased expectations for bin Laden and his group, but a combination of the war on terror and the group’s internal dysfunction left Al-Qaeda with a declining base of capabilities. To compensate, the organization adopted a branching-out strategy to find affiliates in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. But these efforts fell victim to the same types of problems well identified by the principal-agent literature. Local affiliates in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, Algeria, and Somalia all quickly lost sight of Al-Qaeda’s message to keep the focus on targeting the United States, and began attacking their own local governments and rivals. Additionally, in direct contradiction to bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda in Iraq sought to create a sectarian war with the Shia, rather than focus on liberating the Middle East from U.S. influence. The final straw for Al-Qaeda seemed to emerge in the Syrian civil war when the Islamic State, a splinter from its own Nusra front, broke off and invaded Iraq. Mendelsohn argues that by that point, Al-Qaeda’s efforts to expand its organizational capabilities were at an end, and the group faced significant decline.

One of the biggest contributions of this work is to present a history of what went wrong for Al-Qaeda. Unlike previous accounts, Mendelsohn’s tale of Al-Qaeda focuses on the group and its efforts, rather than missteps by the governments it was fighting. This account of Al-Qaeda’s rise and fall alone makes the book well worth reading for those analyzing and studying terrorist organizations. More importantly, however, Mendelsohn offers a general theoretical explanation that identifies the causal mechanisms behind Al-Qaeda’s expansion and ultimate fall. Although the theory is intended to study Al-Qaeda, there is no reason why it cannot be extended to study other terrorist groups, such as the Islamic State, Hamas, or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). This contribution allows students of terrorist groups, their organization, and decisions to expand a very useful and rich theory to test hypotheses about a wide variety of groups with different ideologies.

Further, the theory also offers a novel explanation for why groups choose to expand. A common wisdom is that the size and geographic scope of a group should be a signal of the organization’s strength. Indeed, one reason why Al-Qaeda appeared to be so threatening at its seeming height in the mid-2000s was that it was active in so many states, giving the impression that the organization was quickly establishing a caliphate. Mendelsohn’s work, however, suggests that expansion may also be driven by desperation. Facing a decline in capabilities, an organization may try to use its reputation to co-opt other militants in different states. Theoretically, this should sustain the reputation of the declining group, enhance its geographic reach, increase the number of individuals at its disposal, and generally strengthen the organization.

However, Mendelsohn argues that this potential for increasing capabilities creates two risks for the group. First, there is a possibility that by franchising, the group in question may dilute its original agenda. In the case of Al-Qaeda, bin Laden and Zarqawi wanted all groups to target American interests first instead of the apostate governments. However, because many of the fighters in Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Algeria, and elsewhere were driven to join by local conditions, Al-Qaeda’s message became lost as it expanded. Second, this increasing ideological dilution may allow affiliates to engage in behaviors that are not sanctioned by the center. This led the Al-Qaeda branch affiliates to become intertwined into local conflicts, which diluted the organization’s objectives, left them vulnerable to conflicts with other groups, and increased the opportunities for the U.S. and other states to engage in more effective counterterrorism. Taken together, these insights tell us that we cannot and should not necessarily interpret the expansion of a group and its area of operations as a signal of capability. Mendelsohn demonstrates that while the expansion of Al-Qaeda was in part driven by its notoriety, it was also driven by its weaknesses, and these weaknesses ultimately contributed to its failure.

This raises the strategic question: Given that these risks are known, why would Al-Qaeda choose to take them? Mendelsohn provides a compelling answer to this query: Al-Qaeda’s own internal weakness, pressure from U.S. counterterrorism, and increasing competition forced the group to continue its drive for expansion. Mendelsohn’s theoretical conclusion is that while franchising offered Al-Qaeda the ability to overcome its weaknesses by gaining these short term benefits, it ultimately led to greater conflict within Al-Qaeda that contributed to its downfall. The larger theoretical contribution here is to state that groups facing desperate circumstances due to some combination of external and internal factors may strategically accept the risks associated with expansion. Paradoxically, this suggests that the growth of groups may be signs of weakness, which turns some conventional insight about terrorism on its head.

Mendelsohn’s work offers us an interesting argument for why groups may adopt franchising, one that ties into their organizational strategies, their ideologies, their areas of operations, and their government and terrorist competitors. This study is of considerable value to those interested in terrorism in both the policy and academic worlds. However, one of the central limitations of this work is also one of its strengths, which is the exclusive focus on Al-Qaeda. On the positive side, readers will learn much more about this organization as a result of Mendelsohn’s excellent work. Of course, Al-Qaeda is only one terrorist movement. It would be interesting to observe a group facing a set of challenges similar to Al-Qaeda that chose not to expand, and to explain that decision. Expanding the study beyond Al-Qaeda might also allow us to understand how the process of evolution occurs once groups split, particularly in important cases such as the schism with the Islamic state. Further, it would be interesting to observe other cases where expansion is actually successful, cases where expansion fails but the group persists, and other cases where expansion is attempted but the group subsequently fails. This would allow scholars to better understand the dynamic mechanisms Mendelsohn introduces into the debate in his fascinating and insightful book.