The paper explores India’s engagement in transnational repression, a practice where states target political dissidents, activists, and critics beyond their borders. It examines how the Indian government, under the leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has increasingly leveraged diplomatic, legal, and extrajudicial means to silence opposition figures abroad. The study highlights incidents involving Kashmiri separatists, Sikh activists, and other political dissidents facing surveillance, coercion, or direct violence outside India. The chapter discusses diplomatic pressure on host countries, the use of counterterrorism laws, and intelligence operations as key tactics. Additionally, it addresses the geopolitical implications of India’s transnational repression, particularly in its relations with Western democracies that host many of these exiled individuals. The paper argues that while India frames its actions as necessary for national security and counterterrorism, they pose challenges for democratic norms and human rights. Finally, the research calls for greater international scrutiny and legal mechanisms to counter such practices, emphasizing the tension between security interests and fundamental freedoms in the global arena.

Citizenship deprivation is often justified on the grounds that it helps to combat terrorism. In the last of these historically contextualising chapters, we thus turn to the citizenship categories that pervade the counterterrorist state. As this chapter reveals, these categories include the ‘non-suspicious’ citizen, the citizen ‘at risk of becoming risky’, the ‘risky’ citizen, and the ‘dangerous’ citizen, with the terrorist being the dangerous citizen par excellence, all of whom enjoy different access to rights and duties in the counterterrorist state. I derive these categories in practice from a cross-reading of critical terrorism studies literature and the workings of the French and UK counterterrorist states in practice. By the counterterrorist state, I refer to a set of institutional reconfigurations that have made counterterrorism a permanent and everyday feature of state activities and regard security as the ‘first of liberties’, with implications for state and non-state actors alike. This chapter exposes how France and the UK became counterterrorist states, before discussing the creation of different categories of citizens and their practical effects.

This chapter sets the scene for later analyses, providing a historical overview of African RIOs. I trace the evolution of African RIOs, and discuss how leaders developed RIO policies in response to domestic and transnational threats against their political stability, as well as changing international norms.

The chapter surveys various papers in the literature that specifically analyze deterrence and preemption policies from the perspective of game theory. Emphasis is given to certain classes of models in order to highlight key aspects and characteristics of the policies studied. For example, when countries engage in deterrence against terrorist organizations, it is likely that they may simply deflect terrorist attacks to other countries. Preemptive policies on the other hand, provide positive benefits to other countries and therefore any benefits stemming from this policy, may be underprovided due to the problem of free riding.

The objective of this chapter is to consider the effect of terrorism on trade. We rely on the existing literature on trade and terrorism and primarily use perfectly competitive models of trade. First, we highlight how terrorism may affect trade by damaging resources and causing general equilibrium reallocations of factors of production. Second, we consider how these trade effects may be altered in the presence of optimal counterterrorism policy. Third, the chapter discusses how trade may affect intra-industry trade in varieties using a monopolistically competitive framework. Finally, we discuss some of the existing empirical literature that has focused on trade-terrorism and FDI-terrorism issues. A central message of our analysis is that while terrorism will likely raise costs and dampen economic activity, whether it will raise or reduce trade of a nation depends on how terrorism affects that nation’s resource reallocation, relative prices and real income level.

Over the years since 9/11, there have been many calls for systematic analysis of domestic counterterrorism expenditures—indeed, in the United States, it is required by current regulations. The paper lays out and explains the standard cost/benefit and risk-analytic approaches that might be applied to evaluate such expenditures. However, such research has been quite limited so far. While systematic analysis can make the counterterrorism enterprise more coherent and efficient, domestic terrorism in most countries (particularly those outside of war zones) scarcely presents enough of a hazard to justify the enormous efforts and expenditures that have been made to counter it. It is an area of research that should be more fully developed.

This chapter provides a broad overview of academic and policy research, which explores the efficacy of external assistance to states in diminishing the threat of terrorism. In general, external economic and military aid seeks to mitigate the threat and intensity of terrorism by enhancing recipient states’ coercive and non-coercive capacity, and by incentivizing them to meet donors’ demands. As this chapter shows, the effectiveness of aid depends on a number of factors, which includes the type, magnitude, conditions, and modality of aid as well as recipient states’ governance capacity, and the alignment of donor-recipient priorities. Moreover, aid can often result in negative unintended consequences such as human rights violations and repression by recipient states, or anti-American terrorism and discriminate violence by targeted groups. Yet, research suggests that aid can indeed reduce terrorism levels in some environments, especially if donors devise effective mechanisms to circumnavigate highlighted challenges.

Terrorism has instrumental value in terms of achieving political, ideological, or religious goals; and non-instrumental value, in terms of organizational and psychological motivations. I introduce canonical models of terrorism under asymmetric information that account for both types of goals. As these equilibria identify counterfactuals that would be otherwise unobservable, they illuminate the ‘known unknowns’ that matter for counterterror policy. Finally, I address the signaling value of partial government concessions when voters or terrorists are uncertain about a target government’s type.

In this chapter, we explore the scholarly literatures on the effects of liberal democratic governance on the likelihood of terrorist violence, and on the threat posed by terrorist campaigns to liberal democracy.  Most disagreements in these literatures stem from the fact that the reciprocal relationship between democracy and terrorism is highly complex and largely contingent upon structural elements and other characteristics of states and terrorist organizations.  In regard to general institutional structure, we maintain that in offering checks against the majoritarian impulse towards authoritarianism, in subjecting policymaking to institutional competition, and in allowing for the responsible and effective exercise of executive prerogative, presidential democracy offers greater resistance to autocratization in the face of terrorism than parliamentary democracy.  We find empirical support for this proposition in analysis of cross-national time-series data on democratic structural integrity and the maintenance of civil rights and liberties for the period 1970-2012.

This chapter investigates the role of science and technology as a function of the history of the World War II effort to transform national security resource and acquisition under Vannevar Bush at MIT, its effects upon American society as President Eisenhower warned the nation in 1961, and the later forces of globalization, the knowledge economy and accelerating emerging and disruptive science and technology as applied to war and terror today. Important is our understanding of our application of a specific logic to war and terror after 9/11; forward deployment of American military power overseas and homeland security (defense of the homeland) for the purpose of understanding the rapid evolution of technological capability in achieving outcomes. Furthermore, we will look more specifically at emerging science and technology as a particular area of technological innovation that stems from research and development phenomena that is tasked to provide outsize national security, specifically counterterrorism deliverables for the United States.

The chapter provides a selective survey of studies on terrorism. In particular, we emphasize theoretical and empirical studies where the rationality of terrorists, their allies, and their adversaries are essential. With data on terrorist attacks during 1970–2018, we indicate the evolving nature of terrorism in terms of the distribution of attacks by alternative terrorist groups’ ideologies, the casualties of terrorist attacks, and the regional distribution of terrorist incidents. Based on key studies, we evaluate differences between domestic and transnational terrorism, the effectiveness of counterterror measures, the economic impact of terrorism, and the drivers of terrorism. Next, we highlight areas of deficient knowledge: e.g., governments’ actions to address terrorism, governments’ expenditures on counterterrorism, and practices of international cooperation. Finally, we indicate omissions to our knowledge including the melding of micro- and macro-level studies, the collection of counterterror event data, and the impact of immigration on transnational terrorism.

Terrorist groups face a wide range of organizational issues. They have to recruit members, raise funds, articulate a political vision, develop operational plans, train personnel, execute attacks, and justify their actions. Unlike most organizations, however, they must do so while remaining as covert as possible, making all the normal challenges of organizational management significantly harder. This chapter reviews the organizational issues that terrorist groups face and that counterterrorist organizations should take into account.

Are there objective criteria that we can use to discern if an act of violence constitutes terrorism, or is such labeling always a subjective and political decision? Wherein lies the boundary between domestic versus international terrori and is that a meaningful distinction to make? How do individuals get radicalized, and how do they reach the point of committing violent acts? In this chapter, we tackle these questions (and others) and the issue of terrorism in international security. There are no easy, agreed upon answers to most of them, and terrorism continues to be a highly contested and politically charged concept, while constituting a very real and pressing security threat in many countries around the world. But that is even more reason to look closely at the controversies surrounding its definition, its historical evolution and patterns, and its contemporary manifestations in the twenty-first century as well as approaches to countering terrorism and attempts at international cooperation.

The Trump and Biden administrations have spent an enormous amount of energy blaming each other for the final collapse. Pompeo excoriated Biden in his memoir, fully blaming him and claiming the Doha agreement had nothing to do with Afghanistan’s subsequent collapse. In turn, the Biden White House released a twelve-page document in April 2023 with their version of events, placing blame on the Trump administration. In their mutual finger-pointing, they are both right: Trump signed the deal, and Biden implemented it. Trump was determined to withdraw from Afghanistan irrespective of what the Taliban said or did, weakening the United States’ diplomatic and military position to the point of collapse. Biden, despite having campaigned on a promise to undo Trump’s legacy, inexplicably followed Trump’s example and implemented Trump’s strategy. Thanks to Trump, Biden inherited an extremely difficult situation – one he managed to make even worse. He played a bad hand badly. And he did so, in large part, because when he looked at Afghanistan, he saw Vietnam.