This book makes one wonder who its target audience is. The publishers — or the authors — answer this question on the back cover. They say this book is targeted at the military, the police, law enforcement agencies and government training institutes. In addition, they say, it will also benefit political analysts and professionals such as counter-insurgency and anti-terrorism experts.
With that knowledge one begins to assess the success of this compilation. On the face of it, Terrorism: Patterns of Internationalization, edited by Jaideep Saikia and Ekaterina Stepanova, appears to be a well-timed effort to compile studies on international terrorism in its various regional avatars. Within the book’s 266 pages, the two editors have collected 11 chapters written by 12 experts on terrorism from different parts of the world.
Going by sheer numbers it is a laudable effort, but there is a problem: The text doesn’t go beyond being a 101, a mere introduction to the way several parts of the world have come to be threatened with menacing levels of violence. Most chapters, and we will discuss them shortly, have some interesting details but they don’t say much more than what is already available in newspapers and in dozens of other texts that have sprung up since 9/11.
Before going further afield, let’s examine some of the chapters on terrorism in South Asia.
Saikia, one of the editors, has a chapter that concentrates on India’s northeast. He says it is geographically distant from the centre and for decades has been facing militancy, insurgency, inter-ethnic conflicts and the strategic threat of the region’s Islamisation. With painstaking research, Saikia has documented the ISI-Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (Bangladesh)-ULFA nexus to shelter and train various terrorist outfits and plot terrorist attacks in India. But we already know this.
Subir Bhaumik’s chapter on Bangladesh details information about India’s neighbour facing the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism and how the Jamaat-e-Islami works through the democratic process to support violent Islamist groups. Some facts are interesting but they don’t break new ground.
More From This Section
Colonel R Hariharan (retd) has a chapter on the LTTE’s role in Sri Lanka. He gives his observations on the LTTE and the support it still enjoys from the Tamil diaspora, despite its military defeat at the hands of the Sri Lankan army. He describes the international character of the LTTE and its widespread political, military and financial linkages. All this is well-known, but there is a new twist to the tale. Hariharan claims the IPKF withdrew from Sri Lanka because of the LTTE’s political links within India. If that was indeed the case, the contributor fails to explain why it went into Sri Lanka in the first place. LTTE’s political connections in India are well-documented but it is stretching the imagination to say this is why the IPKF was recalled.
Jennifer Lynn Oetken’s chapter on terrorism in Kashmir does not break limits of credulity but it does not break any new ground on analysing the transforming nature of terrorism in the valley either.
Bishnu Raj Upreti does a study of terrorist activity in Nepal and although Maoist violence is far from taking over the world, its linkages with India technically qualify it for a study of patterns of internationalisation.
Other parts of the world also come up for study. Alonso and Iribarren’s paper focuses on two traditional Europe-based terrorist organisations, the Irish Republican Army and the Basque separatist group, ETA, and their connections beyond the border.
But it does not discuss the recent phenomenon of terrorist networks in Europe that have their connections both in Europe and South Asia, specifically in Pakistan. The threat from IRA and ETA is now diminishing in Europe, but there are new terrorist modules being discovered in Britain and in other parts that have linkages abroad, especially Pakistan and they form the real new lexicon of terrorism in that continent.
In Chapter 9, Mohamed Nawab Bin Mohamed Osman discusses how the Afghan war was instrumental in the transformation of the Jemaah Islamiyah from a group with local aspirations to a trans-regional organisation with linkages across southeast Asia.
The editors themselves use the book to address dilemmas facing academics — such as, what is the meaning of terrorism, what is international terrorism — while stressing the difficulty in drawing a strict line between international and domestic terrorism. Some of these observations are interesting but the reader is not convinced that they are the last word for practitioners of the anti-terrorist trade.
The final chapter by Adam Dolnik studies if the unlimited goals of the al-Qaeda and the broader transnational violent Islamist movements require or are matched by the unlimited means to advance these goals. Dolnik suggests the upcoming trend of terrorist operations by Islamist cells around the world is likely to be one of decreasing, rather than increasing, technological sophistication. This is a reassuring point but I doubt if anti-terrorist squads are going to stop working overtime because of it.
TERRORISM
Patterns of Internationalization
Ed Jaideep Saikia & Ekaterina Stepanova
Sage; Rs 695; 266pp