International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   Terrorism has been widely viewed as the foremost threat to the United States, its allies, and the broader international community since the September 11, 2001, attack ( Walt 2001–2 ; Mueller 2006 ). Regardless of its objective basis, this perception poses a challenge for the field of political science. Political scientists have historically paid short shrift to the study of terrorism and counterterrorism; in the subfield of international relations (IR), the dominant realist tradition focused research attention on great power politics, not on substate violence ( Leheny 2002 ; Crenshaw 2004 ). In the post-9/11 world, international relations scholars are playing catch-up, catering to the unprecedented demand to identify terrorism's causes and consequences. The literature on state responses to terrorism has produced many works of descriptive analysis and policy prescription. Less research has been done on the sources and effects of counterterrorist policies. This entry explicates the core debates in the terrorism literature and then addresses the counterterrorism literature, which has tended to follow a distinct research trajectory. In recent years, the number of undergraduate and graduate courses dealing with terrorism has soared. Scholarly publications are also way up, driven by the steep rise in terrorism-related government funding ( Silke 2003 ; Gunning ... log in or subscribe to read full text